The latest allegation of prisoner abuse by the US military comes from Erik Saar, a former Army sergeant and translator at the American naval base at Guantanamo. In a forthcoming book, Saar describes the use of female sexuality as a tactic against Muslim detainees, for many of whom modesty between the sexes is a deeply ingrained religious requirement.

According to the Associated Press, Saar writes of one female interrogator who attempted to ''break" a devout Saudi prisoner. She removed her top to reveal a tight T-shirt [...] Writes Saar: ''The concept was to make the detainee feel that...he was unclean and was unable to go before his God in prayer and gain strength."

Are Americans OK with using religious humiliation as tools of war?

How about religious torture?

In Abu Ghraib, the cruelties inflicted on prisoners by Specialist Charles Graner and his little band of sadists weren't limited to the sexual. Inmates told investigators they were forced to swallow pork and liquor -- both are forbidden to Muslims -- and to denounce Islam.

But the mosaic that emerges from these 25 tiles is worthy of note. This is the evangelical movement understood in its historical context. Some of these names would like to pull the movement back into places evangelicalism has expressly rejected in the past: either into a cultural disengagement that "circles the wagons" or into a cultural embrace that compromises the gospel (and no, I'm not naming names; interpret as you will). But evangelicalism as a movement has largely succeeded because it includes both of these voices correcting each other's overstatements. Once we stop having the debate over how to be "in but not of the world," we're in trouble.

For months, news from Iraq has told the story of the extremists, those who destroy themselves to murder others and to proclaim the cause of a religious or Baathist dictatorship. Yesterday the world saw and heard, at last, another Iraq, one in which millions of people from all over the country turned out to vote -- even in places where their nominal leaders had proclaimed a boycott, even at polling stations where mortar rounds fell or gunfire rang out. Some danced or distributed chocolates, some wept with joy, others grimly pressed forward as if their lives literally depended on it. A 32-year-old man who lost his leg in a suicide bombing arrived at the polls in Baghdad and told a Reuters reporter, "I would have crawled here if I had to." There were nine suicide bombings, and at least 44 people died, including one U.S. soldier. But the day's message was unmistakable: The majority of Iraqis support the emerging democratic order in their country, and many are willing to risk their lives for it....

Yesterday, however, Americans finally got a good look at who they are fighting for: millions of average people who have suffered for years under dictatorship and who now desperately want to live in a free and peaceful country. Their votes were an act of courage and faith -- and an answer to the question of whether the mission in Iraq remains a just cause.

In Iraq, those who go to vote, especially in areas where the insurgents are active, are true democratic heroes. One observer said that it would be reasonable to anticipate 60 acts of terrorism on Sunday. Terrorists thrive on unpredictability. That is what gives them the great leverage they have. If we knew exactly where a terrorist would strike, the jeopardized could prepare for him, and vitiate or even abort his mission.

The other problem in Iraq reflects tribal divisions. If the Sunnis were to succeed in boycotting the election, that would be different from the failure to vote for fear of retaliation by the insurgents.

Whatever happens, it is a day of haunting significance. President Bush's statement on Thursday that of course the United States military would withdraw if the new government requested it to do so is the perfect frame for a genuinely democratic exercise.

You can't get, in Iraq, sophisticated demographics of a kind that will tell us how many failed to vote for fear of the insurgents, how many were motivated by tribal resentments. But one might hope that the European community would greet the events of Sunday with at least a measure of gratitude for what the United States has made possible.

While 45 million unborn children have been aborted since Roe v. Wade in 1973, there has been no talk from the left of compromise on common-sense restrictions such as parental notification, waiting periods, or a ban on grisly partial-birth abortions -- only endless assertions about a woman's right over her "own" body

On so-called gay marriage, where was the spirit of civility last year when the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts dictated to legislators that they had to legalize something that over 4,000 years of recorded human history had declined to do? Where is the restraint when gay-rights supporters threaten to overturn the federal Defense of Marriage Act (signed into law by none other than Bill Clinton)?

On the teaching of evolution, a school board in Cobb County, Georgia, agreed to paste a sticker into some science textbooks that would meet the concerns of some religiously motivated parents while allowing the Darwin's theory of origins to continue to be taught. The sticker says, "Evolution is a theory, not a fact....This material should be approached with an open mind, studied carefully, and critically considered." While this was a perfectly reasonable attempt at compromise, a federal district court judge ruled that the sticker is unconstitutional.

