The president's policy is based on the belief that all embryos, even the days-old, microscopic form used to derive stem cells in a laboratory dish, should be treated as emerging human life and protected from harm. This seems an extreme way to view tiny laboratory entities that are no larger than the period at the end of this sentence and are routinely flushed from the body by Mother Nature when created naturally.

These blastocysts, as they are called, bear none of the attributes we associate with humanity and, sitting outside the womb, have no chance of developing into babies. Some people consider them clumps of cells no different than other biological research materials. Others would grant them special respect but still make them available for worthy research. But Mr. Bush is imposing his different moral code on both, thereby slowing research that most consider potentially beneficial....Unfortunately, none of this week's heated debate focused on the most promising area of stem cell research, research cloning or therapeutic cloning. Mr. Bush is adamantly opposed to such research, which involves creating microscopic embryos to derive stem cells that genetically match a diseased patient, thus facilitating research on particular diseases and ultimately potential cures. There, too, he seeks to impose his morality on a society with pluralistic views.

While Mr. Abbas in the past few days has apparently begun to take some small steps toward dealing with this problem, he is nowhere near compliance with his promise to neutralize the 52 fugitives. Until Mr. Abbas does this, Israel will continue its postponement of its scheduled pullback from three other West Bank cities.

Mr. Sharon is preparing to release 400 additional Palestinian prisoners from Israeli jails, which would bring to 900 the number released since February. But none of this has persuaded Mr. Abbas to deal seriously with the terrorism problem. Earlier this month, Palestinian security chief Rashid Abu Shbak rejected Israel's request to disarm the fugitives, saying, "We have no intention of withdrawing arms of resistance."

This is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg. Last week, Hamas, embroiled in an internal political dispute with the PA, fired approximately 80 rockets and mortars at Jewish towns in Gaza and Israel. Thus far, Israel has refrained from taking action to root out this terrorist threat. We expect that Mr. Bush will remind Mr. Abbas that this situation is intolerable, and that he would be making a grave mistake if he emulates Mr. Arafat.

I have no idea if the fertilized egg that does not adhere has a soul or if the soul only comes when the egg adheres -- or if there is no such thing as the soul. I do know, though, that showing cute babies is not quite the same as dealing logically and rationally with the promise of stem cell research. If scientists use the very fertilized eggs that in nature are always falling by the wayside, then where is the great ethical leap -- the danger to us all? I grant you that we are embarking on a wondrous and scary intellectual and ethical journey, but we are doing so to save lives, to make them bearable, to mend the broken and cure the sick. What is wrong with that? We can still have the babies of Bush's photo op and also save lives. This is not an either/or situation. To suggest otherwise is simply not the case.

If you believe, as some surely do, that only God can tamper with the process that ultimately produces life, then I cannot argue with you. You believe what you believe. That's the nature of religion. But it is also the nature of religious debates that they are impervious to rational argument. You either believe Muhammad was God's prophet or you don't.

Whatever the case, religious belief cannot be the basis for governmental policy -- not belief, anyway, that lacks consensus. But Bush and his allies among religious conservatives have imposed their religious convictions on the rest of us. In effect, they are saying to a particular victim of degenerative disease: You must suffer or you must die because I simply believe that a fertilized egg ("biologically more primitive than a mosquito," as columnist Michael Kinsley put it) is as much a life as you are. This is president as pope, as mullah -- as someone who cannot understand the practical, the rational, the logical limitations of his own religious beliefs. Bush and others may be willing to die for what they believe -- but why, oh why, should you or I?

Describing stem cell research as dismembering human beings conjures politically useful images of a grisly, abortion-like procedure in which an unborn baby gets torn apart. It's hard, however, to be dismembered if one has no limbs -- being merely a cluster of a couple of hundred non-differentiated cells. These 5-day-old embryos get created all the time in fertility clinics to help people who otherwise could not have children. In a typical in vitro treatment, several more embryos are created than used, and the extras get frozen. Some do not survive the freezing process. Others are discarded at the requests of patients. A survey of fertility clinics in 2002 indicated that there were about 400,000 frozen embryos across the country. Many of these will never be implanted in a woman and will never become babies. All of this is commonplace and accepted because few people regard a group of cells that small as the moral equivalent of a human being. Yet, by Mr. DeLay's standards, each and every one of these embryos is a potential murder victim....

A society that accepts the routine destruction of embryos cannot treat as "dismemberment" the one means of destroying those embryos that might produce great breakthroughs in science and health.

Here's a rich irony: I'm writing today about a new children's book, but I can't describe the plot in a family newspaper without warning you first that it is entirely inappropriate for children.

The book is "Rainbow Party," by juvenile fiction author Paul Ruditis. The publisher is Simon Pulse, a kiddie lit division of the esteemed Simon & Schuster. The cover of the book features the title spelled out in fun, Crayola-bright font. Beneath the title is an illustrated array of lipsticks in bold colors....

