The impulse to give battered women shelter is admirable, and the ruling by the Board of Immigration Appeals is binding on the nation's immigration courts.
But in the case of Darwaza, Islam was important not as the binding substance of the nation, but as a culture and civilization.
Not because our justice minister was widely quoted as telling a convention of rabbis and religious court judges that "step by step, we will bestow upon the citizens of Israel the laws of the Torah and we will turn Halakha (Jewish religious law) into the binding law of the nation".
In sum, George Bush must help rekindle the flame of hope -- flickering weakly at this moment -- in democracy for all, so that his own dream of binding the wounds of the nation may be achieved.
Politics and language: multiculturalists argue that the binding power of the liberal nation state has been eroded from within by value diversity and from without by the arrival of immigrant communities with other loyalties.
And for the new President Trump, it would be an enormously appreciated gesture of healing -- binding up the nation's wounds -- directed at that half of America that has been not just disappointed, but profoundly alarmed by his election.
It should be about binding up the wounds of the nation, as Abraham Lincoln said at another of the most divided moments in our history.
But today, he added, "it is kind of silly to say we are binding together the nation through advertisements and catalogs".
But he emphasized Mr. Bush better bring these values quickly to the fore in binding the nation.
