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.

Again and again, Abbas has expressed his solidarity with violent extremists. Last month he traveled to Damascus to meet with some of the region's most implacable terror groups, including Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Popular Front For the Liberation of Palestine-General Command. Afterward, Abbas's "foreign minister," Nabil Sha'ath, declared that between the Palestinian Authority and the other groups, "there are no differences over the objectives."...He hews unswervingly to Yasser Arafat's hardline positions -- an Israeli retreat to the 1949 armistice lines, Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, the elimination of every Jewish settlement, the dismantling of Israel's security fence, and no limit on the "right of return" -- code for the abolition of Israel as a Jewish state.

Abbas is no moderate. His election is not a step toward peace. What was true in Afghanistan and Iraq is true in the Palestinian Authority as well: Without regime change, freedom and democracy are impossible. Just as the defeat of the Taliban and Ba'athists were a prerequisite to elections, so the dismantling of the corrupt Fatah autocracy is essential to Palestinian reform. President Bush got it right in 2002: The Palestinians need "new leaders . . . not compromised by terror." They still do.

Abbas has consistently opposed the idea of using the Palestinian security forces to stop terrorism. Even though this is an absolute requirement of the misguided U.S. peace roadmap, Abbas said he has no intention of upholding the commitment....In other words, quite clearly, what Abbas says in English to Western audiences is at odds with what he says in Arabic to his constituents. Does this sound familiar? It is exactly what we witnessed with Arafat for more than 40 years.