The coalition forces that attacked and invaded Iraq have achieved a signal victory with very little bloodshed. Our leadership is to be commended for the planning and execution of this campaign, in which a tremendous conventional force, making full use of our amazing technological skills, defeated a fierce but totally outnumbered and outclassed enemy in less than one month. Great credit is due the leaders, from President Bush on down, and to the officers and enlisted men and women who accomplished this. Our readers will know that we have been very critical of the Iraq operation, and even though it has been successful, there are still questions that need to be asked. For the moment, however, we shall give credit where credit is due, and do it gladly and with admiration.

September 11, 2001, confronted our new administration with an immense problem. Neither the Bosnia-Herzegovina situation in 1995 nor the Kosovo problem of 1999 represented a danger for America. President Clinton acted, although there was no danger to the United States or any NATO nation. September 11 was different. The assaults on the Trade Towers and the Pentagon were not followed up by any other attacks and as such did not represent a continuing danger to this country, but they revealed our vulnerability to terrorism. The attacks caused such bloodshed and loss that an immediate and forceful reply would have been appropriate and justifiable, had we been able to identify the nation responsible. Therefore we searched and waited. First, Osama Bin Laden was identified as the most responsible agent Then he was located in Afghanistan, ruled by the Taliban, an extremist sect of Islam. Afghanistan was attacked, Bin Laden put

out of action, and the Taliban government was deposed. However, that did not convincingly end the threat, and so the next source of potential trouble was sought after and identified in the Iraq of Saddam Hussein. After months of negotiation and pressure, Iraq was attacked with the result that we all know.

Once the war against Iraq began, this editor and many others, who had questioned its necessity and legitimacy, stopped their criticism and rallied behind President Bush and American and allied forces. This is consistent with John Calvin’s views on legitimate war, for Calvin held that the decision about the justice of a war is for the government to make. Before a war has been begun, the citizens can argue about its justification and prudence, but once the die has been cast, loyalty is appropriate. Once the war began, it was conducted systematically and without excesses. This will surely make the take of rebuilding Iraq easier than it could otherwise have been.

Now that Iraq has been eliminated as a threat, to where shall we turn? This surely did not end the danger to us and to world peace, and it will be necessary not to fall into over confidence, but to remain alert and well prepared, as the Iraq situation has made us aware of the extent of the hostility to us and to our institutions that exists in the world today.

In rural Florida, an adult male accused of raping a mentally retarded thirteen-year-old girl, who actually confessed his guilt, was released and the case closed, because an investigator did not read him his Miranda rights. While the judge’s action in this case was formally correct, the substance of the matter, an atrocious case of child abuse, was dismissed and left untouched. Principles are important, and following the correct forms may protect them, but in some cases, as in this one, following the formal principle has left a most atrocious crime unpunished: indeed, not only unpunished, but not examined, as the case has been closed for an error of form. This victory of form over substance is a growing problem in our society, but it frequently does not work. In fact, it seems that it is in some of the most important matters that formal principles are ignored, while in others they become dominant. This is an example of something that contributes to the increasing social degeneracy of our nation (Sorokin).

The principles enshrined in our Constitution and Bill of Rights are sometimes ignored, sometimes carried to extremes. The Second Amendment protects the right to keep and bear arms, and the First guarantees freedom of expression. The freedom of expression is maintained to an extreme that permits blasphemy, obscenity, and flag burning, but the right to bear arms is infringed upon, in some jurisdictions almost abolished. The First Amendment, which prohibits the establishment of a national church while protecting freedom of worship, is now regularly interpreted to ban all religious symbolism and every relic of religion in public places.

One of the most fundamental principles of American government is the separation of powers, which assigns the authority to declare war to Congress. In the Iraq war, the Congress abdicated this right to the President to make use of it when he thought the time had come. Most Americans approve of the President’s action, and very few are concerned about Congress’s apparent abdication of its power. It would seem that one reason for this abdication is the pusillanimity of Congress, which is more comfortable with questions of taxes and the economy than with war and peace. Congress wanted to support the war, an undertaking that is not without risks, but did not want to be held accountable if something went wrong.

