Late last month here at Public Discourse, my friend Teresa Collett defended the National Right to Life Committee’s Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act. Professor Collett makes two arguments: first, that unborn children can feel pain and, second, that the Act is constitutional. I do not dispute the first point, but will argue here against the second: the Act is unconstitutional as it applies to pre-viability abortions.

Under controlling Supreme Court precedent, first announced in Roe v. Wade (1973) and reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), states may not prohibit abortion before viability. But the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act prohibits abortions one to two weeks before viability. According to current medical practice, an unborn child is normally considered “viable,” i.e., capable of sustained survival after birth with or without medical assistance, some time between the twenty-third and twenty-fourth weeks of pregnancy, which is measured from the first day of the woman’s last menstrual period (LMP). Subject to very narrow exceptions, the Pain Capable Unborn Child Protection Act prohibits abortions during and after the twentieth week post-fertilization, which is the same as twenty-two weeks after LMP. Collett admits that the Act, to the extent it aims to prohibit pre-viability abortions, would appear to run afoul of Roe and Casey. So, if the Act could not be upheld under current constitutional doctrine, what is the basis for believing the Court would not strike it down?

Justice Kennedy’s Opinions

Collett and other supporters of the Act pin their hopes on Justice Kennedy, who, with Chief Justice Roberts and Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito,, would make up the majority needed to uphold the Act. But it is remarkable that the Act’s supporters think they could attract Kennedy’s vote, given that he co-authored the joint opinion in Casey that  reaffirmed the viability holding of Roe. Collett believes that Kennedy would uphold the Act’s constitutionality by recognizing a state interest in the unborn child’s ability to experience pain; she points to Kennedy’s passionate dissent in the first partial-birth abortion ban case, Stenberg v. Carhart (2000) (Carhart I), and his majority opinion for the Court upholding the federal Partial-Birth Abortion Ban Act seven years later in Gonzales v. Carhart (2007) (Carhart II). Yet a closer look at Kennedy’s reasoning in these two cases suggests that it is unlikely he would vote to uphold a prohibition on pre-viability abortions, even if he recognized a state interest in recognizing the unborn child’s ability to feel pain.

Supporters of the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act may point out that none of the “pain” acts passed to date has been challenged by any abortion providers. This can be explained by several factors: the relatively few abortions performed during and after the twentieth week of pregnancy in several of these states (Alabama, Idaho, Indiana, Kansas and Oklahoma), the recency of their enactments (Arizona, which is based on a model developed by Americans United for Life, and Georgia), or the fact that in one state (Nebraska), the principal late-term abortion provider (Dr. Carhart) moved his practice to another state. Dr. Carhart and other physicians who perform late-term abortions may have made a prudential judgment not to challenge these laws because they fear that the Court, in the course of striking down the pre-viability applications of the law, would uphold the post-viability applications. Such a decision would provide a template for enacting meaningful post-viability prohibitions throughout the United States, replacing the weak and open-ended post-viability laws that are now on the books in most states. Regardless of the reason, however, the more states that enact the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, the more likely that some physician performing abortions will challenge the Act, and that runs the risk of a fourth reaffirmation of Roe.

Public Policy Concerns

In addition to the constitutional concerns raised by the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act, it may be asked whether it is good public policy to ban abortions on the basis of the unborn child’s capability of experiencing pain. The unstated (and certainly unintended) message that such a policy communicates is that it is acceptable to kill unborn children when they are not thought to be capable of experiencing pain (curiously, none of the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Acts adopted to date requires pain alleviation for the very few abortions that may be performed during and after the twentieth week following fertilization). This is not a message that the pro-life movement should send.

Everyone in the pro-life community would agree that the Supreme Court’s selection of viability as the stage of pregnancy when the state has the authority to prohibit abortions is arbitrary. But the selection of a slightly earlier stage of pregnancy—when the child is capable of experiencing pain—is no less arbitrary. Why would the pro-life community want to substitute one arbitrary standard for another? In my judgment, a Court that would be willing to abandon viability would be willing to overrule Roe and return the issue of abortion to the States. We are not at that point yet, but when we do get to that point, why would we want to ban only the one percent of abortions that are performed during and after the twentieth week of pregnancy, and leave unaffected and lawful the other ninety-nine percent of abortions performed earlier in pregnancy? This is a question supporters of the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act cannot answer.

The constitutional and public policy concerns posed by the Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act should give pro-life legislators, lawyers, lobbyists, and activists pause before they decide to support such legislation. And those concerns may help to explain why so many state legislatures have refused to enact this piece of legislation.

Paul Benjamin Linton is the former General Counsel of Americans United for Life and is Special Counsel for the Thomas More Society (Chicago, Illinois). The views expressed herein are his own.

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In 1996, Obama affirmed “I favor legalizing same-sex marriages, and would fight efforts to prohibit such marriages.” (In another document that year he promised his support for a gay marriage resolution in Illinois.) But only two years later, on another questionnaire, he was just “undecided.” Then in 2004, he stated, “I am not a supporter of gay marriage as it has been thrown about, primarily as a strategic issue.” In 2006 he wrote “it is my obligation … to remain open to the possibility that my unwillingness to support gay marriage is misguided.” In 2008 at Saddleback Church, he said “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman.” Again that same year to MTV, “I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. I am not in favor of gay marriage.”

Then, two years after his election, Obama’s public evolution began. In October 2010: “I have been to this point unwilling to sign on to same-sex marriage primarily because of my understandings of the traditional definitions of marriage. But I also think you’re right that attitudes evolve, including mine. … I think it’s fair to say that it’s something that I think a lot about.” In December 2010, he said, “My feelings about this are constantly evolving. I struggle with this.” In June 2011, White House Communications Director Dan Pfeiffer stated, “The president has never favored same-sex marriage. He is against it. The country is evolving on this, and he is evolving on it.” On October 3, 2011, Obama said, “I’m still working on it.” For the next few months it was often reported, and never rejected, that Obama’s opinion was still evolving. Then last week, the administration was lulled out of its slumber by Joe Biden’s bumbling remark on May 6 (which seemed to offer his support for gay marriage), but stuck to the old position that Obama’s opinion was still evolving. Jay Carney stated on May 7 that the President’s opinion “is what it was.” Then, two days later, Obama spoke: “I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.”

So, to summarize: Obama was for gay marriage, before he was undecided, before he was against it, before his feelings were evolving again, before he was both against it and evolving at the same time, before he was simply working on it, before his position was “what it was,” before he was for it again, 16 years after the saga began.

The reactions to his announcement have been almost as interesting as the narrative itself. Some liberal commentators have reacted tepidly, while others are doing their best to celebrate, painting Obama again as a paragon of political courage. But the only way to admire Obama for his transformation on marriage is to refuse to read the timeline. Supporters must prescind from the facts of the case and never look back. (Now I understand Obama’s new motto: Forward.) His two years of “evolution” are either alarmingly morally obtuse or a prolonged and repeated deception. There is no other reasonable interpretation. Even if some still vote for him, they will have to hold their nose on this issue.

The gay marriage argument is not a common policy position like tax rates or oil drilling. It is, as both sides agree, one of paramount importance and significance. It is also, as marriage revisionists always insist, obvious. The day after his big announcement (at George Clooney’s house) Obama made this exact point: “yesterday, we made some news,” Obama said, “but the truth is it was the logical extension of what America’s supposed to be. It grew directly out of this difference in visions. Are we a country that includes everybody and gives everybody a shot and treats everybody fairly?”

But on these terms, Obama’s “evolution” on the issue means that he was deeply conflicted and confused not about a matter of prudence, but about a “logical extension of what America is supposed to be.” For a long time, he apparently could not affirm what he has now described as an obvious application of the idea that we are “a country that includes everybody” and “treats everybody fairly.” If Obama believed all along that the gay marriage issue was one of basic equality and still could not make up his mind, he was strangely confused. If he now sees a direct line from the premise of fundamental fairness to gay marriage, what was holding him back before? The inability to recognize a direct and simple injustice while thinking about it “a lot” for multiple years is not an admirable trait in a president.

Such moral confusion would be distressing, if anyone believed it was genuine. Even the president’s defenders claim that really, Obama personally supported gay marriage all along. But this position would mean Obama is a liar. When Obama’s team claimed from October 2010 that his opinion was “evolving” and he was “still working on it,” they were saying something very different from “no comment.” They, and he, were making an important factual claim about Obama’s state of mind. They were claiming that Obama’s opinion was unsettled, that he had not decided, that he wasn’t sure. If Obama actually supported gay marriage at this time, he was repeatedly lying about his state of mind in those interviews and for that entire year.

Obama and his advocates face a similar dilemma in explaining the last few months. Perhaps Obama’s opinion honestly changed some time between October 2011 and May 2012. Jay Carney claimed the change happened “within the last several months.” But only two days before Obama’s announcement on May 9, Carney himself had stated that Obama’s opinion “is what it was.” Obama knew of the common perception that he had no definite (only an “evolving”) position on gay marriage: he and his surrogates had intentionally cultivated it. He chose not to correct it—it seems not even to his press secretary—even though at some point in this time frame he knew it was false. This is complicity in a serious deception.

We now have an opportunity to pin the president—and those who would vote for him—between the only reasonable interpretations his actions have left open, neither of which is pretty. Any explanation the current Obama can give to his “evolving” years will be baffling when measured against his current statements on his conversion. It will become more and more obvious, as this point is pressed, that he wasn’t being forthright then and probably isn’t now.

After all, what changed between the 2010 interviews (which cited Obama’s personal experience of loving gay couples, prompting him to doubt his original opposition to gay marriage) and the May 9 statement (which also cited personal experience with loving gay couples, but this time for his total conversion)? What exactly confused him about gay marriage in his “evolving” phase if he now claims it is obvious, a clear application of the idea that we are “a country that includes everybody and gives everybody a shot and treats everybody fairly”? How could this “logical” conclusion have taken him two years?

And finally, when did he know he personally supported gay marriage? Between the time he settled his opinion, and his announcement on May 9, why did he allow us to continue to believe a very significant proposition—that he was unsure about gay marriage and did not definitely support it—which he, at that point, knew was directly false? What other common perceptions about his personal opinions, for example his personal support of federalism, his personal belief in robust religious freedom, his personal respect for those who disagree with him, are also, in fact, false? How can we know what he really thinks, if he doesn’t tell us and allows his spokespeople to misrepresent it?

Trying to explain Obama’s marriage narrative just adds more evidence to the increasingly common impression that Obama has an interesting relationship with the truth. This relationship deserves scrutiny, even as we move on to the core of the marriage question.

Thomas Haine, a graduate of Princeton University and Washington University School of Law, is a lawyer.

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These contradictions are readily apparent to anyone who takes the time to read the full transcript of the president’s interview with ABC’s Robin Roberts, in which he made national news by announcing his new position and discussed the reasons for it at length.

To begin with, it is noteworthy that the reasons the president gives for coming to support same-sex marriage do not in fact fully support such a decision. He indicates that he held back from supporting same-sex marriage because he thought civil unions would sufficiently protect the rights of gay Americans. Later in the interview he justifies his embrace of same-sex marriage on the grounds that it will grant gays legal recognition for their committed relationships, allow them to take on the same rights and responsibilities as heterosexual married couples, and to have hospital visitation rights. All of these things, however, could be achieved without same-sex marriage. What remains, then, apparently, as the real justification for same-sex marriage is that its absence treats same-sex relationships “differently” in some symbolic sense. The president thus seems to embrace the position, now insisted upon by gay-rights activists, that civil unions that give the same legal rights as marriage are inadequate, and that homosexuals are somehow harmed when a state decides to reserve the ancient and honorable title of “marriage” for husbands and wives without pursuing any discrimination at all.

Based on his interview, one may accurately summarize the president’s position as follows: (a) he is personally in favor of same-sex marriage, but (b) it is a state issue, and states have a right to decide it for themselves, but (c) the federal government has no authority to defend the states’ right to define marriage as they see fit. The latter position would seem to be the consequence of his claimed opposition during the interview to the Defense of Marriage Act, which Congress passed and President Clinton signed in order to safeguard the ability of each state to define marriage as it thinks best, regardless of what other states may decide. The glaring tension, of course, is between propositions B and C. The president, to say the least, has not been known for insisting upon limits on the federal legislative power, so it is strange that he would find a limit here. According to the president, the federal government has the power to compel individuals to purchase health insurance, but not to restrain the courts from using one state’s marriage laws to rewrite every other state’s marriage laws. Nevertheless, the inconsistency is evident even without recurring to the president’s positions on other issues besides same-sex marriage. If marriage is primarily a state issue, as he insists, why cannot the federal government legislate to ensure that it remains so?

One discerns even more confusion or equivocation if one looks beyond the president’s position to some of the reasons he gives for it. In the interview, the president takes partial credit for prompting the Justice Department to refuse to defend the Defense of Marriage Act. The Act, he says, is a “violation” of the “equal protection clause.” Now, the Defense of Marriage Act is a federal law. The Equal Protection Clause is found in the Fourteenth Amendment, which limits the powers of the state governments and places no limits at all on the federal power. It is, in other words, impossible on any reading for DOMA to violate the “equal protection clause.” Accordingly, we must give the president the benefit of the doubt and assume that he intends to refer to the supposed “equal protection component” of the Due Process Clause in the Fifth Amendment, which does indeed limit the power of the federal government.

The reality of such a “component” is, of course, highly questionable, but it has been held to exist by the Supreme Court and is enthusiastically embraced by liberals such as the president. Nevertheless, his confusion on such details should embarrass the president and his partisans. A few weeks ago the president was ridiculed by conservative commentators for appearing to confuse the issues in Lochner v. New York, a case involving the power of states to regulate their economies, with the issues in the current health care lawsuit, which concerns the power of the federal government under the Commerce Clause. In truth, that was a rather cringe-inducing performance from a man who received a law degree from one of the most prestigious law schools in the nation and who then lectured in constitutional law at an only slightly less prestigious institution. Still, one might have offered a charitable defense of him on the grounds that his interests in constitutional law clearly lie in the realm of civil rights and civil liberties, rather than the powers and structures of government. The nature of those interests, however, leaves him utterly without excuse for his strange invocation of an “equal protection clause” that limits the federal government.

Be that as it may, the more important issue is the deeper confusion of principle suggested by the president’s remarks. Again, the president continues to affirm the right of states to decide the question of marriage as they wish. It is, he insists repeatedly, a state and not a federal issue. Therefore, his position seems to be that the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment permits states to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman, but that the equal protection component of the Fifth Amendment does not permit the federal government to do so. Moreover, as the Attorney General’s statement on the issue makes clear, the administration sees section 3 of DOMA, which defines marriage for federal purposes as a union between a man and a woman, as unconstitutionally “discriminatory” against homosexuals. President Obama’s current position, then, is as follows: It is unconstitutional discrimination against homosexuals when the federal government defines marriage as a union between a man and a woman but not when the states do so. It is difficult to see any coherent thread of constitutional reasoning in such a mishmash of opinions.

Finally, those who are praising the president for coming out in support of same-sex marriage should notice that some of the principles he states tend—at least if he means them seriously—to foreclose the only plausible path to national recognition of same-sex marriage: litigation in the federal courts, leading up to a Supreme Court decision announcing a right to same-sex marriage. In his interview, the president criticizes Mitt Romney’s support for a constitutional amendment to define marriage as a union between a man and a woman on the grounds that it makes a national issue out of what should properly be a state issue. Fair enough. But observe that the same could be said about a Supreme Court ruling that finds a constitutional right to same-sex marriage that binds all of the states. Is it really the president’s position that same-sex marriage should be achieved one state at a time, without recourse to litigation based on the federal constitution? Or does he support such efforts, in which case his position is that a constitutional amendment—enacted by the whole people—would improperly nationalize what should be a state issue, but this would not be the case for the “discovery” of a new constitutional right by the unelected justices of the Supreme Court?

Americans obviously disagree on the question of same-sex marriage. Some think it a wrongful redefinition of a fundamental social institution, while others think it a necessary step in the advance of civil rights. What they can clearly agree on, however, is that it is a very important question, one that deserves to be addressed in the most thoughtful and sincere manner by our highest elected official. Both opponents and supporters of same-sex marriage ought, therefore, to agree that the moral, constitutional, and political contortionism described above is disgraceful in a president of the United States.

Carson Holloway is a political scientist and the author of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity (Baylor University Press).

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Within days of making their criticisms public, the bishops were joined by a large contingent of Catholic academics in denouncing the Ryan budget as antithetical to Catholic social teaching.

To his credit, Chairman Ryan—a Catholic himself—didn’t simply ignore the criticism and move on. Instead, he chose to engage his critics in a conversation by offering, in a speech delivered at Georgetown University, a detailed defense of his budget based on his understanding of what Catholic social teaching calls him to do as an elected leader in the United States Congress.

And so, for the first time in recent memory, Catholics and the broader public have an actual and potentially useful debate under way addressing what the sound and widely shared principles of Catholic social teaching have to say about the federal budget, our out-of-control national deficit, and programs for the poor.

A Trip Down Memory Lane

It’s worth remembering that this is not the first time that the bishops have weighed in on such questions.

Republicans took control of Congress in the 1994 midterm election and quickly began working on a welfare reform measure. Some Catholic leaders, including many U.S. bishops, reacted with alarm at what was being contemplated, most especially the proposal to convert the main cash welfare assistance program into a fixed block grant to the states with time limits on eligibility. As the debate proceeded, the bishops became increasingly vocal in their public criticisms of the effort, and many Catholic academics joined them in denouncing the legislation as it moved through the legislative process. One Catholic leader predicted that passage of the Republican-inspired welfare reform plan would be “a national catastrophe.”

In the end, the legislation did clear Congress and was signed into law by Democratic President Bill Clinton.

Did catastrophe ensue, as predicted? No.

Far from being a failure, welfare reform was a remarkable success, in human and not just budgetary terms. It was instrumental in moving millions of American households off of cash welfare assistance and into paying jobs. In 2011, the average monthly cash welfare caseload was just under 2 million people, which is less than half of the normal monthly caseload in the 1980s and early 1990s. According to the Congressional Budget Office, low-income households experienced an 80 percent jump (in inflation adjusted dollars) in earnings from jobs between 1991, when states began experimenting with welfare reform, and 2005. Higher earnings for these households more than made up for the lost cash welfare assistance from the states.

