For presidential candidates to garner the conservative Christian vote -- which is the block of voters we're mostly talking about here -- they can't get too far by just promoting any issue and wrapping it in the language of morality....Conservatives don't claim that same-sex marriage and abortion are the only moral issues. And I wish liberals would quit superciliously asserting that only they care about the environment, war and peace, poverty, and health care.

Conservatives just have a different approach to these issues. They abhor war, but believe it is sometimes necessary and morally justified. They believe their approach to poverty is actually more compassionate because it is more effective. And it is largely liberals who reduced market forces in health care, which led to much of the escalation in cost. And liberal darling Bill Clinton, after feverishly campaigning to solve the forty million uninsured problem, didn't put a dent in it.

In a better world, the PLO chief would have met his end on a gallows, hanged for mass murder much as the Nazi chiefs were hanged at Nuremberg. In a better world, the French president would not have paid a visit to the bedside of such a monster. In a better world, George Bush would not have said, on hearing the first reports that Arafat had died, "God bless his soul."

God bless his soul? What a grotesque idea! Bless the soul of the man who brought modern terrorism to the world? Who sent his agents to slaughter athletes at the Olympics, blow airliners out of the sky, bomb schools and pizzerias, machine-gun passengers in airline terminals? Who lied, cheated, and stole without compunction? Who inculcated the vilest culture of Jew-hatred since the Third Reich? Human beings might stoop to bless a creature so evil -- as indeed Arafat was blessed, with money, deference, even a Nobel Prize -- but God, I am quite sure, will damn him for eternity.

The world is a better place today because that cold, calculating monster is no longer in it. He is meeting his eternal judgment. And I hear it is crazy cold down there.

Why don't I agree with the New York Times, Kofi Annan, Jimmy Carter and others who are actually mourning this degenerate pervert?

Yasser Arafat was a murderer of Christians, Jews, Israelis and Americans -- including U.S. diplomats, tourists, innocent women and children. Yasser Arafat was an unrepentant terrorist -- the modern-day inventor of Arab terrorism, an inspiration for Osama bin Laden and others. Yasser Arafat was an exploiter of his own people, keeping them in squalor and perpetuating their hatreds while padding his own Swiss bank accounts.

While I hope that the president does nominate judges who respect the Constitution, instead of remaking it in their image -- and that the Senate confirms them -- I worry about the priorities of those values voters who regard themselves as Christian conservatives. Throughout history, the church has demonstrated the least power when it aligns itself with temporal government. It has exercised the most power (that is the power to change lives) when it aligns itself with its Leader and a kingdom "not of this world."

How morally compelling is an institution collectively known as the church when it preaches "traditional" marriage but practices something else in too many cases?...

While the conservative church may seem for the moment to be winning the political battle, it may be doing so at a terrible cost. According to Barna, a lot of people in the general population regard certain behaviors as "morally acceptable." These include gambling (61 percent), co-habitation (60 percent), sexual fantasies (59 percent), having an abortion (45 percent), adultery (42 percent), pornography (38 percent), profanity (36 percent), drunkenness (35 percent) and homosexual sex (30 percent).

Immediately after the election, various Democratic Deep Thinkers suggested that repackaging was the way to go: Just sell the same old ideas, they suggested, "under the rubric" of moral issues. As if these Moral Values voters could so easily be fooled. It won't do just to improve the party's image. ("Democrats' image needs reworking, Clinton suggests" -- Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Nov. 6, 2004.) To change the image, the party will have to change the reality. But the Democrats may not be up to it.

Strangely enough, the president's more condescending critics never accuse him of insincerity when he starts spouting Godtalk. On the contrary, it seems to be his very sincerity that appalls and alarms them. Call it a lack of tolerance. Especially for any sign of Moral Values.

As long as our sophisticated politicos dismiss voters concerned about Moral Values, then "simplistic" Republicans will prosper out here in what Scott Fitzgerald called the dark rolling fields of the Republic. Actually, the folks in the pews may understand the neo-pagan society all around them in this televised, computerized and generally vulgarized culture better than the Hollywood cognoscenti understand them. A lack of familiarity breeds contempt, too.

Sex education in Montgomery County public schools will be broadened to include a pilot program that discusses homosexuality and the use of a video that shows 10th-graders how to put on a condom.

The video, used on a trial basis at three Montgomery schools last year, will be shown to sophomores in health classes at all county high schools starting in 2005, the school board unanimously decided yesterday.