Sounds like these folks are just as "deeply religious" as are evangelicals and weekly churchgoers -- only they have a different religion.

It is something that draws an easy laugh, especially from journalists: a campaign condemning America's most beloved cartoon sponge.

But James Dobson's high-profile jabs against Nickelodeon's monster hit SpongeBob SquarePants are no laughing matter. They are, instead, a textbook example of how powerful evangelical conservatives send galvanizing messages to their faithful that sail over the heads of those who aren't supposed to get it....

Mainstream news outlets cracking jokes only help Dobson's cause, allowing conservative complaints about how the liberal media twist their words around....But Dobson's message can be amazingly effective in generating fear, convincing conservative parents they can't even place their children in front of kiddie channel Nickelodeon without exposing them to radical ideas. No one should forget how effectively fear sold the American public on war with Iraq and a president with a seriously low job approval rating.

These are seeds, once planted, that will pay off in future campaigns against media indecency and gay rights. And when Dobson's faithful turn out again to press their issues at the ballot box, mainstream media outlets will cluck their tongues and wonder how they once more missed the message.

The religious fundamentalists deriding a federal court ruling barring anti-evolution stickers on Georgia textbooks have it all wrong. Judge Clarence Cooper's decision neither denies God nor defends the theory of evolution. It's about one thing: living up to the U.S. Constitution.

That document's view on church and state is as clear now as the day the ink hit the paper. Church and state must be separate, as much today as ever, given the myriad ways issues of so-called morality are creeping into government affairs....

Public school classrooms were never intended to put forth the agendas of any religion, or even atheism. These are matters still best left to parents, who, under the same Constitution, are free to teach whatever they think their children should believe about God and evolution.

The "changing hearts" portion of the abortion debate is over. ATTENTION, PASSENGERS: We're now entering the "minds" portion of the "hearts and minds" journey on abortion. We've been talking about abortion for 32 years. All the hearts that can be changed have been changed. By some estimates, 35 million human hearts (and counting) have been "changed" by abortion....

Until Roe is overturned, telling pro-lifers they need to be "changing hearts" is like telling the New England Patriots they need to practice more -- while never, ever letting them play in the Super Bowl. We've been changing hearts for 32 years -– I think we're ready for the big match now. I think Americans would support massive restrictions on abortion. And NARAL agrees with me! How about it, liberals? Prove me wrong! Let Americans vote.

Hillary Clinton's idea of an overture to pro-life groups is to blame those who oppose abortion for its spread. This line of reasoning is comically convoluted, but Hillary Clinton has been trying it out anyway, saying President Bush is responsible for the rise in abortion in some states because he won't fund her favorite prophylactic programs.

But even in extending a thorn branch to pro-life groups, Hillary Clinton draws gasps, head shaking, and troubled silence from pro-abortion activists. So reported the press after she said earlier in the week that "We can all recognize that abortion in many ways represents a sad, even tragic, choice to many, many women." Notice that she didn't say it is a tragic choice for the aborted babies, only for the women who get abortions....

The "I Had An Abortion" T-shirts Planned Parenthood sold online last year were an attempt to "demystify and destigmatize it," said a spokesman for the group. The strategy here is to normalize abortion, make it so commonplace that no one will think to question it. If you can talk happily and casually about your abortions -- as Barbara Ehrenreich did in the New York Times last year in a piece titled "Owning Up to Abortion" -- then how bad can the practice be?

Understanding this psychology, Alexander Sanger, the grandson of Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, has been emphasizing that abortion advocates should go beyond "choice" -- an insipid, evasive rhetoric, he thinks -- and celebrate abortion unapologetically. After all, he says, the unborn child is an interloper who deserves death. "The unborn child is not just an innocent life," he writes, but a "liability, a threat, and a danger to the mother and to the other members of the family."

The conservative mood, exemplified so vocally and vociferously by the religious right, has no such difficulty, validated by their perception of Biblical support and buoyed by a message that plays to a deep-seated sense of pious entitlement. By co-opting religion into the political sphere, they have, for all intents and purposes, assumed a self-imagined moral higher ground, from which all manner of social, environmental and ethical damage can be justified.

A wholly secular opposition to this way of thinking, long advocated on separation of church and state grounds by those on the left, including believers, has been predictably ineffective, while more half-truths, misinformation and ignorance gain the solidity of dogma. It is, therefore, incumbent upon the too often complacent religious left to serve notice that the fight has been joined. Religion in general, and Christianity in particular, are not the sole province of a conservative, jingoistic electorate.

