Mark Twain, perhaps the most famous American journalist in history, said that the man who chooses not to read has little advantage over the man who can't read.

If the institutions of family and marriage are in trouble -- and the statistics do suggest cause for concern -- surely we heterosexuals have only ourselves to blame. By law and by custom, gay Americans have been allowed no role in those institutions until now. Homosexuals cannot be held responsible for high divorce rates among their heterosexual friends, co-workers and neighbors. They are not responsible for the millions of children casually brought into this world by heterosexual parents and then casually raised to adulthood.

A man who sincerely has changed his mind about something important ought to hold his new views with less certainty and express them with a bit of rhetorical humility. There should be room for doubt. How can your current beliefs be so transcendentally correct if you yourself recently believed something very different? How can critics of what you say now be so obviously wrong if you yourself used to be one of them? But Bush is cocksure that active, sometimes military, promotion of American values in the world is a good idea, just as he was, or appeared to be, cocksure of the opposite not long ago.

The Chicago Tribune said that, for instance, six of Hollinger's 16 directors did not attend 75 per cent of board meetings in 2000. The board included Henry Kissinger, the former US Secretary of State and Richard Perle, the arch-hawk close to the current Bush administration.