Parents will be required to sign permission slips before their children can take the sexuality component of the mandatory class, and the syllabus will be available for parental review. Teachers at Montgomery Blair, James Hubert Blake and Northwest high schools, where the video was tested, generally gave it high marks, school officials said.

As part of a resolution the board approved yesterday, discussion of "sexual variations," including homosexuality and bisexuality, will be incorporated into eighth- and 10th-grade health classes at three middle schools and three high schools. The schools have yet to be identified for the pilot program, which is to begin in the spring, according to board members.

It seems that anyone fool enough to favor the re-election of the president is by definition a God-bothering, pulpit-pounding Armageddon-artist, enslaved by ancient texts and prophecies and committed to theocratic rule. I was instructed in last week's New York Times that this was the case....

Only one faction in American politics has found itself able to make excuses for the kind of religious fanaticism that immediately menaces us in the here and now. And that faction, I am sorry and furious to say, is the left. From the first day of the immolation of the World Trade Center, right down to the present moment, a gallery of pseudointellectuals has been willing to represent the worst face of Islam as the voice of the oppressed. How can these people bear to reread their own propaganda? Suicide murderers in Palestine--disowned and denounced by the new leader of the PLO--described as the victims of "despair." The forces of al-Qaida and the Taliban represented as misguided spokespeople for antiglobalization. The blood-maddened thugs in Iraq, who would rather bring down the roof on a suffering people than allow them to vote, pictured prettily as "insurgents" or even, by Michael Moore, as the moral equivalent of our Founding Fathers. If this is liberal secularism, I'll take a modest, God-fearing, deer-hunting Baptist from Kentucky every time, as long as he didn't want to impose his principles on me (which our Constitution forbids him to do).

Throughout history, same-sex marriage has been illegal. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, so that states could refuse to recognize same-sex marriages from other states. Sen. John Kerry opposes same-sex marriage but supports civil unions for same-sex couples. President Bush has about the same position as Kerry, except that he also supports a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage.

So it is odd that, according to pundits and readers, even though majorities of voters opposed same-sex marriage, only the GOP is the homophobic party.

In 2000, 61 percent of California voters approved Proposition 22, also dubbed the Defense of Marriage Act, which declared, "Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California." If the GOP is the homophobic party for opposing same-sex marriage, then California is the homophobic state.

One commentator quipped that the outcome of the 2004 presidential election demonstrated it is better for the candidate to have a pastor by his side than a rock star.

Almost true, but there's a little more to it than that. As long as the interest of seculars in Christians is piqued, they should know that calling oneself by that name is not enough. Those calling themselves Christian must also demonstrate an interest in pursuing the things of interest to God....

We must also understand we absolutely cannot compromise on our values, as much as the other side suddenly appeals to our sense of unity and peace. It is a scam, a hoax, an attempt to take advantage of our soft hearts because they are now in the minority. The only way to compromise is to allow grayness in place of black and white. Tell me how to do that with regard to abortion. No.

The trouble with "conservative Christian" is that it confuses the question of whether an individual is conservative in his religious practice with the question of whether that person is conservative politically. (Much of the black church, for example, is conservative in the religious but not the political sense.) Similarly, there are politically liberal "evangelical Christians," and there used to be quite a lot more of them. (In Elisabeth Sifton's book The Serenity Prayer, a memoir of her father, the politically liberal theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, Sifton points out that Niebuhr was an evangelical Protestant.) Even fundamentalists (an evangelical subgroup whom Jennings, incidentally, conflated with the broader Christian right) have some political liberals among them. In ditching the term, "Christian right," Green summed up, the Christian right chose to associate itself with the pool of Christians from which it hopes to draw, not the folks who already belong.

That's the good news for liberals. The bad news is that according to exit polls, the large pool of "evangelical/born-again," which represents 23 percent of those who voted for president, went 78 percent for Bush. So maybe these distinctions are starting to break down. Even if they do, I don't see why we can't call these folks "the Christian right."

When I was a younger I used to love hanging around the barracks watching cheesy war movies with my fellow Marines. We would cringe and howl at seeing actors with sideburns and hair down to their collar pretend they were part of our beloved Corps. The lower the movie's budget the lower our expectations became. The sloppy salutes, the wrong uniforms, the use of Army terminology would have us rolling our eyes, wondering how Hollywood could be so clueless. Couldn’t the producers just find a Marine and ask them how someone in the Corps would talk, dress, and act?

Nowadays I get a similar feeling when the media talks about evangelicals. Apparently, the religious species Americanus evangelicus is a rare and elusive bird. How else can we explain that no one in the media has ever actually seen one?