Biblical authority seems a good place to join the debate, since religious conservatives are quick to use scripture to validate their position, perhaps rightfully so. But arguments of a literal versus allegorical interpretation aside (another debate), even a casual reading of the New Testament Gospels, which narratively describe the ministry and message of Jesus, paint a clear picture of a radical teacher who intentionally turned the religious and social thinking of his day upside down, a teacher whose primary advocacy was for the poor, the marginalized and the cast aside, and, as a result, was executed by religious conservatives. His disciples and followers were told to give away their possessions; their community was, by definition, socialistic.

Ending days of speculation about whether they had agreed to a cease-fire with Israel, Hamas and Islamic Jihad on Tuesday denied that they would halt terrorist attacks "without making Israel pay a price."

Hamas leader, Khaled Mashaal, the Syria-based head of the movement's political bureau, said there would be no discussion of a truce before the Palestinians test Israel's intentions and receive assurances from the international community that Israel would halt its attacks on the Palestinians.

He described the recent talks between Hamas officials in the Gaza Strip and Palestinian Authority Chairman Mahmoud Abbas as "positive."

"We agreed that the message that we should send to the international community is that the Palestinian resistance is not the problem, but it is Israel's aggression," he said. "We also agreed that our message to the Zionist enemy is that there would be no solution unless the occupation ends."

A PBS spokesman said late Tuesday that the nonprofit network has decided not to distribute the episode, called "Sugartime!," to its 349 stations. She said the Education Department's objections were not a factor in that decision.

"Ultimately, our decision was based on the fact that we recognize this is a sensitive issue, and we wanted to make sure that parents had an opportunity to introduce this subject to their children in their own time," said Lea Sloan, vice president of media relations at PBS.

However, the Boston public television station that produces the show, WGBH, does plan to make the "Sugartime!" episode available to other stations. WGBH also plans to air the episode on March 23, Sloan said.

If anything, Roe succeeded only in forming a coalition of otherwise politically disinterested voters that has significantly strengthened the Republican Party. For Democrats, Roe has become a political liability: If they aren't sufficiently pro-Roe, their base will ignore them; yet if they are, they cannot hope to make inroads into red states. This has led to the untenable and absurd position held by many Democrats (and a few blue-state Republicans), who say that they are personally against abortion, but in favor of Roe....

One justice retirement is always a big political event, but with a potential of four during Mr. Bush's second term, the pro-life marchers had an extra reason to be excited yesterday. Far from ever being "settled," they know, as do the pro-choicers, that Roe was never more in doubt.

The traditional family -- with marriage, work, and children -- has always provided an effective framework to deal with the challenges our policy wonks are now trying to solve with social engineering. Parents raising children and then children helping their elderly parents is a model that has always worked well. It's a program that doesn't need computers. It just requires caring.

Demographics reflect symptoms -- they don't explain causes. Our crises in Social Security and Medicare are the result of the socially engineered "do your own thing" society.

Of course, we need a free society and we need an "ownership" society. But families provide the social basis of these arrangements.

Families are built on caring, love, and respect for the sanctity of life. If we give it some thought, I think we'll conclude that these values provide a far better basis on which to build our future than "the right to privacy."

Mrs. Clinton, in a speech to about 1,000 abortion rights supporters at the state Capitol, firmly restated her support for the Supreme Court ruling that legalized abortion nationwide, Roe v. Wade. But then she quickly shifted gears, offering warm words to opponents of abortion -- particularly members of religious groups -- asserting that there was "common ground" to be found after three decades of emotional and political warfare over abortion.

Mrs. Clinton is widely seen as a possible candidate for the party's presidential nomination in 2008, and her remarks signaled that she could be recalibrating her strong identification with the abortion-rights movement as the Democratic Party engages in its own re-examination of its handling of the issue in the wake of Senator John Kerry's loss in the 2004 presidential race.

Ms. Clinton has been a visible and very public defender of abortion rights, appearing at a huge rally in Washington last spring and denouncing what she called Republican efforts to demonize the abortion rights movement.

While she acknowledged in her address today that Americans have "deeply held differences" over abortion rights, Mrs. Clinton told the annual conference of the Family Planning Advocates of New York State, "I for one respect those who believe with all their heart and conscience that there are no circumstances under which abortion should be available."

