Advocates of this new religion of "tolerance" wish instead to avoid the demands of religious liberty by airbrushing religious ideas out of the public square, or insisting that all religions are really the same (which is just another, bigger airbrush). Anyone who believes otherwise is "intolerant." Tolerance turns out to be just another hunting license for excluding and stigmatizing people with whom you disagree.

Animating the base quietly while appealing to the broad, fuzzy middle with broad, fuzzy content-free values displays is now a bipartisan endeavor.

Democrats complain the marriage issue is divisive. By that they mean it divides the majority of Democratic voters from some key special interests of their party, who provide money and manpower.

In the name of tolerance, certain European elites are bent on cultural homogenization, directed by a new self-styled "scientific" elite. Why choose "scientific" as the adjective to describe a group of lawyers and law professors? Because the distinguishing characteristic of a "scientific" community today is that it can impose its truths on others without conscience. Mere scholarship cannot do this.

Sex is not an act which takes place merely between bodies. Sex is an act which defines, alters, imposes on the personhood of those who engage in it. We wander through the ordinary course of days as persons, desexed, androgynous, and it is in the sexual act in which we receive reassurance that we are not persons, after all, but men and women.

The central advantage of democracy is that in our system, ruthlessly ambitious men seeking power hurl words at one another, not bombs.This has been, of course, the big message of the family diversity crowd since the dawn of the sexual revolution: Adults have awesome intimacy needs that must be met. Family forms, social norms, household arrangements all must be wound, unwound and rewound so the adults get what they need. Kids? Oh, they adjust.

We might wish to one day achieve a society that is race-blind, but a society that is gender-blind would be just plain blind.

What scares me most about Terri Schiavo is how easy it is to lose the horror at killing. Decent, civilized Romans left their newborn babies on the wayside to die of dehydration; it was just common sense. Decent, civilized Germans looked the other way when their government authorized mass murder. Progressive Americans in the 20th century supported forced eugenics and thought themselves compassionate and rational people for doing so.