What kind of party do you imagine they might be organizing? Perhaps a makeover party? With moms and daughters sharing their best beauty secrets and bonding in the process?

Alas, no. No parents are invited to this get-together. A "rainbow party," you see, is a gathering of boys and girls for the purpose of engaging in group oral sex. Each girl wears a different colored lipstick and leaves a mark on each boy. At night's end, the boys proudly sport their own cosmetically sealed rainbow you-know-where -- bringing a whole new meaning to the concept of "party favors."

In yesterday’s House debate, the most popular argument for the funding was that the embryos were going to be "discarded" or go "unused" -- so why not derive some advantage from their demise? That argument appeals to people’s practical streaks, but it rests on a bit of sleight of hand. It is a way of assuming that human embryos are not human beings with rights without actually trying to establish the point. Anyone who takes seriously the idea that human beings in the embryonic stage of development have rights would find the language jarringly inapposite. Nobody complains that death-row inmates and nursing-home residents are going "unused" since their organs are not being taken from them before their inevitable deaths. (The argument is also misleading, since the vast majority of embryos are not going to be "discarded anyway," but rather would be indefinitely frozen -- a problematic situation, but not the same as death.)

Congressmen also referred to the possibility that America would lose its scientific and economic "edge" if the federal government did not subsidize this research. Our best researchers would move to other lands with more generous subsidies. This worry is, however, essentially incompatible with the fear that by not subsidizing the research, we are throwing away possible cures for diseases. If those cures are found in other countries, then it stands to reason that Americans will have access to them.

Congressmen in favor of the bill piled another contradiction on top of these. They said that by keeping the research in America we could make sure it followed ethical norms. The major ethical norm here would seem to be an either/or matter: If you are not going to forswear subsidizing the killing of human beings for research purposes, then what ethical norms remain to be imposed? But if it is the case that restricting federal funding for the research will drive it overseas, why wouldn’t imposing ethical norms do the same thing? The moment a restriction began to have bite, the congressmen’s logic would militate against it.

While acting positively to save life is a great Jewish good, so is preserving a society that welcomes the weak and never kills the innocent. Even if embryos are not our ontological or moral equals -- though the argument for such a position is hard to make on rational grounds -- there are good Jewish reasons not to promote the destruction of nascent human life, precisely because it will corrode the sensibilities that make us good people -- and good Jews. It is simply wrong to appeal to Jewish law on abortion, which privileges the life of the mother over the life of the unborn child, as a moral justification. Jewish law does so, after all, only in cases where the unborn child is a "pursuer" who threatens the mother's life and health directly. With embryo research, by contrast, there is no direct conflict between an embryo and a patient, and we are not in the position of using particular embryos to save particular patients. Rather, we are proposing a speculative research project that requires the massive, ongoing destruction of human embryos. And this should make all Jews and all decent citizens shudder -- not only for what it is, but for where it might lead. Where is the Jewish "fence around the law" when you need it?

Congress this week is debating several stem cell research bills. President Bush has threatened to veto any that involve the use of cloned human embryos, no matter how they are produced....But science and the give-them-what-they-want-so-they-will-vote-for-me politicians are racing ahead of any fixed moral position, without any kind of tracking to show where this will take us. Perhaps there are other methods that will get us to the destination -- helping people without killing what remains of a moral guidance system.

Before rushing headlong into the unknown, we should ask some basic questions: Where is our home base and what is the fixed moral point that will guide us? Who are we -- evolutionary accidents upon whom any and all experiments should be tolerated for the "greater good," or are we something else and someone else's? Who made us -- a scientist in a laboratory dish, a cosmic accident or "our Creator"?

You don't have to be religious to embrace the notion that life and rights must come from outside of man in order for them to be protected and unalienable. To embrace anything less and to kill embryos in order to "save" older and more developed human beings is to embrace an Orwellian philosophy that "death is life." Do we want to travel to that destination?

The Quran is not "the Bible" of Muslims. It is infinitely more sacred than that. To use a Jewish analogy, it is more like the oral Torah first revealed on Mount Sinai, which was later passed on orally through the prophets and eventually written down on scrolls for all to read. Whereas Christians regard the Bible as written by human beings inspired by God, Muslims regard the Quran--the word means "The Recitation"--as the very words of God, revealed aurally to the Prophet Muhammad in Arabic. To hear those words recited is, for Muslims, to hear Allah. If, for Christians, Jesus is the logos or eternal Word of God made flesh, the Quran is the Word of God made book, and every Arabic syllable in it lives as the breath of the divine.

In short, what Christ is for Christians the Quran (in Arabic) is for Muslims: the living Word of God made present in this world. Moreover, to recite the suras or verses of the Quran, as devout Muslims do, is to breathe in the very words of Allah. Thus, recitation of the Quran is for Muslims much like what receiving the Eucharist is for Catholics--a very intimate ingestion of the divine itself. This, then, according to Newsweek's story--now retracted and "regretted" by the magazine's editor--is what some interrogators flushed down a toilet at Guantanamo Bay.

