Obviously, it is best for teens to wait until they are mature enough to make wise decisions before engaging in sexual activity. Some will not wait, despite abstinence education. The best practice is to give honest and accurate information. Abstinence should be the first and most forceful message they hear, but it should not be the only element of sex education.

"Many teens may plan on abstinence, but if their abstinence fails, they have no information to protect themselves," says Judy Harris, an educator for Planned Parenthood of Indiana in Fort Wayne. Teaching only abstinence leaves students who do become sexually active less informed about how to prevent pregnancy and disease....

It is important that students are told that abstinence is the only way to guarantee against unwanted pregnancy or sexually transmitted disease. But abstinence-based education should not exclude other useful medical information. And federal dollars should only go to effective programs that provide accurate information.

Little attention is given to those of us who feel incredibly threatened by the move towards a right to die when what we want is the right to live.

Over the past few years, the campaign for euthanasia has gained momentum, as can be seen in the Assisted Dying for the Terminally Ill Bill which is being debated in the House of Lords. The momentum comes from people who do not want to die in pain or become a burden. It is also driven by a culture which, despite advances in modern medicine, still dreads any impairment that may reduce physical or mental capacity -- including ageing. Those of us who look physically different challenge society's obsession with the body beautiful and looking and staying healthy.

When I was born, my mother was advised to take me home and enjoy me as I would die within a year. As can happen with the prognosis of terminal conditions the doctors got it wrong. Although I was often unwell, mostly with life-threatening chest infections, I thrived in a positive medical environment. Happily, some 40 years later, I remain very much alive.

Local Methodist pastors disagree on whether or not homosexuals should be allowed to be ordained in the ministry.

They agree that the Rev. Irene Elizabeth Stroud, who a church council stripped of her credentials Thursday, clearly violated a church law she had vowed to live by when she told her Philadelphia-area congregation last year that she has sex with her female partner.

But local ministers differ on how she should be punished and they do not all support banning practicing homosexuals from the ministry in the first place.

"I was disappointed the verdict couldn't be more creative," the Rev. Michael I. Alleman, senior pastor at Grandview United Methodist Church in Lancaster said today. "We've pulled out of the ordained ministry an extremely effective pastor. I grieve what we as a denomination have done to ourselves."

Kadumi spoke on Nov. 29th with Iran's Al-Aram television station. When the interviewer asked Kadumi, "What is the future of Palestine?" the PLO leader answered: "At this stage there will be two states. Many years from now there will be only one."

Asked why he has not softened his stance against Israel's existence, Kadumi
replied, "Our enemy always says, 'This is Judea and Samaria' ... They haven't changed their discourse. If they change theirs, we will change ours, and if not, we will keep saying that armed resistance is the way to Palestine."

Waxman's report on abstinence programs points out what it calls inaccuracies in curricula used by some federally funded abstinence programs. Some of the selections the report cites really are errors that should be corrected -- just as the errors the Physicians Consortium found in many contraceptive-based sex education programs need to be corrected. Sometimes -- on both sides of the debate -- zeal overcomes objectivity.

Among many of the offenses Waxman's study found, however, even a discerning data shopper can just as easily find scientific-journal statistics to support the other side of the argument. Waxman and his colleagues shopped the left side of the aisle and found support for the "safe-sex" argument. They just as easily could have turned around their cart and selected data from the other side.

In an apparent change in long-standing policy, a top Hamas leader said Friday the militant group would accept the establishment of a Palestinian state in the West Bank and Gaza Strip as well as a long-term truce with Israel....

Hamas has long sought to destroy Israel and replace it with an Islamic Palestinian state, rejecting peace accords and carrying out homicide bombings and other attacks that have killed hundreds of people and badly damaged peace efforts.

"Hamas has announced that it accepts a Palestinian independent state within the 1967 borders with a long-term truce," Sheik Hassan Yousef, the top Hamas leader in the West Bank, told The Associated Press, referring to lands Israel captured in the 1967 Mideast war.

The CBS and NBC television networks are refusing to run a 30-second television ad from the United Church of Christ because its all-inclusive welcome has been deemed "too controversial."

The ad, part of the denomination's new, broad identity campaign set to begin airing nationwide on Dec. 1, states that -- like Jesus -- the United Church of Christ seeks to welcome all people, regardless of ability, age, race, economic circumstance or sexual orientation.