Welfare reform still has its critics, but there’s no support from any point on the political spectrum for going back to the pre-1996 status quo that some Catholics were guarding so jealously in 1995 and 1996. All sides now seem to recognize how badly misguided those pre-1996 policies were.

Welfare and the Family

The mistake that some Catholic leaders made in 1995 and 1996 is the same mistake some seem to be making today, which is to equate more federal spending on programs for the poor with the morally superlative approach from the perspective of Catholic social teaching.

Such thinking is oddly negligent of a pillar of Catholic social thought, namely, that no institution is more vital to a healthy society than intact families, with married fathers and mothers raising their children together. Unfortunately, over the past half century, we have witnessed the near total destruction of the family in low-income neighborhoods all across America—neighborhoods in which federal anti-poverty support is ubiquitous. Today, out-of-wedlock births are the norm in these communities, not the exception, with more than 70 percent of African-American children born to unwed mothers.

The hard truth is that the implosion of the nuclear family has coincided precisely with the ramping up of federal low-income assistance programs since the 1960s. Why? Certainly the breakdown of the family is a complex social phenomenon, with many causes. But there’s little doubt that large-scale federal assistance to low-income households with single parents and dependent children has contributed to the destruction. In effect, the federal government has underwritten massive irresponsibility on the part of low-income fathers. They don’t need to act responsibly because the federal government has woven together a massive financial assistance system for single mothers with kids. The result is that multiple generations of low-income Americans have now grown up in neighborhoods almost entirely bereft of a responsible male presence.

This is not a success story to be defended at all costs, especially from the perspective of Catholic social teaching.

There also seems to be a considerable lack of understanding among Ryan’s Catholic critics of the actual state of federal spending commitments for these programs. Listening to them, one might think that the government has been on a long-term campaign to squeeze programs for the poor and reduce or even eliminate their funding. Nothing could be further from the truth. In fact, spending on these programs has exploded over the past three decades. Ron Haskins of the Brookings Institution recently testified that spending on the ten largest federal programs for the poor increased from $126 billion in 1980 to $626 billion in 2011. That’s a $500 billion jump in spending, in real terms (after controlling for inflation). The idea that the entirety of this massive run-up in outlays is off-limits and should not be subject to budgetary scrutiny defies common sense.

Nearly fifty years of Great Society-inspired programs to eliminate poverty—and trillions of federal dollars—have not made a dent in reducing poverty in the U.S. In fact, as of 2010, 46.2 million Americans continue to live below the official poverty line according to the U.S. Census Bureau, the highest level recorded in the 52 years of the Bureau’s existence. Among other things, Congressman Ryan is aiming to challenge this very inadequate status quo.

Ryan’s Clarifying Contributions

The jousting between some bishops and Congressman Ryan is good not only because it has ignited a fruitful discussion of pressing issues in the public square, but particularly because of what it contributes to three closely related matters of Catholic self-understanding in the twenty-first century, and of genuine commitment to the poor and to future generations of Americans.

First, Congressman Ryan’s efforts to advance his views on sound budget policy and to defend them on moral grounds has richly illustrated the role of the Catholic layman immersed in the “res socialis,” the social reality in which the Church is called to be a leaven for humanity and to which the patrimony of Catholic social teaching is directed. Congressman Ryan is not a theologian, nor does he claim to be one. He understands, however, that one need not possess a doctorate in theology to attempt to apply the principles of Catholic social teaching to the social reality in the political sphere. He further, and correctly, understands that it is precisely and most specifically the role of lay men and women like himself to explore and generate such applications in practice. He has understood and is attempting to live a key tenet of the Church’s understanding of the role of the lay faithful. As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, “It is not the role of the Pastors of the Church to intervene directly in the political structuring and organization of social life. This task is part of the vocation of the lay faithful, acting on their own initiative with their fellow citizens.”

Second, Ryan’s very public attempt to apply these principles to the federal budget have drawn helpful attention to a specific, and often misunderstood, dimension of moral thought, namely, the distinction between the level of principles, and the level of prudential application of those principles. Ryan’s proposed federal budget entitled “The Path to Prosperity: A Blueprint for American Renewal” contains page upon page of prudential judgments that, if implemented, would affect (not eliminate) funding for social programs such as food stamps, housing for the elderly, and people with disabilities. Unlike matters where absolute moral norms come to bear (such as abortion or euthanasia), the moral realm of prudential judgment (such as applications of the principles of Catholic social teaching) is open to differing approaches and even opposing interpretations. Some Catholic bishops have opined on specific aspects of Ryan’s proposed budget. Their views should be given serious and respectful consideration by the Catholic faithful and indeed by the broader American public; their views on these matters should not, however, be given the same weight as when they formally and authoritatively teach on matters of faith and morals or render moral judgments in specific matters under their jurisdiction.

Finally, and most importantly, Ryan has drawn much overdue attention to the fact that in many areas of social policy, the Church must rethink the most adequate applications of Catholic social teaching in frank and honest dialogue with contemporary social reality, a dialogue whose point of departure is the honest recognition—to quote Ryan’s “Plan for Prosperity”—that “a system designed for mid-20th century demographics and economics is ill equipped to deal with the unique pressures of the 21st century.” It is more than evident that, as Ryan deftly asserted in his Georgetown speech, far too many Catholic thinkers have identified “preferential option for the poor” with a reflexive assumption that more governmental spending is better than less. But surely the facts as we now know them should put to rest such simplistic thinking. It is manifestly not in service of the “common good” to ignore and allow to fester the looming fiscal crisis now facing the country. The American population is aging rapidly, and costs for the nation’s main entitlement programs are set to explode in the next two decades. Mounting deficits and debt are pushing the nation toward a very predictable and devastating fiscal crisis of some sort (though it is impossible to know when or how exactly it will unfold). Given these facts, one would think that Catholic leaders would be reminding the nation’s elected officials of their moral obligation to take action to avert a serious economic calamity that everyone can see coming—a calamity that would almost certainly hurt the poor more than anyone else. Indeed, if nothing is done and a crisis does in fact occur, today’s leaders will almost certainly be heavily criticized for their failure to act when they had the opportunity to do so—including by some who today are defending the programmatic status quo.

Conclusion

Catholic social teaching is a treasure—a genuine roadmap for building a just society. It should be treated with utmost seriousness by the faithful. But it doesn’t displace the need for sound judgment by lay leaders and doesn’t provide cookie-cutter solutions to society’s problems. With the exception of the protection of human life and the sanctity of marriage, there is plenty of room within the Church’s social teaching for different points of view.

Indeed, there may well be sound arguments against the Ryan budget. Those arguments should be made based on reason and fact, and forcefully advanced in public forums. That’s how public policy debates should be conducted. What we should not passively tolerate, however, is the outright and doctrinaire dismissal of the Ryan plan on the grounds that it contradicts many long-held and arguably specious convictions of some Catholic thinkers.

Rev. Thomas V. Berg is professor of moral theology at St. Joseph’s Seminary in Yonkers, New York. James C. Capretta is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and a visiting fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.

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Once elected, the president acted in every possible way like a supporter of same-sex marriage—except that he failed to say he supported same-sex marriage. He pushed for, and got, a congressional repeal of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. He called for repeal of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act, and when the votes weren’t there, he cravenly abandoned the legal defense of DOMA in ongoing federal litigation. He announced his opposition to every effort to defend marriage constitutionally at the state level, beginning with California’s Prop 8 when he was a presidential candidate. On the current White House webpage for “civil rights,” seven of the ten accomplishments listed are items on the agenda of the “gay rights” left.

There really could be little doubt, in short, that the president was a not-so-secret supporter of same-sex marriage. And it bears noting that in all the words he has spoken or written on this issue in his national career (going all the way back to his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope), Obama has never said “I oppose same-sex marriage.” There has always been rhetorical space available to him to affirm (or reaffirm) his support for it, without being accused of self-contradiction, and he has always associated his resistance with his Christian “beliefs,” while at the same time hinting that those beliefs have no rational foundation. This way of talking around the subject was a strategy for timing his completed evolution for maximum political effect. Why then did he choose now as the time to say so?

Recent events in the presidential campaign may have been taken by the president as a sign that the time is right. For in the last month the same-sex marriage issue surfaced on the Republican side of the political campaign in a very interesting way, which showed some rather muddy thinking among some conservatives—always in trouble when they adopt the rhetorical frame offered by liberals—about the relation between the marriage issue and political principle.

The story begins with the Romney campaign’s appointment on April 19 of Richard Grenell as foreign policy spokesman. Grenell had served the Bush administration for years at the United Nations, and, as some reports (but not all) noted upon his appointment to Romney’s campaign, he is also “openly gay.” Most of the political world took little notice of it, an exception being Bryan Fischer of the American Family Association, who rightly highlighted the fact that “Grenell has for years been an outspoken advocate for homosexual marriage,” but, I think, wrongly bundled this with concerns about Grenell’s “private sexual conduct.”

I became part of this story myself with two blog posts at National Review Online’s The Corner on April 27. When all I knew was that Grenell was homosexual, I took no interest, and I knew nothing of Fischer’s comments until long after publishing my own. But then I read an April 24 blog post by Jonathan Capehart at the Washington Post, describing a drubbing he endured from Grenell over Twitter for not confronting the president personally about the marriage issue at a White House dinner in March. Grenell then published a piece in the Washington Blade, ramping up his criticism of Capehart and other Democrats for supporting a president who “isn’t performing” on “gay equality.” He argued that “if gays are going to win support for their political issues, they better start playing smarter politics,” and that meant they must stop being “loyal to their party at the expense of the movement.” Plainly, for Grenell (a self-described “activist”), the cause of same-sex marriage had become the most vital issue of the day. The personal seems to be the all-consuming political: as a gay man who believed in “gay equality,” he believed that “smarter politics” required everyone in “the movement” to sacrifice party loyalty to the cause.

I thought there were three reasons to be alarmed at Grenell’s appointment to the Romney campaign. First, the appointment of a passionate same-sex marriage advocate might cause conservatives to falter in their support of Mitt Romney. Second, it seemed inappropriate for such an advocate to have an influential position in the campaign, even on foreign policy, given the growing relevance of the “gay rights” agenda in that field. And finally, it was doubtful that a man who declared “the movement” for same-sex marriage to be of a higher value than party loyalty was a good choice for the obviously partisan business of a presidential campaign.

These were the concerns that prompted my two Corner posts on April 27. As I said in the first, “Grenell’s being openly gay is, in itself, of no consequence for his service in the Romney campaign,” and I added that support for same-sex marriage would not necessarily be disqualifying in all personnel choices. But if the Romney campaign were to be, and appear to be, consistently devoted to the principles the candidate has enunciated—committed to the preservation of marriage as a conjugal union of a man and a woman, and pursuing foreign and domestic policies consistent with that commitment—then, I argued, it had made a mistake with this appointment of a man whose own public commitments were fundamentally opposed to those principles.

On May 1, Richard Grenell announced his departure from the Romney campaign. This prompted a storm of commentary that Grenell had been “hounded” out of his new job by “anti-gay” conservatives—a theme Grenell planted in the press himself when he decried a “hyper-partisan discussion of personal issues”—and I was sometimes named as one of those doing the hounding. But it turned out, as the New York Times reported on May 3, that before I published a word about Grenell, the Romney campaign seemed to know it had a problem. The rapid implosion of his hiring suggested that the campaign did an inadequate vetting of him in the first place, and the realization set in that a mistake had been made.

It was no surprise that the left would chalk up the collapse of Grenell’s appointment to “anti-gay” animosity on the right. Representatives of the Log Cabin Republicans and GOProud, two “gay-rights” interest groups dedicated to removing the preservation-of-marriage plank from the Republican Party platform, unsurprisingly joined the chorus. It has become an article of faith in such circles that if your “orientation” is homosexual, then of course you must be an advocate for same-sex marriage—and if you are a loud, passionate advocate for “the cause,” that only shows your authenticity. The “gay rights” left enforces a party line today rather like the one that prevails in the contemporary “civil rights” left, where opposition to affirmative action makes a black man an Uncle Tom. Any homosexual men or women in America who dissent from the proposition that marriage can be rationally “extended” to same-sex couples should take heed that such dissent will not be tolerated. “Gay rights” groups were overjoyed at Grenell’s hiring by Romney not because he is openly gay, but because he was vocally one of them on what he himself called “their political issues.” They were dismayed at his firing for exactly the same reason, but found it useful to retail the canard that Grenell was the victim of “anti-gay” conservatives. For if all homosexuals are expected to toe the party line, then by the same token the rest of the world must be made to understand that opposition to same-sex marriage is exactly the same as opposition to homosexuals as a class of human beings.

All this, again, was unsurprising. What was surprising and dismaying was to see some conservative commentators take variations on this line themselves. Some did not want to credit the plain evidence that Grenell stood passionately opposed to the position of Mitt Romney on marriage, with a published record that made his loyalty potentially a contingent matter, and needlessly obscured the public message the campaign needs to be sending. Some thought the marriage issue wholly irrelevant to the area of foreign policy. But this is both ill-informed and not a little bizarre. Virtually every one of these same commentators would reject a campaign spokesman on tax policy who was an apologist for Hamas, or a spokesman on environmental policy who had raised funds for Planned Parenthood to build new abortion clinics. And it is not merely a matter of “optics,” in the current political jargon; it’s a matter of principled consistency on a moral issue that matters to many voters.

The campaign to preserve marriage between one man and one woman—which just won its thirty-first victory in amending a state constitution, with 61 percent of a high-turnout vote in North Carolina—is a matter of high importance to scores of millions of American voters. They are evangelical Christians, Catholics, Mormons, Jews, Muslims, and people of other religious faiths or of none, all interested in preserving marriage and the truth about marriage. They see in Mitt Romney, whatever he has said in the past, a candidate who has now firmly committed himself on their side of this issue. They can also see clearly now that President Obama has committed himself to the other side.

The Grenell appointment uselessly risked the gains Romney has made with a vital constituency, with no potential upside, even before the president’s clarification revealed the gulf between the candidates. And conservative commentators did no good to Romney’s prospects with persuadable middle-of-the road voters, and to conservatism more generally, by accepting the rhetorical frame that these scores of millions of voters who oppose same-sex marriage can be tarred with the epithet “anti-gay.” When you adopt the language of your political adversaries, you begin to talk yourself into your own defeat.

So why did Obama make such an announcement now? The Grenell affair assured him, I think, that a theme of “anti-gay bigotry” can be usefully deployed against social conservatives generally, and against Romney in particular. The May 6 remarks of Vice President Biden on NBC’s “Meet the Press” turned out to be a trial balloon. They prompted renewed calls from supporters—including those in the press corps—that the president come clean, and level with the American people. Wealthy supporters of same-sex marriage talked openly of withholding large donations they would be ready to make if the president obliged them. And finally, the president must be feeling that he needs this issue—that he needs not to be talking from now until November about his dismal record on the economy, the federal debt, and the takeover of the nation’s health care system. It seems he thinks this will be a close election, and he needs the left fired up.

In his ABC interview, Obama said, “I’ve just concluded that for me personally it is important for me to go ahead and affirm that I think same-sex couples should be able to get married.” He went on to stress (in ABC’s words) that this was only his “personal position, and that he still supports the concept of states deciding the issue on their own.” Of course, on issues of great public moment, a president does not have merely “personal” views. This is now, more clearly than ever, a huge campaign issue for 2012. The president will now wage an all-out campaign of calling Mitt Romney an “anti-gay” bigot for opposing what he himself would not embrace until five minutes ago. But given the track record of victories for the defense of marriage in thirty-one states, and the still-tentative declaration of the president, it is clear that he knows he is running a risky strategy. What he knows, we should know too. And we should know that if we keep our heads, and don’t buy into the “anti-gay” framing of the liberal establishment, we are strong enough to win the fight for the truth about marriage.

Matthew J. Franck is director of the William E. and Carol G. Simon Center on Religion and the Constitution at the Witherspoon Institute.

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The connection between assisted suicide and the civil rights struggles of previous centuries is foundational. To claim that some human lives are not worth living is to deny the intrinsic and equal worth of every human being. It is, in other words, to deny the principle from which we derived our prohibitions against slavery and racial segregation. Pro-life scholars and activists would do well to make this clear, and may be assisted in their efforts by consulting the arguments of Emily Jackson and John Keown in their new book, Debating Euthanasia. Jackson, a law professor at the London School of Economics, marshals the arguments for legalization of physician-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia, and Keown, the Rose F. Kennedy Chair in Christian Ethics at Georgetown University, defends their continued prohibition by law on both practical and principled grounds.

Central to Keown’s case is concern for the equal and intrinsic worth of all human beings. The “cardinal ethical principle” of the inviolability of human life prohibits the intentional killing of an innocent person, and it is precisely this principle that grounds the “equal and inalienable rights” that we enjoy “in virtue of our common membership in the human family.” The authors of the Declaration of Independence thought this principle self-evident. Keown points out that the principle also finds expression in the Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the European Convention on Human Rights, and a 1994 report of the House of Lords Select Committee on Medical Ethics. Neither anachronistic nor novel, this idea explains the law’s insistence on protecting the lives of all, irrespective of age, stage of development, or condition of dependency. No one is better off dead, Keown maintains, “even if some patients lose sight of their worth.”

It is precisely the failure to grasp the implications of intrinsic human worth that plagues arguments for decriminalization of physician-assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia, including Jackson’s. Jackson quite candidly rejects the inviolability of human life. “There is nothing independently valuable about being alive, other than that it enables me to live a life.” But to claim, as Jackson does, that the value of life is merely instrumental is to reject the immutably inherent and equal value of all human persons. On Jackson’s terms, any particular human life is more or less valuable, and thus variably worthy of legal protection, according to some standard of instrumental usefulness. But this raises the questions of how the value will be measured and whom the state will authorize to make the valuation.

Jackson recognizes this problem but seems unable to resolve it coherently. She insists that we should not accept the judgment of the lovesick teenager that her life has no worth, and yet we should accept the same judgment from the elderly or terminally ill person for whom “life has become an intolerable burden.” Jackson discounts outright the lives of persons in persistent vegetative states because of the “important difference between simply being alive, and having a life which is worth living.” But here, again, we are no closer to understanding what a worthy life consists of.