Justices will review a lower court ruling that struck down New Hampshire's parental notification law. The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals said the 2003 law was unconstitutional because it didn't provide an exception to protect the minor's health in the event of a medical emergency.

The decision to review the emotional case, which came amid wide speculation that Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist's retirement is looming, will be heard in the next term beginning in October. Liberal groups have vowed to fight any Rehnquist replacement who opposes the high court's landmark 1973 decision legalizing abortion.

In their appeal, New Hampshire officials argued that the abortion law need not have an "explicit health exception" because other state provisions call for exceptions when the mother's health is at risk. They also asked justices to clarify the legal standard that is applied when reviewing the constitutionality of abortion laws.

Fighter aircraft and surface warship postings were opened to women a decade ago in a heated but progressive national debate after the Persian Gulf war. The overall policy entrusted to the Pentagon provided larger job opportunities for women in the services. Right now, with a war raging, female soldiers vital to the effort need no demoralizing intrusion into the gender issue by impulsive lawmakers....

The gruesome truth remains that war is hell, even as its front lines become viciously vague. The daily car bombings, suicide atrocities and insurgent raids show that no area of Iraq, from Humvee patrols to chow halls, is a safe haven for the occupation troops, male or female. Women have volunteered for the full range of opportunity and risk implicit in their military careers. They are proving their valor in Iraq and need no demeaning protections from Congress.

"I made [it] very clear to the Congress that the use of federal money, taxpayers' money, to promote science which destroys life in order to save life, I'm against that," Bush told reporters. "Therefore if the bill does that, I will veto it."

It would mark the first veto of Bush's presidency.

Supporters of the bill dispute Bush's depiction of the research, saying it's critical to advance scientific discoveries that may help cure diseases.

The bill would broaden the limits on funding embryonic stem cell research beyond the strict rules the president outlined four years ago.

State lawmakers yesterday rebuffed Governor Mitt Romney's latest bid to bar scientists from cloning human cells and once again approved a measure that broadly endorses embryonic stem cell research.

The Legislature also rejected three other changes the Republican governor proposed. By large margins, lawmakers refused to take out wording defining when life begins, rejected his call to further limit what women can be paid for donating their eggs, and turned down his proposal to strengthen a ban on fertilizing eggs for research. Both the House and Senate reaffirmed the bill they approved last March and sent it back to Romney's desk....

A Romney spokeswoman said the governor will veto the measure, but both chambers have approved the measure with large majorities that would overrule him.

From the get-go, social conservatives warned of disaster. If love were the only criterion, people who hadn't fallen in love might remain single, people who had fallen out of love might demand divorce, and even homosexuals could lay a claim to marriage. As Coontz says, they were right. They were just 200 years early.

Gradually, the truly traditional marriage was transformed into the ''love-based, male breadwinner marriage" that we now label traditional. It was held in check by the economic dependency of wives, the unreliability of birth control, and penalties for having children out of wedlock. In the last 40 years all of this too was changed...by heterosexuals."...

Of course, this is a definition of marriage that drives opponents to the ramparts. The backlash that mobilized to ensure that marriage was not between two ''people" but between a man and woman also draws a bead, or an arrow, on love. Indeed, running through the tirades is the warning that if marriage is based on love alone, we'll have marriage between people and their pets, what one wag called petophilia.

But opponents need more than a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage to shore up traditional marriage. They need to roll back everything from female independence to divorce, birth control, and the ideal of marriage as primarily a personal relationship. While some are happy to do just that, you can't choose one strand from the fabric of history.

The method, called therapeutic cloning, is one of the great hopes of the stem cell field. It produces stem cells, universal cells that are extracted from embryos, killing the embryos in the process, and, in theory, can be directed to grow into any of the body's cell types. And since the stem cells come from embryos that are clones of individuals, they should be exact genetic matches. Scientists want to obtain such stem cells from patients to study the origin of diseases and to develop replacement cells that would be identical to ones a patient has lost....

Until now, scientists have been studying human embryonic stem cells they extracted from embryos that were created for that purpose or from embryos created at fertility clinics and donated by couples who no longer needed them. They also are studying mouse stem cells, working on the extraordinarily difficult task of directing them to develop into specific tissue types.

Scientists say they know the word "cloning" raises fears of actual babies that are clones, but say they have no intention of doing such work. The South Korean government, which paid for the new study, has made it a criminal offense to implant a cloned embryo into a woman's uterus, Dr. Hwang said. "It should be banned throughout the world," he added.

Christians, Jews, and Buddhists don't lash out in homicidal rage when their religion is insulted. They don't call for holy war and riot in the streets. It would be unthinkable for a mainstream priest, rabbi, or lama to demand that a blasphemer be slain. But when Reuters reported what Mohammad Hanif, the imam of a Muslim seminary in Pakistan, said about the alleged Koran-flushers -- ''They should be hung. They should be killed in public so that no one can dare to insult Islam and its sacred symbols" -- was any reader surprised?