Allard unsuccessfully sought an amendment to the U.S. Constitution defining marriage as the union of one man and one woman in 2004. Since then, 11 states passed their own versions of a same-sex marriage ban.

"We think we have more support this time than we had last time around," Allard told the Rocky Mountain News.

On matters such as Social Security, taxes and tort reform, compromise is quite possible -- perhaps inevitable. We may even achieve a degree of unity on the anguishing question of Iraq, since, absent the development of a serious get-out-of-Iraq-now campaign, nobody seems to have a particularly attractive alternative to the administration's approach.

What, in my view, threatens to test the American tradition of working things out are issues closely tied to religious faith: abortion, homosexual marriage, the teaching of evolution....we may all agree that "working things out" is the right thing to do when it comes to secular disagreements. But as many deeply religious Americans see it, compromise between righteousness and sin is: sin.

That's fine when it comes to personal behavior. But it could spell serious discord when extended to legislation or government policy.

The Supreme Court wants us to believe that they have settled a matter they have no power nor right to settle, that they have created precedents, and generated behaviors and commitments which compromise millions and many will therefore want in self-interest to defend, and that slowly their decision of 1973 will pacify the public thoroughly.

But they have overstepped their powers. They have practiced government without the consent of the governed. They have usurped the role of the legislature.

We have no procedure for making our consciences effective within the law, short of marches and protests and a constant series of elections -- defeating those who would kill the unborn by choice, and bringing in new champions of the inalienable right to life and to defend the otherwise defenseless.

The moral position of the other side is more and more visibly untenable.

The case was one of two right-to-die appeals pending at the high court. Justices are expected to decide in the next month whether to consider a Bush administration request to block the nation's only law allowing doctors to help terminally ill patients die more quickly. Oregon voters passed that law in 1998.

At issue Monday was "Terri's Law," which the Florida Supreme Court ruled unanimously was an unconstitutional effort to override court rulings.

The 41-year-old Schiavo suffered brain damage in 1990 when her heart temporarily stopped beating because of an eating disorder. In 2001, her parents lost an emergency Supreme Court appeal seeking to keep her feeding tube in place, but more appeals followed.

Florida judges will now decide, after the Supreme Court's action, what happens next in the case.

Coming just two days after George W. Bush's inauguration, Saturday's anniversary of the 1973 Supreme Court decision legalizing abortion is dominated by the hopes of one side -- and fears of the other -- that the president will try to overturn Roe v. Wade (search) through appointments to fill expected high court vacancies.

Anti-abortion activists were among the legions of Bush supporters converging on Washington in the past few days, and most will remain for Monday's annual March for Life. Though Bush is widely admired within the movement, some of its militants still question his commitment to reversing the 32-year-old decision.

Sadly, more than 30 years after the Supreme Court ruled, we still must remain vigilant in defending Roe from assaults by anti- choice lawmakers in Congress and President Bush. In the last year alone, President Bush signed into law the first federal bill to criminalize abortion, promoted policies that block access to family planning and emergency contraception, and steered taxpayer money to abstinence-only programs....We must preserve the right to privacy while promoting a comprehensive approach to reproductive health care, including planning for healthy families, preventing unintended pregnancies, and providing comprehensive and medically-accurate sexuality education.

On this cold, clear Jan. 20, as a president tested by war and terrorism and renewed in power, Bush pledged to seek "the greatest achievements in the history of freedom," the liberation of oppressed people everywhere and the end of all tyrannies.

If that seems a wildly ambitious agenda for a country whose citizens are increasingly discomfited by the unfinished effort to liberate one country -- Iraq -- it is.

But it reflects one essential truth we have learned about Bush: his faith that the quest for freedom is a universal truth, rooted in human nature and intended by God.

History is dynamic and changeable. On the other hand, some things are constant, such as human imperfection, injustice, misery and bad government.

This world is not heaven.

The president's speech seemed rather heavenish. It was a God-drenched speech. This president, who has been accused of giving too much attention to religious imagery and religious thought, has not let the criticism enter him. God was invoked relentlessly....Ending tyranny in the world? Well that's an ambition, and if you're going to have an ambition it might as well be a big one. But this declaration, which is not wrong by any means, seemed to me to land somewhere between dreamy and disturbing. Tyranny is a very bad thing and quite wicked, but one doesn't expect we're going to eradicate it any time soon. Again, this is not heaven, it's earth.

