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.