President Bush was widely ridiculed for consulting the Reverend Billy Graham before the Gulf war.

The formation of character in young people is educationally a different task from, and a prior task to, the discussion of the great, difficult, ethical controversies of the day. First things first. And planting the ideas of virtue, of good traits in the young, comes first. In the moral life, as in life itself, we take one step at a time. Every field has its complexities and controversies. And so does ethics. And every field has its basics. So too with values.

It is our character that supports the promise of our future - far more than particular government programs or policies.

When we were attacked on Sept. 11, we knew the main reason for the attack was that Islamists hated our way of life, our virtues, our freedoms. What we never imagined was that the free press - an institution at the heart of those virtues and freedoms - would be among the first to surrender.

Have we come to the point where it is now considered a secular blasphemy to acknowledge the name of God at all?

The President is the symbol of who the people of the United States are. He is the person who stands for us in the eyes of the world and the eyes of our children.

America's support for human rights and democracy is our noblest export to the world.