In a 27-page brief filed early last month, attorneys for Gov. Jeb Bush asked the nation's nine top justices to review and eventually reverse the Florida Supreme Court's Sept. 23 ruling that struck down "Terri's Law" as unconstitutional, arguing that the lower courts had denied the governor's and Schiavo's federally protected rights to due process and equal protection....

The entire case hinges on what Terri herself wants. Schiavo insists he is simply carrying out his wife's wishes, claiming that everything he orders, including removal of her feeding tube, is done in accordance with her wishes and any interference is a violation of her privacy.....The court has three options, Destro told WorldNetDaily. It can agree to consider the case, it can refuse or it can order Felos to submit a brief in answer to the governor's.

A decision is expected by Monday.

We have seen our vulnerability -- and we have seen its deepest source. For as long as whole regions of the world simmer in resentment and tyranny - prone to ideologies that feed hatred and excuse murder -- violence will gather, and multiply in destructive power, and cross the most defended borders, and raise a mortal threat. There is only one force of history that can break the reign of hatred and resentment, and expose the pretensions of tyrants, and reward the hopes of the decent and tolerant, and that is the force of human freedom.

We are led, by events and common sense, to one conclusion: The survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of liberty in other lands. The best hope for peace in our world is the expansion of freedom in all the world.

Between the Scopes trial and the early 1930's, "science-proof" fundamentalists pressured publishers into excising discussions of evolution -- and often the word itself -- from biology textbooks. The nature of that success is literally illustrated by a change between the 1921 first edition of "Biology for Beginners," a standard text by Truman Moon, and the second edition, published in 1926. The 1921 edition appeared with a portrait of Darwin on the frontispiece. Five years later, Darwin had been replaced by a drawing of the human digestive tract....

Perhaps the most insidious effect of the campaign against evolution has been avoidance of the subject by teachers, who, whatever their convictions, want to forestall trouble with fundamentalist parents. Recent surveys of high school biology teachers have found that avoidance of evolution is common among instructors throughout the nation.

The singular achievement of the fundamentalist minority has been to render evolution controversial enough to silence many teachers who know better. Only now, when the religious right is no longer satisfied with avoidance but is demanding that schools add anti-Darwinist intelligent design to the curriculum, are defenders of evolution fighting back against the intimidation that has worked so well since the premature declaration of the death of fundamentalism in the 1920's.

The rejected ad shows a serious young man, apparently pondering the problems of modern life. The text touts the TNIV as a source for "real truth" in a world of "endless media noise and political spin." A blue Bible peeks up from the corner of the ad.

The Onion, the weekly satirical magazine, will carry a similar ad next month, and the February/March issue of Modern Bride has an ad featuring a woman in bridal white promoting True Identity, the women's study version of the TNIV. More ads are booked for Web sites, including VH1 and MTV. "God" isn't mentioned in any of these, only in ads for Christian media such as Relevant, a Christian monthly magazine aimed at hip twentysomethings.

But every ad carries the slogan: "Timeless truth; Today's language."

And that assertion of "truth" evidently triggered the rebuff from Rolling Stone.

My uncle said that "the Negro cannot win if he is willing to sacrifice the lives of his children for personal comfort and safety." Now if you look at the issue of abortion, that's immediately sacrificing the life of a child for personal comfort and safely....

I had an abortion in my early twenties. I was married, but the father did not want the child. He was very emphatic about that, and somewhat threatening, and I felt under tremendous pressure, and so I made that choice. At the time, we had one son, and [the father] did not want other children. And it was so convenient, because Roe v. Wade had just passed, and my medical insurance paid for it. I would say in retrospect, we have a greater responsibility as a compassionate society to teach our young people, male and female, the responsibility of parenting, what happens when you have sex, and to teach again like we used to: be prepared to raise a child if you have sex. People stopped saying that. And so I do have compassion for the young person who says, "If I have this baby, my life will be ruined." But I believe the answer is: Think about that before you have the sex. I would say to that young lady, if she's already pregnant, then we go into intervention and look for opportunities to have the child adopted, or to strengthen her with maybe a scholarship to finish school so she doesn't feel deserted or abandoned.

The slim majority that supported the proposed constitutional amendment banning gay marriage last year has been thrown into doubt with the recent resignations of three legislators who oppose gay marriage and a net increase of two gay-marriage supporters in the crop of newly elected legislators.

