Public Discourse

There is no right to lose oneself in a game of chance for the state’s benefit, and more than that there is no good in it. Video keno contracts liberty and virtue while accelerating the state’s colonization of civil society.

President Obama’s recent address to Planned Parenthood’s National Conference sweepingly mischaracterized abortion restrictions and pro-life views as culturally inaccurate and outdated.

Donna Freitas’s new book on the hookup culture rightly encourages students to see its harms, but fails to give them moral reasons for opting out of it.

Total brain death is a valid criterion for pronouncing the death of human beings.

Proposition 8 does not, contrary to Judge Vaughan Walker’s claims, treat equals unequally.

Natural law theory makes a very limited, but very important claim—that there is common ground between all human beings, and particularly between religious believers and non-believers, on which moral disagreements can be rationally adjudicated.

The Boy Scouts are en route to holding that there is nothing to being a boy, and nothing to the boy’s becoming a man; they might as well be the Unisex Scouts, as they are in Canada, where the scouting movement has collapsed.

Complex rather than single causality is the norm, not the exception, for terrorism.

While the ambition guiding today’s young Americans is not the robust, risk-taking ambition of earlier generations, it is still essential to American life; President Obama’s grandiose goals offer just one example. The second of a two-part series.

As an essential part of our character and a reason for our nation’s exceptionalism, ambition in America has been portrayed both as a sentiment to be contained and a virtue to be cultivated. The first of a two-part series.

Our public debate about religious liberty is missing a clear definition of religion. The absence of that definition has generated confusion, frustration, shrill voices, and short tempers.

Children’s relationship to the political community is fundamentally different from that of adults, because it is mediated through their belonging to a family and living under the authority of their parents.

Media voices and progressive activists for same-sex marriage are appealing to judicial fiat because they know they won’t always have public opinion on their side.

People are at the heart of what we are doing in Afghanistan. Novels can help us understand them and their cultures in all their subtlety and complexity.

A new documentary on late-term abortion providers shows us that the abortion debate is much more about why life is valuable than about when human life begins.