I'm often asked by pro-choice friends why pro-lifers oppose sex education, family planning, and contraception. Don't those approaches reduce unintended pregnancy and therefore the numbers of abortions? It's a question at the heart of efforts to achieve "common ground" on abortion.

So I emailed Jill Stanek, an important pro-life leader...

Obama's speech reminds us that 9/11 needn't have led to a conflict between the West and Islam. It's a reminder of the road not taken.

Remember, after the attacks, the whole world -- including the Muslim world was on our side. America was innocent. Much of the Islamic world didn't...

The murder of George Tiller has prompted many families to post first-person accounts of their own heart-wrenching decisions about abortion and child birth.

There's a broad national consensus against late term abortions yet these stories raise the question of just how much do we know about why women have them....

The political debate on abortion has for several decades focused on the wrong moral question: Does life begin at conception? Those who believe it does, oppose abortion. Those who don't, or think the question is unanswerable, believe the pregnant woman should make that choice.

Yet consider this statistical couplet....

The political debate on abortion has for several decades focused on the wrong moral question: Does life begin at conception? Those who believe it does, oppose abortion. Those who don't, or think the question is unanswerable, believe the pregnant woman should make that choice.

Yet consider this statistical couplet....

Most attention these days has focused on revelations that administration officials sanctioned torture for "high value" Al Qaeda operatives.

That's important but another moral issue is as crucial, and in some ways more morally clear-cut: As part of the war on terror, the U.S. government routinely detained people for...

We have growing numbers of unemployed journalists.

We have zillions of dollars being spent by the federal government, a recipe for mismanagement.

How about we employ some of these out of work journalists to evaluate and monitor the programs to improve their quality?

Sergeant Shriver, the first director of the...

The Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston split seems to have re-ignited the old arguments about abortion, birth control, hypocrisy etc.

But now that it's clear, in hindsight, that this relationship wasn't likely to result in a happy, intact marriage, there's another question we should be discussing: under what circumstances should...

Here's a modest proposal to get the gay marriage debate unstuck: religious conservatives back gay marriage while gay marriage advocates push efforts to reduce the divorce rate.

Some opponents of same sex marriage say their big fear is the slippery slope toward a weakening of the institution of marriage. Gay...

The Democrats have been so busy defending federal spending, and denigrating the stimulative power of tax cuts, that they apparently either forgot -- or felt they couldn't -- point out something rather dramatic: the tax cuts in this stimulus plan appear to be the biggest in history.

The compromise stimulus...

I was recently telling a Democratic friend about Obama's abortion balancing act. One day he repeals the Mexico City "gag rule" delighting pro-choice activists. The next week he seems intent on making it up to pro-life voters, announcing that one priority of a new faith-based council will...

During the campaign, Barack Obama proposed tripling AmeriCorps, the full-time community service program, at a cost of roughly $3 billion. John McCain, though less specific, also supported a large expansion in national service.

That consensus had grown around national service before the economic crisis -- which has only...

If you dropped in to America from another planet and were told there was a group of people dedicated to reducing the number of abortions, and then were asked, "would that group be for or against family planning and contraception?" you might reasonably assume these anti-abortion folks would be ferocious...

I'm depressed about this whole flap over contraceptives being in the stimulus package. It reflects much about what's wrong with politics and policymaking in Washington. Here are my top three reasons to be depressed:

1) Democrats are still not committed to the new abortion politics. Democrats have to make a...

Obama's pro-life supporters are claiming to be pleased that he at least waited a day before reportedly repealing the Mexico City "gag rule," which blocks federal money from going to overseas groups that offer information about abortion.

Jim Wallis, for instance, declared, "In breaking the symbolic cycle, President Obama showed...

Obama's inaugural address was brimming with religious references.

"We remain a young nation, but in the words of Scripture, the time has come to set aside childish things...."

"This is the source of our confidence -- the knowledge that God calls on us to shape an uncertain destiny...."

"With eyes...

Michael Wolff writes on the Huffington Post that it is a "shibboleth" that the New York Times is important for the good of journalism and notes that an evolving piece of conventional wisdom is that "the Huffington Post is the new New York Times."

I know Huffington Post. Huffington...

The Obama administration may be about to squander a historic opportunity. By all reports, the economic recovery plan doesn't include a large-scale national service program.

Franklin Roosevelt viewed the Civilian Conservation Corps as an essential part of the New Deal, and it became one of its most popular programs. It...

Barack Obama's decision to have Rick Warren deliver the inaugural invocation, will no doubt frustrate or infuriate many Obama supporters.

In a recent interview with Beliefnet and the Wall Street Journal, Warren equated gay marriage to incest, pedophilia and polygamy and repeated the inaccurate charge that without Prop 8,...

In an exchange this weekend with Tom Brokaw, Joe Lieberman said he regretted some of what he'd said during the campaign.

Brokaw said, "I hear the word regret, but not the word apologize."

Lieberman responded that he's "going forward," adding, "You can take from the word 'regret'...