Jackson tries to resist the full implications of her own argument. She protests that “accepting that someone’s life has ceased to benefit them is not the same as saying they have no worth.” Family and friends of a suffering patient, she claims, can assent to the request for death without assenting to the judgment that the patient’s life is worthless. Presumably, the operative principle here is one of deference to the personal autonomy of the patient, but Jackson does not explain why deference is necessary. Given the high correlation between terminal illness and depression, deference would seem especially inappropriate in such cases.

Jackson’s conception of human worth becomes clearer in light of her analogy to animal euthanasia. “When it comes to animals,” Jackson observes, “most people accept that euthanasia is not only justifiable, but also often the right thing to do.” For at least some humans, she argues, the experience of dying is no different than a cat’s. Even allowing for differences between humans and cats, such as the practice of making wills and other provisions for resolution at the end of life, these differences do not “justify forcing someone to suffer intolerably.”

That Jackson considers this argument persuasive indicates that she has not fully confronted the claim that human beings have intrinsic and equal worth. Keown is quite clear that we should not force anyone to suffer, nor should we preserve life at all costs. “That would be ‘vitalism,’” Keown explains, “and morally indefensible.” The right to life is a “right not to be intentionally killed” (Keown’s italics). Animals enjoy no such right precisely because they are merely animals, and not humans. Acting with a purpose to bring about the death of a fellow human being is fundamentally unlike acting with a purpose to bring about the death of an animal.

Jackson fails to appreciate her interlocutor’s arguments in other respects, as well. An important corollary of the inviolability of human life is the principle of double effect, according to which it is sometimes permissible knowingly to bring about harms (as foreseen side-effects) that may never be intended directly. Jackson attacks this principle with a hypothetical:

If I visit my doctor complaining of mild stomach cramps, it would not be acceptable for him to give me a life-threatening injection of diamorphine, and he could not escape responsibility for my death by pointing to the doctrine of double effect. My doctor could not claim that his intention was merely to relieve my pain, and that my death was a foreseen but unintended side-effect.

It apparently does not occur to Jackson that the doctor’s disproportionate response to the pain would in fact supply a significant, perhaps conclusive, reason to infer that his intentions were not pure. She ignores what Keown expressly states, namely, that one of the conditions of the operation of double effect requires a “proportionate reason for allowing the bad effect to occur.” Far from excusing the disproportionate conduct that Jackson rightly condemns, the principle of double effect would rule out the doctor’s actions.

By contrast, Keown takes Jackson’s arguments seriously. (In one instance, he makes the effort to strengthen one of her arguments before refuting it.) Indeed, the book’s most glaring weakness is its asymmetry. The rules of engagement required each author to submit his and her contribution blindly, unable to predict precisely what arguments the other would deploy. Nevertheless, Keown and others have developed many of the pro-life arguments over a period of many years. If Jackson wanted to understand the arguments she was trying to refute, then she could have found robust statements of those arguments with little effort.

Despite this asymmetry, Jackson’s contribution to the book is well worth reading. She is often refreshingly candid, as when she acknowledges the limits of personal autonomy. She remarks that the choice of suicidal patients to end their lives requires the cooperation of others: “they are crucially dependent upon other people, namely healthcare professionals, to comply with their wishes.”

Jackson’s contribution also contains important reminders for opponents of decriminalization. Legalization proponents, like many citizens who are open to legalization, are motivated not by bias against the disabled but rather by compassion and respect. “It seems cruel to force someone to endure suffering they find intolerable,” Jackson’s argument goes, “and condescending to disbelieve them when they claim to be suffering so much.” Such advocates, therefore, tend to be unpersuaded by the common pro-life argument drawing analogies between contemporary legalization and Nazi euthanasia practices. As Jackson notes, the Nazis operated on social Darwinist theories of racial hygiene; their “motivation was never a compassionate response to individual suffering.”

Similarly, Jackson offers some insight into the relative inefficacy of “slippery slope” arguments. Accepting assisted suicide and voluntary euthanasia does not, in her view, obviously set one on a course toward “the involuntary extermination of disabled people,” and therefore, a blanket prohibition seems to her “a peculiarly blunt approach to regulation.” Why not give carefully regulated legalization a try?

There are, of course, many good reasons not to try. Keown discusses the failures of regulatory efforts in Oregon and the Netherlands. Despite the prevalence of depression among those who request assisted suicide and euthanasia, fewer than 10 percent are referred for psychiatric evaluation. Oregon’s meager reporting requirements prevent any comprehensive study of abuse, but anecdotal evidence suggests that coercion by family members is sometimes a factor in the decision to commit suicide. And the speed with which the Dutch have moved from voluntary euthanasia of adults to non-voluntary euthanasia of infants should trouble even those who are unmoved by slippery-slope arguments. But for legalization proponents, these failures are insufficient reasons not to proceed with legalization, albeit with more rigorous regulations. Jackson herself criticizes the Swiss regulatory scheme for its lack of safeguards. For example, she favors rules that would require “thorough investigation of the person’s circumstances.” One has the impression that, no matter how many of these safeguards might fail in practice, Jackson will always be prepared to propose more, until reasonable concerns about abuse are satisfied.

Most importantly, Jackson has no answer to the moral argument against physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. And herein lies a lesson for pro-life advocates as they fight legalization efforts around the country this year: they should resist the temptation to avoid making moral arguments. They are our strongest resources. To skirt the fundamental moral question would be both unnecessary and, it seems, a strategic blunder. Pro-life activists should not give offense or recall images of swastikas. It is enough to point out that a nation committed to racial equality should, for the same reason, be committed to the intrinsic worth of the sick and the disabled.

Adam MacLeod is an associate professor at Faulkner University’s Thomas Goode Jones School of Law.

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Weaver understood that to uncouple a word from the universal reality it is meant to denote is to degrade words themselves: “If words no longer correspond to objective realities, it seems no great wrong to take liberties with words.” Let us take for example the word “dog.” If it names a merely arbitrary category, then it makes no moral claim upon us; there is no way a dog “ought” to be treated, according to its doggy nature, since there is no such nature to bind us. Yet most people would rebel against such a conclusion, because most people, or most Americans anyway, would recognize that a creature meant to run with a pack ought at least to run with his human masters, and a creature so sagacious in his sense of smell ought to have plenty of opportunities to use it, out in the world of grass and trees and rocks and, best of all, other dogs. So true is this, that we have laws against the “inhumane” treatment of dogs, a remarkable conundrum. For we assume that it is the humane thing, the humanly appropriate thing, to recognize the caninely appropriate thing, and treat man’s best friend as he deserves. There are no calls to keep the government (by which is meant, here, the force of the moral intuitions of one’s fellow men) out of the doghouse.

But we will not do to dogs what we will do to mankind—to ourselves and to one another. Naturally, we will dress up our betrayals in fancy words. We will say, with the Supreme Court of the United States, in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, that the capacity, nay the duty, of determining for oneself the meaning of the entire universe is inseparable from freedom; and this by way of legitimizing the snuffing out of that small part of the universe whose existence is owing to one’s voluntary and irresponsible action. What appears here as a Promethean omnipotence is in fact a declaration of complete unmeaning. We are left with what Weaver calls the “abysm,” the fall into a dark nothingness. For we feel, somehow, that we human beings are meant for something, not individually and arbitrarily, but together and truly, and yet we lack the language and even the political sanction to think along those lines. We cannot ask, “Does this new tool actually assist us in attaining the good toward which we are drawn by our nature?” We have denied the nature; and so the tools come, and we submit to them.

A sad and absurd example of the abysm of unmeaning has recently come to my attention. A seven-year-old boy, whose mother has encouraged him in the fantasy that he is “transgendered,” has attempted to join the Girl Scouts—and the Girl Scouts have allowed it. In a saner age, the mother would be subjected to severe reproach. Again, we would not do to a dog what we allow to be done to a boy. The child is a boy—that is a plain fact—and boys have boyish natures, which imply boyish ends toward which they strive: boys are to become men. These boyish natures are made manifest in a million ways; not all boys will play baseball, but all boys do need affirmation in their masculine nature, usually by their fathers and brothers and playfellows. But because we refuse to acknowledge any human ends that apply to us all universally, especially in matters of sex, we allow the word “boy” to be emptied of significance. Now, it appears, a “boy” or a “girl” is what some arbitrary determiner says it will be, and the rest of us must wink and play along in fantasyland.

Here someone may object, “The self is the determiner! Our new policy grants freedom to everyone.” The reverse is true. It robs us of freedom; but to see that, we need again to acknowledge nature and ends. If I place a dog in the middle of a prairie and drive away, I have set him “free” in the trivial sense that now he can go where he pleases; but he is alone and likely to die without the support of the pack, human or canine. That is, if his life is a race to attain a dog’s fulfillment, I have just cut his hamstrings. If I say, “You may call yourself a girl even if you are genetically male,” I have not only hamstrung the child in my care. I have, by one apparently libertarian diktat, robbed all other boys and girls of their right to claim from us what will assist them in their development as boys or girls, for I no longer really recognize such creatures as boys and girls at all. They are mere arbitrary groupings.

Such a position is not only insane; it is also impious, and therefore fatal to just and limited government. Piety, writes Weaver, “admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego,” while “it is the nature of unlimited egotism to deny any source of right ordering outside itself.” Impiety is a state of belligerence against what is.

Among the ancient Romans, piety was bound up with a strong sense of the limits imposed by things greater and more reverend than oneself. So the Romans worshiped Terminus, the god of boundary stones. Thus it was that the pious duty they owed to the state was one with the duty they owed to their families—to their fathers, living and deceased; to the gods of hearth and home. The state could not encroach upon the hearth, any more than a man can invent his own ancestry; it was considered an absurdity, by the very nature of things.

But when that piety is denied, we deny the boundary stones along with it. There is no hearth, there is no home. There is no male, no female, no family, not even a common human nature. In appearing to hand to the individual a right to construe the universe, we have swept away the grounds upon which, as individuals, as families, and as free associations of human beings, we can claim priority to the State. For if each of us is to be an egotist, then the State will be one, too—the largest and most dangerous egotist of all.

Thus it is absurd to cry out, “The State should keep out of our bedrooms,” when what one really means is, “There is no recognizable order to human sexual relations, and so I, in my role as Prometheus, should be able to marry as many people as I want, of such sexes as I shall choose, without the slightest interference from my neighbors.” That is because, as soon as we say so, we have granted to the Great Egotist the power not simply to enter our bedrooms, which of course it will do anyway, but to enter and corrupt the very language we speak. The State may as well then write our dictionaries for us. “This,” sayeth the State, “will constitute a family,” and “this,” sayeth the State, “will be a male,” or a female, or whatnot.

And that will reverse the order of Adam naming the animals. “Adam,” says the spanking new deity, “you shall call this that, and that this. Don’t grouch, either. It’s not that they or you mean anything anyway.”

Anthony Esolen is Professor of English at Providence College in Providence, Rhode Island, and the author of Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child and Ironies of Faith. He has translated Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata and Dante’s The Divine Comedy.

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The quest for same-sex marriage begins here. In a world where seeking marriage is seeking a community-endorsed way to have sex and bear children, the idea of same-sex marriage is like the idea of a square circle. The very idea of same-sex marriage is conceivable only in a world that is using the term “marriage” in a completely different way, to refer to something of a completely different nature.

Allow me, then, to make a case for my assertion about sex, children, and marriage through a “thought experiment”—a scenario in which human beings have no word for, no concept of, marriage.

Imagine a colony of young men who have no memory of ever having lived anywhere else. Properly speaking, the men do not even know that they are men, but only that they are different from all the other creatures they encounter. They hunt and gather. They are naturally social beings who care about each other, form friendships, try to please one another, generally live according to the rules, and have formulated various rites of initiation, celebration, and grief concerning the important moments of community life. These social beings find that certain things they do for one another cause pleasure, both physical and emotional. They tend to each other, rub each other’s feet when they are sore from the long hunt, hold and caress each other in times of sorrow and illness.

One day, two of the men announce that they are very special friends, because they really like each other’s company, help each other to be better, and they give each other especially good foot rubs. The members of the community are, of course, glad for them: friendships are important, and they all know the pleasures of a good foot rub between friends. These two, however, want to go further: they want to move off to a separate hut together, so they can experience their foot rubbing in private. They also wish to pool together their worldly resources, and to promise before the entire community that they will rub only each other’s feet until they die.

Though jaws have dropped, the pair is not finished. They want the community to validate the joining of their lives in this way, support them in their choice, and help them to remain faithful in their foot-rubbing exclusivity when they are tempted to do otherwise. They want a special ceremony to initiate their combined lives. But the community refuses: What is so important about close friendship and foot rubs that we need to form a special rite to acknowledge it? Do you really want us to force you to remain friends when things go sour? There is nothing in either friendship or the mutual giving of pleasure that requires the community’s input.

Now, the idea that any pair of these men would choose publicly endorsed exclusivity for enjoying the pleasures and closeness of foot rubbing sounds unlikely, even absurd. Nothing is enhanced for the pair of men by such exclusive activities, and there is nothing in it for the community to be bothered with.

Even had these men instead discovered (what we call) sexual pleasure, which is obviously more intense and more conducive to bonding than the best of foot rubs—and at times surprisingly urgent—the logic would remain the same: what they have discovered is an act which is very pleasurable, and which may help to strengthen friendships and express affection. But the same goes for back-scratching, being on a team, or working together on a project. There is nothing in this kind of act that would recommend exclusive relationships, let alone special community recognition.

Eventually, some bright fellow with philosophical leanings in the colony asks the question: What are these feelings for? Why the urgency? The leaders who first brought the men to the colony reply: “The answer lies over the mountains.” Those who want to find an answer begin their journey.

Over these mountains, there is a colony of young women. For their part, they know only women, though they do not know they are women, properly speaking. They gather and cultivate. Since they, like the men, are naturally social beings who care about each other, they also form friendships and have important religious and community ceremonies to mark important moments. They too find similar things useful, pleasurable, and comforting—including what we might call “sexual” pleasuring. So they do those things that are useful, comforting, affirming, caring, and pleasant.

Like the men—yet quite unlike the men—the women have parts of their bodies about which they cannot quite make sense. Why does our body do this? What is this longing all about? They are told: “Wait. The answer will come from over the mountains.”

Imagine the surprise when these two groups finally meet. Here are beings who, unlike any other creature on earth, but just like us, talk to one another, are intelligent, walk upright, gather things, build things, grow things, live in deliberate communities with rules. Yet they are so unlike us; their bodies are quite different in several obvious ways.

You can imagine that it would not take long for some enterprising couple to find the answer to their urges and longings in each other. Best of all, some of those peculiar organs fit together in an intensely pleasurable way. This does not mean that everyone in these two communities takes to this new kind of man-woman pleasure. Some are quite comfortable sticking with what they have always done; some men find the women, and some women find the men, too strange, too foreign to share this kind of intimacy. And so they continue in their old habits.

Despite the introduction of this new twist in giving pleasure and becoming closer as friends, the community has been presented with nothing qualitatively different from the status quo ante. They have discovered a new way of bringing pleasure. But ultimately, they can see no real difference between what they used to do in their isolated colonies, and what they now do in the mixed one. Neither the individual men and women, nor the community, is presented with any reason to treat these couplings as anything more than pleasure-inducing, friendship-building activities, like foot rubs or back scratches, playing games or working together.

But when, nine months later, the first baby is born, and the first mother nurses it, and the first father seeks to protect them both and care for them, the entire community would have a moment of recognition: So this is what these urges and these bodies are for!

Under these conditions, it would make sense for the whole community, and its individual members, to recognize this momentous event for what it is. From these bodies, male and female, through this act, a child is brought forth into the world—a child who needs to be protected, nourished, and taught. The community now has a reason to say several things: First, this act that we men and women have been doing together is an act that has extraordinary consequences for the whole community—consequences that our acts alone or in the previously isolated communities did not have. Second, it has extraordinary implications for the couple who have received both a gift for which they yearn to care, and a grave responsibility. Third, it has serious implications for the child, who finds herself born into the world, in need of care, education, and the security of knowing who she is, where she comes from, and where she is going. Fourth, now that they see what their bodies and urges are for, the members of the community understand that their earlier acts were in fact an improper use of their bodies and a misplacement of their longings (though none of this was their fault, given the incompleteness of their information).

Thus, it is in the interest of the community, the couple, and most especially the child that human sexuality be protected and nurtured such that it will be used aright. For this reason, entering into a sexual relationship with a member of the opposite sex is a matter of great importance for the community and the couple, worthy of a rite of recognition and acceptance, of being made secure in and by the community, and of rules governing their sexual practice. It is only here that the notion of marriage can be brought forth—not from the desires of the couple for recognition, not from feelings of affection and closeness, but in the face of the reality of human sexuality.

Of course, this story is a thought experiment, not history. It illustrates that it is within the realm of human experience for human beings to form bonds of friendship that are centered in, and enhanced by, mutually pleasant acts. But it also illustrates the unreasonableness of the notion of marriage in a world where a pleasurable act cannot, by its nature, lead to children; in other words, it shows the unreasonableness of marriage being merely about the desires, pleasures, and affirmation of adults—the contemporary conception of marriage.

A contemporary characterization of marriage looks like this: (1) two people (2) with great affection for each other (including, generally, desires for deeper knowledge, interpersonal closeness, and mutual care) (3) also want to have sex together, so (4) they consent to combine their lives materially and economically, and (5) to have sex only with each other, (6) with the ritual recognition, endorsement, and support (often material) of the community. Since same-sex couples can meet the first five criteria as easily as opposite-sex couples, how can society refuse the sixth? If the list above fully describes the proper relationship between sex and marriage—sex is just a deeper expression of personal affection and friendship, and marriage is an arrangement concerned with nothing more than this—then we must acknowledge that same-sex couples are just as capable of marriage as opposite-sex couples.

But this is where it must be pointed out that the act in which opposite-sex couples wish to engage has a very public outcome: children. Let me put my initial assertion another way: if sexual intercourse between a man and a woman always and naturally led to the same outcome as genital contact between two people of the same sex—that is, pleasure, increased feelings of closeness, even affirmation and love, and nothing else—no one would ever have come up with the idea of marriage.

