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Mark Steyn hit the nail on the head when he accused a Canadian appeals court of allowing for a “fourth-trimester abortion” - that’s right, the killing of a baby that is already born.

There can be few more frightening experiences than an earthquake, and last Friday’s quake that has devastated Japan will rank among the strongest ever recorded. Ranking 9.0 on the scale of magnitude, the Sendai, Japan quake ranks fifth among earthquakes in recorded history, coming after the 1960 quake in Chile (9.5), the 1964 quake at Prince William Sound, Alaska (9.2), the deadly Sumatra, Indonesia quake of 2004 (9.1), and the 1952 quake at Kamchatka, Russia (9.0).

Pastor Rick Warren now stands at ground zero of a whirlwind, and he is likely to be there for some time. The announcement that President-elect Obama had chosen him to deliver the invocation at the inaugural ceremonies on January 20 came with formality but no fanfare. The first headlines speculated that Warren had become "the next Billy Graham" - for Billy Graham has missed praying at few inaugurations in recent decades.

The challenge of defending marriage as the union of a man and a woman was on full public display on November 4. The immediate news was very encouraging indeed. Voters in Arizona, Florida, and California all passed measures defending marriage and prohibiting same-sex marriages in their states. These three states, added to the over twenty others that had already passed similar constitutional amendments or similar provisions, have made a massive public statement in support of marriage.

The election of Sen. Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States came as a bang, not a whimper. The tremors had been perceptible for days, maybe even weeks. On Tuesday, America experienced nothing less than a political and cultural earthquake.

Americans head for the voting precincts today as the 2008 election is now at hand. Already, some 20 million citizens have voted through early voting options. Some expect a record turn-out for today's election. In any event, millions of citizens will participate in the first duty of freedom - the freedom to vote.

Writing more than twenty years ago, Thomas Sowell described the basic worldview clash we observe today as a struggle between "constrained" and "unconstrained" visions of humanity. The fundamental distinction between these two visions is moral, but the thrust of each is ideological. The constrained vision may be considered basically conservative, while the unconstrained vision is basically liberal, in modern terms.

"We're talking about really refraining from using things like, husband-wife, boyfriend-girlfriend, those kind of things, and just say 'partner,'" explains Robin Sinks. She is the health education specialist for the Long Beach Unified School District in California. The point she was making is clear enough. The legalization of same-sex marriage will require a comprehensive change in our language.

Same-sex marriage is, for now, legal in three of fifty states in the United States. Beyond our borders, it is legal in the Netherlands, Spain, Belgium, South Africa, Canada and Norway. This represents a very small percentage of the world's population. Same-sex marriage is, by any measure, the exception rather than the rule. Even when legalized civil unions and domestic partnerships are thrown into the mix, the countries that consider same-sex unions and heterosexual marriages to be equal before the law represent a small percentage of the world's nations.

Human society is a complex reality, but certain constants have framed that reality for human beings. One of those constants has been the institution of marriage. The respected status of the heterosexual pairing, set apart for exclusive rights and respected for its functions for the society, is among the most important of those constants. Even where deviations from this pattern occur, they are of interest merely for the fact that they are deviations from this norm.