The final decision about war on Iraq was delegated to President Bush. When he made it, why did he not ask Congress to declare war? His defenders, who are many, argue along two or three main lines. The first speaks of the United Nations resolution 1441, which permitted the use of force if Iraq did not disarm. President Bush and British Prime Minister Blair argued that Iraq has not disarmed, which permitted their massive and successful military assault. In the meantime, however, most of the Security Council, including three permanent members with veto rights, France, Russia, and China, no longer agreed by mid-March, when the final decision was made. Others argued that since the original peace treaty with Iraq that ended the Gulf War required Iraq to disarm, and since Iraq had not conclusively proved that it had done this, war was just the resumption of hostilities. However, even the original hostilities in 1991 did not involve an actual declaration of war. A wag might say that since the War Department was replaced with the Defense Department in 1947, we have never declared war, and that is true: not in Korea in 1951, nor in Vietnam in 1965, nor in Bosnia in 1995, nor in Kosovo in 1999. What this indicates is that the formal constitutional requirement is no longer what counts.

On the other hand, if the constitutional principle on war is not respected, elsewhere the Constitution, or rather the judicial interpretation of it, is held to be decisive. In Roe v. Wade (1973) and several other subsequent decisions, abortion was held to be a constitutionally protected right, although the Constitution mentions neither abortion nor the right on which it is said to be based, privacy. The right to privacy is nevertheless being increasingly disregarded in our reactions to international terrorism, as exemplified by the Patriot Act and the new Department of Homeland Security. By contrast, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, explicitly protected by the Second Amendment, is either interpreted away or simply ignored in many states, and there is very little, if any, reaction to this in the media.

The most important moral standards for Western civilization are summed up in the biblical decalogue, the Ten Commandments, but the Ten Commandments have now been banished from schools and courthouses nationwide, as allegedly violating the separation of church and state (which like privacy is not in the Constitution, but is found there as a kind of penumbra of explicit rights).

Our Constitution is widely praised; the document has ruled (more or less) our nation for two centuries. However, as we enter the twenty-first century, we see that in the matter of form versus substance, in our nation neither is systematically respected. It is not clear what the criterion for deciding is, whether what the Constitution actually says or is interpreted to say, or certain substantial interest of one influential authority or bloc. Perhaps we would be better off with no constitution, like the United Kingdom, than with one which is coming to exist more as a nostalgic memory than as a principle on which to base our governmental order.

On the morning of April 10, American newspapers carried headlines, “Baghdad Falls; U.S. Fights On.” In the same edition, Charles Krauthammer, a supporter of the war from the beginning, exulted, “Never before has a regime been toppled by force while saving the people.” Elsewhere other writers exulted at the speed and comparative bloodlessness (at least among the American and British forces) of the conquest. While credit is due the commanders and men and women who accomplished this, it is hard to imagine any other outcome. The United States and Britain have about 15 times as many people as Iraq, and our weapons are far superior, so there was never a question of not winning, but only how quickly and at what cost. Post-victory complications, whatever may be in store, have not yet appeared. What will our huge military establishment already in the Middle East do, in addition to policing conquered and liberated Iraq? Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld has uttered some warnings to Syria, a nation which gave a bit of support to Hussein’s futile resistance and which has been deeply involved in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians. The relative ease with which we subdued Iraq has led many to ask, “What’s next?” The ever-vigilant Pat Buchanan thinks that Iraq may be only the first among a number of U.S. interventions intended to transform the Middle East. Certainly our success tells us that we can accomplish yet much more. Whether we ought to try to do so is a different question. The temptation to attempt to establish an imperial hegemony in the Middle East may be great; certainly some strategists, such as Zbigniew Brzezinski, think that that should be our goal. If we make no such attempt, it will illustrate Helga Pross’s idea that freedom is less the result of the love of the people for freedom than of the self-restraint of the rulers. We must pray that our initial success does not overcome the sense of proportion and self-restraint that President Bush has heretofore exhibited.

Even as we in the United States rejoice in the speed and completeness of our victory and the low casualty figures of the United States and our chief ally, Great Britain, so far we have not discovered the weapons of mass destruction that provided much of the argument for invading Iraq. If it should turn out that there are none that can be found, then it will appear that the primary justification for the war was the desire to depose Hussein. Meanwhile, Mr. Bush has repeated his assertion that we come to Iraq not as conqueror but as liberators. Would it not be more correct to say that we came as conquerors, but shall stay to liberate and depart as benefactors? The benefits on all sides of our victory and of the overthrow of a very oppressive regime suggest that further military action might be a boon elsewhere in the Middle East. The United States have an unprecedented ability to make forceful changes in the despotic Middle East, where only Israel is democratic. We hope that if any such decisions are in the offing, they will be made only after very careful consideration.