The Muslim riots should have been met by outrage and condemnation. From every part of the civilized world should have come denunciations of those who would react to the supposed destruction of a book with brutal threats and the slaughter of 17 innocent people. But the chorus of condemnation was directed not at the killers and the fanatics who incited them, but at Newsweek....

[W]hat ''Muslims in America and throughout the world" most need to hear is not pandering sweet-talk. What they need is a blunt reminder that the real desecration of Islam is not what some interrogator in Guantanamo might have done to the Koran. It is what totalitarian Muslim zealots have been doing to innocent human beings in the name of Islam. It is 9/11 and Beslan and Bali and Daniel Pearl and the USS Cole. It is trains in Madrid and schoolbuses in Israel and an ''insurgency" in Iraq that slaughters Muslims as they pray and vote and line up for work. It is Hamas and Al Qaeda and sermons filled with infidel-hatred and exhortations to ''martyrdom."

Julie and Hillary Goodridge are celebrating their first wedding anniversary today, and the world, unsurprisingly, has not fallen off its axis. The women, who were among seven same-sex couples to sue for the right to marry under the Massachusetts Constitution, have spent the year in the ordinary pursuits of American families everywhere.

They have been joined by more than 5,000 other gay and lesbian couples who have exchanged wedding vows in Massachusetts since last May 17, without apparent catastrophic effect on the state, its families, or other marriages....

It strains the imagination to see how a year of gay marriage has caused the state any discernible harm. Supporters even point to a modest economic boost due to tourism and other local spending on gay weddings. But the reason to toast today's wedding anniversaries has little to do with tax revenues and everything to do with the riches that come from extending civil rights to every citizen.

The opinion by Chief Judge Joseph F. Bataillon of the federal district court in Nebraska is weak in critical respects and will be vulnerable on appeal. Its core, however, is not trivial. The Nebraska provision, particularly as interpreted by the state's attorney general, is so broad as to invalidate any legal recognition of any same-sex relationship. This has implications, the judge notes, not merely for those who would marry but for "roommates, co-tenants, foster parents, and related people who share living arrangements, expenses, custody of children, or ownership of property." The state attorney general, in fact, interpreted it to prevent any state law allowing gay couples to make organ donation decisions for one another. The constitutional guarantee of equal protection may not require states to recognize same-sex marriage, but it unquestionably prevents a state from arbitrarily targeting gay couples for differential treatment.

Even if Judge Bataillon's opinion were entirely frivolous, however, it would still be a lousy argument for writing discrimination into the federal Constitution. The American judiciary has a process for correcting its mistakes: two layers of appellate review, culminating at the Supreme Court of the United States. In the American system, the Constitution shouldn't be changed to reverse a single judge in Nebraska.

"Using public funds, the 'Silver Ring Thing' urges students to commit themselves to Christ," said Julie Sternberg, Senior Staff Attorney at the ACLU Reproductive Freedom Project. "The courts have repeatedly said that taxpayer dollars cannot be used to promote religion. The 'Silver Ring Thing' blatantly violates this principle."

Over the past three years, the federal government has awarded more than one million dollars to the "Silver Ring Thing." According to legal papers filed by the ACLU today, the "Silver Ring Thing" describes its mission as "offering a personal relationship with Jesus Christ as the best way to live a sexually pure life."

There is no conclusive evidence that abstinence-only-until-marriage education reduces the rate of unintended pregnancy or sexually transmitted diseases. Moreover, research indicates that in addition to proselytizing, many of these programs do not help teens delay having sex, and some studies show evidence that these programs actually deter teens from protecting themselves from unintended pregnancy or disease when they become sexually active.

Thursday's decision by a federal court to overturn Nebraska's state constitutional marriage amendment is a landmark moment in the battle over same-sex marriage. For the first time, a federal court has taken this matter out of the hands of a state. A constitutional amendment passed with a 70 percent majority of Nebraska's voters has been voided. There could be no clearer demonstration of the arrogance of activist judges. This should remind Republican senators of the urgent need to confirm the president's nominees to the bench. And of course this decision clearly shows that, without a federal marriage amendment, same-sex marriage is destined to be imposed on the country by the courts....

The distinctive thing about public debate on this issue is the claim by same-sex-marriage advocates that there are no rational grounds for opposing gay marriage -- that opposition to same-sex marriage is rooted in sheer animus. The court here is simply buying into the widespread view that this is not a rational debate, but a debate between rationality and prejudice. The Goodridge decision in Massachusetts did something similar.

Lost in the propaganda and facial expressions is just how modest the proposed revisions are. For all the comparisons to the Scopes trial, the roles in that trial have been reversed 80 years later. Today, it's the critics of Darwinism who want to introduce what they see as important scientific evidence into science classrooms and it's the Darwinists who are fighting to keep out what they see as heresy.

