When witnesses are sworn in, the religious texts of non-Christian faiths should be allowed in North Carolina courts along with the Bible, the ACLU argued in lawsuit filed against the state Tuesday.

Denying the use of other religious texts would violate the Constitution by favoring Christianity over religions, the American Civil Liberties Union of North Carolina said in its lawsuit.

State law allows witnesses preparing to testify in court to take their oath either by laying a hand over a "Holy Scripture," by saying "so help me God" without the use of a religious book, or by using no religious symbols.

"We hope that the court will issue a ruling that the phrase 'holy scripture' includes the Quran, Old Testament and Bhagavad-Gita in addition to the Christian Bible," said Jennifer Rudinger, executive director of the ACLU of North Carolina.

'I RESPECT and will protect a woman's right to choose....Women should be free to choose based on their own beliefs, not mine and not the government's."

That was Mitt Romney in April 2002, then a candidate for governor, responding to a questionnaire from the Massachusetts affiliate of the abortion rights group NARAL.

Today, Romney says ''abortion is the wrong choice" and ''wishes that the laws of our nation could reflect that view."

Romney has tried to present his legalistic explanation for vetoing the bill expanding access to emergency contraception -- that he had pledged not to alter the state's abortion laws -- as part of a consistent philosophy. But the inconsistencies are blinding.

I realize that we're treading on delicate ground here. These issues, if not presently before the Court, inevitably will be in one form or another in the near future, and we don't want judges or judges in waiting to prejudge specific cases. But I would err on the side of trying to discover a nominee's judicial philosophy, being careful not to have him opine on specific cases.

After all, revealing a nominee's philosophy regarding these issues does not necessarily answer, conclusively, how he would rule in the context of a specific case before him, considering the many variables that might be involved.

I think we must try to find out in advance whether Supreme Court nominees believe they will sit as part of a superlegislature or as a passive, albeit usually final, arbiter.

With Roberts in his honeymoon phase on Capitol Hill, this behind-the-scenes Bushie activity suggests three obligations for those senators who support choice. One is to press for all records of Judge Roberts's work in the solicitor general's office during Bush I, including his assistance in writing and then signing a brief to the Supreme Court calling for the overturning of Roe itself. To the general public the White House portrays the judge as a lawyer advocating for his client; to its conservative friends, the White House is saying that he believed in his work. Let's find the truth.

The second is to question him for his views on the bedrock of Roe's foundation -- a right to privacy. Any sign of dissent would be grounds for a filibuster.

But the most important obligation is to secure abortion rights through political work. In the end, the courts never provide enough protection for constitutional rights if voters are not asked to support them.

The organizers don't believe in a God who is greater than they are. They figure such faith is for suckers and hicks, whom they hope to woo from the pews by means of alluring promises of life without stress, woe or college-tuition payments. The Creator (or, as they call him, the Left God) plays a pivotal role by serving as the frontman for everything from government-paid sabbaticals for everybody to a "new militancy" in the labor movement.

The Lerner-Wallis brigades, evidently believing the term "red state" refers to Leninist strongholds, want Christians, Jews and Muslims to capitulate -- ignore the holy books, surrender devotion to an almighty God, dispense with charities and ministries of small deeds and join "progressive" forces obsessed with military surrender and condom distribution.

Personal responsibility? Forget about it. Sin and salvation? You must be kidding. This is a conference for a world devoid of conscience but drenched in condescension -- the kind of thing doomed to failure because its votaries will never understand that apostasy is not "progressive" -- and that Uncle Sam and God are not one and the same.

Conflicts in the Middle East have a tremendous impact on Muslim public opinion worldwide. In justifying its terrorist attacks by referring to Iraq, Al Qaeda is looking for popularity or at least legitimacy among Muslims. But many of the terrorist group's statements, actions and non-actions indicate that this is largely propaganda, and that Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine are hardly the motivating factors behind its global jihad....

Even their calls for the withdrawal of the European troops from Iraq ring false. After all, the Spanish police have foiled terrorist attempts in Madrid even since the government withdrew its forces. Western-based radicals strike where they are living, not where they are instructed to or where it will have the greatest political effect on behalf of their nominal causes.

The Western-based Islamic terrorists are not the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, unmoored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that does not meet their expectations. And their vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of and a form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are.

Democrats knew that whoever was chosen to fill Justice Sandra Day O'Connor's seat on the Supreme Court was going to be conservative and that he would have the opportunity to change the balance of the court in three monumental areas: abortion, civil and political rights, and separation of church and state. What they might have thought was that they'd have a choice about which area of law they would have to sacrifice. But, with John G. Roberts Jr., it looks like they will lose on all three "Rs": Roe, rights and religion....One might have advised the Democrats to pick their poison with any of Bush's nominees. Roberts, however, does not seem to give them that chance. He is apt to undermine settled constitutional law with all three.

