Jeff Jacoby

NO HISTORICAL MOMENT could ever capture in its entirety the promise of American equality. But if you had to choose just one date, you might go with Nov. 7, 1967. It was on that Election Day in Cleveland 40 years ago that Carl B. Stokes , great-grandson of a slave, became the first black mayor of a major American city ...

AT A White House ceremony tomorrow President Bush will honor eight distinguished men and women with the Presidential Medal of Freedom , the nation's highest civil award. Among the recipients will be the longtime civil rights activist Benjamin Hooks; Harper Lee, author of the much-loved novel, "To Kill a Mockingbird"; and C-SPAN's founder and president, Brian Lamb.

BELIEF IN God is no guarantee of goodness. Piety without ethics - religious fanaticism - can be a prescription for great evil, as centuries of religious brutality and bloodshed make all too clear. A millennium ago, Crusaders massacred their victims to the cry of "Deus lo volt!" - "God wills it!" Islamist radicals exclaimed "Allahu Akbar" - "God is great" ...

I began working for newspapers 20 years ago this week, when the Boston Herald hired me as an editorial writer, a job I enjoyed for six years before moving to The Boston Globe in 1994. A career in journalism was not something I had ever envisioned: When I was in second grade I announced that I was going to be ...

"DO WE REALLY want presidents who sign laws that they think are unconstitutional?" It was a debate over the Bush administration's conduct in the war on terrorism. The discussion had turned to the president's heavy reliance on " signing statements " - written interpretations by President Bush of bills he has signed into law, frequently including the claim that one ...

IN CIVILIZED circles it is considered boorish to speak of Jews as Christ-killers, or to use language evoking the venomous old teaching that Jews are forever cursed for the death of Jesus. Those circles apparently don't include the Sabeel Ecumenical Liberation Theology Center, an anti-Israel "peace" organization based in Jerusalem, or its founder, the Anglican cleric Naim Ateek.

"FREEDOM of education, being an essential of civil and religious liberty . . . must not be interfered with under any pretext whatever," the party's national platform declared. "We are opposed to state interference with parental rights and rights of conscience in the education of children as an infringement of the fundamental . . . doctrine that the largest individual ...

DURING AN INTERVIEW at The Boston Globe last week, Senator Hillary Clinton was asked about a vote she had cast in 2005 against raising automobile mileage standards - a vote seemingly at odds with her stand on the issue. She answered that it had been a largely "symbolic" vote, since everyone knew the bill in question "would never pass," and ...

IT WOULD NEVER have occurred to me to ask Barack Obama why he doesn't wear an American flag pin on his lapel, let alone to draw any inference from such a seemingly trivial fact. But it did occur to a journalist in Iowa City, Iowa, to ask that question last week, and the answer it elicited wasn't trivial at all.

BEHOLD TWO public displays: One is an immature stunt, the other a work of art. Can you tell which is which?

WHEN JOHN MEARSHEIMER and Stephen Walt embarked on "The Israel Lobby and US Foreign Policy," which argues that a mighty pro-Israel machine controls America's dealings in the Middle East and crushes those who get in its way, they expected to be condemned as anti-Semites.

NOT LONG after the 2004 election, the executive director of MoveOn.org sent his members an e-mail trumpeting their newly acquired influence over the Democratic Party - for which, he said, "grass-roots contributors" like them had raised $300 million. "Now it's our party," Eli Pariser crowed. "We bought it, we own it, and we're going to take it back."

I SPOTTED the obituary for Madeleine L'Engle , who died last week at 88, and in my mind's eye I was 9 years old again, racing through "A Wrinkle in Time," unable to stop turning the pages despite my shudders of foreboding at the sinister something that I knew was coming - the implacable malevolence, referred to only as "IT," ...

IF THERE WAS one thing we all knew after Sept. 11, 2001, it was that another massacre was coming. The next terrorist attack on US soil, it was asserted time and again, was not a matter of if, but of when.

DEBATING capital punishment at an Ivy League university a few years ago, I was confronted with the claim that since death sentences are more often meted out in cases where the victim is white, the death penalty must be racially biased. It's a spurious argument, I replied. Whites commit fewer than half of all murders in the United States, yet ...

IDAHO isn't Massachusetts, so as soon as the story of his bathroom escapade broke it was clear that Senator Larry Craig would soon be needing new business cards. Except for those elected from the Bay State, US senators and representatives involved in sex scandals are almost always forced to leave Congress. Making advances to an undercover policeman while cruising an ...

IT'S A WAR, and it's the Middle East, so glad tidings can go sour and there are never any guarantees. But for all the caveats, the news from Iraq has been heartening.

SOME SCENES from the casino wars: Governor Ernie Fletcher of Kentucky wants his reelection battle with Democratic challenger Steve Beshear to turn on the issue of casino gambling. Fletcher opposes any expansion of legal gambling in Kentucky beyond the state's famous racetracks. Beshear favors amending the state constitution to legalize casinos. Last week, the governor embarked on a "No Casinos ...

Was there an Armenian genocide during World War I? While it was happening, no one called the slaughter of Armenian Christians by Ottoman Turks "genocide." No one could: The word wouldn't be coined for another 30 years. But those who made it their business to tell the world what the Turks were doing found other terms to describe the state-sponsored ...

Second of two parts IF THERE'S anything climate-change crusaders are adamant about, it is that the science of the matter is settled. That greenhouse gases emitted through human activity are causing the planet to warm dangerously, they say, is an established fact; only a charlatan would claim otherwise. In the worlds of Al Gore, America's leading global warming apostle: "There's ...