Forget "soccer moms" and "security moms." In this election, a significant majority of Americans who are simply pursuing the traditional societal model of getting married, having kids and trying to raise those kids right -- by, among other things, going to church regularly -- voted Republican.

The America that still embraces the ideal of family depicted in the type of prime-time television shows (such as "Leave it to Beaver") that the networks don't produce anymore came shouting out from this year's network presidential exit poll. Its message was loud and clear: We don't want a Massachusetts liberal running our country.

This poses a peculiar dilemma for the Democratic Party. To become a truly national party again, it needs to do one of two things: Either seek an agenda that appeals more to traditional American families, or seek an America that has fewer of them.

The fact is that if you think we are safer now, you probably voted for Bush. If you think we are less safe, you probably voted for Kerry. That's policy, not fundamentalism. The upsurge in voters was an upsurge of people with conservative policy views, whether they are religious or not....

But the same insularity that caused many liberals to lose touch with the rest of the country now causes them to simplify, misunderstand and condescend to the people who voted for Bush. If you want to understand why Democrats keep losing elections, just listen to some coastal and university town liberals talk about how conformist and intolerant people in Red America are. It makes you wonder: why is it that people who are completely closed-minded talk endlessly about how open-minded they are?

What we are seeing is a diverse but stable Republican coalition gradually eclipsing a diverse and stable Democratic coalition. Social issues are important, but they don't come close to telling the whole story. Some of the liberal reaction reminds me of a phrase I came across recently: The rage of the drowning man.

So just how, precisely, were all these cultural conservatives duped? It seems to me that they saw through the promises for what they were -- empty -- and voted on what mattered most to them. They knew, just as we all know, that nothing in the Democrats' oh-so-moderate program was going to make much difference to them -- or, even if it did, it was not worth what they would have had to give up in exchange....

It behooves Democrats to understand that Christian conservatives can make the same, hard choices. Of course, real economic privation can change the equation -- would you rather have a job or stop gay marriage? -- but barring that sort of choice, culture wins out.

That does not mean that liberals have to feign agreement or abandon their values. When it comes to gays, for instance, the Republican Party has engaged in unconscionable demagoguery -- and the president knows it. In the short run, gay rights may be a losing issue, but this is a matter of human rights, not to be traded away. With all due respect to the voters of most of the states, on certain issues, I'd rather be right than red.

Still, what matters most is attitude, a mind-set that does not convey the message that people who vote the "wrong" way are dupes. These people know exactly what they are doing and why they are doing it. It is the people who insist otherwise who are the true dupes in this case -- not of some political candidate, but of their own wishful thinking.

The combination of Bush's stunning new mandate and Arafat's near-death condition will lead, I predict, to (1) a quick revival of Palestinian-Israeli diplomacy after months of relative doldrums and to (2) massive dangers to Israel.

The doldrums will cease because the Bush administration views Arafat as the main impediment to achieving its vision -- articulated above by the president -- of achieving a "Palestine" living in harmony side-by-side with Israel. As Arafat exits the political stage, taking with him his stench of terrorism, corruption, extremism, and tyranny, Washington will jump to make its vision a reality, perhaps as soon as this Thursday, when Tony ("I have long argued that the need to revitalise the Middle East peace process is the single most pressing political challenge in our world today"”) Blair comes to town.

Declarations of "faith" are abstractions that permit both voters and candidates to fill in the blanks with their own religious beliefs. There are two dangers here. One is the merging of church and state. The other is rank hypocrisy. Having claimed moral authority to achieve political victory, religious conservatives should be very careful, in their administration of the public trust, to live up to the standards they have claimed for themselves. They should also be called upon to address the teachings of Jesus and the prophets concerning care for the poor, the barriers that wealth presents to entering heaven, the blessings on the peacemakers, and the belief that no person should be left behind.

If we are to insert "faith" into the public dialogue more directly and assertively, let's not be selective. Let's go all the way. Let's not just define "faith" in terms of the law and judgment; let's define it also in terms of love, caring, forgiveness. Compassionate conservatives can believe social ills should be addressed by charity and the private sector; liberals can believe that the government has a role to play in correcting social injustice. But both can agree that human need, poverty, homelessness, illiteracy and sickness must be addressed. Liberals are not against religion. They are against hypocrisy, exclusion and judgmentalism. They resist the notion that one side or the other possesses "the truth" to the exclusion of others. There is a great difference between Cotton Mather and John Wesley.

