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Public Discourse

“Medical Futility”: Help or Hobgoblin in End-of-Life Discussions?

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Because it is often used imprecisely, the term “futile” can cause confusion and exacerbate conflict in disagreements about end-of-life care. It is more helpful for patients, families, and physicians to discuss the benefits and burdens of medical procedures.
Public Discourse

European Resistance to Cultural Suicide

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Across Europe citizens are fighting back to protect faith, family, and freedom.
Public Discourse

50 Years of Sex Changes, Mental Disorders, and Too Many Suicides

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Early pioneers in gender-reassignment surgery and recent clinical studies agree that a majority of transgender people suffer from co-occurring psychological disorders, leading tragically high numbers to commit suicide. Outlawing psychotherapy for transgender people may be politically correct, but it shows a reckless disregard for human lives.
Public Discourse

What’s Wrong with the Humanities?

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The humanities are declining because too many humanities scholars are alienating students and the public with their opacity, triviality, and irrelevance.
Public Discourse

Science, Philosophy, and God

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An understanding of the transcendence of creation forms the essential foundation of natural science. But does that understanding require revelation?
Public Discourse

Justice Brandeis and the Birth of Liberal Judicial Activism

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The roots of today’s judicial activism stretch back one hundred years to the appointment of controversial Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis, a champion of “sociological jurisprudence.”
Public Discourse

Corporate Personhood and Individual Rights: A Reply to S. Adam Seagrave

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The truth that human beings possess a natural personhood and natural rights is not incompatible with the idea of corporate personhood and rights that exist not by nature but by convention.
Public Discourse

Goodnight, Vienna: What’s Wrong with Saying That Corporations Are People

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Corporations, and civic associations in general, are necessary bulwarks between governmental power and individual citizens—but they’re not people. Now more than ever, we must recover a clear understanding of what it means to be a human person with inherent dignity and natural rights.
Public Discourse

Don’t Eliminate the Filibuster–Restore and Reform It

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With a simple change, the Senate can restore its republican bona fides, give minority points of view an audible voice, greatly reduce the number of filibusters, make incremental gains in the passage of bills important to the majority, and improve the quality of debate.
Public Discourse

The Living Constitution Revisited

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Justice William Brennan’s vision of a living constitution continues to dominate contemporary constitutional interpretation, in spite of its troubling inconsistencies.
Public Discourse

The UN’s Push for “Same-Sex Marriage”

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In direct opposition to international law, both the central UN bureaucracy and individual Member States are aggressively promoting same-sex marriage worldwide.
Public Discourse

The Family and the Force

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The destruction of the Jedi order was due, in large part, to their persistent blindness to the deep, essential, and ineradicable power of familial love. The Skywalkers can bring balance to the Force because they unite it with love learned through family.
Public Discourse

Four Score and Seven Years Later: Reflections on Martin Luther King Jr.

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Today we are called to reflect anew on the vision and legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., not in mere deference to ceremonial custom or civic piety but instead as Lincoln reflected on the Founders, mindful of the crisis of the times.
Public Discourse

Life, Liberty, and Modern Bioethics: A Reply to Cooper and Nuckols

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In its zeal to deal with suffering, modern bioethics fails to account for the rights of the sufferer. There is no law that can legitimize taking a life too soon.
Public Discourse

Balancing the Rights of Patients and Doctors: Another Perspective on a Tragic Case

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When assessing the case of Christopher Dunn, in which some key details remain hazy, we ought to give his physicians and hospital ethics committee the benefit of the doubt.
Public Discourse

Transgenderism Has No Basis in Science or Law

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In a domain in which the proposed “therapies” are so drastic, it is not too much to ask for a solid, evidence-based statement of who is being treated, for what, and why, before writing a prescription or passing a law.
Public Discourse

Conscience, Obamacare Mandates, and Sex-Reassignment Therapies

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No American should be forced to violate his or her moral and religious beliefs, especially when it comes to morally fraught issues in health care.
Public Discourse

Liberty and SOGI Laws: An Impossible and Unsustainable “Compromise”

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Big Business and Big Law are using Big Government to impose their cultural values on small businesses and ordinary Americans. Indiana does not need to create new laws on sexual orientation or gender identity for people who identify as sexual minorities to be treated justly. The best way to protect all Hoosiers is for Indiana not to adopt a SOGI policy at all.
Public Discourse

A Conservative’s Odyssey: Russell Kirk and Twentieth-Century American Conservatism

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Bradley J. Birzer’s intellectual biography of the twentieth-century conservative thinker Russell Kirk highlights the complexities of the American conservative movement and its ongoing challenges.
Public Discourse

A Tragic Case of Modern Bioethics: Denying Life-Sustaining Treatment to a Patient Who Wanted to Live

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In deciding to withdraw life-sustaining treatment from an alert and cognizant patient who was pleading for his life, a Texas hospital’s ethics committee stole from him the two most fundamental rights enumerated in our Constitution: life and liberty.
Public Discourse

Immigration, Citizenship, and Cosmopolitanism

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Traditions, duties, and ideals cannot exist without attachment to particular communities—a man can love his neighbors or his nation, but he cannot love an abstraction like humanity.
Public Discourse

The Danish Girl: People Aren’t Born Transgender, But Playing Dress-Up Can Spark Psychological Problems

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A recent film accurately portrays the deep emotional and psychological problems that transgender people experience, but it fails to address the reality of life after sex reassignment surgery and the need to treat comorbid psychological disorders.
Public Discourse

Joyous Surrender: A Rhapsody in Red (and Green)

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Christmas isn’t tasteful, isn’t simple, isn’t clean, isn’t elegant. Give me the tacky and the exuberant and the wild, to represent the impossibly boisterous fact that God has intruded in this world.
Public Discourse

Christmas and Western Civilization

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Though Christmas is a religious holiday, secularists should appreciate its great contribution to Western Civilization: the lesson that all men are equal in their fundamental human dignity.