The Yahwist, however, has one very definite theological (or theo-political) preoccupation: to establish Israel's divinely bestowed right to the land of Canaan.
As Ms Morone's business plan describes it, JLM "derives value from three sources, and legally protects and bestows rights upon the total output of Jennifer Lyn Morone".
Because the drafters included admirers of Western liberal democracies, and because they emerged from a regime that treated its citizens as essentially chattel, the Constitution is expansive in bestowing rights.
The overturning of the ban has been used by the country's leaders as a marker of a new era, with repressive social conservatism ostensibly replaced by newly bestowed rights.
Re "The Costs of Being a Gay Couple Run Higher" ("Your Money" column, by Tara Siegel Bernard and Ron Lieber, front page, Oct. 3): As your article illustrates, marriage in America is a complex legal contract that bestows rights and responsibilities at both state and federal levels of government.
All elected officials and prochoice advocates, however, should take the hint, one sent loudly and clearly in recent years by voters in Albuquerque, Florida, Mississippi, North Dakota, Colorado and California: Americans reject ballot measures designed to restrict abortion rights, whether they involve bestowing rights on embryos or banning later abortion.
Most recently, after Chen's nephew was sentenced to three years in jail, Chen released a video to urging his countrymen to follow his lead: "Don't expect some good emperor to bestow the right upon us, or some upright officials to defend our rights.
In an odd twist, these entities in turn are allowed to bestow the right to make broad judgments about trustworthiness to third parties.
Let's not exaggerate'". Yet his son is denied Egyptian citizenship, or freedom to work there, since mothers cannot bestow that right if their husbands are Palestinian.
Regular medallions, which bestow the right to pick up passengers on any city street, are typically sold at auction and can be worth nearly $1 million.
And at last week's corporate medallion auction, in which taxi fleets vied for the aluminum shields that bestow the right to operate a yellow cab in New York City, prices set records, climbing to more than $700,000 for a pair.