With the start of the new legislative session, a Globe analysis indicates that supporters of gay marriage appear to be gaining ground in their effort to defeat the proposed amendment to ban same-sex marriage. The Legislature voted 105 to 92 for the amendment in March, but it would have to pass one more roll call to reach the 2006 ballot for voter consideration.

One leading gay-marriage opponent said he sensed a shift against the constitutional ban.

The president said there is no reason to press for the amendment because so many senators are convinced that the Defense of Marriage Act -- which says states that outlaw same-sex unions do not have to recognize such marriages conducted outside their borders -- is sufficient. "Senators have made it clear that so long as DOMA is deemed constitutional, nothing will happen. I'd take their admonition seriously....Until that changes, nothing will happen in the Senate."

Although many progressives agree that "abortion should be safe, legal, and rare," the Open Letter goes further, maintaining that we have a moral imperative to ensure access to abortion services. The ability to choose an abortion should not be compromised by a woman's economic, educational, class or marital status, her age, her race, her geographic location or her lack of adequate information. Current or proposed measures that limit women's access to abortion services -- by denying public funds for low-income women; coercing minors to obtain parental consent and notification instead of providing resources for parental and adolescent counseling; denying international family planning assistance to agencies in developing countries that offer women information about pregnancy options; and banning certain medical procedures -- are harmful to women's lives and well being.

The Open Letter recognizes that in a pluralistic society, the government cannot privilege the teachings of one religion over another. No single religious voice can speak for all faith traditions on abortion, nor should the government take sides on religious differences. More than 40 religious denominations and organizations support the right to safe and legal abortion. It is unconscionable to legislate specific religious doctrine concerning abortion for all Americans or for the women of the world.

As it happened, the era following the decline of religion in Europe led not to unprecedented moral greatness, but to unprecedented cruelty, superstition, mass murder and genocide. But believers in reason without God remain unfazed. Secularists have ignored the vast amount of evidence showing that evil on a grand scale follows the decline of Judeo-Christian religion....

Another example of reason's incapacity to lead to moral conclusions: On virtually any vexing moral question, there is no such a thing as a [missing] purely rational viewpoint. What is the purely rational view on the morality of abortion? Of public nudity? Of the value of an animal versus that of a human? Of the war in Iraq? Of capital punishment for murder? On any of these issues, reason alone can argue effectively for almost any position. Therefore, what determines anyone's moral views are, among other things, his values -- and values are beyond reason alone (though one should be able to rationally explain and defend those values). If you value the human fetus, most abortions are immoral; if you only value the woman's view of the value of the fetus, all abortions are moral.

On Thursday, Newdow told U.S. District Judge John Bates that having a minister invoke God in the Jan. 20 ceremony would violate the Constitution by forcing him to accept unwanted religious beliefs.

Newdow became famous in 2002 for his unsuccessful attempt to remove the phrase "under God" from the Pledge of Allegiance. Two years earlier, he also tried to stop the prayer in Bush's first inauguration, but lost in two federal courts.

The government had asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia (search) to dismiss the current lawsuit, saying the invocation had been widely accepted for more than 200 years old.

The president's welcomed affirmation of traditional Pentagon policy is timely. The Army is looking for ways to transform combat brigades into what it calls "units of action." As reported by this newspaper, these "units of action" would combine support and combat units into one "modular" unit. Some have questioned whether this proposal violates the law, because women could be assigned to serve in the support units that operate near combat units. Under a 1994 law, women are prohibited from serving in land combat units and units that "collocate" with them, such as close support units. We take the president's comments to be a firm reassertion of that rule -- and we commend him for it.

Something serious, a paradigm shift in the way civilization views women, is happening, and you may not even know about it--women are being moved closer and closer to combat....There’s an important place for women in the military, and many women have served our country with valor and honor, but that place is not being shot at, raped by enemy combatants, or killed or maimed in fighting.

In an interview with ABC's Barbara Walters to be broadcast on Friday, Bush said some of his past remarks were too blunt.

"'Bring it on,' was a little blunt," the president said in a transcript of the interview released on Thursday.

"I remember when I talked about Osama bin Laden, I said we're going to get him dead or alive. I guess it's not the most diplomatic of language," Bush said.