The best that can be said about the contemporary face of “marriage”—the deliberately childless union, or union built around the desires of adults, with children a secondary and dispensable characteristic—is that it is entirely parasitic on the proper idea of marriage. Impossible to imagine on its own, it takes real marriage and strips it of the thing that gives it meaning, yet continues to refer to it by the same name. That means that the notion of “same-sex marriage,” which relies entirely for its conceivability on the notion that marriage exists for the desires of adults, is by that fact two levels removed from reasonableness.

Stephen J. Heaney is associate professor of philosophy at the University of St. Thomas.

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The novel had reached its apogee with the marriage plot and had never recovered from its disappearance. In the days when success in life had depended on marriage, and marriage had depended on money, novelists had had a subject to write about. The great epics sang of war, the novel of marriage. Sexual equality, good for women, had been bad for the novel. And divorce had undone it completely. What would it matter if Emma married if she could file for separation later? How would Isabel Archer’s marriage to Gilbert Osmond have been affected by the existence of a prenup? … [M]arriage didn’t mean much anymore, and neither did the novel.

In former times, the marriage plot began with a young man or woman coming into adulthood and facing a decision fraught with irreversibility. The right marriage meant blissful stability, the wrong one misery until death. The tension that would make readers keep reading was ready-made, the identification with characters easy. The plot moved through an obstacle course of parental resistance, mistaken infatuations, a past complication in a young man’s life, questions of property, rivals to the woman’s affections, and so forth, with lots of social observation by the author along the way until the final resolution of matrimony.

But it worked only as long as a romance had lifelong consequences. One kiss had to mean a decisive pledge or a gross misjudgment. A marriage contract involved transfers of land and money. Marriage itself lasted forever, and escaping a bad one brought lasting ignominy. Once marriage lost its binding character, it no longer served the novel as a significant plot, and without the marriage plot, the novel lost its basis.

The old plot serves as a clever counterpoint to the plot of this novel, which portrays an engaging trio of students on their way to adulthood—a bright but unbalanced biologist (Leonard) and a reasonably smart English major (Madeleine) who end up in a grueling year shacking up and eventually marrying before he runs away (perhaps to save her from his demons), plus a thoughtful religious studies youth (Mitchell) who wanders to India and Mother Teresa’s Home for Dying Destitutes while pining to marry Madeleine. When her marriage collapses and Mitchell and Madeleine unite at her parents’ home and become lovers, the next morning he changes his mind—“He looked at Madeleine. She wasn’t so special, maybe.” That’s the last page of the book. The previous 400 pages have chronicled scattered episodes during and after college, each one promising to transform them, such as Leonard’s fellowship year in a prestigious laboratory and Madeleine’s seminar in literary theory. None of them proves decisive, however, their impact lasting only until the next episode. At the end, Leonard has disappeared into Oregon, Madeleine is on her way to graduate school in English, and Mitchell has no idea where he’s heading, though he has dropped all plans to go to divinity school.

These are college students circa 1982, not the sons and daughters of lords and wealthy British tradesmen in 1832. They live together before they get married, jump from partner to partner, drink to excess, and draw ideas and values not from God and country but from teachers and academic fashion and, most of all, from the social interests of one another. Mitchell is the exception, not only because of his devotion to Madeleine, but also because of his books (Augustine, Thomas á Kempis) and charity (though he labors in the Home for only a month before fleeing in shock, for which we shouldn’t judge him). His spiritual quests, however, influence him less than his love for Madeleine, and it hasn’t a speck of caritas in it. Take away the social and personal dimensions of their lives and the stories signify little else. Madeleine’s decision to marry Leonard suggests nothing about the meaning of marriage in general, and Mitchell’s religious explorations bear only upon his own circumstances, not on the conditions of faith in late-twentieth-century America. Eugenides inserts a lengthy section on Leonard’s tortuous descents into manic depression, with brief, vivid portrayals of self-serving parents and tactical medications. It’s a compelling presentation, but it has few moral, philosophical, or social implications, showing instead only the behavioral effects of chemical imbalance and unloving parents.

This is not to criticize Eugenides, but to underscore the plight of the post-marriage plot novelist. What do the motivations and dilemmas of these youths amount to? Everything to them, nothing to us. Eugenides produces a readable novel out of the ups and downs of early-1980s twenty-somethings, but they represent nothing more than themselves. Think of Gatsby presented as a guy still smitten with an old flame and trying to win her back, his ambition all his own, not a reflection, too, on broader human conditions (“so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past”).

Indeed, the comparison to other characters illuminates the situation of literature in a world wholly liberalized and individualized. At the center of Pride and Prejudice is Elizabeth Bennet’s decision regarding marriage. Her judgment reflects not only upon herself, but upon every other young man and woman in a certain class in England at the time. Yes, the decision rests with her, but the meaning of it, the nature and circumstances of courtship and matrimony, belongs to her society, and hence the decision has a representative value that she cannot dispel. Her sharp wit never turns upon the institution itself, and, however willful she is, she accepts the conditions of it. Elizabeth’s case reflects an entire social machinery in action, while Madeleine’s marriage represents only her own choice.

Or, regarding Mitchell’s religious queries, consider Ivan Karamazov. They pose some of the same questions about suffering and Christ, and both of them fail to land upon faith. Neither of them experiences God, but while Ivan’s answers lead him into despair and madness, Mitchell’s answers (or rather, his inability to experience God’s grace) lead him to shrug off the whole religious thing and pursue a future elsewhere. Ivan’s crisis is a touchstone of modernity, Mitchell’s an excursion in the bio of a college grad.

Finally, set Leonard alongside Quentin Compson of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury. Their pathologies differ, but we may still compare their framing as representations. Leonard sometimes slips into mania—not sleeping, phoning friends incessantly, romancing one girl after another—and sometimes slides into anomie—avoiding work, thinking about getting old, gaining weight. Eugenides probes his upbringing and details treatment he receives in the hospital and from psychiatrists, but the background doesn’t prompt general observations on modern families, and his medical experiences don’t allow for reflections on the understanding and care of psychic turmoil circa 1980. Quentin’s situation is different. As he proceeds through the day that will end with his suicide, Quentin ponders two things over and over: his sister’s sexuality and his father’s tutelage. They follow him every waking moment, his sister’s lovers plaguing his male identity and his father’s remembered commentary rising into musings on the human condition (for instance, handing his son a watch with the words: “I give you the mausoleum of all hope and desire . . . I give it to you not that you may remember time, but that you might forget it now and then for a moment and not spend all of your breath trying to conquer it”). Virginity becomes not just a scourge for Quentin, but an issue to consider in itself, and his father’s enfeebling despair acquires a value independent of how it affects Quentin. Leonard’s experience is all Leonard’s and will remain so for readers. Quentin’s experience has become the experience of countless readers as well, for instance, that of the French existentialists who made an idol of Faulkner in the 1940s.

Again, we should not fault the novelist because his characters don’t signify anything more than themselves. We live in the postmodern condition, when “meta-narratives,” as Jean-Francois Lyotard called them, have collapsed, those obsolete structures including the marriage plot, the bildungsroman, the salvation story, and other archetypal plots based on now-exploded notions of being and humanity. Eugenides himself highlights the problem in the beginning, that is, the loss of the marriage plot, which we may extend to the inability of any individual to mean anything more than himself once social (or political, religious, intellectual, etc.) institutions collapse. When individualism triumphs, when romance and marriage are entirely an individual thing, the drama of the characters narrows accordingly, and social, religious, political, and other obligations are recast as impositions.

We find its expression in the now-famous assertion in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992):

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.

Apart from the truth or politics of that statement, its consequences for the novel are certain. A good plot needs conflict, an unsettled situation whose outcome we care about. For more than two centuries, the theme of “individual vs. society” provided a ready tension for it, as in Huck Finn’s personal feelings for Jim clashing with the norms of slave society, or Edna in Kate Chopin’s The Awakening rebelling against patriarchal demands in turn-of-the-century Louisiana. The conflict worked precisely because the social side isn’t powerless and on occasion voices a legitimate criticism of the specific individual with whom we sympathize. Once all legitimacy lies on the individual side, once social institutions have no claim upon the one, tension dissipates and the novel reads like a chronicle of events in the life of _____, not a meaningful examination of human affairs in this or that setting.

This is the position of The Marriage Plot. The one area in which the novel does evoke larger concerns that did affect American culture during those years—or at least an important enclave of it, the college campus—only proves the decline of those concerns into a strictly individualist import. As Madeleine proceeds in her English major, she takes a seminar in semiotics, where she gains from Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse not insights about humanity at large but rather resonance with her own experiences. Of the book, she first observes that “the writing seemed beautiful,” and then Barthes’ sentences crystallize into an insight: “Here was an articulation of what she had been so far mutely feeling . . . Madeleine was in a state of extreme solitude.”

The insight ends the paragraph on that expanding clarity, but the very next sentence shrinks it back to the peer scene: “It had to do with Leonard. With how she felt about him and how she couldn’t tell anyone.” The moment fails. A Lover’s Discourse doesn’t draw her out of her paltry individual existence, but instead reinforces it. She continues with Barthes obsessively for weeks, but “She was reading A Lover’s Discourse and marveling at its relevance to her life.”

Precisely. Once social institutions deteriorate and people live contained by their own sole selves, relevance becomes the first measure of value. Barthes appeals to her not because he imparts truths about life or expresses well a plight many of us share, but because he voices her state of mind and feeling, locally and immediately. He prompts a broader understanding of love—“It explained what love was like and, just maybe, what was wrong with it”—but only for a second before she returns the text to her personal circumstances. It’s the dilemma of the narcissist, and of the postmodern novelist. The dominant venues of our culture empower the personal perspective, a do-whatever-you-want-as-long-as-you-don’t-infringe-on-others outlook, and the contemporary novelist interested in current conditions represents sensibilities that result from it. But the more those characters care about themselves and circle events, ideas, places, books, and everything else back into the sphere of their direct experiences, the less we care about them.

Mark Bauerlein is Professor of English at Emory University. His most recent book is The Dumbest Generation: How the Digital Age Stupefies Young Americans and Jeopardizes Our Future.

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Withdrawal from politics is not an option. While it’s wrong to subordinate everything to politics, God cares about justice, so politics will always be important. Moreover, we should remember C.S. Lewis’s Iron Law of Social Ethics: “Spiritual nature, like bodily nature, will be served; deny it food and it will gobble poison.” The void left behind by the decline of the old political model is already being filled by toxic identity politics.

So we need a new model. I propose five key starting points:

1) Build moral consensus. The biggest problem with the old model was its hostile attitude toward those outside our group. Evangelical leaders viewed the rising social influence of other groups as illegitimate. Those outside our group were the enemy, and our political goal was to neutralize, defeat, and expel them.

There are many reasons this approach is inadequate; perhaps the most important is that it is inconsistent with religious freedom in the broadest and deepest sense. It may not involve directly persecuting other beliefs, but it fails to live up to that civic standard of good will and solidarity among fellow citizens that George Washington articulated so eloquently to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport:

It is now no more that toleration is spoken of, as if it was by the indulgence of one class of people, that another enjoyed the exercise of their inherent natural rights… May the Children of the Stock of Abraham, who dwell in this land, continue to merit and enjoy the good will of the other Inhabitants; while every one shall sit in safety under his own vine and figtree, and there shall be none to make him afraid.

All Americans who “demean themselves as good citizens” (in Washington’s phrase) deserve this goodwill. This is what I mean by religious freedom in the broadest and deepest sense: we want a society where neighborly love and civic solidarity don’t depend on adherence to a particular religion or tradition. More than anything else, the founding idea of America is that the state legislates based on the moral consensus of society, not the particular morality of one religious group.

You can’t govern based on moral consensus, however, in a society that doesn’t have one. Recent controversies surrounding religious freedom reveal how precarious it has become today. Religious freedom is no longer sacred to most Americans, because they feel like they’re locked in a life-and-death power struggle on religious lines. That won’t change until we rebuild a sense of moral consensus in society at large.

In the phrase “build moral consensus,” all three words are important. If law is not guided by societal consensus, government can rule only by dictatorial force. But if the consensus is not moral, grounded in the natural knowledge of right and wrong written on the human heart, politics degenerates into a cynical power game. Either way, we cease to be a free people.

Yet the most important word is build. Moral consensus does not come easily to human communities. Whenever it is not being intentionally built up, it deteriorates. (Bush’s error was a failure to recognize this.) Yet because God’s grace remains active throughout creation and his law is written on all human hearts, moral consensus does emerge when we work to build it. (Failure to recognize this was the twentieth-century model’s error.) The natural human processes of reason, history, culture, and socialization are enabled by providential grace to be vehicles for producing moral consensus.

Thus evangelicals were right to embrace partnership with Catholics and the mitigation of our own internal divisions in the 1980s. Where we went wrong, in addition to the problem of partisanship (which I’ll get to below), was in building these partnerships upon moral traditionalism. America is not a traditionalist country. Moving beyond a model of “Judeo-Christian” cultural superiority toward a model based on building moral consensus is not only better on the merits, it’s a better fit for America.

2) Rethink the American founding. Our concept of citizenship begins with the story we tell ourselves about our national identity. Since at least the great Protestant schism, two rival understandings of the origin and meaning of the American founding have been circulating among evangelicals. Unfortunately, neither is adequate.

One story overemphasizes the Christian-ness of the founding. One central feature of the predominant political model of the last century was the idea that the American civic order is the social expression of the Reformation. But Luther didn’t nail the Declaration of Independence to the Wittenberg door.

The other story portrays the American founding as primarily anti-Christian in character. This story has prevailed among those who were turned off by the predominant political model. The founders were a bunch of unitarians, deists, and moralistic theists in thrall to naturalistic ideas. But the Enlightenment was not a homogeneously naturalistic or anti-Christian movement.

In fact, the American founding drew in deep and meaningful ways upon both Christian and anti-Christian sources. Developments in seventeenth-century theology and philosophy converged to forge a strong civic partnership for the broad social model of religious freedom between evangelical Protestants and adherents of unorthodox liberal belief systems.

And here’s where things get really interesting: the founders’ project was incomplete. As Washington’s letter shows, they aspired to create a new kind of society—a new social order. Well, they carried us a long way toward that goal, but they didn’t get us all the way there. The rigid Protestantism of every institution other than the state kept America separate and unequal on religious lines. And the long, slow slide of American culture since the great Protestant schism demonstrates that the founders’ model was unable to assimilate true religious plurality.

The calling of history for our generation of Americans seems clear. The founders’ great, unfinished task of building a society in which civic solidarity is decoupled from religious particularism must be taken back up. As our cultural divisions seem to get deeper every year and the forces of disintegration gather strength, the voice of Ben Franklin becomes harder and harder for Americans of diverse beliefs to ignore: if we do not hang together, rest assured we shall all hang separately.

3) Wrestle with partisan and ideological division. Among evangelicals today, there is a widespread fear of subordinating our religious life to partisan or ideological agendas. We must be worried about that problem, given recent history. Yet this fear can itself become paralyzing and dysfunctional.

We certainly shouldn’t straightforwardly identify the church’s public witness with promoting a specific ideology or party. That leaves no space for moral consensus. If we talk as though the gospel requires us to vote a certain way or to promote “conservatism” or “progressivism,” or even a more narrowly defined ideology such as “social conservatism,” this implies that Americans can have no shared moral commitments across those ideological divides.

But we can also become so afraid of our divisions that the church ends up saying little of practical value on public questions. I call this the “be a nice person and don’t look at porn” school of ethics. The implicit message is that it doesn’t much matter what you do with your life as long as you mean well.

Fortunately, we don’t have to choose between identifying one party or ideology with the social witness of the church and leaving the church with no social witness. The answer, to my mind, is to confess our ideologies and then work within the church to forge as much shared social witness as we can by taking the concerns of all sides seriously. Where we find that we really need to agree to disagree, we can work separately to promote the causes we believe in while remembering that in doing so, we do not speak for the whole church.

This isn’t as hopeless as it may sound. Consider the astonishing levels of marriage, industriousness, honesty, and even church attendance among the same social elites who despise “social conservatism.” When you set aside the ideologically charged labels, there’s a lot of common ground to be discovered.

In my own work, I have found that many people who identify themselves as progressives share concerns about public issues that I think of as “conservative.” I have had a lot of success working with them toward shared goals without insisting that they agree with my ideological labeling of what we’re doing together. It’s amazing how much you can accomplish if you don’t care which ideology gets credit.

4) Be doers of the gospel, not proclaimers only. We won’t be able to get politics right until evangelicals become more active in “living out the gospel” in ways that are not political. Given my clear track record, I won’t let anyone question my commitment to the importance of politics. Yet so long as political activism remains, as it is now, the most visible form of evangelical public engagement, the public will keep thinking that the gospel is a political program and evangelicals want to impose Christianity on people by force. (Of course we should be living out the gospel in all those other social spheres anyway.)

Our doing of the gospel across every sector of society needs to become so common and so visible that evangelicals acquire a national reputation as people who make the world a better place. The inadequate model of politics in the twentieth century has led evangelicals as a whole to under-invest in other forms of doing the gospel. Where are the evangelicals who are famous for visibly doing the gospel as business leaders? Where are the neighborhoods transformed by evangelical volunteerism? They’re out there if you look for them, but they’re too few and far between.

5) Be realistic, but be encouraged. The challenges of our time are daunting, and we need to recognize the limits of what can be accomplished. However, it’s equally important that we take courage. Despair is a sin; it denies God’s providential grace.

Evangelicals are well-equipped to face these challenges and even to take the lead in doing so. We believe in the freedom-of-religion society the American founders wanted to build. We’re highly flexible and are experts in adapting to new cultural situations. Our theology emphasizes getting out of the church building to make our faith active in the world. We have a robust appreciation of the fall, so we know better than to think we can change the world just by having the best arguments. Oh, and we know our Bibles—when operating a complex system, it never hurts to read the instruction manual.

But can it be done? God doesn’t owe us success, but I believe so. I like to remember that Flight 93 was prevented from crashing into the White House by a gay man and an evangelical. When America’s survival was at stake, they had no difficulty linking arms and fighting together to save it, even unto death. In the coming decades, all Americans are going to be discovering that we have to link arms across religious divisions to save our country. If they could find a way to die together, we can find a way to live together.

In closing this three-part essay, I wish again gratefully to acknowledge the valuable work and insights of Daniel Williams on which I have drawn throughout the essay, even while disagreeing on some points.

