NEW YORK, DECEMBER 9

George W. Bush has a helluva problem. The Court said No to the lady's final appeal against the death sentence. The lady in question is youngish (38) and beautiful. She is a born-again Christian. In the course of her conversations with the prison chaplain, all of them conducted with bulletproof glass separating minister and postulant, a courtship developed, and lo! they have been married, though they have never shaken hands. The prosecutors who got her sentenced have asked for clemency. So also a pro-death-penalty former U.S. attorney. So also the sister of one of the murder victims. Pat Robertson, the Pope of the Christian Coalition, has publicly requested clemency, while reiterating his support for capital punishment.

The mechanics of commutation are complicated in a way that helps Gov. Bush. The Texas Board of Pardons and Paroles has got to acquiesce in a gubernatorial pardon. Ah yes, but the members of the Board are named by the governor. Which means that although George W. has a little camouflage working for him, in fact he is seen as the man who will decide whether Karla Faye Tucker dies at midnight on January 30.

The case has mostly to do, of course, with -- women. Should they be put to death?

There are other factors, contingently relevant. Karla Tucker began using marijuana at age 8, went to heroin at 10, was a groupie at 13, married at 17, and turned to prostitution to support her drug habit. Question: Did the drugs transfigure her true nature, adding up to a reason for clemency?

Karla Tucker took part in a crime of extraordinary brutality. There were two victims of her and her collaborator (a man, since dead of natural causes). A recitation of the details of the crime she committed makes the reader bloodthirsty for revenge.

But the case of course hangs on her sex. The last time Texas executed a woman was during the Civil War. The last time anybody executed a woman was 1984, in North Carolina, by lethal injection. Do the figures reflect the incidence of murders committed by women? Murders committed by women are dramatically fewer. Still, there are seven women on Texas's Death Row right now. That's just under two per cent of the total (400) on Texas's Death Row, but it means that if Gov. Bush is going to be influenced critically by the sex of Karla Tucker, he is going to walk into the identical bind at least six more times, assuming he is re-elected.

Now here are a couple of considerations that are politically fretful. The politically correct position is that men and women are equal in respect of everything that bears on civil, or indeed military, life. What this appears to tell us is that no latitudinarian consideration of any kind is to be given to Karla's being a woman. Agreed?

Well, not exactly . . . There is no way to get rid of the strain on psychological predispositions that twangs when anomalous situations confront us. The mother in South Carolina who sent her two sons to drown a couple of years ago committed a crime infinitely more horrifying, in public sensibility, than if the murderer had been a man. A woman soldier's being killed by an enemy bayonet in front-line combat is more dismaying than the identical thing's happening to a man -- don't try to reason with this; simply accept that it is so.

And then we touch upon an unmentionable: Karla Tucker is a born-again Christian! If her sentence were commuted, what would the American Civil Liberties Union say? Nothing. But what would the ACLUers be thinking? Right: a violation of the First Amendment. True separation of church and state means that no governor should incline toward clemency for anyone merely because that person has embraced religion. Amen.

We normal people are entitled to believe that this is hogwash, preferring to believe that clemency by a secular institution is understandable; and that someone who has convincingly embraced Christianity can be presumed to have gone at least part of the way in atoning for sins committed.

But of course there'd be a popular reaction against what might be thought of as a penitentiary scam. When Charles Colson embraced Christianity while in prison there were hoots of ridicule: hardly credible now, after a generation's exemplary life as head of The Prison Fellowship.

So, if you were George W.'s political advisor, what would you counsel? The same thing George W.'s religious advisor would urge on him?

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