After the complete and speedy rout of his forces, it is difficult to imagine precisely what motivated Mr. Hussein in his determination to resist us. It ought to have been fully apparent to him that he could not successfully defend himself against our vast preponderance in military power and technology. If he had fully acquiesced to the demands of the United Nations to disarm, he would still be in power. Even if he did not foresee the speed of his defeat, the buildup of American and allied forces, mostly British, should have made it evident to him that he could not last long. If he actually had or still has weapons of mass destruction, he did not decide to use them, and thus spared his people immense bloodshed in retaliation. What was his purpose? Our repeated threats of war crimes trials certainly did not encourage him to seek exile and spare his country war. He may have preferred death in battle to the humiliation of a trial where the outcome would almost certainly be known in advance: death before dishonor. Perhaps he wanted to be some kind of a symbol to the Arabs or the Islamic world, despite the fact that he was hardly their hero. If he has already lost his life in the conflict, we may never know.

It is becoming increasingly harder to close our eyes to the fact that religion, especially Christianity and to a lesser extent, Judaism, is increasingly subject to discrimination all over the United States and Western Europe. It has not yet reached the level of persecution, but it certainly is widespread and consistent. All of the symbols of Christianity are being forcibly removed from schools, public buildings, and government property. The interpretation of the First Amendment, called the separation of church and state, replaces the freedom of religion with freedom from and purging of religion. This fraudulent interpretation of the Amendment is now so familiar and well-established that it seems almost futile to criticize it, much less to attempt to change it.

When America accepts ever-growing numbers of immigrants from non-Christian cultures, does that automatically deprive the Christian majority of all rights of self-expression outside the private home? Does the fact that something that the majority cherishes may possibly offend a minority require that the majority relinquish all its symbolism? Should a tiny group of people claiming to be offended by stadium prayers in San Diego, Texas, prevent the vast majority of the audience from having a public prayer? Apparently so. A minority objects; the courts rule, and the Christians and, in some cases, the Jews are silenced.

In Deerfield, Illinois, the public library used to display a Christian creche and a menorah during the Christmas season (forgive us, the holiday season). The raising of an objection by a contentious atheist from nearby Buffalo Grove resulted in the library director ordering the removal of everything reminiscent of the season, which is now just the “winter holiday.” In Libertyville, Illinois, the school board has forbidden the teachers to wear red and green pins and other decorations that might cause children to ask, “Why are you wearing that?” Sometimes a kind of political correctness prevails, creating a reversal of anti-religious discrimination in favor of Islam; last fall, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill required incoming freshmen to read a book with a very positive treatment of Islam, while in California, an elementary school required students to pretend that they were Muslims, dressing accordingly and reciting Muslim prayers.

At the University of North Carolina in Charlotte, commencement ceremonies go by without any invocation, prayers, or thanksgiving to God, although thanks are expressed to the teachers, the school, the state, and almost anything else except Mickey Mouse. This is in a state with a strongly Christian population and huge Christian churches, both liberal and conservative, and as little as a few years ago such a ceremony without prayers of thanksgiving to God would have been unthinkable.

Serious Christian writers such as Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, and Franklin Graham, the son of evangelist Billy Graham, are regularly denounced in the supposedly objective media, even on the news pages, with an intensity seldom used even on the most vigorous of the political conservatives, Pat Buchanan. The scandal involving pedophile priests that broke last year and that ultimately resulted in the defrocking of Boston archbishop Bernard Cardinal Law, may have received less attention than otherwise might have been heaped upon it, because it soon came out that most of the offenses were homosexual in nature rather than heterosexual.

None of this constitutes actual persecution, but it is discouraging to and wearing upon Christians who constantly have to put up with being reduced to the status of less than second-class citizens, as well as rather public nuisances. If there is to be a national revival, it will surely have to have a religious component, and most of that component will be Christian. Unfortunately, the discriminatory policies of government and the media may gradually dispel the desire of Christians to do anything positive in society.