Greg Forster is the author of five books, including The Contested Public Square.

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The rise of the Religious Right was not as dramatic a change from previous history as it may seem. Evangelicals did change the strategy of their political activism in the late 1970s. The new strategy was markedly better in some respects, and markedly worse in others. Both the good and the bad changes received much attention and convinced people that something fundamentally new was happening.

Though evangelicals’ strategy changed, their underlying assumptions about politics and the goals of their activism remained largely the same. These continuities deserve more notice than they have received, especially if we want to think systematically about how our activism needs to change for the new century.

Unfortunately, some commentators use the phrase “religious right” simply to refer to voters who are both politically conservative and religiously conservative. On this definition, there will always be a “religious right”—but that’s a very misleading picture. Most evangelicals vote conservative, yet less than a fifth continue to identify themselves as members of the Religious Right.

It’s more illuminating to consider the Religious Right as a distinct political strategy. Evangelicals’ operating strategy incorporated at least four major changes in the late 1970s, all of which culminated in 1979 through a broad constellation of political efforts (such as Jerry Falwell’s founding of the Moral Majority):

1) Catholics. Well into the early 1970s, most evangelical leaders were almost as anti-Catholic as they were anti-secularist. This was a natural result of their political model based on restoring the old Protestant-dominated social order. But by 1979, evangelical leaders were suddenly making major long-term investments in alliances with Catholics. They jettisoned the confessional Protestantism of the old social order for a broader “Judeo-Christian” moral traditionalism.

2) Fundamentalism. What had been an acrimonious divide between “fundamentalists” and “evangelicals” was also largely mitigated. Up through the early 1970s, the prevailing political model had fueled hostility between these subgroups. The evangelical desire to act as moral guardians of America’s social order clashed head-on with fundamentalist fears that playing such a role would inevitably compromise doctrinal purity, just as it had for the mainline. Tensions along these lines remain to this day, but in 1979 they suddenly became subordinated to what were viewed as more urgent moral and cultural concerns. This opened the door to unprecedented levels of evangelical cooperation and of political mobilization among fundamentalists.

3) Race. White evangelical leaders as a group, who had too often turned a blind eye to racial injustice or even aided and abetted it, got on board for civil rights. Until the 1970s, many white evangelical leaders supported the racial status quo uncritically, in large part because they saw themselves as guardians of the existing social order. Changed racial attitudes would still take a while to reach everybody, but by 1979 it was clear enough which way the wind was blowing.

4) Partisanship. Perhaps most important was the new willingness of evangelical leaders—unconsciously, but consistently—to put all their eggs in the basket of one political party. Earlier evangelical leaders had always seen themselves as the guardians of a bipartisan social order and cultural consensus, so they had carefully maintained relationships across party lines. Billy Graham, turned off by Goldwater’s opposition to federal civil rights legislation, welcomed Johnson’s aggressive efforts to cultivate his support. Pat Robertson backed the evangelical Carter over Ford in 1976. But under the Religious Right model, seemingly without realizing what they were doing, evangelical leaders extensively subordinated the life of the church to the political interests of the GOP.

Evangelical leaders muted their criticism of immoral personal behavior in order to avoid embarrassing Republican leaders. Moral witness on divorce was especially eclipsed. Graham had backed Eisenhower in part because his opponent, Adlai Stevenson, was a divorcee; evangelicals mobilized against Nelson Rockefeller for the same reason. All that changed when evangelicals decided to go all-in with the divorced Reagan. Right at the moment when divorce was becoming normalized, evangelicals unilaterally disarmed themselves against it.

They also tempered the more socially scandalous aspects of their theology, such as the exclusivity of salvation in Christ. The Religious Roundtable’s 1980 National Affairs Briefing is mainly remembered for Reagan’s “I endorse you” remark, but a remark by Southern Baptist Convention President Bailey Smith is equally noteworthy. Smith complained that political rallies typically feature public prayers from both Christian and Jewish clergy, which implies Christianity and Judaism are the same, when in fact only those who trust Christ have God’s favor. Robertson and Falwell rushed to offer complex, obfuscatory “clarifications” of this embarrassing comment, lest the media fallout damage Reagan.

And they donated time and resources to GOP politicians who ignored them, in pathetic hopes of currying their favor. Ralph Reed was especially aggressive in pushing evangelicals to invest in helping the GOP, on the preposterous theory that the GOP would feel a need to repay them. A federal corruption investigation would later expose Reed as a shameless huckster on the make (“Hey, now that I’m done with the electoral politics, I need to start humping in corporate accounts!” ran a now notorious 1998 email to Jack Abramoff). But it says a lot about evangelical leaders’ naiveté that Reed could play them so brazenly. It says even more that some people are still letting him do it.

To a large extent, this partisanship coincided with increased levels of hostility from the other side of the aisle. Yet even if many in the Democratic Party were pushing evangelicals out, evangelical leaders didn’t have to respond by becoming uncritical cheerleaders of the Republicans. Moreover, the causation ran the other way, as well; uncritical evangelical cheerleading for the GOP generated hostility to evangelicals among Democrats—certainly after 1980, if not before.

What explains these four strategic shifts? The conventional narrative is that court decisions on issues such as abortion and school prayer were the catalyst. But evangelicals were actually slow to adopt these causes, largely due to their anti-Catholicism.

Some Religious Right leaders point to a 1978 IRS proposal to strip some evangelical schools of their tax-exempt status. But that seems like a slender thread on which to hang such a huge and sustained social shift. The proposal, which was never implemented, was not a central feature in evangelical political discourse. Nor was this the first time evangelicals had ever been the target of federal harassment.

A parsimonious explanation that fits the facts is that the astonishing steamroller of libertinism in the 1970s produced something like a panic. Evangelicals saw America rushing ever more rapidly toward cultural catastrophe. The tipping point had to be near. “God is angry with us as a nation,” Falwell declared. “I have a divine mandate to go right into the halls of Congress and fight for laws that will save America.”

The moral panic theory explains at least three of the four strategic shifts. Evangelicals dropped their opposition to Catholics because, in their panic, they were desperate for allies. Fundamentalists overcame their fear of activism because they were more afraid of societal collapse. Evangelicals went all-in on the GOP in hopes of maximizing their political leverage. (The change in racial attitudes is a more complex story to which we can’t do justice here.)

This theory differs from the prevailing explanations mainly by denying that evangelical mobilization was primarily a defensive response to anti-evangelical government action. There certainly have been plenty of instances of legal, policy, and regulatory discrimination against evangelicals—and not only recently. In the 1940s, for example, FCC regulations blatantly discriminated against evangelical religious broadcasters in favor of the mainline until evangelical political activists successfully challenged this injustice. But in general, evangelicals have been much too quick to cry out, “They attacked us! We’re only defending ourselves!” The high points and low points of evangelical mobilization in the twentieth century just don’t seem very strongly connected, either in timing or in content, to government incursions. But they are clearly connected to heightened anxiety about national moral decay.

Why does all this matter? Because it shows that what was really shifting in evangelical politics was strategy—evangelicals were prompted to desperate measures by what they saw as desperate times, but their basic assumptions and goals did not really change.

In some ways, the Religious Right exacerbated the inadequacies of the inherited model by removing inefficiencies and mobilizing more effectively. It was a triumphalist movement, openly bragging that with its new alliances, new voter enrollments, and new partisan strategic positioning, it would roll to victory, put the enemies of morality under its heels, and save America. “We have . . . enough votes to run the country,” Robertson announced in 1979. “We are going to take over.” As with Ockenga in 1947, Robertson’s triumphalism was not only typical for the time, it was formative.

The Religious Right accomplished early successes. Before the 1980 election, libertinism was winning an accelerating series of political victories, shifting American law and policy onto a materialistic, utilitarian basis. After 1980, a new anti-libertine coalition forged by the Religious Right brought this victory procession to a halt. That is a substantial achievement.

But the Religious Right was already declining in power by the mid-1980s, and it withered throughout the 1990s. After the early years, it accomplished few of its legislative priorities. Politicians deftly extracted money, votes, and volunteer time from evangelicals while delivering little of substance. The best it could do was maintain a political stalemate with libertinism.

Here is where I have to disagree with Daniel Williams’ groundbreaking new book, God’s Own Party. Williams has collected extensive evidence documenting evangelical activism throughout the last century, upon which I’ve drawn in both parts of this article (along with other sources). But Williams thinks the Religious Right was highly successful; his main thesis is that evangelicals are now essentially in control of the GOP. I agree with David Courtwright that it’s the politicians who have been in the driver’s seat.

Then in 2000, George W. Bush broke with the Religious Right strategy decisively. He aligned with conservatives on social issues and wasn’t shy about identifying himself personally as a man of faith, but he eschewed triumphalist rhetoric and kept Religious Right leaders at arm’s length. He emphasized that he was equally sympathetic not only to “people of all faiths,” but also to “people of no faith” and their concerns. His heavy investment in positive portrayals of Islam after 9/11 was of a piece with this. Bush’s desire to treat Christianity, Islam, and atheism as functionally equivalent for civic purposes stands in stark contrast to the “Judeo-Christian” moral traditionalism of the Religious Right. Bush consistently appealed to what he said were universal values shared by all humanity; whatever you think of that, it isn’t what Pat Robertson believes.

Bush’s campaign and presidency were not just the death knell of the Religious Right strategy; they were the beginning of the end of the whole twentieth-century evangelical model of political engagement. Bush manifestly did not view either evangelicals as such or some grand coalition of conservative religious traditions as having a special guardianship over America’s social order. Nor did he have any interest in trying to restore such a guardianship.

A decade after its death, it now seems to be pretty widely admitted that the Religious Right strategy was a bad deal. It did extensive damage within our own household and exposed us to a great deal of political manipulation. Worst of all, it has reinforced a widespread cultural perception that the gospel of Christ is a right-wing political program, driving people away from the church.

If the twentieth-century model is no longer satisfactory, how do we begin building a new one? I’ll look at that in a follow-up article tomorrow.

Greg Forster is the author of five books, including The Contested Public Square.

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The article below has been in the works for months, since long before Colson’s health turned. I wish I could rewrite the whole thing as some kind of tribute to him. Nonetheless, I regard the timing of the publication as providential. Colson exemplified how valuable political philosophy is when it actively informs political practice, and I can’t think of a better tribute to him than to start a conversation about the implicit political philosophy that I think has stood behind American evangelicals’ activism since their movement began.

In the past few years, American evangelicals seem to have been reaching a turning point in their engagement with politics. A growing number of evangelical leaders are no longer satisfied with the model of political participation that has predominated for a century, and yet the available alternatives seem no better. The time is ripe for a new model to emerge, if we can build one.

But we can’t build it successfully until we understand where the old model came from and why it’s now coming to be viewed as unsatisfactory. The inherited model originated in the tumultuous religious developments of the early twentieth century; it presupposes a broad consensus in American society on the moral basis of civic life. For the twenty-first century, we need a model that builds moral consensus rather than presupposing it.

For some time, the conventional narrative has been that evangelicals mostly stayed out of politics until they were mobilized in 1976 and 1980. It would be truer to say that there were some periods in the last century when evangelicals were politically inactive, especially the 1930s and the early 1940s, but, on balance, they were more active than not.

A little forgotten history: “The Christian people of America are going to vote as a bloc for the man with the strongest moral and spiritual platform, regardless of his views on other matters. I believe we can hold the balance of power.” That was Billy Graham in 1951, during the first of what would become recurring efforts to deliver the evangelical vote to the GOP. Graham baptized Eisenhower in the White House and had Nixon speak at his crusades. Though his activism shifted away from the GOP for a while in the mid-1960s, since he preferred Johnson to Goldwater (a preference Johnson aggressively cultivated), Graham didn’t pull back from politics until 1974, when he and the rest of the world heard on the Watergate tapes how Nixon had contemptuously duped and manipulated him and his followers.

Graham was no trailblazer in leveraging the leadership role his ministry gave him for political activism. From the Social Gospel movement, Prohibition, and opposition to the presidential candidacy of a Roman Catholic in the 1920s; through anti-Communism, drugs, sexual morals, and opposition to the presidential candidacy of a Roman Catholic in midcentury; to the Religious Right of the 1980s and 1990s—political activism was normal among evangelical ministry leaders for most of the twentieth century.

Political activism is normal among just about all demographic groups in this country. Not everyone is called to be an activist, yet the presence of activism across all major cultural subgroups is an essential element of America’s political tradition of democratic citizenship, self-government, and the rule of law. American evangelicals are more activist than evangelicals elsewhere in the world for the same reason that American Catholics, Jews, agnostics, and atheists are more activist than their peers abroad—because they’re Americans.

But evangelical activism in the past century has been dominated by a distinctive model, the roots of which lie in the great schism of American Protestantism at the turn of the century. Evangelicals saw the apostasy of the liberal mainline and the consequent division of the American church as a harbinger of social disruption and moral disorder. From the 1920s onward, evangelicals have publicly anticipated a trend of cultural decline leading ultimately to the collapse of society. To take only two examples, William Jennings Bryan declared in 1924 that Catholic candidate Al Smith would “lead the nation back to wallow in the mire.” One of the century’s most important evangelical broadcasters, William Ward Ayer, explained in 1942 that the founding of the National Association of Evangelicals was necessary to “save American democracy.”

Evangelicals did what any good citizens would do in the face of a threat to their country: they mobilized to save it. It speaks well of them that they did. Good citizens don’t stand by while their nation is threatened, and evangelical political activity has accomplished much good. Although the rising tide of moral disorder has not been reversed, its progress has been halted in many respects, and forces of renewal are gathering. All of this was made possible largely by evangelical efforts.

From the start, however, most evangelical leaders have had an insufficient understanding both of the problems that they were trying to solve and of their own cultural situation. As a result, while much that they have done has been good, their overall model for how to engage in politics has been inadequate, and its limits have become increasingly clear over time.

They were right that the Protestant schism struck a dire blow to the American social order. Before the schism, America had a longstanding social consensus on how to reconcile religious freedom with public morals: the state would legislate based on the moral consensus of society, but keep its hands off directly confessional issues and try to steer clear of inhibiting diverse religious exercise. Meanwhile, beyond the bounds of state power, America’s leading institutions would be predominantly defined by and loyal to the Protestant view of the world. This strong yet informal Protestant cultural authority would keep the citizenry moral, so the coercive power of the state could be mostly kept out of moral formation in the interests of religious freedom.

The Protestant schism was the decisive factor that ended the old social order. To be sure, a variety of other factors were already weakening it; for example, the injustices imposed upon Catholics and Jews were becoming steadily harder to ignore. However, the schism destroyed the framework of the social order from within. Protestantism could no longer serve as a moral center of society once no one could say with any confidence what “Protestantism” was.

But evangelical leaders misunderstood the nature of the threat. They didn’t seem to grasp that the schism had destroyed America’s Protestant cultural consensus. They spoke and acted as though it was still basically sound in the country at large, and was only being challenged by a cabal of liberal secularists who were hijacking America’s culturally leading institutions (especially denominational bodies and universities). In short, they thought of the crisis more in terms of apostasy by a relatively narrow set of leaders than a true schism of the church.

Because of this misunderstanding, evangelicals turned to politics as a tool for mobilizing social power and cultural influence to wage their battle against the liberal secularists. They expected that politics would give them the power they needed, because elections are based on majority rule and America was still basically a Protestant country.

In fact, the Protestant social consensus wasn’t really hijacked; it had dissolved from within, and the liberal secularists were just rushing in to fill the void. The old consensus had been fragmented by centuries of accumulated theological and philosophical divisions. By 1952, the old order was so hollow that Eisenhower raised few eyebrows when he remarked that “our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don’t care what it is.” Evangelicals were trying to prop up a structure that no longer had enough integrity to stand.

Moreover, evangelicals misunderstood their own place in the social order. Because they were faithful to classical Protestant theology, they saw themselves as the rightful heirs of the old Protestant cultural authority. At the founding convocation of Fuller Seminary in 1947, cofounder Harold Ockenga declared that because western civilization was built on Protestant premises, only evangelicals could “rebuild the foundations of society” and rescue America from destruction at the hands of secularism and “Romanism.” Such comments were typical. Indeed, Fuller was founded with the involvement of many leading evangelical public voices of the day, to serve as a national brain trust for increased evangelical engagement in the civic order. Ockenga’s comments were not just representative; they were formative.

Evangelicals were indeed the theological heirs of the old Protestantism. But they never inherited its social position in American civilization. They were not outsiders to America, but they were outsiders to the institutions and networks that were recognized in American culture as the legitimate moral guardians of the social order. They had no cultural standing to claim a leadership role in American civilization.

Unfortunately, they too often spoke and acted as though their theology entitled them to serve as America’s moral guardians. This attitude can be seen most clearly in the way they so often implied that voting for a given candidate or party was a moral duty. From Graham’s assumption that all good and decent Christians would naturally vote “as a bloc” for Eisenhower; to Jerry Falwell’s warning that politicians would have to meet the demands of “the moral majority” or lose elections; to Pat Robertson’s efforts to create a “Christian coalition” whose votes could be brokered in Washington, evangelical leaders have frequently identified voting for their preferred candidate with being a good Christian (or a good person).

The issue here is not whether the American social order presupposes a religious people whose votes are influenced by their beliefs. It does. But after the great schism, there was no longer any set of churches or religious leaders who could rightfully claim to be accepted by the American people as moral guardians of the social order, the way Protestant churches and leaders were before the schism. Few of the evangelical leaders involved in political activism in the twentieth century fully came to terms with this fact.

This is one reason so many citizens resent evangelical political participation, viewing it as illegitimate and a threat to their freedom. They perceive evangelicals as thinking that they have a right to rule them. That perception is not always unreasonable in light of the way evangelical leaders generally spoke and acted throughout the twentieth century.

This problem is starting to get attention in evangelical circles, but its deepest historic origins are not yet sufficiently explored. In his new book Indivisible, co-written with my friend Jay Richards, James Robison reflects: “The Moral Majority struck the wrong chord. It sounded as if we were claiming to be the moral compass for everyone else.” He blames that on “anger and big egos.” While it’s big of him to say so, deeper forces were at work—an inadequate model of politics handed down more or less unchanged from the great Protestant schism.