And yet, the revisions would not require the teaching of ID, which is fine with ID advocates who admit that their theory is too new to be the focus of classroom instruction. The revisions would merely have teachers teach Darwinism and the scientific evidence that supports it, but not treat Darwinism as revealed religion that must not be questioned....

Outside, a lone protester was handing out bumper stickers that said, "Kansans: not as bigoted as you think!" She asked those leaving Memorial Hall for a lunch break, "Do you want one of these or are you thoroughly indoctrinated?" Since supporters of a critical approach to Darwinism say their whole point is to oppose indoctrination, her question cut both ways. Asked which side she was on, her response was, "I'm opposed to a theocracy." Given the existence of the church of evolution, with Darwin as God, that still did not answer the question.

Six years later, evolutionists in Kansas are under attack again. They think the old creationism is back. They're mistaken. Homo erectus--the defense, on pluralist grounds, of the literal account of Genesis--is beginning to die out. The new challenger, ID, differs fundamentally from fundamentalism. Like its creationist forebears, ID is theistic. But unlike them, it abandons Biblical literalism, embraces open-minded inquiry, and accepts falsification, not authority, as the ultimate test. These concessions, sincere or not, define a new species of creationism--Homo sapiens--that fatally undermines its ancestors. Creationists aren't threatening us. They're becoming us....

Perversely, evolutionists refuse to facilitate this collapse. They prefer to dismiss ID proponents as dead-end Neanderthals. They complain, legitimately, that Calvert and Harris are trying to expand the definition of science beyond "natural explanations." But have you read the definition Calvert and Harris propose? It would define science as a continuous process of "observation, hypothesis testing, measurement, experimentation, logical argument and theory building to lead to more adequate explanations of natural phenomena." Abstract creationism can't qualify for such scrutiny. Substantive creationism can't survive it. Or if it can, it should.

It's too bad liberals and scientists don't welcome this test. It's too bad they go around sneering, as censors of science often have, that the new theory is too radical, offensive, or embarrassing to be taken seriously. It's too bad they think good science consists of believing the right things. In the long view--the evolutionary view--good science consists of using evidence and experiment to find out whether what we thought was right is wrong. If they do that in Kansas, by whatever name, that's all that matters.

Since 1974, an "unborn child" in Massachusetts has been "the individual human life in existence and developing from fertilization until birth." Barring a Romney victory on this point, the legislature is poised to change the law to define human life as beginning at the "implantation of the embryo in the uterus." In a letter sent to the legislature this morning, Romney calls this statutory change "completely unnecessary." The governor told the Boston Globe: "It is very conceivable that scientific advances will allow an embryo to be grown for a substantial period of time outside the uterus. To say that it is not life at one month or two months or four months or full term, just because it had never been in a uterus, would be absurd." Scientists on the cutting edge, of course, want the freedom to go there when science leads them. For legislators who reluctantly signed onto the "therapeutic" cloning go-ahead, influenced by the emotional testimony on its behalf calling the legislation a panacea ("It's about saving lives and helping children."), that's an uncomfortable position -- changing the definition of life, on top of everything else. So Romney, sending the bill back now, is giving them another chance to do a little clean-up.

Romney's protests against the bill -- in the form of four proposed amendments -- otherwise represent his consistent opposition to the cloning efforts in Massachusetts. For instance, in a guaranteed no-go amendment, Romney proposes to ban cloning, striking too much at the heart of the bill to have any mileage, unfortunately. But you can't blame the man for trying. His two other amendments would hold back prospects for "human embryo farming" by prohibiting embryos from being fertilized for research purposes, and limit the compensation women would get from "donating" eggs for research in an attempt to avoid exploitation (women’s selling their eggs as a viable income source).

The latest focus of apprehension over the headlong rush of biotechnology involves the creation of animal-human hybrids, known as chimeras. Distinguished groups of ethicists and scientists have been pondering what steps should be taken, if any, to head off the nightmarish possibility of a human brain's becoming trapped inside an animal form, silently screaming, "Let me out," or a human embryo's being gestated by mice. It is fascinating -- some would say terrifying -- to contemplate, but these weird, far-out possibilities should not distract us from welcoming more mundane experiments with chimeras that will be needed to advance science....

Fortunately, real-world scientists have much more prosaic experiments in mind. In the superheated area of embryonic stem cell research, for example, they want to put lots of human-brain stem cells into mice to see how they perform in a real body as opposed to a laboratory culture, possibly shedding light on how to treat neurological diseases. The researchers appear to be proceeding cautiously, and the scientific community is erecting ethical barriers to guide such research. This is hardly a freak show.

Tacoma Baptist's superintendent did not return phone calls about the policy and the reasons for it. At Cascade Christian in Puyallup, Superintendent Don Johnson said the school "does not want to put our young men in a situation where they would be inappropriately touching a young lady."