Amidst all the speculation about John Roberts's views on abortion, I am certain that Roberts will not be a "pro-life" justice. Indeed, there is absolutely nothing in his record that would remotely support the misplaced hopes of some and fears of others on that point. To the limited extent that political labels can properly apply to judging, what all Americans should hope is that Roberts will prove to be a genuine moderate on abortion....John Roberts is, by all accounts, a man of deep intellect and high character who understands the proper role of the judiciary in our constitutional republic. There is therefore good reason to hope that he will be a genuine moderate who will not read his own policy views on abortion (whatever they are) into the Constitution but who will respect the constitutional authority of the people to govern their own states and communities on this and other issues of social policy.

First the terrorists of the Middle East went after the Israelis. From 1967 we witnessed 40 years of bombers, child murdering, airline hijacking, suicide murdering, and gratuitous shooting. We in the West usually cried crocodile tears, and then came up with all sorts of reasons to allow such Middle Eastern killers a pass.

Yasser Arafat, replete with holster and rants at the U.N., had become a "moderate" and was thus free to steal millions of his good-behavior money. If Hamas got European cash, it would become reasonable, ostracize its "military wing," and cease its lynching and vigilantism.

When some tried to explain that Wars 1-3 (1947, 1956, 1967) had nothing to do with the West Bank, such bothersome details fell on deaf ears....

In any case, anti-Semitism, oil, fear of terrorism -- all that and more fooled us into believing that Israel’s problems were confined to Israel. So we ended up with a utopian Europe favoring a pre-modern, terrorist-run, Palestinian thugocracy over the liberal democracy in Israel. The Jews, it was thought, stirred up a hornet’s nest, and so let them get stung on their own....Then the Islamists declared war on the United States. A quarter century of mass murdering of Americans followed in Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, East Africa, the first effort to topple the World Trade Center, and the attack on the USS Cole.

Advocates of unrestricted embryo destruction make two principal arguments; first, that 400,000 embryos left over from fertility treatments are going to be thrown away anyway, and second, that an embryo is not a human being because it is extremely tiny.

As to the first argument, the RAND Law and Health Initiative examined the matter and found that while nearly 400,000 embryos remain frozen in fertility clinics around the nation, only about 11,000 of these have been designated for medical research. The vast majority are held for future family building. Of those 11,000, only about 65 percent would survive the thawing process, resulting in 7,334 embryos. Only about 25 percent of those would likely develop to the blastocyst stage, and even fewer would be able to produce stem cells. Honest proponents of embryonic research admit that cloning of embryos would probably be necessary to obtain the optimum number of stem cell lines.

As to the second objection: Is size morally relevant? Is a 21-year-old man three times as precious as a 7-year-old boy? We can barely see an embryo with the naked eye, yet, as Dr. Hurlbut points out, from the vantage point of space, no human is visible on the Earth's surface. He quotes philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascal, who noted more than 300 years ago that "human existence is located between infinities -- between the infinitely large and the infinitely small." Pascal continued, "By space the universe encompasses and swallows me up like a dot -- by thought I encompass the universe."

The president is to be congratulated on nominating John Roberts to the Supreme Court. In the days to come, every manner of liberal interest group may seek to characterize aspects of Roberts’s record as a lawyer and judge as hostile to their particular political interest. He may be called anti-environmental, anti-abortion rights, anti-labor, etc., etc. But the special interests merely want a judge who is a sure vote for their agenda. Rather than thinking of John Roberts as an opponent of Liberal Activist Group A or B, think of him as a proponent of the rule of law.

If there is to be a fight, it will be a fight well worth waging. Our Constitution and our nation will be better off with John Roberts on the Court.

A Ugandan member of parliament has pledged to reward girls for their chastity by paying their university fees if they are virgins when they leave school, a local newspaper said on Wednesday....

"The criterion is that a student must be a virgin and from Kayunga district," he told the state-owned New Vision.

The MP did not extend his offer to young men.

He urged pupils to manage their lives responsibly, and called on parents to explain the threats from HIV/AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases.

"Our children should be told the risks they face if involved in early and unprotected sex," Madada said.

But it needs to be understood that most of the proposed alternatives are not restricted by a presidential executive order, although they may run afoul of other federal restrictions on research with human embryos. Interested scientists need only write a grant proposal and pass the scientific peer review process for technical merit to secure funding for the research. It is the president's executive order of Aug. 9, 2001, that is impeding research progress in bringing potential stem cell therapies to the clinic. That is why legislation to lift the federal limits on research with human embryonic stem cells should be passed.