This model is also one reason American politics is becoming more ideologically polarized. The assumption that all good, decent people vote one way has gradually undermined everyone’s ability (on all political sides) to believe that America has a shared culture or a public moral consensus. Politics has come to be viewed as a clash between radically divergent moralities.

Moreover, this dynamic explains why American politics is becoming more immoral. Actual lawbreaking (graft, vote rigging, etc.) is more rare now than it was in midcentury; yet these days, the real crime is what’s legal. Every year, more and more irresponsible behavior is destigmatized and accepted as normal, especially in the mobilization of group grievances and resentments. That’s because we no longer believe in moral consensus. If politics is a competition between groups that have no shared morality, the political competition itself can have no moral basis, and thus no firm moral boundaries. The incentives tend to favor irresponsibility.

The predominant model of political activism in the evangelical world has done little to challenge this dynamic, and it has often reinforced it. Not all evangelical activism has followed this pattern, of course, and it ought to be repeated that much good has been accomplished. But America, like every civilization, needs politics based on moral consensus. In the past century, evangelicals have, on balance, done more to undermine moral consensus across religious divisions than to build it.

This history throws new light on the Religious Right movement of the last generation, and it suggests a different way forward for the coming generation. I’ll discuss those topics in two subsequent articles.

Greg Forster is the author of five books, including The Contested Public Square.

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This conscience proposal would forbid the use of new mandated benefits lists under PPACA to force those who offer, sponsor, or purchase health plans to cover specific items or services that violate their “religious beliefs or moral convictions.” The immediate threat is the Obama administration’s mandate for almost all health plans to include female sterilization, all FDA-approved “contraceptive” drugs (including those that can act as early abortifacients), and related education and counseling, without co-pays or out-of-pocket expenses.

The contraceptive mandate debate is far from over. Among other things, the House of Representatives—where more than half the members have co-sponsored the Fortenberry/Blunt bill—has yet to act on this issue. But efforts to resume the debate will run up against at least two charges. One is the claim that the bill would allow employers on “moral” grounds to deny health coverage to black Americans, or pregnant women, or people with disabilities—but that claim is clearly false, since such discriminatory decisions have long been forbidden by other federal laws that the new bill does not alter. The other major charge, which continues to be made, is that such a conscience proposal is an unprecedented attack on “women’s health,” in fact part of what Vice President Biden has called a Republican “war on women.”

What is the truth about this charge? For an answer, we need look no farther than the most recent non-Republican presidency, that of Bill Clinton.

In 1997, President Clinton and Congress wanted to address a specific problem: Some managed-care plans were telling providers in their networks that they may not discuss with their patients, or do referrals for, any services the plan does not provide. Apparently the managed-care organizations did not want patients to know about services they may have chosen not to provide on fiscal grounds, for fear the patients may seek coverage elsewhere. President Clinton signed into law a proposal requiring managed-care plans participating in Medicaid and Medicare to allow such counseling and referral. But the proposal had a conscience exemption. Here’s the Medicaid language (here and in what follows, italics are added for emphasis):

[Protecting enrollee-provider communications] shall not be construed as requiring a Medicaid managed care organization to provide, reimburse for, or provide coverage of, a counseling or referral service if the organization … objects to the provision of such service on moral or religious grounds …

Such an organization had to notify enrollees of such a morally based policy when they sign up for the plan. Virtually identical language, under the heading “Conscience Protection,” was applied to Medicare+Choice plans.

These provisions were signed into law on August 5, 1997, as part of the Balanced Budget Act of 1997. The final conference report had been approved by the Senate 85 to 15, with these provisions accepted by Senators Reid, Mikulski, Durbin, Boxer, Murray, Leahy, Inouye, Landrieu, Dorgan, and other progressive lawmakers who now oppose similar language amending PPACA.

Sometimes a president has to sign particular provisions he does not personally favor, as part of an overall law that he sees as essential for other reasons. But that was not the case here. In 1998, the Clinton administration, on its own initiative and its own authority, addressed this same issue of enrollee-provider communications in the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). The Clinton regulation states:

Providers, health care workers, or health plan sponsoring organizations are not required to discuss treatment options that they would not ordinarily discuss in their customary course of practice because such options are inconsistent with their professional judgment or ethical, moral or religious beliefs.

So not only did an organization sponsoring a health plan not have to cover services against its religious beliefs or moral convictions—it didn’t even have to talk about any such service (or let its providers talk about them). Fourteen years later, no member of Congress has contested this policy.

The following year, 1999, President Clinton signed into law an appropriations rider requiring most health plans offered in the FEHBP program to provide contraceptive coverage. But even that mandate exempted “any existing or future plan, if the carrier for the plan objects to such coverage on the basis of religious beliefs.” Abortion was explicitly excluded from the mandate as well. As for health plans that did provide contraceptive coverage because their issuer had no religious objection to it, those plans could be denied participation in FEHBP if they decided to “subject any individual to discrimination on the basis that the individual refuses to prescribe or otherwise provide for contraceptives because such activities would be contrary to the individual’s religious beliefs or moral convictions.”

This policy, too, remains in law, having been reaffirmed by Congress every year since as part of the annual appropriations process.

Finally, on November 22, 2000, President Clinton signed into law a District of Columbia Appropriations Act for Fiscal Year 2001 that provided:

Nothing in this Act may be construed to prevent the Council or Mayor of the District of Columbia from addressing the issue of the provision of contraceptive coverage by health insurance plans, but it is the intent of Congress that any legislation enacted on such issue should include a “conscience clause” which provides exceptions for religious beliefs and moral convictions.

Congress approved this language because the D.C. city council had approved a contraceptive mandate for health plans in the District without a conscience clause. Mayor Anthony Williams pocket-vetoed that law. Congress and the president then acted to prevent such a mandate from passing in the future without clear protection for moral and religious objections. The appropriations act incorporating this provision passed the House without objection, and the Senate by unanimous consent. This provision, too, has been reaffirmed by Congress every year since then.

This Clinton legacy was no departure from party orthodoxy. In 1994, with the support of Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell (D-ME), Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-NY) brought to the Senate floor a “Health Security Act” approved by the Senate Finance Committee which he chaired—one of several (ultimately unsuccessful) efforts to enact a comprehensive health care reform law during the Clinton years, over heavy conservative opposition. The Moynihan bill included this extensive provision “relating to religious belief or moral conviction”:

Nothing in this title shall be construed to—

(1) prevent any individual from purchasing a standard benefits package which excludes coverage of abortion services, if the individual objects to abortion on the basis of a religious belief or moral conviction;

(2) prevent any employer from contributing to the purchase of a standard benefits package which excludes coverage of abortion or other services, if the employer objects to such services on the basis of a religious belief or moral conviction;

(3) require any health professional or health facility to perform or assist in the performance of any health care service, if the health professional or facility objects to performing or assisting in the performance of such a service on the basis of a religious belief or moral conviction; and

(4) require any commercial insurance company, Blue Cross plan, integrated health plan, or any other organization that assumes health insurance risk to offer a package including abortion or other services, if the health plan sponsor objects to covering such services on the basis of a religious belief or moral conviction.

The conscience protection afforded by the Blunt/Fortenberry bill is modest compared to that proposed by Senator Moynihan.

Finally, what of the man hailed as the “Liberal Lion” of the Senate during this period, Senator Edward “Ted” Kennedy? He was prime sponsor of the Health Insurance Bill of Rights Act of 1997 (S. 353). It proposed the same policy on “medical communications” between health insurance issuers and their enrollees that President Clinton would sign into law for Medicare and Medicaid: instead of providing counseling and referrals for procedures it objects to, an insurance issuer could simply inform enrollees of “the coverage’s limitations on providing particular medical services (including limitations on referrals for care provided outside the coverage) based on the religious or moral convictions of the issuer.” The Kennedy bill, which did not pass, would have incorporated this conscience policy into a new section of the Public Health Service Act.

Senator Kennedy’s interest in health care rights of conscience spanned his political lifetime. During his final illness he wrote a letter to Pope Benedict XVI, stating, “I believe in a conscience protection for Catholics in the health field, and I’ll continue to advocate for it as my colleagues in the Senate and I work to develop an overall national health policy that guarantees health care for everyone.” He had also supported the first major federal conscience law in 1973—the Church amendment, sponsored by Senator Frank Church (D-ID). That law has for thirty-nine years protected the right of health care institutions to continue receiving federal funds while declining to take part in abortion or sterilization—and the right of individual health care professionals to be free from discrimination in these areas when they apply for medical education or training or hospital privileges. The Church amendment also allows an individual working in programs funded by the Department of Health and Human Services to decline participation in literally any medical or research activity that is “contrary to his religious beliefs or moral convictions.” (For the texts of this and other conscience laws see the fact sheet, “Current Federal Laws Protecting Conscience Rights.”)

Some have pointed out that between 2001 and 2007, Senator Kennedy sponsored bills to create a nationwide contraceptive mandate in health plans, and these bills did not include a conscience clause. But if any of these bills had ever been marked up in committee, everyone knew at the time that the framing of conscience language was one of the tasks the lawmakers would have to take up.

The fact is that while one of the Kennedy contraceptive bills was the subject of a Senate committee hearing in 2001, none of them was ever reported out of any committee in House or Senate—despite Democrats’ control of the Senate from 2001 to 2003, and their control of both chambers of Congress and the White House from 2007 to 2010. No federal legislative body of any party has ever voted to make private employers include contraceptive coverage in their health plans, with or without a conscience exemption. That did not happen until PPACA gave new authority to unelected officials at the Department of Health and Human Services—who then redefined “preventive services” to include contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs.

Hypocrisy or bad short-term memory can be a bipartisan sport. In the recent health care reform debate, Democrats have asked Republicans: How did the mandate for each person to buy health insurance become a hated paradigm for overreaching by the federal government, when the idea has appeared in Republican proposals for health care reform in the past? That’s a fair question.

But Democrats in turn haven’t answered this question: How did respect for religious beliefs and moral convictions in health care and health coverage, until recently a common bipartisan consensus, become “dangerous and wrong” (as HHS Secretary Sebelius said of the Blunt/Fortenberry bill on March 1)? How did a position held even a few years ago by so many celebrated Democratic leaders in Congress and the White House suddenly become a “Republican war on women”? If this radical shift does not signal a new animosity toward freedom of conscience and freedom of religion, what does it signify?

It’s a fair question. Answers, anyone?

Richard M. Doerflinger is Associate Director of the Secretariat of Pro-Life Activities, U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

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The few studies conducted of women who have terminated following a prenatal diagnosis reveal that these women consider themselves mothers and their fetuses with Down syndrome to be their children. Rafie and Winsor’s response does not explain how national groups’ fighting for these unborn children will overcome the reasons these mothers cite for why they still abort: the burden they think Down syndrome will be for these children and the lack of societal support for them.

Since the advent of prenatal testing, the medical establishment has recognized that balanced information and support are needed for its ethical administration. In the early 1990s, the National Institutes of Health sponsored a workshop on women and prenatal testing. Though it happened two decades ago, the very same issues I wrote about in the “Prenatal Testing Sham” were identified by the academic and medical leaders who attended that workshop.

In a statement the NIH workshop issued, they identified necessary steps for the ethical administration of prenatal testing, including:

1. Prenatal testing should not be used to pursue eugenic goals;
2. Prenatal testing should be meticulously voluntary;
….
4. Prenatal testing should emphasize genetics information, education and counseling rather than testing procedure alone; and,
….
6. Prenatal testing may further stigmatize individuals affected by a particular disorder or disability.

The medical community has known the standards that should be met for the administration of prenatal testing but has repeatedly failed to meet them. For this reason, national Down syndrome organizations should fight to hold medical organizations and the testing laboratories that develop and profit from prenatal testing accountable. At the same time, these organizations must rely on and partner with the medical community if expectant mothers are ever to receive information that addresses their reasons for aborting.

The two most influential sources of information on which expectant mothers say they rely in making their reproductive decisions following a prenatal diagnosis are: (1) their treating medical professional, and (2) educational materials, either provided to them or that they find on their own. The medical community, therefore, is effectively the gatekeeper for accurate information. For national and local Down syndrome groups to make it past the threshold of many doctors’ offices, the medical profession must be assured that their patients’ myriad of perspectives in this pluralistic society will not be subjected to directive pro-life counseling. This very real barrier to partnering is evidenced by the consensus statement that Rafie and Winsor criticize in their original column. In order for medical organizations to work with the national Down syndrome groups, they first sought assurance that the Down syndrome organizations were not pro-life.

With all this said, one hopes this dialogue does not prevent passionate advocates for individuals with Down syndrome, born and unborn, from engaging with national and local Down syndrome organizations. Instead, it should serve as an impetus for concerned individuals to become engaged in the moral challenges posed by the current administration of prenatal testing. Such a dialogue should guide these passions and energies. Partnering is needed, not a hardening of opposing views between pro-life advocates and the medical community. This partnership can produce the information and resources that expectant mothers need when they are considering abortion following a prenatal diagnosis.

Mark W. Leach is an attorney from Louisville, Kentucky, pursuing a Master of Arts in Bioethics.

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Leach disagrees with our assessment that the Down syndrome advocacy movement’s problem is that it will not face the abortion issue head-on. He argues that a “pro-life agenda,” even if it should succeed in policy, will not stop women from aborting after a Down syndrome diagnosis. It would be better, he argues, to counter the new federal mandates concerning increased prenatal testing, and to increase funding for educational outreach aimed at parents who receive the diagnosis.

We agree with a number of Leach’s points, although he also addresses arguments that we did not make. For example, we did not criticize the National Down Syndrome Society (NDSS) and the National Down Syndrome Congress (NDSC) for not being overtly pro-life. We don’t expect that of them. We do, however, hope to draw attention to advocacy that vilifies the new threat of increased prenatal testing, and yet turns a blind eye to the abortion that actually kills the baby. Likewise, we did not pinpoint the “availability of abortion” as the issue Down syndrome advocates are failing to tackle. Rather, we argued that abortion is a problem that can no longer be ignored.

In saddling our perspective with the term “pro-life agenda” and then defining that agenda, Leach distorts our message. He misconstrues the pro-life agenda as a narrow and single-minded movement to overturn Roe v. Wade, and then attempts to persuade the reader that abortion restrictions can’t save babies diagnosed with Down syndrome. We disagree with his conclusion, but we also never argued that Down syndrome advocates should take on Roe v. Wade.

He writes, “Furthermore, they criticized the NDSS and the NDSC for assuring the medical community during a consensus meeting that they were not pro-life organizations. Advocating that a fetus has as much of a right to life as any of us, and that Roe v. Wade should be overturned, however, isn’t enough.” He is correct that we question the prudence of the Down syndrome advocates’ proclamation that they would not be advocating on behalf of the unborn baby with Down syndrome; we are also critical of their failure to express strong opposition to selective abortion, the preferred “solution” of the very professionals with whom they were meeting. Just because we question their approach, however, does not mean that we expect them to proclaim support for overturning Roe v. Wade.

In our article, we suggested and recommended a subtle shift in advocacy perspective, one that looks at the baby in the womb as a member of the Down syndrome community. Is it unreasonable to ask the national Down syndrome organizations to examine their “abortion-neutral” position, which is, in fact, fully supportive of abortion rights?

There are myriad abortion policy initiatives that would not eliminate abortion, but would lower abortion rates after a prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome. Leach mentioned one possibility in his response to our article: he suggested that $16,000 in Medicaid funds would be better spent on therapy for children with Down syndrome than on an abortion at 30 weeks. Of course, we agree. We recently supported a parent testifying against state funding for the abortion of babies with “gross malformations.” None of the local affiliates from the national Down syndrome organizations showed up alongside our representatives, despite the fact that those testifying for continued state funding persuasively described why they had aborted their babies with Down syndrome.

Leach says that

NDSS and NDSC must assure the medical community that they are not pro-life organizations. They must do so because, otherwise, such [balanced, up-to-date, accurate] information is viewed skeptically as being a pretext for a pro-life agenda. This skepticism can further result in practitioners not referring their patients to responsible, caring parent support organizations where mothers report finding the most accurate information about Down syndrome, because their physician is concerned that instead, their patients will be browbeaten with a pro-life message during a very emotional and difficult time.

Because we work with MDs, geneticists, social workers, and neonatologists, we understand this concern. The truth of the matter, however, is that where there is trust, there are referrals to responsible, caring parent organizations, like our own, that encourage welcoming a baby after a prenatal diagnosis. Even if they are initially skeptical, we know that medical professionals are willing to embrace options when they see that their patients are well cared for and supported. The national Down syndrome organizations have had local affiliates in communities all over the country for years. If they are not receiving referrals from OB-GYNs and other professionals, that is not the fault of the pro-life movement.

In our original article, we quoted Dr. Brian Skotko, a colleague of Leach, whose perspective, we believe, illustrates how and why the national Down syndrome organizations have not yet faced the problem that abortion poses for the Down syndrome community. In a USA Today column, Dr. Skotko wrote, “I care deeply that patients receive accurate, up-to-date, balanced information so they can make informed decisions. Yet, as a physician, I am not in the business of telling expectant couples what pregnancy decisions they should be making when their fetus has Down syndrome. That is their decision.”

The disconnect between advocates’ concern that parents make decisions with accurate information, and their clinical disinterest in the eventual outcome of the unborn baby with Down syndrome, is troubling. If advocacy efforts surrounding prenatal diagnosis focus only on the goal of informed decision-making, and the majority of even well-informed parents still decide to terminate, can we deem that advocacy successful? Would it be “inaccurate” to suggest to parents that while abortion is an option available to them after prenatal diagnosis of Down syndrome, it is not the best one?

If Down syndrome advocates cannot state with certainty that abortion is not the best option available, then why do they insist, along with those of us who are pro-life, that there is a problem with the rate at which babies with Down syndrome are aborted?

Leach claims that “leadership is needed to effect change in the medical community to provide balancing information, and in society to support these families.” We suggest that the leadership in the national Down syndrome organizations not allow the perceived opinions of medical professionals, pro-choice advocacy professionals, or any other single sphere of influence to define their terms of advocacy. Instead, we encourage them to embrace, from the start, those for whom they advocate—those with Down syndrome. Fight for them, defend them, from the moment they are diagnosed, with the same passion and perseverance that every person deserves.

