Human Rights, Sexual Orientation, and Gender Identity at the UN
One of the great achievements of the 20th century is the development of the universal human rights regime. But that regime teeters under the weight of new ideologies, and as it teeters it endangers not just gays and lesbians but everyone.
Better than Our Philosophy: A Response to Muñoz
Our Founding liberal principles aren’t the best invocation against inhuman practices like slavery and abortion because they also produce self-aggrandizement, individualism, willfulness, and a conception of liberty as the absence of constraint.
Why Social Conservatives Should Be Patriotic Americans: A Critique of Patrick Deneen
Rather than reject liberalism for its excesses, we should take up the more modest task of recovering the principles of liberalism once embraced by our founding fathers and Abraham Lincoln.
Reason and Compassion in the Marriage Debate
In their book What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, Sherif Girgis, Ryan T. Anderson, and Robert P. George draw our attention to the question that matters most in the marriage debate—what marriage is—and make a reasonable and compassionate argument for marriage as a one-man one-woman union.
The Future of Marriage: “Why The Inevitable” Is Not Inevitable
Public opinion, the methods and messaging of LGBT activists, and social reality all converge on a simple fact: marriage is worth fighting for and we can win.
Stripping the Constitution
Adam Freedman’s stark proposal in The Naked Constitution that we strip our founding document of its modern and academic glosses shows us that we need to take structural reforms to our Constitution seriously.
The GOP and Social Issues: Sophomoric Arguments at the Wall Street Journal
By discarding its support for life, marriage, and religious freedom, the GOP, contrary to what some party members think, will doom itself to minority status.
Medicine’s Dance with Death
A physician-philosopher argues that modern medicine is oriented toward the dead body because it is no longer informed by an ultimate purpose for human existence.
The Abolition of Man-and-Woman: On Marriage, Grammar, and Legal Strategy
Preserving marriage as a union of man and woman is bound to fail unless we address the true point of contention in the marriage debate, one completely ignored by even the best legal advocates for redefining marriage: the question “what is marriage?”
Potentiality Rightly Understood
From the beginning of its existence a human being is always already a person because personhood belongs to it essentially as an instance of that natural kind. The second of a two-part series.
Potential Misunderstandings
Pro-choice philosophers err in their criticism of the pro-life position because they do not understand potentiality in terms of a being’s essential properties. The first of a two-part series.
Liberty and a Free Press
Can the press still prevent a tyrannical majority opinion as it did in Tocqueville’s time? Second of a two-part series.
Walter Lippmann and the Crisis in Journalism
Progressive journalist Walter Lippman’s 1922 book Public Opinion still offers a relevant critique of the concept of “public opinion” and journalists’ power to shape it. First in a two-part series.
Saving Natural Law from Itself
Naïve proponents and skeptics of the natural law often point to the world “out there” as the source of objective truth (or lack thereof), but the truths of the natural law are to be found through the actions of our intellect.
Life in the ‘Kingdom of Whatever’
The Reformation unintentionally undid the medieval synthesis of faith and reason. Now we romantically seek a spiritual life free from authority and tradition, or rationalistically seek truth as if human beings were autonomous and self-sufficient.
Same-Sex Marriage Ten Years On: Lessons from Canada
The effects of same-sex civil marriage in Canada—restrictions on free speech rights, parental rights in education, and autonomy rights of religious institutions, along with a weakening of the marriage culture—provide lessons for the United States.
Free Speech, the Supreme Court, and Neutral Principles
Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito and Judge Robert Bork argue that the First Amendment gives the people greater deference to determine legitimate speech than the courts.
Taxed for Wearing Their Heads
The Anti-Federalists’ early fear about Congress’s taxing power—that it would result in a tax on humans’ very existence—are now realized in the Supreme Court’s upholding of Obamacare.