We urge Congress to deal with this matter on its scientific merits without raising a laundry list of other speculative scientific approaches that serve only to confuse the issue. The treatment of otherwise intractable diseases can become a reality if we expand the number and quality of the stem cells that American scientists have to work with.

Islam is a religion of peace and tolerance, but it is a religion of many other things, too. Compare the following two quotes from the Koran: 'There shall be no compulsion in religion' and: 'Slay the unbeliever ... wherever you find him.' Throughout its existence, Islam has evolved into a repository of a vast range of different resources, allowing its texts to be interpreted, sampled and deployed in myriad ways. When the Muslims were a persecuted minority in 7th-century Mecca, the stress lay on tolerance and pluralism....The very practical nature of Islam, a religion that enjoins the faithful to act in the world to change it, is also a boon to activists, good and bad, as does its emphasis on public demonstration of faith. The sight of rows of believers facing Mecca to answer the call to prayer often moves me, an atheist, deeply. Yet the Arabic word for martyr -- and currently suicide bomber -- comes from the same linguistic stem as the word for bearing witness....

Yet before we embark on a round of religious finger-pointing, we should note that all major faiths are the same. They can all offer help for different needs and agendas. Think of the muscular Christianity of imperialist, Victorian Britain (or, indeed, of contemporary America) or Hinduism's lunatic fringe. In Sri Lanka, even smiley, happy Buddhism has exacerbated one of the most vicious civil conflicts of our time.

The questions that are now creating controversy -- the teaching of evolution, the right to life, stem cell research -- have put science on the defensive as well as revealed an almost dangerous literalism that has infected certain religious communities. Genesis is less of a science text than even ''The Descent of Man" is a religious book, but we have read them both looking for answers into the other. But the science of space is a science that begins, like authentic religious feeling, in wonder and trembling. Astrophysics is the last best hope for science to bridge the cultural gap between science and faith.

As both a theist and a skeptic, a believer and a rationalist, I can appreciate the cultural tension currently at play. I have at times wanted my science to be speckled with religious sentiment, and my faith to be reasonable. Nevertheless, this conflict is resolved for me when I read about galaxies forming....

Even astronomers, in the public consciousness, are the last of the dreamy-eyed scientists, the ones who are still looking for the answers to our ancient questions, who don't ask how life evolves, but how life itself began. Astronomers appear more like reverent monks as they gaze heavenward than Frankenstein geneticists who seek to create the very life whose origin remains a mystery.

Both science and faith begin in wonder, but instead of sharing this sense of mystery, battle lines have been drawn. There can be peace when religion and science stop trying to answer each other's questions. The first truce can be found in the science of space, in the work of NASA.

I can only imagine that for politicians, true religious feelings are not stirred by cantankerous debates over cloning and intelligent design.It's when NASA has produced fireworks in space that echo the ancient sounds of billions of years through as many miles of space that a greater sense of awe and reverence take hold.

Lakewood Church, led by televangelist and best-selling author Joel Osteen, has grown so much in recent years that this weekend it will expand into a new building: the former Compaq Center....It now seems fitting that "discover the champion in you" has long been the church's slogan.

"It all ties in together," Osteen says. "Many sports champions have been crowned there and we believe we can crown champions in life."

Lakewood, a non-denominational Christian church, recently became the first congregation in the country with an average weekly attendance of more than 30,000 for its services -- and had an average attendance of 32,500 in the first quarter of this year, said John Vaughan of Church Growth Today, an organization that studies megachurches, based in Bolivar, Mo.

Who needs a legislature when we have a governor who can ignore the majority of lawmakers and spend $10 million from a cash-strapped state on a project he personally declares "morally right"?

Gov. Rod Blagojevich's end run of the Legislature to commit $10 million for embryonic stem-cell research that the federal government won't cover was the ultimate in arrogance and it was ethically wrong.

Repeated attempts to provide grant money for such research has failed in legislative sessions for two years.

Among Catholics, marriages that are childless, for whatever reason, are still sacramental, witnessing to the love of God. Wise Christian advisers of couples speak of the gift of self to the beloved other, of unconditional mutual acceptance, of pursuing such ideals by habits of respect, dialogue, and daily attention. The goal is a unity of heart and spirit and, yes, body that makes real the pledge to become ''two in one flesh."

Dig deeper in Christian wisdom and find the most outrageously attractive of Christian claims, that the reality that lies beyond the horizon of our knowledge and experience, at the edge of the universe and in the deepest reaches of our own consciousness, is best named as love. God is love, revealed in the incarnate Jesus of Nazareth, so genuine love is the very presence and experience of God. Where do we find God? In love for one another, and that includes the day to day decision to love this person, with whom one lives.

If there is any truth in these claims, then the big Christian question about homosexuality is not sodomy but whether these people, too, can experience that love in intimate personal relationships.