Monica Rafie and Tracy Winsor are founding partners in the work of BeNotAfraidMinistry, an outreach to parents grappling with prenatal diagnosis. Monica and Tracy are contributing writers for HLI America, an educational initiative of Human Life International. Their recent articles may be found at HLI America’s Truth and Charity Forum.

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Such conservative-libertarian divisions are not new. They were long subdued in America by awareness of the existential threat posed by Soviet Communism to freedom around the globe. In 1989, however, the glue provided by that common enemy began unraveling. Other fractures have since opened and widened. These are driven by many factors, including increasingly opposed visions of sexual ethics and longstanding divergences concerning the law’s role vis-à-vis public morality.

In some ways, the rise of Barack Obama has created a new common adversary. Self-described conservatives are generally appalled at the Obama administration’s promotion of policies that facilitate lifestyle liberalism. Libertarians are deeply unhappy with the administration’s expansion of the state’s economic role. There are also many who oppose both the administration’s social and economic policies. They regard this combination as reflecting the administration’s unspoken core commitment to modern liberalism à la John Rawls: one that, in the name of equality, promotes lifestyle liberalism alongside a social-democratic economic agenda.

That said, many of the cracks identified by Wenzel and Schlueter are real. Many libertarians note that some conservatives seem only belatedly to have grasped economic liberty’s importance for the common good. Many conservative politicians, libertarians observe, have presided over fiscally expansionist policies that have contributed significantly to America’s ruinous public debt. The same conservatives often succumbed to the soft corruption of pork-barreling to bolster their reelection chances.

Conversely, conservatives wonder why many libertarians, given their purported resistance to social engineering by the state, apparently support efforts to use government power to further weaken the pre-political natural institution of marriage. More generally, they regard some libertarians’ claim that the state should not, as a matter of principle, promote one view of the good over another to be a self-refuting proposition. For to say that law ought not concern itself with what constitutes human flourishing is to breach one’s own claims to neutrality about the state’s responsibilities vis-à-vis human fulfillment (not least by using the language of obligation).

There are, however, other dimensions to this conservative-libertarian debate that merit closer attention. One is the difficulty in navigating the discussion, given the various standpoints that invoke these words in often contrasting ways.

Consider some of those happy to identify themselves as conservatives. They range (to name just a few) from Kirkian traditionalists, Oakeshottian conservatives, and social conservatives, to neoconservatives, conservative liberals, fiscal conservatives, agrarians, and isolationists. Under the libertarian label we find self-described virtue libertarians, classical liberals, philosophical hedonists, paleolibertarians, isolationists, miniarchists, anarcho-capitalists, and Randians, among others.

Between these two broad churches there is often overlap. Self-identified free marketers, for example, are found in both camps. Considerable disagreement also exists within each camp’s boundaries. Neoconservatives generally clash with conservative isolationists on foreign policy. On many foundational issues, virtue libertarians are at odds with philosophical hedonists.

These often tortuously drawn distinctions indicate many things, but they especially highlight the sheer volatility—and, at times, worthlessness—of post-Enlightenment political terminology.

Take, for example, the word “liberal.” The large number of often-opposed positions claiming to be liberal indicates, as John Finnis observes, that “the term ‘liberal’ has no core of meaning sufficiently stable and clear for use in a general political philosophy or theory.” Some liberals maintain, in the name of liberalism, a strictly limited view of the state’s economic role. Others claim that liberalism translates into strongly interventionist economic policies. Obviously, many principles and prudential judgments inform these dissimilar understandings of the state’s economic responsibilities. It’s unclear, however, how the words “liberal” or “liberalism” clarify what is at stake. Even qualifiers such as “classical” or “modern” don’t always help, given that their precise content is also disputed among those adhering to such positions.

Another characteristic of contemporary political syntax is that it often disguises shared—and troubling—commitments undergirding the thought of some conservatives and libertarians. A prominent case is the philosophical skepticism that informs the position of several prominent conservative and libertarian figures.

As a “pragmatic conservative,” the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott questioned whether reason could serve as the foundation of any non-empirical, non-positivist truth claim. He consequently looked to inherited habits, social conventions, and traditions to provide such ballast. Writing as a “classical liberal,” Friedrich Hayek stated in his Constitution of Liberty “that in some respects the liberal is fundamentally a skeptic.” Hayek subsequently embraced social evolutionist theories to ground his various philosophical and economic arguments.

Oakeshott and Hayek were partly reacting against the abstract constructivist reason they linked with René Descartes. But their views also reflect a long tradition of philosophical skepticism that many associate with Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, though it’s traceable as far back as the Greek Sophists of the fifth century B.C.

Neither Hobbes nor Hume denied that humans possess reason. Rather, they argued, it is essentially instrumental in character. In Hobbes’s words, “The Thoughts are to the Desires as Scouts and Spies to range abroad, and find a way to the things desired.” If this is true, then people cannot know the proper ends of human choice through reason.

On this basis, some conservatives insist we need a strong state. This, they hold, is the only way we can have order in societies in which everyone will otherwise do as they feel in the absence of significant coercion. By contrast, some libertarians regard the same conclusion as implying a sharply limited role for government. Regarding all philosophical and moral positions as ultimately subjective, they claim it is unfair for the state to privilege any one view about the good.

There are three reasons why this often unconscious but sometimes deliberate embrace of philosophical skepticism by some conservatives and libertarians should be challenged. The first is simple: skepticism is self-refuting. And if a basic principle of logic is that self-contradictory theses should be discarded, self-identified conservatives and libertarians should have long ago dispensed with skepticism.

Perceptive critics of skepticism have illustrated that the concern to be reasonable and avoid self-deception about reality is the starting point of any quest for philosophical truth: i.e., the very knowledge that skeptics believe we can’t know. What reason could skeptics therefore have for desiring to comprehend that, in the final analysis, all is unknowable, unless they are engaged in a quest for truth? In other words, skeptics draw their deduction that we should be philosophical skeptics from foundational assumptions they cannot doubt.

Also self-refuting is the common skeptic claim that reason is purely instrumental. For to defend this position, the skeptic’s reason necessarily engages in a non-instrumental task. He presumes it is good to know the truth of skepticism, and on grounds of reason rather than feelings. It is thus inconsistent for skeptics to assert that all philosophical viewpoints are arbitrary opinions. When skeptics posit that humans can only be motivated by sentiment rather than reason, they are not proposing this statement as their own impetuous preference. They claim to be making a rational judgment.

The second reason why conservatives and libertarians should reject philosophical skepticism is that such refutation is essential if meaningful discussion between the two camps is to occur. For if people cannot know philosophical and moral truth through critical reasoning and debate, then they are reduced to marshaling merely ideological claims against one another, and/or making sure they accumulate more power than those with whom they disagree.

A third reason for conservatives and libertarians to disown skepticism is that it would pave the way for serious reflection about the nature of something that both camps claim to value—free choice. For if, as Hume stated, reason is the slave of our passions, then our choices aren’t free in the sense that it is my free will that moves me to choose this rather than that. Instead, human acts can only result either from external pressures (as posited by, for example, Karl Marx’s “hard determinism”) or internal factors, such as whatever desire just happens to be haphazardly surging through my consciousness at any given moment. For all his extolling of liberty, John Stuart Mill was essentially a soft determinist. This is apparent from his distinction between two types of choices: those that are “free” in the sense that they occur necessarily but without coercion; and those that were “unfree” because they were coerced.

Rejecting philosophical skepticism doesn’t mean that disagreements among conservatives and libertarians will disappear quickly, if at all. The pervasiveness of disagreement arises from many sources: unexamined assumptions, feelings overriding reason, our capacity to rationalize unreasonable choices, and even reasonable disputes about prudential issues. The fact of disagreement about whether something is good or true, however, doesn’t mean we can’t know whether it is in fact good or true. That is a straightforwardly invalid argument from an “is” to an “ought.”

But in debating disagreements at the level of principle, what should matter is not whether a claim is considered the “true conservative” position, the “authentically libertarian” approach, the “real Hayekian” stance, or the “genuine Burkean” view. What matters is whether a proposition accords with orthós logos—right reason: an idea’s correlation with information, reality, and other principles reasonably identified as true. Affirming this position would be one way to begin releasing reason from the prisons of skepticism, positivism, rationalism, and scientism to which some conservatives and libertarians (not to mention most modern liberals) have unwittingly or otherwise confined it. Therein lies one path for fresh thinking about the good and about rules of political order, not to mention the ends and limits of government.

Samuel Gregg is Research Director at the Acton Institute. He has authored several books, including On Ordered Liberty, his prize-winning The Commercial Society, Wilhelm Röpke’s Political Economy, and his forthcoming Becoming Europe: Economic Decline, Culture, and America’s Future.

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There are serious disputes between these groups. The recent series of essays by Nathan Schlueter and Nikolai Wenzel at Public Discourse provides a near-perfect contrast. In his response to Schlueter’s follow-up essay, Wenzel raised a representative libertarian complaint about conservatives: “The prohibition of pornography, the banning of drugs, privileging heterosexual marriage over other types of associations, and all activities that violate the rights of some can hardly be considered a ‘common’ good.”

In my experience, however, such sharp philosophical divisions are uncommon among both right-leaning voters and right-leaning politicians, neither of whom divide up neatly into conservative and libertarian camps. They don’t know what “methodological individualism” or the “harm principle” are, and they don’t much care. For example:

• One of the best predictors that a member of Congress is a fiscal conservative is whether he or she is a social conservative, and vice versa.
• With the exception of Ron Paul’s foreign policy views, all the leading contenders in the Republican primaries claimed to be standard-bearers of the complete conservative package.
• The Tea Party is often reported to be fixated on fiscal issues, but anyone who attends Tea Party events discovers throngs of pro-life Christians.

Are these people being inconsistent? I don’t think so. I suspect there is a tacit if inarticulate conservative wisdom that recognizes that the libertarian commitment to free markets and limited government is best preserved within a broader conservative context.

Over fifty years ago, National Review’s Frank Meyer made the case for “fusionism,” which joined traditional morality with a defense of liberty and free markets. Meyer and others knew that fiscal conservatism needs social conservatism, and vice versa. A free market allows us to exercise creativity and virtue, for instance, but it also needs a reasonably virtuous citizenry. A population of thieves would create anarchy, not freedom. Unfortunately, the very name fusionism implied that that these were separate concerns that needed to be, well, fused.

In our recent book Indivisible, James Robison and I argue that there are (at least) ten basic principles that not only ground this tacit conservative wisdom but ought to appeal to the “everyman libertarian” who values limited governments, individual rights, and free markets, but is not otherwise committed to a deeply libertarian philosophy. Perhaps the best way to illustrate these principles briefly is to focus not on their philosophical foundations but on the two greatest sources of conflict between libertarians and conservatives: abortion and marriage.

If You Love Freedom, Defend Life

Pro-choice libertarians argue that limited government shouldn’t legislate what happens in the uterus of a woman. This sounds superficially plausible. What they don’t realize is that they are striking at the foundation of their own beliefs, since the case for economic freedom is also a moral one.

“Free trade,” wrote Edmund Burke, “is not based on utility but on justice.” While you might expect Burke to say something like that, consider also the pro-choice atheist Ayn Rand. “Man—every man—is an end in himself,” she insisted, “not the means to the ends of others.” Rand’s followers make the same argument, as do most libertarians. The moral case for economic freedom is invariably rooted in the idea that every human being, whatever his or her race, age, or social status, has inherent dignity. Even at the Randian extreme, the notion persists, though hanging in mid-air, that a human being is valuable and should be free because of what he or she is, apart from whether he or she is useful to anyone else. (Rand maintained her pro-choice stance only by denying, implausibly, the humanity of the unborn.)

The intrinsic value of the individual is the foundation of the pro-life position, too. It is why pro-lifers argue that the government should protect the life of the unborn, the elderly, and the infirm, and should prohibit scientific procedures that destroy human embryos. “Human life cannot be measured,” said the late Pennsylvania Governor Robert Casey in a speech at the University of Notre Dame in 1995. “It is the measure itself. The value of everything else is weighed against it.”

Most libertarians support a limited government, not an absence of government. The central role of government—its core competency—is to maintain the conditions in which individual initiative, personal freedoms, and personal property are protected under the rule of law. Those conditions do not include the “freedom” of some to violate the basic rights of others.

Protecting innocent, pre-born, human life, then, is not only consistent with economic freedom; as Ron Paul understands, it is one of the prerequisites of freedom. That is why libertarians committed to freedom should be pro-life.

Marriage: A Limited Government Recognizes Pre-Political Realities

It’s fairly easy to connect the pro-life and pro-freedom causes. The right to life is inscribed in the Declaration of Independence alongside the rights to liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It’s less obvious how those who believe in limited government could also believe that the government should favor conjugal marriage. Shouldn’t the state get out of the marriage business altogether, and just treat us all as individuals? If two men want to get “married,” for instance, where does Big Brother get off telling them they can’t? As Nikolai Wenzel argues, “Privileging heterosexual marriage over other types of associations . . . can hardly be considered a ‘common’ good.”

The problem with this line of reasoning is that it ignores what marriage is. Marriage is a public institution with public consequences. We’re having this debate because marriage is about public recognition and approval, not private feelings and vows. “Including homosexuals within marriage,” observes Andrew Sullivan, a supporter of same-sex marriage, “would be a means of conferring the highest form of social approval imaginable.”

Philosophically, I would argue that libertarians often miss this point because their commitment to individual rights and “methodological individualism” lacks the equally important commitment to our inherent and specific sociality, which includes the universal institution of marriage.

But let’s set that aside and focus just on the libertarian commitment to the individual. Ironically, redefining marriage would strike at the foundation of individual rights. A limited government doesn’t try to redefine reality as the Orwellian governments of the twentieth century did. A limited government recognizes and defends certain realities outside its jurisdiction. Our government doesn’t bestow rights on us as individuals. We get our rights from God. A just and limited state simply acknowledges and protects the rights that already exist.

The individual is one pre-political reality; marriage is another. It transcends every political system. Even cultures that have taken homosexual acts in stride, such as the ancient Greeks, still knew that marriage was for a man and a woman. The question is not what people would like to do, but what marriage is. Since only a man and a woman can mate, marriage always has a special relationship to bearing and raising children.

Since so many different cultures and religions have recognized and protected marriage, we should conclude that it’s based on human nature and is not merely a social convention that we’re free to change once progressives capture the Supreme Court or the state legislature. Our very biology testifies to this. Every healthy individual has biological systems that are complete in themselves. Only our individual sexual organs are intrinsically incomplete. They can only achieve their primary purpose when joined with another human being of the opposite sex. No doubt this is why few cultures until recently ever had a widespread debate about the nature of marriage. It was obvious.

In fact, marriage is far more universally recognized than are our ideals concerning individual rights and equality. Each of us is, by nature, a person in relationship. And marriage, a unique union of a man and a woman, is one of our most basic human relationships. Appealing to nature and nature’s God to defend individual rights and equality, which most cultures have not recognized, while ignoring the universal testimony of nature and culture on marriage, is like sawing off the branch you’re sitting on. Put another way, you can’t make war on the source of our natural rights and then appeal to it for help.

Just as government may not redefine our rights as individuals, it has no authority to redefine marriage. Communism was totalitarian because it tried to redefine the individual, to create a new “Communist Man.” (It also tried and failed to redefine marriage.) We’re now struggling with another totalitarian impulse to redefine reality. If the state, working hand in glove with most of the media, can redefine a universal institution rooted in human nature, what can’t it redefine?

We conservatives need to strengthen our base without alienating our near allies. One way to do that is to show how the central convictions of “everyman libertarians” can find a peaceful repose in a conservative home.

Jay W. Richards is Director of the Center on Wealth, Poverty, and Morality at the Discovery Institute, a Visiting Scholar at the Institute for Faith, Work, and Economics, and co-author, with James Robison, of the New York Times bestselling book Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family, and Freedom Before It’s Too Late.

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This view, however, is mistaken, and sober libertarians should acknowledge that conservatives are much more their friends than are liberals. That is, conceding (merely for the sake of the argument) that libertarianism is correct and conservatism is an incorrect understanding of the role of government, libertarians still ought to see that conservatism is far less hostile than contemporary liberalism is to the individual liberty that libertarians seek to protect.

It is true that conservatives often defend morals legislation, and that libertarians view this as an intrusion into the realm of personal liberty similar to liberal business regulations’ intrusion into the realm of economic liberty. Nevertheless, libertarians err to the extent that they think this means that conservatism represents an opposite but equal threat to liberty as liberalism. The key difference between the two is that conservatism, unlike contemporary liberalism, contains resources within itself that limit its impulse to regulate human behavior through law.

In the first place, for conservatives, the standards that justify such regulation are relatively fixed and knowable in advance. Ordinary conservatives like to see the law reflect traditional morality. But tradition, by definition, is not subject to much change. More philosophically inclined conservatives might seek morals legislation that reflects their understanding of the natural law. Natural law, however, is understood to be part of the permanent order of things and is therefore, by definition, fixed and unchangeable. Thus conservatives are not going to be found continually introducing new subjects of moral regulation, or constantly revising and expanding the scope of government.

Liberals, in contrast, can be expected to do so and in fact are routinely found doing so. They cannot acknowledge any settled limits to governmental authority because of their belief in progress, a process to which they are unwilling to assign any endpoint. Moreover, liberals’ conception of progress is intimately bound up with the expansion of state authority, since they view government as an important, and usually the chief, tool by which social and economic wrongs are to be ameliorated. The extent of economic and social regulation that was sufficient and admirable to liberals of a generation or two ago would be derided as utterly inadequate and inhumane by today’s liberals. There is every reason to believe that the liberals of the next generation will demand an even more extensive role for government.

This liberal overreach explains why the conservative defense of traditional morality frequently involves no intrusion on individual liberty at all but merely an effort to resist liberals who would use the power of government to rewrite traditional morality or make individuals conform to what liberals regard as modern morality. For example, the conservative defense of traditional marriage does nothing to limit individual freedom, since it would merely deny governmental recognition to same-sex unions while leaving homosexuals free to live however they wish. Similarly, when conservatives oppose the expansion of anti-discrimination laws to cover sexual orientation, they are not seeking to impose their views on others but merely defending the right of individuals to conduct their economic affairs according to traditional moral standards if they so wish.