Americans, as this election made clear, are riven over such compromise-resistant issues as abortion, stem cell research, gay marriage -- things that fit loosely under the heading of "values." And the side that won on those issues will hardly feel any imperative to compromise.

Look at it this way: Imagine that civil rights advocates had just won a close election against an advocate of massive resistance. Would it make sense for the victors to offer concessions? Wouldn't they take even a narrow victory as an opportunity to begin systemic change?

Why should it be different for the people -- particularly those we identify as the "religious right"? They won every contest where same-sex marriage was on the ballot. Will they hesitate -- should they hesitate, since they believe they are on God's side -- to press for the eradication of the remainder of an agenda they see as anti-marriage?

The president and his rival speak of compromise. But the people on the winning side may see opportunity.

What has offended the Left since Marx, and American liberalism since Dewey, is the notion that moral authority should be derived from anyplace other than the state or "the people" (conveniently defined as citizens who vote liberal). Voting on values not sanctified by secular priests is how they define "ignorance." This was the real goal of Hillary Clinton's "politics of meaning" -- to replace traditional religion with a secular one that derived its authority not from ancient texts and "superstitions" but from the good intentions of an activist state and its anointed priests. Shortly before the election, Howell Raines fretted that the worst outcome of a Bush victory would be the resurgence of "theologically based cultural norms" -- without even acknowledging the fact that "theologically based cultural norms" gave us everything from the printing press and the newspaper to the First Amendment he claims to be such a defender of.

What Maher, Raines, and Smiley fail to grasp is that all morality is based upon transcendence -- or it is merely based on utilitarianism of one kind or another, and therefore it is not morality so much as, at best, an enlightened expediency or will-to-power. It is no more rational to vote based on a desire to do "good" than it is to vote based on a desire to do God's will. Indeed, for millions of people this is a distinction without a difference -- as it was for so many of the abolitionists progressives and civil-rights leaders today's liberals love to invoke but never actually learn about.

The worst case scenario may actually be the most likely. The godfather of the Palestinian revolution fell into a coma Nov. 4 in a French military hospital outside of Paris where he was airlifted two weeks ago after collapsing in his Ramallah compound.

With no heir apparent waiting in the wings, a bloody war of succession between Arafat deputies in the PLO and the forces of Hamas and Islamic Jihad could engulf the West Bank and Gaza in a Palestinian civil war, killing scores of innocent Muslims and Christians, dispatching suicide bombers to attack Israeli civilian population centers, and derailing the peace process.

On the one hand, the death of an evil man, of a mass murderer is always a cause for celebration and hope. Yet on the other hand, Arafat's death will only constitute an opportunity for building a better future if the Bush administration uses his disappearance as a catalyst for a true overhaul of Palestinian society. And this requires more than just applying pressure on Israel to meet with and make concessions to a new PLO warlord who was raised on Arafat's knee.

There is no doubt that there are Palestinians alive today who have the potential to be Palestinian Adenauers. But for these leaders to come forward the apparatus of genocide and terror that Arafat has wrought over the past four decades must first be dismantled. Arafat's heirs have no more chance of bringing peace and democracy to the Palestinians than Hitler's heirs could have brought to Germany. For peace to arise, Palestinians must make a clean break from their past.

America is not divided on this issue. The national consensus on the meaning of marriage is strong and broad, uniting whites with blacks, the Bible Belt with the coasts, working class with the well-to-do. Same-sex marriage advocates went 0-for-13 this year not because they were thwarted by intolerant extremists but because they are demanding something wildly out of step with American values and history. Gay and lesbian activists should be able to acknowledge the legitimacy of the nation's deep opposition to homosexual marriages. And they should be able to respect the outcome of the democratic process, even if they don't like it.

In many cases, unfortunately, that isn't their response. Too often they demonize those who reject same-sex marriage as haters and homophobes. Ballot measures that are purely defensive -- efforts to protect the common understanding of marriage from high-handed judges -- they condemn as "writing bigotry into the constitution." And far from agreeing that this is a thorny issue that should be resolved democratically, they insist that what the people think shouldn't matter at all.

Science textbooks in suburban Cobb County warn students that evolution is "a theory, not a fact." The controversial disclaimer faces a court challenge Monday from a parent who argues the stickers promote the teaching of creationism.

Cobb school officials will defend their 2002 decision to place the stickers in textbooks, which they say simply encourages students to keep an open mind. The trial, in U.S. District Court in Atlanta, is expected to last four days.

The stickers read, "This textbook contains material on evolution. Evolution is a theory, not a fact, regarding the origin of living things. This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully and critically considered."