As the season of general assemblies and other functions of the major Protestant churches approaches, it appears that several of the “main line” denominations will once again consider the question of admitting active homosexuals to clergy status. So far only the Unitarian-Universalists — a denomination that is hardly Christian — and the very “liberal” United Church of Christ have done so. The ordination of active homosexuals will be a kind of watershed issue for Protestants. It will represent the crossing of two lines that will be all but impossible to undo. It will show that the Holy Scripture, still honored in form as the Word of God, will be respected and obeyed only when it pleases the leadership of the various churches to do so. The Bible, especially but not only in Leviticus, Romans, and I Corinthians, is very explicit in its condemnation of homosexual activity; in fact, I Corinthians sees such conduct, along with several other sins, as behavior which, if one persists in continuing in it, will deprive one of the chance for eternal life. How can a church accept as leaders those who are excluding themselves from the hope of eternal life (I Corinthians 6:10). The following verse, 11, promises forgiveness and renewal for those who change, but very few self-declared homosexuals want to change, and even if they do, they certainly should not be presented as spiritual leaders until their repentance and renewal is indisputably clear. The second line is sexual morality in general. If homosexuality is permitted throughout the church, even in its leadership, then sexual morality of all kinds will be abolished. How can sexual continence and fidelity be required of ministers when homosexual conduct, variously described in the Bible as abominable, is permitted?

The abolition of sexual standards for the ministry naturally involves their abolition for all Christians and in essence breaks apart the Second Table of the Law, where “Thou shalt not commit adultery” follows “Thou shalt not kill” and precedes “Thou shalt not steal.” In Christian and Jewish morality, and in the moral codes of virtually every other religion as well as in secular morality, sexual behavior has a prominent place. Adultery is almost always forbidden, and homosexual behavior is never placed on a par with heterosexual conduct. When sexual conduct is no longer the subject of moral direction, it is a sign that the society as a whole is rapidly degenerating; soon there will be no place for morality of any kind, except for such as may be imposed by civil and criminal law. As the rejection of English and American attempts to legitimatize homosexual conduct by African and Asian Anglican bishops at the last Lambeth Conference suggests, it may be up to the Africans and Asians to bring Christian morality back to the heartlands from which it was once exported to them.

Recently there has been growing public discussion over an increasing trend among junior high and high school aged youth to engage in oral sex. According to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta (CDC), the prevalence of sexual experience among young people has declined 16 percent from 1991-2001. However, these conclusions came from surveys that were void of any questions regarding oral sex. Funded by the government and other large organizations, the studies have naturally stuck to questions related to vaginal intercourse, since the motivation for the research is primarily measuring unwanted pregnancies and STDs.

Meanwhile, there have been increasing rumors and anecdotal information in the popular press that oral sex is spreading like wildfire among our nation’s youth. The first hint of this was in an April 1997 article in The New York Times where it was asserted that many youth were engaging in oral instead of vaginal sex, because it was a healthy alternative, physically and emotionally. The Washington Post reported in July of 1999 of a new fad in which suburban middle-school students were regularly engaging in oral sex at one another’s homes, in parks, and even on school grounds. This piece reported that about half of these students were practicing oral sex by the time they were in high school, according to unnamed counselors and sexual behavior researchers.

More stories have followed. According to a February 2000 piece in Talk magazine that reported on interviews with 12 to 16 year olds, seventh grade was the normal starting point for oral sex, and by 10th grade, “well over half of their classmates were involved.” The New York Times chimed in again with an April 2000 article which quoted a Manhattan psychologist as saying oral sex is “like a goodnight kiss” to seventh and eighth grade virgins who were saving themselves for marriage. They perceived the behavior as safe and risk free. The investigation continued in a July 2000 Washington Post Magazine cover story where eighth graders described being regularly propositioned for oral sex in school. The report went on to say that middle-school-aged students appeared to be experimenting with a wider range of behaviors at progressively younger ages.

This brings many questions to the fore: What is contributing to this trend? How many teenagers are truly engaging in oral sex? Do they think it is sex? What are they being taught about oral sex in abstinence education? Are they aware of the oral transmission of STDs?

The topic of oral sex hit the headlines again just last month. Under influence from similar types of programs in countries like Sweden, sex education teachers in Britain are actually being encouraged by the government to have their students consider oral sex. With nearly 39,000 girls under 18 conceiving each year, Britain has the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Western Europe. The government wants to halve this statistic by 2010, and this is seen as a way of encouraging a “stopping point” before full-blown intercourse, rather than the commonsense thought that this would lead to more intercourse and pregnancy.

This idea probably shocks the moral sensitivities of most Americans, but maybe we are not too far behind. Many teenagers apparently took direct instruction from former President Clinton on the matter. When he said he did not have “sexual relations with that woman,” he was communicating that oral sex does not qualify as sexual relations. According to the popular press’s field reporting, this is a virtual trump card for most teens in considering oral sex not to be sex. An abstinence educator from South Carolina told me in a phone interview that she hears this “all the time.”