According to a written explanation from CBS, the United Church of Christ is being denied network access because its ad implies acceptance of gay and lesbian couples -- among other minority constituencies -- and is, therefore, too "controversial."

The abruptness of the Roe v. Wade decision is a graphic illustration of moral confusion. One day, abortion was illegal in most jurisdictions--the next day it was legal. An entire structure of moral reasoning, legal precedent, and cultural conscience was discarded by a court that rested its judicial decision on a legal contrivance. How can an act be criminal murder one day and a woman's "right" the next?

By the action of the Supreme Court, abortion was simply declared to be a legal right. A 'right to privacy' was contrived and contorted in order to reverse millennia of moral knowledge and legal precedent. The Supreme Court of the United States may have the constitutional power to reverse legal precedent, but it does not have the authority to reverse moral truth. Though abortion may have been illegal one day and legal the next, it was not morally wrong on one day and morally right the next. The moral horror of abortion is unchanged. Abortion remains a blight upon the nation's character--a graphic symbol of moral rebellion cast in a cry for individual rights.

Many American youngsters participating in federally funded abstinence-only programs have been taught over the past three years that abortion can lead to sterility and suicide, that half the gay male teenagers in the United States have tested positive for the AIDS virus, and that touching a person's genitals "can result in pregnancy," a congressional staff analysis has found.

Those and other assertions are examples of the "false, misleading, or distorted information" in the programs' teaching materials, said the analysis, released yesterday, which reviewed the curricula of more than a dozen projects aimed at preventing teenage pregnancy and sexually transmitted disease.

In providing nearly $170 million next year to fund groups that teach abstinence only, the Bush administration, with backing from the Republican Congress, is investing heavily in a just-say-no strategy for teenagers and sex. But youngsters taking the courses frequently receive medically inaccurate or misleading information, often in direct contradiction to the findings of government scientists, said the report, by Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), a critic of the administration who has long argued for comprehensive sex education.

Many readers may be saying, "Peter who?" -- but The New York Times, explaining how his views trickle down through media and academia to the general populace, noted that "No other living philosopher has had this kind of influence." The New England Journal of Medicine said he has had "more success in effecting changes in acceptable behavior" than any philosopher since Bertrand Russell. The New Yorker called him the "most influential" philosopher alive.

Don't expect Singer to be quoted heavily on the issue that roiled the Nov. 2 election, same-sex marriage. That for him is intellectual child's play, already logically decided, and it's time to move on to polyamory. While politicians debate the definition of marriage between two people, Singer argues that any kind of "fully consensual" sexual behavior involving two people or 200 is ethically fine.

Although it has been described by two former FBI counter-terrorism chiefs as a spin-off of a U.S. front for the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, or CAIR, led the workshop on "Islam and the American Muslim community" at the FBI's Jacksonville Division All Employee Conference.

CAIR's Florida branch, CAIR-FL, said in a statement that "more than 150 law enforcement agents, including FBI and Joint Terrorism Task Force supervisory personnel, attended the workshop that examined basic Islamic beliefs and concepts, common stereotypes of Islam and Muslims and ways in which to improve interactions with the Muslim community."...

The training is part of a campaign by CAIR to counteract what it sees as widespread anti-Muslim prejudice in the United States. A report released last year, titled "Guilt by Association," blasted the Bush administration for government policies that unfairly single out Muslim individuals and organizations" -- a charge denied by the Justice Department.

A hospital in the Netherlands -- the first nation to permit euthanasia -- recently proposed guidelines for mercy killings of terminally ill newborns, and then made a startling revelation: It has already begun carrying out such procedures, which include administering a lethal dose of sedatives.

The announcement by the Groningen Academic Hospital came amid a growing discussion in Holland on whether to legalize euthanasia on people incapable of deciding for themselves whether they want to end their lives -- a prospect viewed with horror by euthanasia opponents and as a natural evolution by advocates...

The Groningen Protocol, as the hospital's guidelines have come to be known, would create a legal framework for permitting doctors to actively end the life of newborns deemed to be in similar pain from incurable disease or extreme deformities.

Do a majority of young adults favor gay marriage? It depends on how the question is asked. Over the past year, polls by reputable polling companies have found the proportion of adults ages 18-29 who favor gay marriage ranging from 40 percent to 63 percent. Conversely, the proportion of young adults opposed to gay marriage has ranged from 36 percent to 54 percent....

