The fact that Catholic religious institutions filed the lawsuits provided "more evidence that the healthcare law is extremely flawed in its bias for abortion and abortion-inducing drugs," said Americans United for Life President and CEO Dr. Charmaine Yoest. "This lawsuit is only beginning, as many Americans are deeply troubled by the largest expansion of abortion since Roe v. Wade."

Those who had already filed such lawsuits welcomed the massive influx of fellow litigants.

Now NBC is set to debut a new show this fall entitled The New Normal. What is the premise? Two guys are married and of course can't have a child of their own. They hire a surrogate to begin their family.

You cannot point to the effect on the emotional development of children, of a culture in which homosexuality is treated as a legitimate way of life, nor can you allude to the correlation between male homosexuality and pedophilia. Some writers have gone public on these issues-Jeffrey Satinover, for example, in Homosexuality and the Politics of Truth (1996)-and paid a predictable price for it.

But here's another angle to consider: the family and sexual revolutions didn't happen in a vacuum. They were aided in part by religion's declining influence, and in turn hastened that decline.

According to author and journalist James Haught, the crumbling of sexual and other taboos is one of the surest signs that the United States is belatedly following Europe and other industrialized nations into a post-religious era.