The president in July 2003 used the phrase "Bring 'em on" when speaking of insurgent attacks on U.S. forces in Iraq. The comment was widely interpreted as a challenge to the insurgents but Bush said his intent was to rally U.S. troops.

Days after the September 11, 2001, attacks, Bush said he wanted to catch Osama bin Laden "dead or alive," a phrase that reinforced the U.S. president's international image as a cowboy.

In ruling that the stickers violate the constitutionally mandated separation between church and state, U.S. District Judge Clarence Cooper ruled that labeling evolution a "theory" played on the popular definition of the word as a "hunch" and could confuse students...."Due to the manner in which the sticker refers to evolution as a theory, the sticker also has the effect of undermining evolution education to the benefit of those Cobb County citizens who would prefer that students maintain their religious beliefs regarding the origin of life," Cooper wrote in his ruling.

Outside the precincts of the religious right, though, the scientific consensus about evolution is very close to unanimous. For decades, biologists at the world's major universities, and in esteemed peer-reviewed journals, have proven that cellular processes have indeed evolved in sync with Darwin's theories. In November 2004, National Geographic ran a cover story asking, "Was Darwin Wrong?" Its subhead provided the answer: "No. The Evidence for Evolution Is Overwhelming."...

It's not hard for creationists to convince the public that the evidence for evolution is weak. Scientists accept evolution as something very close to fact, but Americans never have. In a November 2004 CBS News/New York Times poll, about evolution, 55 percent of the respondents said that God created humans in their present form. Twenty-seven percent believed in the evolution of man guided by God, and 13 percent believed in evolution without God....Creationism is the perfect culture-war issue because it inevitably pits majorities in local communities against interloping lawyers and scientists. In a country gripped by right-wing populism, it's not hard to stoke resentment against scientists who have the gall to think that they know more than everybody else.

With better communication, people where the tsunami first hit could have warned others where it arrived later. It's similar with abortion: Millions of women who have had abortions could warn those planning to have them this year of the sadness they will find. Our major communication channels, though, do not transmit those stories.

Here's what I've learned from 20 years in the pro-life movement: Almost no women choose abortion. Almost all women naturally want to produce life, and they only "choose" abortion when they feel they have no choice. Since the Cuban government takes away choice, to be pro-choice in Cuba is to be pro-life. The pressures are not official in the United States, but with vision we can see that the bottom line is the same.

What to do? Another intense Asian tsunami may be a century away, but the abortion tsunami occurs every year. An overall constitutional amendment would be great, but in this meantime many lives can be saved through a compassionate conservative approach that features ultrasound machines, waiting periods, involvement of boyfriend or husband and both sets of parents, information about post-abortion syndrome and pro-adoption counseling.

"We're using humor to stop the spread of AIDS," he told a news conference launching the public service announcements, which are targeted at people ages 15 to 24 in countries threatened by the epidemic, including India, China, Russia, the Caribbean and central Asia.

"The Three Amigos" -- as the cartoon condoms are called -- are pictured in a variety of settings, from a spaceship to a soccer field to a casino. Twenty different spots are available in each of the 41 languages, varying from 20 to 60 seconds in length. Some spots are blatantly sexual, others more restrained.

One spot focusing on a roulette wheel in a casino says: "Not all gamblers realize the odds stacked against them. Don't gamble with your life. Use a condom. Stop the spread of AIDS."

America symbolized the onset of a hated modernism and its breakdown of religious, gender and ethnic hierarchies that were so treasured by Islamicist patriarchs. As this war wore on, we also fathomed the pathological partnerships of tyrannies in Afghanistan, Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia and Syria with al-Qaida and other terrorist cadres. Both groups scapegoated the superpower United States for their own failures. In addition, killers in bin Laden's mafia and other terrorist planners from Iran to the West Bank turned out not to be the impoverished, but more often the pampered of the middle class -- like the Saudi suicide zealot who just blew up Americans in Mosul.

Yet in the gloom over postwar Iraq, ex-CIA agents and moody public intellectuals have recently doubted this "They hate us for who we are" explanation. Instead, they have reintroduced the notion of "They hate us for what we do" -- as if there are legitimate grievances that logically earn such violent attacks organized by petro-heirs, doctors and crackpot mullahs. Even a toned-down bin Laden is quoted as witness. He recently joked that al-Qaida is going after America, not liberal Sweden: had we just shrunk to the stature of the politically correct Scandinavians, then our problems would vanish.

