Jennifer Hartline - With our government on the verge of passing health care legislation that, absent explicit language placed within it prohibiting Federal funds from being used for abortion, will mandate abortion coverage paid for by you and me, I figure now's a good time for a radical discussion about sex. We'll never change the way we view abortion until we change our attitudes about sex. It's time for a sexual counter-revolution.

The sanctity of human life from the moment of conception throughout all of life up to and including a natural death is the only foundation our society will ever be able to stand upon if we hope to flourish as a truly free people. It's quite obvious our foundation is crumbling. To repair it, we must go back to square one and correct our ideas about sex. Unless we give sexual intercourse its due reverence, we'll never give human life its due reverence. The two can never be separated, as Pope Paul VI tried to tell the world in his prophetic encyclical, Humanae Vitae. If we don't regard all life as sacred - and thus the creative act of sex-then we will always find ways to rationalize and justify the murder of a child as a "right."

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Thomas C. Reeves - I read not long ago that automobile companies are racing to reduce the noise in cars. Along with fuel efficiency and safety, the executives are deeply concerned about silence. Why? Where is the demand? Modern life is extraordinarily noisy, and people are rushing to augment their car stereos with satellite radio and television sets. The motorcycle and truck owners who have modified their vehicles and roar down our street attempting to sound like the Airbus A380 about to land on our roof seem entirely in step with contemporary culture, a culture enamored of super-loud leaf blowers, riding mowers, jet-skis, and snowmobiles. And then there is the omnipresent popular music.

Muzak, usually unobtrusive popular music played in commercial and industrial centers, became a reality in 1934, and spread throughout the 1940s and 1950s. It grew because it was popular; studies showed that stores improved sales and factories raised worker morale by exposing people to a steady diet of "elevator music." Radios, phonograph records, and television sets kept the level of sound high most of the time wherever one went. But how quiet it all seems now.

It is almost impossible today, beyond the confines of one's home, to escape hip-hop (now taught as a serious subject in some colleges), rap, rock, and country-western hits, played at high volume. Shopping malls blast recordings, spoken commercials, and videos at shoppers. Our local Home Depot and Best Buy reverberate with the assault of sobs, groans, and twangs over gigantic loudspeakers. Our cavernous grocery store sounds like a perpetual rock concert, with thump-thumping, shouting, and shrieking tearing at one's ears in every aisle.