Historian Eric Hobsbawm has described the twentieth century as the age of “megadeath.” The past century’s assaults on human life stagger the imagination and defy computation. With symbols like Auschwitz, the Soviet gulags, and Cambodia’s killing fields, the century stands as a stark reminder that technological advance and moral progress often do not travel through history together.

Newsweek magazine has launched a frontal attack upon Mel Gibson’s movie, “The Passion of the Christ,” but the real target of the magazine’s article is the truthfulness of the Bible itself. In “Who Really Killed Jesus?: What History Teaches Us,” Newsweek’s February 16 cover story, writer Jon Meacham labels Gibson’s movie “controversial,” “powerful,” and “troubling.” More seriously, he blasts the movie as anti-Semitic and potentially dangerous. Newsweek raises the specter of a new wave of anti-Semitism spreading across the world, directly due to the influence of “The Passion of the Christ.”

Are we witnessing the end of marriage? In a fascinating study, researcher Stanley Kurtz of the Hoover Institution indicates that marriage is already dying in Scandinavia, and his evidence demands attention. In Sweden and Norway, a majority of children are now born out of wedlock. A full 60-percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents.

The latest atrocity handed down by the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts is yet another reminder that America’s venerable rule of law is being replaced by the rule of judges. In this case, the same four-judge majority that ruled last November that a prohibition against same-sex marriage is unconstitutional has now rejected civil unions as an acceptable legislative solution. The Supreme Judicial Court rendered its decision at the request of the Massachusetts Senate, which had petitioned the High Court to consider whether its legislative proposal for civil unions would satisfy the court’s order in the previous case, Goodridge v. Department of Public Health. The Court’s response, handed down on February 3, reveals the true legislative intention behind the Court’s decision on gay marriage.

Do you want girl or a boy? Throughout human history, expectant couples have been asked that question. Now, the question comes with a new twist–advanced technologies that can actually come close to guaranteeing a child of a specific gender. But this technology comes at an unacceptably high moral cost.

A culture demonstrates its true character through its treatment of the young and impressionable. Every society sends signals about its moral expectation, and young people are bombarded with messages from competing mentors, models, and influencers. Consider–if you have sufficient nerve–the signals being sent to young people today.

Fans tuning in for Sunday’s Super Bowl broadcast may have been looking for an all-American sports spectacle. What they got–at least in the halftime show–went far beyond anything related to athletics. Instead, America’s families were subjected to a burlesque of pornographic images, erotic music, and Janet Jackson’s exposed flesh.

Jewel Graham has started a wildfire. A student at Indiana’s Butler University, Jewel serves as a columnist for Dawgnet, the university’s on-line student newspaper. A recent column put Jewel right in the middle of the culture war.

Panic is setting in among the Darwinists. Even as diverse forms of Darwinist theory have become the enforced orthodoxy of naturalistic science, the fragile house of evolution is in big trouble–and the Darwinists know it.

Dr. Robert Shaw is convinced that American society has become toxic to children. In his new book, The Epidemic, Shaw argues that a pattern of absentee and permissive parenting has led to children that are anti-social, emotionally fragile, and even dangerous. Shaw is a child and family psychiatrist practicing in Berkley, California. He also serves as director of the Family Institute of Berkeley, and has directed the Family and Children’s Mental Health Services for the city of Berkeley. Even the slightest evidence of common sense coming out of the city of Berkeley is worthy of note–and this book deserves the attention of every American parent.

Peggy Noonan is right. At some point, in some moment, all of us must admit that something remarkable has happened to American culture. Mrs. Noonan, a former presidential speechwriter, recalls that this moment came for her during a high school graduation in the early 1970s. A young girl walked across the stage to receive her diploma. The girl was obviously pregnant. Noonan recalls that her first impulse was admiration for the girl’s grit and determination against social disapproval. “But,” recognized Noonan, “society wasn’t disapproving. It was applauding.” As she reflected, “Applause is a right and generous response for a young girl with grit and heart. And yet, in the sound of that applause I heard a wall falling, a thousand-year wall, a wall of sanctions that said: We as a society do not approve of teenaged unwed motherhood because it is not good for the child, not good for the mother, not good for us.”

“Move over, Ellen DeGeneres, and make way for the younger girls.” That’s the opening line in a recent article by Laura Sessions Stepp that recently appeared in the Washington Post. In “Bisexuality Goes Trendy,” Stepp argues that bisexuality has now become chic among teenage girls.