What explains teens’ increasing disapproval of gay marriage? Most likely, as more adults voice firm objections to gay marriage, they appear to be having an impact on their children’s attitudes and values.

Will young adults who currently favor gay marriage continue to do so, even as opposition to gay marriage continues to be voiced and as they move through the lifecycle, marrying and becoming parents themselves? Will teenagers’ current high levels of opposition survive the college experience? The answer to both questions is: We don’t know. And that’s the point.

What might explain the differences in behavior today versus yesteryear? A significant part of the explanation is seen by recognizing that society's first line of defense is not the law but customs, traditions and moral values. Customs, traditions and moral values are those important thou-shalt-nots such as: thou shalt not murder, shalt not steal, shalt not lie and cheat. They also include respect for parents, teachers and others in authority plus those courtesies one might read in Emily Post's rules of etiquette.

The importance of customs, traditions and moral values as a means of regulating behavior is that people behave themselves even if nobody's watching. There are not enough cops, and laws can never replace these restraints on personal conduct so as to produce a civilized society. At best, the police and the criminal justice system are the last desperate lines of defense for a civilized society. Unfortunately, too many of us see police, laws, and the criminal and civil justice systems as society's first line of defense.

Conducted by Ipsos-Public Affairs, the poll qualified the question by first telling respondents that the "1973 Supreme Court ruling called Roe v. Wade made abortion in the first three months of pregnancy legal."

But, that's not true.

"Roe v. Wade allows absolutely no limits on reasons for abortion until nearly six months into pregnancy," explains National Right to Life legislative director Douglas Johnson....The AP story "paint[s] a greatly exaggerated picture of public support for the Supreme Court's abortion policy," Johnson indicated.

The poll, which found that two-thirds of respondents don't want President Bush to appoint pro-life judges who will overturn Roe, flatly contradicts previous polling data.

A Wirthlin Worldwide poll commissioned just after the presidential elections, found 55 percent said they took a pro-life position and only 40 percent took one of three positions in favor of legal abortions.

Pro-abortion advocates would still be free to legalize abortion through the democratic process. It was the Roe decision that took the matter out of the people's hands in favor of judicial decree. And this judicial decree was issued in complete contravention of the Constituiton by the creation, out of whole cloth, of a constitutional right to privacy, which a majority of the justices found hiding in the "emanations and penumbras" of the Bill of Rights.

In Wisconsin, where the first efforts to harvest embryonic stem cells for medical research took place, pro-life activists are battling the state's Democratic governor over his plan to spend $375 million to advance the controversial scientific technique....Right to Life does support adult stem cell research, Armacost added. "Let's go forward with good stem cell research that is ethical," she said, explaining that information about the adult stem cell alternative will be included on a soon-to-be-launched website dedicated to stopping Doyle's plan.

Doyle, however, does not see embryonic stem cell research as life-threatening. He views it as a key component in developing treatments and possible cures for debilitating diseases such as Parkinson's, which afflicts his own mother.

How is it that so many evangelicals--including some of the most respected leaders in the movement--now reject the traditional doctrine of hell in favor of annihilationism or some other option? The answer must surely come down to the challenge of theodicy--the challenge to defend God's goodness against modern indictments.

Modern secularism demands that anyone who would speak for God must now defend Him. The challenge of theodicy is primarily to defend God against the problem of evil. The societies that gave birth to the decades of megadeath, the Holocaust, the abortion explosion, and institutionalized terror will now demand that God answer their questions and redefine himself according to their dictates.

In the background to all this is a series of inter-related cultural, theological, and philosophical changes that point to an answer for our question: What happened to evangelical convictions about hell?

The first issue is a changed view of God. The biblical vision of God has been rejected by the culture as too restrictive of human freedom and offensive to human sensibilities. God's love has been redefined so that it is no longer holy. God's sovereignty has been reconceived so that human autonomy is undisturbed. In recent years, even God's omniscience has been redefined to mean that God perfectly knows all that He can perfectly know, but He cannot possibly know a future based on free human decisions.

There is a world of difference between real-life people of faith and the made-for-TV, Elmer Gantry-style blowhards who are selected to represent them. Falwell and Pat Robertson are held up as spokesmen for evangelicals, which is ridiculous. Meanwhile people like John Stott, who are actually important, get ignored.

