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.