In the second place, the conservative appetite for government regulation finds an internal constraint in the conservative belief in a flawed or imperfect human nature. Religious conservatives understand this in terms of the fall of man—the weakness in human nature arising from original sin—while secular conservatives simply content themselves with the empirical observation that most humans rarely reach a very high moral standard, and draw the conclusion that there are limits within human nature preventing such elevation. In any event, most conservatives of whatever stripe recognize the imperfection of human nature as a limit on the good to be achieved through legislation and regulation of the lives of individuals. This disposition arises in part from an appreciation of the limits of what can be achieved for the governed by attempts at improving them through law. Since man is inherently flawed, it can be a source of needless conflict and unhappiness for the law to set an unreasonably high standard. The respect for limits also arises from the recognition that a flawed human nature means that the humans who administer government are flawed, too. That is, conservatives see that we cannot expect any clean, simple gain from increasing the government’s power to “do good,” since the very people who wield that power are imperfect and often tempted to abuse it.

The liberal is much less sensitive to such limits. Contemporary liberals tend to believe less in an inherently flawed human nature than in the idea that human beings have been corrupted by unenlightened and unjust social institutions. Accordingly, they favor the progressive correction of such social institutions through what they claim are centrally administered rational reforms—while conservatives and libertarians alike believe such claims of rationality are hubristic folly. The very thing that conservatives view as a caution against government-led social and economic reforms, the imperfection of human conditions, liberals regard as an ongoing invitation to further government intervention. And if conservatives are correct that human nature is inherently flawed, then liberal efforts at governmental control will never cease to expand: every regulation that liberals expect to improve society will in fact create new problems, which liberals will then try to address through further government regulation.

Finally, conservatives, like libertarians, are not egalitarians. This places both in sharp contrast to contemporary liberals. Conservatives believe in a certain equality of basic rights for all, but they do not regard inequalities of achievement, social status, or wealth as intrinsically suspect. On the contrary, they view them as the natural result of a free society in which individuals are left alone to act on their very diverse talents and interests. Put simply, conservatives believe in equality of rights and opportunity to succeed, but not in equality of outcomes.

Dogmatic egalitarianism, however, is one of the deepest impulses of the modern liberal. This is not to say that liberals insist on an absolute equality. Nevertheless, their spontaneous moral reflex is to find inequalities of all kind suspect and to think that they need to be remedied through government intervention. This impulse sets them on the path to unlimited government. As Tocqueville suggests in Democracy in America, people who are fundamentally committed to equality can never be satisfied by existing social conditions. The elimination of each inequality makes the remaining ones stand out even more sharply against the backdrop of general equality. This irritates the mind of the egalitarian and leads him to demand further efforts of government to enforce an ever greater equality.

One can see this restless, insatiable desire for equality in the way that liberals advocated the new health care law when it was being crafted and proposed. Their defense was energized by indignation over inequalities in access to health care, an indignation that was comparable to the anger liberals expressed in relation to past inequalities that had been ameliorated through past programs of government assistance. Precisely because of their dogmatic egalitarianism, they could not defend the new law as a mere societal improvement, but had to frame it as remedying a basic injustice, a step without which we could not claim to have a decent society. Doubtless if the health care law survives the political and legal challenge it now faces, the next generation of liberals will insist, with indignation, that the government role in health care needs to be expanded even further in order to address the remaining inequalities in this area. In fact, some liberals of today frankly admit that the law is merely a step toward a system in which health care is even more comprehensively administered through government. Contemporary conservatives are not in the grip of such egalitarian passions, and so cannot reasonably be viewed by libertarians as an equal threat to individual liberty.

None of this means, of course, that libertarians and conservatives should ignore the real differences between their visions of society. Those differences are important, and they should be debated frankly and vigorously (as has been done at Public Discourse recently). Such debate should not, however, be allowed to impede political cooperation against the common adversary: an egalitarian liberalism whose understanding of the role of government in society far outstrips anything entertained by conservatives or libertarians.

Carson Holloway is a political scientist and the author of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity (Baylor University Press).

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President Obama must have skipped that day in constitutional law class at Harvard (and in his years teaching at the University of Chicago). How many things, exactly, are wrong with this picture? For openers, it is hardly “unprecedented” for the Supreme Court to hold an act of Congress unconstitutional. It has been doing so since Marbury v. Madison in 1803. “Extraordinary” is not exactly the right word, either. Depending on how one counts these things, the Court has struck down many scores of acts of Congress, and hundreds upon hundreds of acts of state legislatures. (Again: so much for “unprecedented.”) All of this is just the ordinary, almost humdrum, exercise of “judicial review.” For President Obama to claim that striking down an Act of Congress would be an unprecedented or extraordinary exercise of judicial authority is simply laughable.

And, as if on cue, nearly everybody laughed. The president and his attorney general—and even the president’s old constitutional law professor—quickly backed and filled, explaining that President Obama did not mean that, quite. He’d misspoken, if ever so slightly. The president meant something more nearly like that the justices should defer to Congress’s judgments on matters of constitutionality, and especially so in Commerce Clause cases, where it has been a long, long time since the Court has struck down an act of Congress.

That is, since 1995 and 2000, when the Court, in two landmark cases, invalidated the Gun-Free School Zones Act (United States v. Lopez) and the Violence Against Women Act (United States v. Morrison), respectively. To be sure, the connection to actual commercial transactions was weak in those two cases, but Congress had thought the link sufficient to permit it to legislate. The Court did not defer then. It is not clear why it might be expected to decline to exercise its independent judgment now.

Perhaps what’s different about the constitutionality of Obamacare is the “strong majority” (in the president’s words) that passed the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act? Not likely: it passed the House 219-212, with zero Republican votes, and barely defeated a filibuster in the Senate—neither an overwhelming margin of passage nor a model of bipartisanship.

Is the fact that Congress is “democratically elected” and courts “unelected,” standing alone, sufficient to require courts to defer to Congress on issues of constitutional law? It cannot be.  If it were, judicial review would never be warranted; the Supreme Court would be engaging in improper “judicial activism” every time it found a “duly constituted and passed law” contrary to the Constitution—more than 150 times with federal statutes alone.

To be sure, deference to democratic choice makes sense when a constitutional provision bears a range of meaning and elected officials have acted within that range. But that merely begs the question-in-chief: has or has not Congress acted within the bounds of its limited powers?

That is a classic judicial question. Judicial “restraint,” or “deference,” cannot properly mean abdication of courts’ independent constitutional role, simply because Congress has acted. That would be inconsistent with the Constitution’s deliberate separation of powers and the independence of the branches, notably including the judiciary. The framers thought that making judges “unelected”—making them not subject to political forces—was crucial to fortifying the independence and integrity of their judgment. What we call “judicial review” is really nothing more than the independent power of constitutional interpretation by courts, acting in the course of their ordinary duties of applying the law to decide actual cases. As such, it is a straightforward inference from the separation and co-equal authority of the branches, combined with the supremacy of the Constitution over other law. (Judicial review, a sound doctrine, should not be confused with judicial supremacy, the unsound assertion that whatever the judiciary says binds the other independent branches, no matter how wrong its decision might be. That claim, though often made, is itself contrary to the independence and co-equal authority of the several branches and the supremacy of the Constitution.)

Judicial deference to the political branches means taking seriously their well-considered constitutional views about legislation. The case for deference to Congress’s constitutional judgment is strongest where Congress has actually considered a constitutional problem and thoughtfully resolved it one way rather than another, based upon thorough, careful consideration of facts or realities peculiarly within its competence to evaluate. Often Congress does exactly that. With the Affordable Care Act, not so much: when Nancy Pelosi was asked, “Where specifically does the Constitution grant Congress the authority to enact an individual health insurance mandate?” she famously scoffed, “Are you serious? Are you serious?!” Congress did not give this issue serious thought.

None of this necessarily means the mandate is unconstitutional. Nor does it mean that there is never any such thing as “judicial activism.” (We all know better than that.) Nor does it mean that it is improper for the president of the United States to weigh in with his own arguments about a law’s constitutionality or attempt to persuade the Court of his views. It simply means that President Obama’s vacuous quips do not amount to arguments at all. They are shallow sloganeering.

What is “judicial activism,” then? The phrase is often tossed about imprecisely and thoughtlessly, but it does have meaningful content. In its simplest sense, judicial activism is judicial decision-making contrary to true legal authority. In colloquial terms, it occurs when courts “make up” law without authority to do so: when they invent rights not supported by the text of the Constitution, invent powers not justified by the document’s language and logic, invent jurisdiction or remedies not warranted by law, or otherwise refuse to enforce laws as enacted.

Judicial activism has a flipside, which might be called “judicial passivism”: judicial decision contrary to law in the form of refusal to act in accordance with judicial obligation; allowing unconstitutional exercises of authority; declining to intervene to correct lawless action; unduly deferring to political authorities, when such deference is unwarranted; or adhering to a past precedent even when fully convinced it was wrongly decided. Thus there can be such a thing, ironically, as “activist judicial restraint.” When courts accede to violations by other branches of government, or perpetuate their own past errors, they commit an error that is simply the mirror-image of judicial activism.

There are of course many examples of illegitimate judicial activism—of decision manifestly contrary to law; of plain invention of rights, powers, and results not warranted by the Constitution’s text; or of abdication of judicial duty. But it is hard to say that a decision either way on the constitutionality of the individual mandate would be “activist.” No precedent is squarely controlling, the case pushes limits not before breached, and competing interpretive principles point somewhat in different directions.

So, what was President Obama trying to accomplish? What was he thinking? The answer seems obvious. The president was trying to lobby—woo, cajole, seduce, importune, perhaps intimidate with a presidential shot across the judicial bow—Justice Anthony Kennedy, and perhaps other wavering justices.

The justices voted, at least preliminarily, on the mandate case at their Friday afternoon conference the week of the oral argument. President Obama made his clumsy comments early the next week. The best speculation from informed observers is that the vote in conference leaned against the administration, but was perhaps not fully resolved. Then, someone on the left—perhaps a law clerk, with or without a justice’s blessing—leaked information (unethically) of the Court’s private deliberations to the administration, along with the catch-phrases that the liberal justices thought most likely to persuade the conservative-centrist Kennedy: “judicial restraint,” “deference to democratic choices,” “unelected judges.” Out popped the same types of arguments at a news conference—badly botched by President Obama, for whom such terms are something of a foreign language—in a last-ditch concerted effort by the administration and the left-wing justices to save the day.

Others have speculated that the administration had learned that the case already had been firmly decided, against the validity of Obamacare, and the president elected to launch a pre-emptive political strike against the Court’s anticipated ruling. This seems less likely, given the timing (why not wait until the Court hands down its ruling?) and the poor politics of such a move against the Court. It seems far more probable that Obama believed he could turn the case around by personally telling the Court that it would be “unprecedented,” “extraordinary,” “antidemocratic,” and “activist” to rule against him.

On the merits, none of those buzzwords is apt, as the public derision that followed has made clear. Whether such disingenuous presidential sloganeering will turn any judicial votes remains to be seen.

Michael Stokes Paulsen is University Chair and Professor of Law at the University of St. Thomas, in Minneapolis, and co-director of its Pro-Life Advocacy Center (PLACE).

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Copyright 2012 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

For supporters of the recent HHS mandate that forces religious institutions to buy insurance that makes these items free to their employees and students, the cause served is “reproductive justice.” It was as past president of Law Students for Reproductive Justice that Sandra Fluke testified to Congress—as a victim of injustice who, along with her female peers at Georgetown, suffers from not having contraception paid for her in full.

But what is “reproductive justice”? To help answer that question, perhaps we should first ask: Who is guilty of the injustice? For Fluke, it’s her school that “creates untenable burdens that impede our academic success.” But of course it’s unfair to say that an institution, by not covering the cost of some product, implicitly creates burdens for its female students. My employer, by not covering my preferred allergy medicine, doesn’t create my burden of allergies. My allergy problems are internal to myself. They are, so to speak, natural problems I live with, ones I cannot label as someone else’s fault. Unless I were futilely to blame, say, God or nature.

But I would argue that underneath it all, advocates of “reproductive justice” do blame nature. Nature is the true obstacle to these women’s idea of justice.

Fluke might not put it this way, but radical feminists who cling to terms like “reproductive justice” and “reproductive freedom” are really trying to beat the cards that nature dealt them. They want sexual license outside the scope of what nature provides as the healthiest course—sex with one person for a lifetime. They object to the reality that sex can naturally lead to babies, creating burdens that research shows they’d be best suited to bear with the help of a husband. Underneath sexual liberationists’ wish to overthrow patriarchal traditions of marriage and religious institutions’ principles of sexual ethics, there seems to be a wish to overthrow the most stubborn foundation of all—nature herself.

This thinking was impossible to miss as I read the recent book by staunch activist for reproductive rights Merle Hoffman, Intimate Wars: The Life and Times of the Woman Who Brought Abortion from the Back Alley to the Boardroom. A rambling memoir of her personal life that spares none of the inglorious parts—having an affair with her much-older boss, marrying him and then abandoning him in the last years of his life, hiring doctors with bad records to perform abortions at her clinic, being sued for Medicare fraud—the book reveals Hoffman to be less the mind behind the abortion movement and more an accidental money-maker from it in the New York metropolitan area.

Hoffman is not your average abortion supporter. For one thing, she recognizes abortion as ending the life of another human being. She also recognizes the unconstitutionality of “the right to choose”: “the U.S. Constitution contains no express right to privacy, so the foundational legal pillar of [abortion] is vulnerable.”

It’s refreshing to see someone on the pro-abortion side speak so candidly about the issue. But, if one recognizes abortion as the ending of a life, and concedes that its legality is not protected in the Constitution, then where lies the defense?

One shouldn’t strain too hard to find logic in Hoffman’s memoir. What the book doesn’t offer in a coherent thesis, it does reveal in an underlying theme that discloses the reasoning of those who champion reproductive freedom.

Hoffman started her career working as a receptionist in a medical office, began an affair with the doctor who ran it, and followed his career path to help him start an abortion clinic in New York. Soon, Hoffman was running an abortion clinic herself. With every abortion patient she welcomed, Hoffman grew more and more committed to helping women find reproductive freedom.

After decades of abortion activism in New York, at age 66 she writes that even if abortion ends a life, it is defensible in the pursuit of “true reproductive freedom” for women. As Hoffman puts it, “the anti-choice movement claimed that if women knew what abortion really was, if only the providers had told them the truth, they would never have killed their babies. . . . But women did know the truth, just as I knew it, deep down, when I allowed myself to recognize it. Mothers saw the sonogram pictures, knew that sound bites assuring them that abortion was no different from any other benign outpatient surgery were false—knew that, as the antis say, ‘abortion stops a beating heart.’” Even still, she continues, they were making a “decision so vital it was worth stopping that heart.”

Having witnessed these hearts being stopped for years now, Hoffman admits, “I wasn’t immune to the physicality of abortion . . . but I quickly came to realize that those who deliver abortion services have not only the power to give women control over their bodies and lives but also the power—and the responsibility—of taking life in order to do that.” She continues, “acknowledgment of that truth is the foundation for all the political and personal work necessary to maintain women’s reproductive freedom.”

Unlike other freedoms, reproductive freedom has no basis in nature and no mention in the Constitution; it is not considered a God-given freedom, so to speak. Instead, terms like reproductive freedom are manufactured ideas—ideas that represent what some people want to strive for. Ideas that nevertheless, for women like Hoffman, are worth protecting in law.

Hoffman writes, “the comparative history of abortion is actually the history of power relations between states and their female populations. . . . The battlefields are different, but the war is always the same. . . . True reproductive freedom for women is never under consideration.”

So, getting back to our original question: What is “true reproductive freedom”? If it means absolute sexual license without consequences such as pregnancy and children, then it has the unfortunate attribute of never before existing in history. It’s not a freedom that women have ever fully exercised; it isn’t one that was possessed by women at some time but was taken from them and thus needs to be safeguarded from violators.

Nevertheless, terms like “reproductive freedom” and “reproductive justice” are the rallying cries of such advocates. For Hoffman and her comrades, unwanted pregnancy is an unjust imposition on women who are sexually active. Technology such as contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization have nearly evened the scales of reproductive justice—even if not completely; as long as women have had to pay for these things, they’re still being treated unjustly.

It’s this fringe-feminist thinking that can explain the reasoning behind HHS mandating free contraceptive and abortifacient coverage. But according to this logic, it would be equally unjust for women to pay $300-$500 out of pocket for an abortion. Men don’t have to go through the trouble of getting abortions or bear the financial, physical, and emotional burdens. In a sense, the millions of dollars Hoffman has made from women’s abortions are a testament to her cashing in on what her own logic would call a grave injustice to women.

In her defense, Hoffman would cling to her favorite prop to carry at abortion rallies—the wire hanger, which for her symbolized the purpose of the movement. Hoffman’s solace in her work came knowing that if doctors weren’t performing abortions or prescribing the morning-after pill, women would be taking health risks in pursuing illegal abortions. The “back-alley abortion” argument—another impressive instance of logic—relies on women implying that if they aren’t granted legal ability to end their child’s life in the womb, they’ll hold themselves hostage and threaten both lives if not appeased.

But it’s fair to say this self-destructive turn in logic hasn’t really helped today’s radical feminists. Pitting women against nature, it is running into the ground a movement that started rightly in the name of peaceful ideals. Once they justified mothers ending the lives of their children, they created an unsustainable pillar for the movement—as evidenced by abortion remaining an unsettled issue in America nearly forty years after its legality.

Hoffman describes her own abortion saying, “Now I was joined to the common experience of my sex.” But abortion has never been the common experience of women. For all of history and for most of the world, it’s childbirth—that essential part of womanhood that keeps humanity going. Hoffman never treated herself to the experience of motherhood, until at age 58 she decided to adopt a girl in Russia. But not all women have that luxury. Hers is not quite a picture of reproductive justice.

It’s tragic, really. The fight against nature is a hard and constant fight. In Intimate Wars, Hoffman’s decades-long odyssey fighting the battles for reproductive freedom brings to mind the words of the Greek tragic dramatist Aeschylus: “In war, truth is the first casualty.”

Mary Rose Somarriba is chief operating officer of the Catholic Information Center in Washington, D.C., and managing editor of Altcatholicah.

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Copyright 2012 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.