In addition to our former President, the entertainment industry has been glamorizing oral sex in movies and music targeted to teens. One source told me there are four or five songs currently playing on top 40 radio stations that include references to oral sex. A song that spent several weeks as the #1 single last year, Missy Elliot’s “Work It,” has repeated references to the practice. Teenage sexploitation films have been running for years with depictions of a wide array of sexual activity, oral sex being one of the most prominent. Recently the success of the 1999 film, American Pie, opened the floodgate for marketing these bawdy films. What young people exactly pick up from these sources cannot possibly be measured, but their influence is undeniable.

Even abstinence education may be contributing to this reported trend. In 1996, Congress established a new abstinence education program as part of its overhaul of welfare. The regulating arm for the curriculum stipulates that programs teach “abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage as the expected standard for all school-age children.” The problem: the law does not delineate sexual activity. Some abstinence programs are being as explicit as possible, while others leave sexual activity open to interpretation. All the students know is that they must abstain, not knowing necessarily from what.

Heritage Community Services (HCS) is one such abstinence program that clearly defines sexual behavior. Currently, it is in four states and is one of six programs being considered by the Bush administration for possible nationwide standardization of abstinence education. They communicate the dangers of all types of sexual activity, including the social and psychological effects. Monica Suarez, one of HCS’s instructors in South Carolina, says there is widespread ignorance as to the prevalence of STDs — including chlamydia, herpes, gonorrhea, HIV, and AIDS — transmitted through oral sex. In 1960, there were two significant STDs, syphilis and gonorrhea. At the present there are over 25 categories of STDs, with 200 possible manifestations if you include all the strains. HIV has one hundred strains alone. STDs are now more common than the common cold in doctor’s offices. The CDC admits we are in a “crisis.”

Meanwhile, under the guise that this behavior is “safe,” Ms. Suarez says boy-girl sleepovers are prevalent among students, the full intention of these sleepovers being oral sex orgies. “Hookups” are common, where oral sex is a casual and fun thing to do. Unfathomably, according to HCS, oral sex is most prevalent among middle school students.

Exactly how much oral sex is going on can never be known, but it is obvious to many that it is rampant and contributing to what is increasingly a STD epidemic. More importantly, it is a symptom of a moral epidemic in our nation. Not only are the social, psychological, and spiritual side effects of this behavior incomprehensible, the fact that an older generation is either implicitly or explicitly encouraging it is damnable (Matthew 18:6-7). Instead of the older generation guiding and instructing the younger, it is systematically corrupting it in on all fronts. Even our former President cannot serve as a proper role model in his behavior or testimony. —D.B.S.

The lightning victory of the U.S. led coalition in Iraq merits the title of Blitzkrieg, a word used to describe the amazingly fast German victories over Poland and France in World War II. As the war began, the Poles at first were relatively confident that they would be able to put up a good fight against the Germans and that their allies, Britain and France, would quickly come to their aid by attacking Germany in the West. Instead, the Soviet Union also attacked Poland in mid-September, while the British and the French remained inactive behind France’s Maginot Line. After Poland was crushed in thirty days, there were several months of “phony war,” which ended abruptly and without warning in May of 1940 when the Germans launched another Blitzkkrieg against France through the Low Countries. The French soon suffered the fate of the Poles, despite the fact that in 1939 the French army was reputed to be the best in the world. However, the future did not turn out as Hitler and his strategists planned, and Germany ended up a heap of rubble and ashes in 1945. Somewhat the same thing happened to Japan later that same year when the full folly of its assault on the United States became evident. In war as in politics and love, all that begins well does not necessarily end well.

Our little war against Iraq has so far ended well, and we do not have greater enemies in view who might deal with us as the reinforced Allies did with Germany. Where our greatest future danger lies will not be in the realm of international conflict, but in progressive decadence within our own country. As essays in this issue point out, there are some alarming indications of the increasing abandonment of the sexual morality that served us so well for so long.

No society in the past has been able to endure long after abandoning its moral compass in sexual behavior. Moreover, it is not only sexual morals that are vanishing: old standards of corporate integrity and business ethics seem to be going, as well. It is true that we have a moderate-sized and very effective military establishment, armed with a technology unmatched anywhere in the word. Unfortunately, our army is beginning to look a bit like that of the late Roman Empire, superior to all enemies, but unable to stop the growing moral and social rot within the Empire. The growing Christian community in the Roman West was not growing fast enough to counter the disintegration, and the Empire there ended, so to speak, not with a bang, but a whimper in A.D. 476. In our society, unfortunately, it is not churches that struggle to rescue a rotting moral order, but now many churches participate, less fully perhaps, but nevertheless participate, in the social rot. If the society continues to degenerate, with the youth learning deviance and decadence even in the schools, soon the society will be ready to crumble from within. The moral strength of conservative Christianity and Judaism could arrest the deterioration and help to place the nation on a right course again, but both are objects of derision and discrimination. Nevertheless, if they could stand firmly for what the Bible teaches, they might begin to bring more and more of society back to its moral roots and thus save us from the destruction that no foreign power can bring.