Connors, however, believes the forfeit rule shouldn't be used to discriminate against girls, including his daughter, one of a half-dozen girls on teams in the league, drawn from schools in King, Pierce and Mason counties.

Connors, a former Episcopal president and one-time pastoral assistant for social justice at St. James Cathedral in Seattle, believes religion should play a role in public life. "But there's a limit," he said....He's filed a complaint alleging the Vashon Island School District is violating Title IX, the federal law that prohibits sex discrimination in schools, by allowing the policies to exist. If the policies aren't changed, he says, he'll make a complaint to the Office of Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Education and, if necessary, file a lawsuit.

The principal at McMurray Middle School, Greg Allison, said the school values its female wrestlers and plans to attempt to get the policies changed, too.

"We can't necessarily change a private school district's policy," he said. "But we can certainly try to influence it as best we can."

When girls started wrestling in Washington state decades ago, they often faced forfeits from boys at public schools, said Darcy Lees, program supervisor for equity coordination at the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction. But that's died down, she said, because boys don't want to give up points that could help them advance to the state wrestling championship....

Meaghan Connors and Sylvie Shiosaki find the sport challenging, fun and not at all sexual.

"When you walk on the mat, you're not a girl, you're not a guy anymore. You're just there to wrestle," Shiosaki said.

What's missing in all of this talk about "decisions" and "compassion" is any appreciation of the absurdity that underlies the abortion debate. In any other context, the idea that a 13-year-old has a constitutional right to choose against her parents' wishes an invasive surgical procedure, or even consent to one, would be absurd. Schools need parental permission to dispense over-the-counter medications. And a 13-year-old can't get her ears pierced without mom or dad being present.

Similarly, an unrelated adult who took a minor out-of-state for another medical procedure would be called a "kidnapper." We'd issue an "Amber Alert," and her picture would be on CNN and Fox 24/7. Upon apprehension, the adult would face possible charges of endangering the welfare of a minor or interference with parental custody--both of these are felonies.

Yet, because the "procedure" in question is abortion, none of this applies. Abortion is not a right anymore; it's the right. It trumps everything else and, thus, embodies our deepest commitments and most treasured values.

Now, most people would deny this but it only proves that they haven't been paying attention. If they had, 13-year-olds like "L. G." wouldn't feel entitled to make life and death decisions.

Evolution is a reality, no matter how much people may object to it. And denying or downplaying its importance to any serious examination of the biological sciences ill serves students who may wish to know how bacteria become resistant to drugs, how birds and dinosaurs are related, or why dolphins and sharks share certain morphological traits. How people reconcile their religious convictions with scientific reality is a matter for places of worship, not for science classrooms -- or state boards that set standards.

It has been only six years since Kansas covered itself in ridicule by giving schoolteachers the green light to teach the Genesis creation story as a serious scientific alternative to Darwin. That decision was hastily reversed, and the Christian fundamentalist majority on the Board of Education overturned, following a hue and cry from scientists and educators from around the world.

Now, though, the Christian conservatives are back in the ascendant -- as indeed they are in every area of Kansas politics, and in much of the United States. The seemingly pleasant, down-to-earth sensibility of the American Midwest has been upended by a new radicalism, one which has fundamentalist protesters wielding "God Hates Fags" placards in the streets of Topeka and Christian choirs singing in the rotunda of the state capitol. As one of the vanguards of this new radicalism, the board of education has every intention of defying the conclusions of its own standards committee by endorsing Intelligent Design and changing the state standards accordingly....

The hearings weren't a farce exactly, but they were certainly shot through with a certain unintentional black humour. In a snugly sized auditorium just across the street from Topeka's soaring sandstone capitol building, one university professor after another came to the stand, brandishing fistfuls of Ph.Ds if not necessarily an over-abundance of direct experience in the field of evolutionary science, only to come across as patently ridiculous as they said they didn't believe there was a hominid precursor species to homo sapiens.

Many of them, when pressed, acknowledged the centrality of a fairly extreme form of Christianity in their belief systems. Jonathan Wells, a fellow at an explicitly pro-Intelligent Design thinktank called the Discovery Institute, is a longtime follower of Reverend Sun Myung Moon. As he once said: "Father's words, my studies, and my prayers convinced me that I should devote my life to destroying Darwinism, just as many of my fellow Unificationists had already devoted their lives to destroying Marxism."

Curiously, while secular liberals underestimate the intellectual seriousness of the religious right, they also overestimate its uniformity and ambition. The hysterical talk about an incipient "theocracy"--as if that is what America was before 1963, when the Supreme Court banned prayer in public schools--is either utterly cynical or staggeringly naive.

Last week an article in The Nation, a left-wing weekly, described the motley collection of religious figures who gathered for Justice Sunday. A black minister stood next to a preacher with a six-degrees-of-separation connection to the Ku Klux Klan. A Catholic shared the stage with a Baptist theologian who had described Roman Catholicism as "a false church."

