EDITOR’S NOTE: “Window on The Week” acts as our weekly, quick-and-punchy, “between-the-issues” survey of some of the hot topics of the day. “Window on The Week” gives you a sense of what “The Week” — a popular feature that appears fortnightly in National Review — looks like.

#-# A New York court Thursday deferred to the legislature’s judgment that the state should recognize only the union of a man and a woman as a marriage. It even ventured to explain why a rational legislature could make that judgment. Georgia’s supreme court, meanwhile, let stand the voters’ determination that the definition of marriage should remain unchanged. So the people’s will rules in both states, until those courts change their minds or Justice Kennedy chooses to drag us toward enlightenment. We would prefer a constitutional amendment that removed the matter from their hands.

#-# The Senate will soon vote on whether the federal government should, for the first time, fund research that kills human embryos. The embryos would be those created by fertility clinics but not implanted. President Bush has said that he will veto any such bill, as he should. The bill breaches an important principle, and not to achieve any practical benefit but only to prepare the ground for further breaches of principle. If the bill became law, most of its advocates would instantly begin arguing that funding research on these embryos is inadequate. They will say that cloning embryos and using them for experiments is more promising. And they will be right on that narrow point, although wrong in thinking the moral price worth paying. They may also be wrong in thinking that cloning is the only way to make breakthroughs in stem-cell research. An expanding number of alternative approaches, at various stages of development, might yield those benefits without killing any human embryos at all. The president is for those alternative approaches, and we hope that he prevails.

#-# Hillary Clinton declared that she will support whoever wins the Democratic primary in Connecticut’s Senate race — a move that signals her desire to appeal to the left-wing base of the Democratic party in anticipation of a 2008 presidential run. Leftist Democrats oppose the reelection of Joe Lieberman, the three-term senator from Connecticut whose centrism has disappointed them on issues ranging from Social Security to the Iraq war. They have rallied instead to millionaire businessman Ned Lamont, a state politician who is threatening to unseat Lieberman in the primary. Lieberman has announced his intention to run as an independent if Lamont defeats him, which would put his Senate colleagues in an awkward position: Would they support Lieberman or back the hard Left that opposes him? By saying she would do the latter, Clinton is trying to ingratiate herself with a base she thinks she’ll need to win her party’s nomination in 2008.

#-# Israel must soon decide what its tactics are to be in Gaza. So far the government has been in favor of playing it long. This contributes nothing to the rescue of the young hostage, Cpl. Gilad Shalit. Delay is also allowing Palestinian gunmen to mobilize, to prepare ambushes and lay explosive devices. Hamas is devoting its energies to firing Qassam rockets of improved design, capable of reaching the Israeli town of Ashkelon. A suicide bomber was arrested before he could detonate himself, and Israeli intelligence claims to have received no fewer than 90 warnings of other terrorist plans. Israeli forces so far have reoccupied three of the Gaza settlements evacuated earlier, now a devastated wasteland from which Hamas fires its Qassams. To push ahead and do what has to be done to protect Israelis and free Shalit is obviously fraught, and furthermore reveals that the Palestinians took the uprooting of Israeli settlements from Gaza as an invitation to do their worst. (Has it ever been more obvious that what the Palestinians want is not a state of their own but to destroy Israel?) In the light of this dilemma, Israeli prime minister Ehud Olmert is going to have to revise his intention to pull settlements out of the West Bank, for that would leave a firing-ground for terrorists yet closer to Israeli population centers. Moreover, playing it long will raise tensions among all the parties composing Olmert’s governing coalition. Short and sharp has always stood Israel in good stead in the disasters the Palestinians persist in bringing down on themselves. #-# With a recount in Mexico’s presidential election nearly complete, conservative Felipe Calderón appears to have beaten left-wing populist Andrés Manuel López Obrador by the thinnest of margins. Calderón’s victory is much to Mexico’s advantage. He plans to pick up the economic reforms that outgoing president Vicente Fox promised and then abandoned, the most important of which are opening Mexico’s undercapitalized energy and electricity markets to foreign investment and reforming Mexico’s tax and labor laws to create a more favorable business climate. Failure to address these and similar economic problems has kept millions of Mexicans poorer than they should be, and López Obrador — with his distaste for free markets and his hostility toward trade and foreign investment — would only have made things worse. He has insinuated that the election was stolen from him (without providing any evidence for this claim) and called on his followers to gather this weekend in Mexico City. Mass protests could follow, possibly leading to violence. Unfortunately, López Obrador seems not to understand that the greatest service he could render his country would be to accept the will of a majority of its people.

#-# Vice President Dick Cheney has reportedly agreed to meet with Iranian dissident Amir Abbas Fakhravar. Fakhravar, age 30, was imprisoned by the Iranian regime for criticizing it in his book This Place Is Not a Ditch. Since escaping from the authorities in 2005, he has been a tireless leader of the student dissident movement. The mullahs eventually gave their police an order to shoot Fakhravar on sight, causing him to flee Iran for the United States. He now spends his time in Washington, trying to win American support for Iran’s democrats. The recent U.S. offer to negotiate with the Iranian regime over its nuclear program may have seemed a slackening in the Bush administration’s desire to see the mullahs removed from power. We hope this isn’t the case — and that Fakhravar’s meeting with Cheney will only intensify the administration’s resolve to hasten the mullahs’ demise.

#-# The U.N.’s newly created Human Rights Council is getting off to just the kind of disgraceful start that many had predicted. Convening its first session at a time when human-rights violations abound throughout the world — in the Middle East, in Darfur, in China, in Cuba, in North Korea — the HRC has chosen a curious target: Israel. The council bemoaned the “human rights situation in the occupied Arab Territories, including Palestine,” and voted to make criticism of Israel a permanent fixture on its agenda for future sessions. This is but the latest chapter in the sad story of the U.N. — an institution that was born of noble ideals but was corrupted by greed and the presence of tyrants in its midst. A precondition for forming a decent human-rights council is that its members protect human rights within their own borders. But given that the U.N. treats democracies and dictatorships as equals, decency is far from the norm.

#-# A panel of media luminaries gathered last Sunday on Meet the Press to defend the honor of mainstream journalism. That honor needs vigorous defending in the wake of several major newspapers’ decisions to publish classified information about a government program to monitor the finances of terrorists. As a tip-off to terrorists, the exposés have been a serious setback to national security. But you wouldn’t know it from the Meet the Press panel, whose members unanimously dismissed the quaint notion that the revelation might have been irresponsible. Their commentary was heavy on references to the rights of a free press but conspicuously light on the right of Americans to be protected from terrorism. A free press is not free from criticism, and the First Amendment does not require one to think that the New York Times should get to decide when government secrecy is merited in the interest of national security.

Read more from NRO’s “editorial page” this week: Read our editorial on North Korea here, on Daily Kos here.