Strategists for the anti-abortion movement were betting that the Supreme Court would soon be different: more conservative, and more open to an array of new abortion restrictions. With the retirement of Justice Sandra Day O'Connor, part of the court's majority for abortion rights, that gamble may soon begin to pay off.

The basic right to abortion, declared in Roe v. Wade in 1973, will survive regardless of who replaces Justice O'Connor, given that the current majority for Roe is 6 to 3, many experts agree. Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist was one of the two original dissenters from the Roe decision; if he retires, as has been widely speculated, President Bush would presumably replace him with a similar conservative, so that would not change the balance on Roe.

But a number of cases that are likely to reach the court in the next few years, including the latest versions of the ban on the procedure that critics call partial-birth abortion, may give a new set of justices the opportunity to restrict abortion in significant ways.

In short, even without overturning Roe, the new court could seriously limit the decision's reach and change the way abortions are regulated around the country, experts say. This means that Mr.Bush's nominees will be intensely scrutinized, by all sides, on their records, past rulings and general philosophy on abortion.

After the inevitable backlash from bewildered taxpayers warning that Tulsa would be dismissed as a science backwater, the directors "clarified" their vote to say they intended no monopoly for the Adam and Eve tale but rather wanted "six or seven" creation myths afforded equal time. There was the rub: there are hundreds of creation tales properly honored by the world's multifarious cultures, starting with the American Indian tribes around Tulsa.

You want creationism? How about the Cherokee buzzard that gouged the valleys and mountains? And why should Chinese-Americans tolerate neglect of P'an Ku and the cosmic egg at the zoo, or Norse descendants not speak up for Audhumla, the giant cow?

The futility of this exercise was emphatically made clear last week when a crowd of critics demanded reconsideration. With the speed of the Mayan jaguar sun god, zoo directors reversed themselves, realizing they had opened a Pandora's box (which see). In stumbling upon so many worthy cosmogonies, Tulsa did us all a favor by underlining how truly singular the evolution explanation is, rooted firmly in scientific demonstration.

The world is blind if it sees this as an issue about the separation of church and state. It is not about separation. It is about consolidation.

By evicting God, government consolidates its power to become the de facto Higher Power of its subjects. But if there is no Creator, no right, unalienable or otherwise, can be endowed. Even if a majority of politicians vote yea on "granting" a right and never change their minds.

But rights-granting is not in their job description. If it were, rights-revoking also would be. And that would make "rights" privileges.

If no human has endowed rights to the oppressed in Third World dictatorships, does this mean they have none? God says they do even when their fellow man says they don't.

If the state says God does not officially exist, who -- or what -- endows the individual with certain unalienable rights? God must exist or else this republic's foundation -- that rights are granted by a Supreme Being instead of a human being -- collapses.

With O'Connor off the bench, Justice Kennedy will likely control religious-display cases, and he has proven much less hostile to religion than O'Connor. In the 1989 Allegheny County v. Greater Pittsburgh ACLU, Kennedy dissented when O'Connor and the Court stuck down the city of Pittsburgh's holiday display, which contained a crèche and a menorah. Kennedy wrote, "Government policies of accommodation, acknowledgment, and support for religion are an accepted part of our political and cultural heritage."

Three years later in the school-prayer case Lee v. Weisman, Kennedy set forth his "coercion" analysis of the Establishment Clause. His standard prohibits the government from compelling or psychologically coercing an individual to participate in or attend a religious activity. This means there can be no official prayer at public-school graduations or football games, but non-coercive passive displays with religious content are permissible. One can argue, as Justices Scalia and Thomas have, that "psychological coercion" is not really coercion in the legal sense of the term. But whatever its flaws, Kennedy's doctrine is an improvement over O'Connor's inherently subjective approach.

Of course, Justice Kennedy's coercion analysis will control the Court only if President Bush nominates an individual who eschews the Left's "strict separationism" or O'Connor’s no-endorsement approach to the Establishment Clause. Those in the White House and Senate who lament the judiciary's hostility toward religion ought to ask every nominee to explain his opinion of O'Connor's religion jurisprudence. If the nominee indicates support for O'Connor's endorsement test, the nominee should not be endorsed.

Over 100 congressmen have introduced a constitutional amendment to protect religious expression on public property.

Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-Md.) joined Rep. Ernest Istook (R-Okla.), other congressmen and pro-family groups to propose the Religious Freedom Amendment (RFA), an effort to reverse the U.S. Supreme Court ruling which removed the Ten Commandments from a Kentucky courthouse.

"Deeply religious European colonists escaped the two tyrannies of the crown and the church and came to America," said Bartlett in a statement. "Our founders created a country and a Constitution that protected the ability of individuals to freely express their respective religions in public life.