It could be that you have never heard of John Stott. I don't blame you. As far as I can tell, Stott has never appeared on an important American news program. A computer search suggests that Stott's name hasn't appeared in this newspaper since April 10, 1956, and it's never appeared in many other important publications....Stott is so embracing it's always a bit of a shock -- especially if you're a Jew like me -- when you come across something on which he will not compromise. It's like being in "Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood," except he has a backbone of steel. He does not accept homosexuality as a legitimate lifestyle, and of course he believes in evangelizing among nonbelievers. He is pro-life and pro-death penalty, even though he is not a political conservative on most issues.

Most important, he does not believe truth is plural. He does not believe in relativizing good and evil or that all faiths are independently valid, or that truth is something humans are working toward. Instead, Truth has been revealed.

By some measures, the state has the most obstacles to divorce. It is one of a handful that does not allow one spouse to unilaterally end a marriage. It is also one of the few without some form of one-step, no-fault divorce for couples like the Jacobs.

There are all sorts of theories about why New York has been so conservative on matters of family law and has held out on this issue. The Catholic Church has objections to easier divorces, and women's groups are concerned about the economic harm to women from inequitable financial settlements. Divorce reformers have spent years focusing on other issues, including distribution of assets, child support and custody and domestic violence. Then there is the generally sclerotic Legislature, where some members still recall the bruising fight over this issue 15 years ago, when the Assembly defeated a no-fault bill.

But now, matrimonial lawyers, bar associations and judges are pushing to have the law changed, saying it is archaic and heightens hostilities between spouses, which particularly hurts children. Both the New York State Bar Association and the city bar are backing a legislative change in Albany to add no-fault grounds, and several powerful legislators appear to be receptive.

The truth is, if you depend on the Christian right for your theological sustenance, you probably won't recognize the Jesus of the Gospels.

Jesus was quite a troublemaker. In fact, I'm thinking the Bush administration would have a special place for Jesus were the swarthy Nazarene to take up his ministry today in the U.S. of A.--in a cell with other Middle Eastern men awaiting deportation.

Let's recall what the Jesus of the Gospels espoused. "When you give a banquet, invite the poor, the crippled, the lame, and the blind. And you will be blessed, because they cannot repay you," the sandal-wearing rabble-rouser was known to say....

Holy class warfare! No wonder Republicans have switched out the Jesus of the Gospels for a low-rent moralizer preoccupied with what other people are doing with their bodies.

Proponents of gay marriage in Connecticut say the high court's decision could help efforts to pass legislation next year that legalizes marriage between same-sex couples or allows civil unions.

"The bottom line is, states are free to recognize same-sex marriages if they choose to," said Rep. Michael Lawlor, D-East Haven, co-chairman of the Judiciary Committee.

Lawlor said there is a lot of support for civil unions in the Connecticut legislature and that could be "the starting point" for the new session that begins in January.

Gay marriage opponents are expected to propose a Defense of Marriage Act or DOMA that would allow marriage only between a man and woman.

Americans as a people are losing their ability to distinguish right from wrong.

There are many reasons for it, but it is undeniable that the ties that bind us are breaking down and have been for the last 40 years.

For at least that long, forces within our society have been persuading Americans -- through the schools, the universities, movies, TV shows, advertisements, the press, pseudo-scientific research and a thousand other means -- that there is no objective truth, that there is no ultimate morality, that there is no authority higher than government to which we as individuals are accountable.

These forces now represent a greater danger to us as a nation and as individuals than do all foreign threats combined.

For certain, far more Americans are dying as a result of this unholy relativist, ultra-secularist jihad than are being killed by the Islamist holy warriors.

American Greetings Corp. has about 10 Hanukkah-Christmas line offerings this year.

"It’s an interesting market," said Kathy Krassner, editor of Greetings Inc., a trade magazine. "But it’s a limited market."

The newest player is Chrismukkah. Ron Gompertz founded the company this year with his wife, inspired by an episode of the popular Fox series "The O.C." in which character Seth Cohen, whose mother is Protestant and whose father is Jewish, coins the term.

"It’s a little bit of both," Gompertz explains.

As with anything addressing religion, though, card makers are careful not to offend. Chrismukkah even offers a disclaimer: "We respect people’s different faiths and do not suggest combining the religious observance of Christmas and Hanukkah."