Public Discourse

Natural law does not demand capitalism, but we can deduce from natural law that some institutions that are key to market economies are normally just, while practices key to socialist arrangements are usually unjust.

Our language about sexuality is dominated by public health, with its talk of risk, “protection,” health, choice, and rights. In so doing we scoff at babies—the crowning glory of human creativity—and where they come from.

Aristotelian-Thomistic moral philosophy doesn’t imply that every economy should be capitalist.

Kermit Gosnell was not sentenced to life imprisonment for sloppiness, for insensitivity, for bad keepsakes, for a backed up drain, for fleas, or even for making women suffer. He was sentenced to life imprisonment for murdering three babies.

It is neither the impossibility of writing clear laws nor our inability to witness abortion that stops us from making it illegal. Instead it is the will to kill for convenience that drives some people to sustain the fiction that human life begins at birth.

Is the fundamental and essential point of forming the polity the polity itself, or is the polity primarily a means of protecting and achieving many other valuable ends?

Our arguments for limited government should recognize political community as an intrinsic good, not mistake it for a merely instrumental one.

The just way to settle the marriage debate is to delink from marriage any benefits that apply to any group of people who cohabit and comingle assets, while preserving marriage as a permanent and exclusive union of a man and a woman to provide the optimal setting for raising children.

Kermit Gosnell has been the equivalent of the American slave-dealer—someone who has done work rendered absolutely necessary by the twisted laws of his regime, but who has nevertheless been ignored or regarded with unease, and even repulsion, by his fellow citizens.

We don’t need a new resolution from Congress to address the wrongs of clinics like Kermit Gosnell’s—the Born-Alive Infants Protection Act already serves that purpose, and we should restore the civil penalties originally attached to it.

The Gosnell case shows us that a society’s laws teach, and if they teach a lesson of injustice they will corrupt its people over time. Indeed, contemporary abortion jurisprudence undermines the very notion of natural rights and constitutional government.

Conservatives need to stop shying away from principled, as opposed to merely utilitarian, defenses of economic freedom and its associated institutions.

The proposed design for the Eisenhower Memorial should be rejected for one that accords with our capital’s classical tradition of architecture and with the nature of monuments themselves—to make a simple, clear statement easily accessible to the public. Adapted from testimony given before the Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests and Public Lands of the House Committee on Natural Resources.

No-fault divorce hurts women, men, and children. So why is it still legal?

The Regent University 2013 Commencement Address, delivered May 4, 2013.