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Public Discourse

On Abortion, Medical Science is Still Waiting to be Heard

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Judicial overreach and badly flawed constitutional reasoning were not the worst offenses committed by the Roe court. Far worse was its contempt for facts and truth, which left a cultural wound that continues to fester.
Public Discourse

Keeping the Spotlight on Planned Parenthood

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Do not be distracted by misdirection. Do not let the horror of abortion be the main issue. Stick to the pertinent facts: Planned Parenthood is profiting from the sale of fetal parts. Planned Parenthood is routinely violating federal law. Planned Parenthood does not care about women.
Public Discourse

Joys, Struggles, and Scare Tactics: On Down Syndrome and Abortion

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It’s tempting to make neat calculations based on what we know in the abstract about Down syndrome. But once an actual child enters into the equation—with all of his strengths and foibles, quirks and habits—we don’t get the answer we expected at all.
Public Discourse

Assisted Suicide and Our Society of Autonomy

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The individualism required by a society of autonomy shuts down love, dependence, and self-sacrifice. To extinguish grief, we are told, we must extinguish the grieving.
Public Discourse

Donald Trump, George Will, and the Crisis of American Conservatism

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You can’t beat a flawed moral vision with no moral vision. This is not idealism but hard political reality.
Public Discourse

Give Me Liberty and Give Me Death: Belgium’s Brave New Euthanasia Regime

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Belgium has the most permissive euthanasia laws in the world, and one of every twenty deaths in Belgium is now deliberately caused. Suicide is becoming a moral obligation in a culture that promotes euthanasia as a dignified exit that offers relief to caregivers.
Public Discourse

The Inequality Act: Weaponizing Same-Sex Marriage

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If enacted, the deceptively titled Equality Act would punish dissenters, giving no quarter to Americans who continue to believe that marriage and sexual relations are reserved to the union of one man and one woman.
Public Discourse

The Supreme Court’s 2014-2015 Term: The Year the Administrative State Trembled

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The opinions of the Supreme Court’s most recent term indicate that the court’s conservative justices are rethinking the scope and power of the administrative state.
Public Discourse

Is Lying Ever Justified?

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A new book powerfully examines the most important questions surrounding lying and argues that to assert falsely is to commit an act of self-induced practical schizophrenia.
Public Discourse

The Social Injustice Done to Adjunct Faculty: A Call to Arms

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The time has come. If senior faculty members don’t force the issue of justice for adjuncts, no one else will.
Public Discourse

What’s Driving the Marriage Divide?

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Although economic factors certainly play a role in the growing gap in marriage rates between higher income, college-educated Americans and those with lower levels of education and income, the impact of changing cultural mores should not be underestimated.
Public Discourse

The Unreasonableness of Secular Public Reason

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When voters and legislators act on religiously informed moral convictions in making the law, it may entail a blending of religion and politics that is disquieting to the secular liberal mind, but it closes no gap in the “separation of church and state.”
Public Discourse

What Science Doesn’t Know

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Perhaps it isn’t ignorance that keeps ordinary, non-scientific Americans from accepting what scientists tell them; perhaps it’s their knowledge of and experience with realities which they rightfully judge to be more important than the objects accessible to modern science.
Public Discourse

Slaying the Hydra: Can Virtue Heal the American Right?

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The modern administrative state and our militant secular culture are like two heads of a single hydra. To destroy the beast, we must deal with the monster in its totality.
Public Discourse

In the Cave: How Automation Changes the Way We Interact with Our World

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Good work connects us more deeply to the world around us. By contrast, automation can often alienate us from the physical world, changing the way we think and act.
Public Discourse

Complementarity: Lessons from the Adams Family

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As the history of the Adams family attests, the proper education of the young American requires both father and mother, grandfathers and grandmothers.
Public Discourse

Amy Kass: Teacher, Truth-Teller, Defender of Dignity

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The loss of Amy Kass is incalculable. But what cannot be taken from us are the lessons she taught, not only by precept, but by the splendid example of the life she led.
Public Discourse

What’s Conservative about Radical Traditionalism?

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There are deep flaws in the narrative of decline that blames the Founders’ natural-law liberalism for today’s cultural and political decay.
Public Discourse

Why the “Catholic” “Pro-Life” Case for the Bomb Fails

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No one who claims to be pro-life can say that women, children, the elderly, and indeed, the unborn of a nation may be legitimately targeted with death for the sake of the consequences, however beneficial.
Public Discourse

Marco Rubio Is Right: The Life of a New Human Being Begins at Conception

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Senator Rubio is on the firmest possible scientific ground when he says that science shows that the child in the womb, from the very point of successful fertilization, is indeed a human being.
Public Discourse

The Constitutional Powers of War and Peace

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228 years ago today, the Framers at the Constitutional Convention decided the power to declare war would be reserved to Congress, and the power to conduct war and make peace would be reserved to the president. Presidents and congresses have not always followed the Constitution in matters of war, but that doesn’t mean the Constitution has changed.
Public Discourse

Conservatives, Check Your Privilege

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The idea that some groups are objectively disadvantaged in our society should not be dismissed by conservatives. After all, we believe that we are all embedded in a tapestry of traditions that inform our personal and communal identities.
Public Discourse

The Stakes of Free Exercise

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The Free Exercise Clause creates a unique type of constitutional liberty—a substantive freedom that limits the extent to which government can interfere with religious freedom.
Public Discourse

“Shut Up, Bigot!”: The Intolerance of Tolerance

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Conservatives are called bigots because those who embrace the new sexual mores are beholden to the new tolerance as a plausibility structure. Postmodern liberals cannot comprehend the idea that one could simultaneously reject a belief and accept the person who holds it.