In Europe, religious education is the rule from the elementary grades on. So Austrians, Norwegians and the Irish can tell you about the Seven Deadly Sins or the Five Pillars of Islam. But, according to a 1997 poll, only one out of three U.S. citizens is able to name the most basic of Christian texts, the four Gospels, and 12% think Noah's wife was Joan of Arc. That paints a picture of a nation that believes God speaks in Scripture but that can't be bothered to read what he has to say.

U.S. Catholics, evangelicals and Jews have been lamenting for some time a crisis of religious literacy in their ranks. But the dangers of religious ignorance are by no means confined to those worried about catechizing their children or cultivating the next generation of clergy.

When Americans debated slavery, almost exclusively on the basis of the Bible, people of all races and classes could follow the debate. They could make sense of its references to the runaway slave in the New Testament book of Philemon and to the year of jubilee, when slaves could be freed, in the Old Testament book of Leviticus. Today it is a rare American who can engage with any sophistication in biblically inflected arguments about gay marriage, abortion or stem cell research.

Mr. Bush said he leans heavily on his religion every day that he is in the Oval Office and cannot imagine any man handling the pressures of the job without leaning on God.

"I fully understand that the job of the president is and must always be protecting the great right of people to worship or not worship as they see fit," Mr. Bush said. "That's what distinguishes us from the Taliban. The greatest freedom we have or one of the greatest freedoms is the right to worship the way you see fit.

"On the other hand, I don't see how you can be president...without a relationship with the Lord," he said.

In a setback for the gay rights movement, the Supreme Court refused Monday to hear a challenge to a Florida law that prohibits homosexuals from adopting children.

Florida's is the only such statute in the country, and the prohibition is the only categorical adoption ban on the state's books. Florida evaluates adoption applications from all other would-be adoptive parents, including those who have failed at previous adoptions and those with a history of drug abuse or domestic violence....

Three gay men and the children they have raised in long-term foster care challenged the statute in a lawsuit filed four years before the Supreme Court, in Lawrence vs. Texas, invalidated that state's criminal sodomy law in a landmark gay-rights ruling.

The Florida plaintiffs had lost their case in federal court and had already filed their appeals briefs when the Lawrence decision was issued in June 2003. Their attorneys then argued that the Texas decision meant that Florida's law should also fall, as an expression of anti-gay sentiment that the Supreme Court had ruled could not be a basis for public policy.

Some Democratic activists are now debating the wisdom of accepting popular restrictions on abortion--banning partial-birth procedures and requiring parental notification. A number of Democrats even advise against filibustering pro-life judicial nominees.

The Democrats might be serious. John Kerry recently told a meeting of Democratic activists that they had to demonstrate they didn't like abortion. Nancy Keenan, president of NARAL Pro-Choice America, reportedly observed: "There was a gasp in the room."

But that gasp exemplifies the Democrats' challenge. Many activists still don't understand what there is about abortion not to like.

As Frances Kissling points out, "Abortion is a profoundly moral question and any movement that fails to grapple with and respect all the values at stake" won't win voter support. Some Democrats are listening, encouraging Kristen Day, executive director of Democrats for Life.

But Democrats must walk the walk. It is not enough to talk about the unborn as life. Democrats must treat the unborn as life.

Almost anywhere you look around the world, with the glaring exception of Western Europe, religion is now a rising force. Former Communist countries are humming with mosque builders, Christian missionaries and freelance spiritual entrepreneurs of every possible persuasion. In China, underground "house churches" are proliferating so quickly that neither the authorities nor Christian leaders can keep reliable count. In much of South and Central America, exuberant Pentecostal churches, where worshipers catch the Holy Spirit and speak in tongues, continue to spread, challenging the Roman Catholic tradition. And in the United States, religious conservatives, triumphant over their role in the re-election of President Bush, are increasingly asserting their power in politics, the media and culture....

Now, the future of fundamentalism is murky, with several contradictory trends at work simultaneously.

There is little doubt that one fundamentalism can feed another, spurring recruitment and escalating into a sort of religious arms race. In Nigeria's central Plateau State, Muslim and Christian gangs have razed one another's villages in the last few years, leaving tens of thousands of dead and displaced. In rioting in India in 2002, more than 1,000 people, most of them Muslims, were killed by Hindus in Gujarat state -- retaliation for a Muslim attack a day earlier on a train full of Hindus, which killed 59.