With all the attention that the various varieties of Islam have received in the aftermath of September 11, from the horror at the terrorist wing to dreams of Islam as a religion of peace, people hardly remember that the Communist movement, which so abruptly left the European stage in the years 1989-91, was resolutely committed to the extermination of Christianity. In 2002, Sergiu Grossu, the Romanian-born director of the Swiss publishing house L’Age d’Homme (The Age of Man), published The Persecuted Church: Between the Gulag and the Opulent Society (L’Eglise persecutee. Entre Goulag et societe opulente: Lasanne: Editions L’Age d’Homme). The expression “church of silence” was often used for the church living under the Communist yoke. The most distressing thing about M. Grossu’s work is not the enforced silence of the churches under Communism, but the complicit silence of the churches in the West, including the World Council of Churches headquartered in Geneva. In the 1960’s, Eugene Carson Blake, then general secretary of the WCC, argued that it was better for the WCC and Christian churches in the West to moderate their criticisms of persecutions in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, or to refrain from criticism altogether, because any criticism might provoke a reaction that would exacerbate the situation of the Christians. This attitude was terribly disillusioning to M. and Mme. Grossu when they finally reached the West, after M. Grossu had served a prison term for his Christian activities. Apparently the churches of western Europe and North America find it quite difficult to face the fact that there are people and movements in the world that are militant in their hostility to Christianity, for there is very little awareness of the degree to which Christians are persecuted today in areas where Islam rules. Failure to recognize the seriousness of the threat surely lessens the churches’ chances of weathering it successfully.

• As the United States gather our forces and work up enthusiasm for an assault on the Axis of Evil, we notice a new development in political consciousness. Saddam Hussein is accused of, and condemned for, contempt for the United Nations, a new kind of lese-majesty. If we insist on affording the status of majesty to the United Nations, which began as a kind of American creation at the end of World War II, but which is that no longer, we should beware lest before long we too can be charged with lese-majesty when we fail to obey resolutions that will destroy our illusion of national sovereignty.

• Emmanuel Todd, in “After Empire,” offers a partial explanation of the increasing suspicion, exasperation, and resentment that American policies are meeting in Europe. Much of the world is getting the impression that instead of being the solver of problems, the United States are coming to be the problem, as we seek to exert our presumably benevolent influence virtually everywhere. It is too late to start implementing George Washington’s advice to avoid foreign entanglements, but perhaps we could follow Goethe’s, “Stay home and earn your own living honestly.” We foment globalism and multiculturalism in the sublime confidence that we Americans will end up as the globocrats, but in a world in which we make up perhaps five percent of the total population, this is indeed naive.

• Tolerance of, or enthusiasm for, marriage-like homosexual unions seems to be growing in various churches. One district of the Moravian Church in the United States proposes accepting it. In the Evangelical Church in Germany (EKD), regional churches in the Palatinate, the Rhineland, Berlin-Brandenburg, and Hessen-Nassau have already done so.

• According to a report from Mission India (New Delhi) on January 25, Indian police shot and killed fifteen Bible students. The students were on their way, on foot, through a forest to a town where they planned to hold a worship service. The police, lying in wait, for some reason held them to be terrorists and opened fire, killing them all. Fortunately, the fear of terrorists has not yet reached this extreme in the United States. Students can still walk through a forest without having to fear being mowed down.

• Marvin Olasky, an editor of World magazine, an evangelical newsweekly, was an important advisor to George Bush when he was Texas governor and a candidate for the presidency. A fervent supporter of the Iraq war, he used love of neighbor as a justification of the U.S attacks on Iraq, in a recent issue of his magazine. In the course of a long article, “Golden Rule,” he wrote, “[s]ince most of us in the United States would want to be delivered from evil, we should try to liberate others.” Of course, he notes, we can’t do this everywhere, but when this interpretation of the Golden Rule coincides with our own interest in protecting ourselves from terrorist attacks, we should go for it (issue of April 5, p. 40).