These folks may not be your cup of tea, but this was a highly ecumenical group, united on some issues of morality and politics but deeply divided on matters of faith. The thought that they could ever agree enough to impose a theocracy is laughable.

And the religious right includes not only Christians of various stripes but also Orthodox Jews and even conservative Muslims. Far from the sectarian movement its foes portray, it is in truth a manifestation of the religious pluralism that makes America great. Therein lies its strength.

I have never understood why conservative entrepreneurs are so all-fired pious and Bible-thumping, let alone why so many of them claim Jesus as their best friend and personal savior. The Old Testament is bad enough: The commandments forbid us even to envy or covet our neighbor's goods, and thus condemn the very spirit of emulation and ambition that makes enterprise possible. But the New Testament is worse: It tells us to forget thrift and saving, to take no thought for the morrow, and to throw away our hard-earned wealth on the shiftless and the losers....Thus far, the clericalist bigots have been probing and finding only mush. A large tranche of the once-secular liberal left has disqualified itself by making excuses for jihad and treating Osama bin Laden as if he were advocating liberation theology. The need of the hour is for some senior members of the party of Lincoln to disown and condemn the creeping and creepy movement to impose orthodoxy on a free and pluralist and secular Republic.

When it comes to the classroom, religious extremists have an ambitious agenda: to replace science with ideology at every opportunity. As if denying even that their own ideas can evolve, they've recently taken up their dusty arms against an old, familiar issue -- the teaching of evolution in public schools.

The supposed rival to the theory of evolution -- creationism -- now goes by the new name of "intelligent design." Just as with other phrases (like the Bush administration favorite, "culture of life"), the name change is merely the latest tactic in an ongoing strategy by conservative ideologues to manipulate language to achieve their goals.

"They've gotten a little more sophisticated in stripping out religious references," says Witold Walczak, Pennsylvania legal director for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU). But make no mistake. By any name, "intelligent design" is creationism: the religious belief that human life was divinely created and cannot otherwise be explained, certainly not scientifically and definitely not by Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.

Scientists who support the idea of intelligent design, a set of assumptions that challenges established scientific thinking, told an approving Kansas State Board of Education subcommittee that modern Darwinian theory relies too much on unproven reasoning. Gaps in the science, they argued, leave open the possibility that a creator, or an unidentified "designing mind," is responsible for earthly development.

It would not be far-fetched, said William S. Harris, a Kansas City researcher who favors intelligent design, to conclude that DNA itself is the work of an intelligent being. Students, he said, should be told that.

Outside the auditorium, scientists and educators dismissed the arguments as claptrap.

"It's clear from the beginning that this is not a real science discussion. This is a showcase for intelligent design," said Jack Krebs, vice president of Kansas Citizens for Science, which is boycotting the four days of hearings. "They have created a straw man. They are trying to make science stand for atheism so they can fight atheism."

The initiative does not seek to make abortion illegal, but rather to dissuade women from having one. It proposes federal funding for a toll-free number in each state that would direct women to nonprofit adoption centers or organizations that help women carry babies to term. Organizations providing abortion referral services would not qualify.

The 95-10 initiative's 17 proposals do include some language indicating their Democratic origins--for example, federal grants "to school districts that are in need of funds to administer effective, age-appropriate pregnancy prevention education." Such wording leaves the door open for the promotion of condom use rather than abstinence. But Ms. Day insisted the intention is for a balance between abstinence training and the how-to of contraception.

Peter Samuelson, president of Americans United for Life, recognizes the ambiguity but sees little need to parse initiative specifics at this point. His organization affirms the overall effort and joined DLA for the introductory press conference. "We're delighted to see pro-life Democrats get active," Mr. Samuelson told WORLD. "I do think it will help them at the ballot box, but I'm far more pro-life than Republican."

So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression--an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity--and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion--has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With the current political-socio-religious tensions between the West and the Islamic world, making a film about killing one's enemies in the name of God can be carelessly incendiary or politically correct mush. This movie fell into neither trap. Instead, Kingdom of Heaven is a majestic triumph in portraying the passionate fanaticism, religious zealotry, and uncommon chivalry that marked the dark and fascinating era of the Crusades.

The restraining order issued by U.S. District Judge Alexander Williams Jr., which was to last 10 days, prohibited the system from beginning the program in which 10th-graders would be shown a video on how to put on a condom and eighth-grade teachers would be allowed to initiate discussions about homosexuality with their students.

The order was a victory for two community groups, Citizens for a Responsible Curriculum and Parents and Friends of Ex-Gays and Gays, which filed suit Tuesday to block teaching of the material. The groups maintain that the curriculum was biased and favored the viewpoints of certain religious groups. The groups also argued that the school board did not follow proper procedures in approving the curriculum.

"Defendants open up the classroom to the subject of homosexuality and specifically, the moral rightness of the homosexual lifestyle," the judge wrote in a 22-page opinion. "However, the Revised Curriculum presents only one view on the subject -- that homosexuality is a natural and morally correct lifestyle -- to the exclusion of other perspectives."

Hoping to avoid a bitter public showdown, defenders of the theory of evolution boycotted the first of four days of hearings Thursday over the science curriculum in Kansas, where members of the state Board of Education critical of the standard theory are considering changes to give more weight to creationist ideas.

Mainstream science organizations spurned invitations to participate, dismissing the hearings in Topeka as an effort "to attack and undermine science," in the view of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, which publishes the journal Science.

As a result, the only witnesses heard Thursday were advocates of a philosophy called "intelligent design," critics of evolution or both. Pedro Irigonegaray, a Topeka lawyer representing what he called mainstream science, dismissed the event as a "kangaroo court."

The hearings, which run through Saturday and resume May 12, resemble a trial, as three school board members hear arguments from champions of both sides. The panelists -- all three of them conservative Republicans who have questioned evolution -- will report to the full school board, which is expected to approve new science standards next month.

The slogan, Every Child a Wanted Child, always gave off a eugenic chill, implying that unwanted children weren't fit for life. But it didn't quite spell out what makes a child unwanted. Were the meaning of the slogan unpackaged and given more eugenic precision, it would read: Every Child a Perfect Child.

Imperfect children aren't wanted children -- this is the logical terminus of a society obsessed with choice and control, and the culture is hurtling towards it. If you doubt this, note the growing impatience with imperfection in children, both unborn and born, that increasingly dominates the culture of reproductive choice and control. The New York Times ran a story earlier this week titled, "Ugly Children May Get Parental Short Shrift." The article doesn't even mention the shortest shrift they receive: eugenic abortion. To the extent that the numbers are known, most unborn children deemed ugly by virtue of a disability detected through prenatal screening are aborted, and research surveys have shown that many parents will choose abortion once doctors become able to diagnose nothing more than "obesity" prenatally....For all of this culture's talk about "unconditional love" of children, its tolerance of them is baldly conditional: It permits them to live on the condition that they possess wanted traits. It is not a culture of love but a culture of control, and woe to the children who don't meet its solipsistic expectations.

State law in Florida requires that the Department of Children and Families not consent to "sterilization, abortion or termination of life support." Yet on Monday, May 2, a circuit court judge in Florida, Ronald Alvarez, ruled that a pregnant 13-year-old girl in state custody had a right to an abortion despite the state's objections. The girl ran away from her state home in January, became pregnant and asked her caseworker to schedule an abortion; the caseworker, presumably breaking state law, did so. And now the state -- the legal guardian of this girl -- has been barred from doing anything to prevent her from aborting her child.

Predictably, the ACLU simultaneously lauded the decision and launched a broadside against the state government, which, not coincidentally, happens to be Republican. "This is another instance in which state government, under the leadership of our governor, is attempting to frustrate decisions that are made within what should be a zone of personal privacy," raged ACLU lawyer and Florida executive director Howard Simon.

The development of the "right to privacy" in American thought has been long and tortuous. Obviously, the federal Constitution guarantees certain rights that deal with privacy. The First Amendment guarantees that government may not encroach upon our rights to free speech, free exercise of religion and free assembly; the Third Amendment guarantees that our homes may not be seized for quartering of troops; the Fourth Amendment guarantees our rights against "unreasonable searches and seizures"; and the Fifth Amendment guarantees that our property may not be taken for public use without just compensation.

In more than 50 years of direct engagement in and observation of the major news media I have never encountered anything remotely like the fear and loathing lavished on us by opinion mongers in these world-class newspapers in the past 40 days. If I had a $5 bill for every time the word "frightening" and its close lexicographical kin have appeared in the Times and The Post, with an accusatory finger pointed at the Christian right, I could take my stack to the stock market....

In the long journey from the matchless moment when I became "born again" and encountered the risen and living Christ, I have met hundreds of evangelicals and a good many practicing Catholics and have found them to be of reasonable temperament, often enough of impressive accomplishment, certainly not a menace to the republic, unless, of course, the very fact of faith seriously held is thought to make them just that. It is said, again and again and again, that the evangelical/Catholic right is out of accord with the history of our republic, dangerously so. What we are out of accord with is not that history but a revisionist version of it vigorously promulgated by those who want it to be seen as other than it was.

Evangelicals are concerned about the frequently advanced and historically untenable secularists' view of the intent of our non-establishment/free exercise of religion clause: that everything that has its origin in religion must be swept out of federal, and even civil, domains. That view, if militantly enforced, constitutes what seems dangerous to most evangelicals: the strict and entire separation of God from state. This construct, so desired by some, is radically out of sync with much in American history that shows a true regard for the non-establishment of religion while giving space in nearly all contexts to wide and free expressions of faith.