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Public Discourse

A Call for a Unified Party

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The recent Obergefell decision should serve as a wake-up call to conservatives. In particular, conservatives should rethink the Republican Party platform and work to refocus the GOP around the broad theme of “nature.”
Public Discourse

Conservatism, Free Markets, and America’s Post-Obama Economy

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Instead of settling for damage control, now is the time for conservatives to outline a far-reaching pro-market economic reform agenda. Not only should conservatives explain how America’s economy can be changed in ways that promote lasting growth and wider prosperity, but they should also speak in moral terms, presenting a convincing normative alternative to progressivism’s social democratic vision.
Public Discourse

Doing Injustice to the Just Price

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An article in the Journal of Clinical Oncology on the just price of cancer drugs in the United States contains an odd reference to a nonexistent book by Aristotle. Unraveling the origins of this error reveals an almost farcical series of misinterpretations.
Public Discourse

On the Dangers of Thanking God for the Atom Bomb

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There are often great temptations to violate the absolute norms against intentional killing and against lying. On the anniversary of the dropping of the atomic bombs over Japan, we should remember what is at stake in such decisions and how agents constitute themselves in their choosing.
Public Discourse

For Baby, #AnotherBoy, and Millions More: Why I’m Speaking Out about Miscarriage and Abortion

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Having carried life in my womb, I cannot look away. I cannot cloak reality in another name: early pregnancy loss is death, and willful termination is killing.
Public Discourse

Planned Inhumanities: From Roe to Obergefell

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Consider the intellectual consequences of the foundational belief that humanity can be “planned.” Such a belief means that humans can be edited and arranged; it makes children into objects rather than subjects.
Public Discourse

The Dark Side of Third-Party Reproduction

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Third-party reproduction is pitched as a victory for all, a vehicle for creating beautiful families. But the process requires enticing marginalized women to undergo harmful procedures. Moreover, children are created, with no regard for the rights that other children enjoy, to satisfy the desires of wealthy adults.
Public Discourse

Class of ‘59: Our Kids by Robert Putnam

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The nature of poverty has changed substantially over the past fifty years. In Our Kids, esteemed social scientist Robert Putnam compares the conditions and opportunities of the rich and the poor in Port Clinton, Ohio, his hometown, both in 1959 and today. But the government programs that Putnam proposes won’t solve a problem that starts with the family.
Public Discourse

Conservatives and Transgenderism: A Response to Jennifer Gruenke

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Adopting a gender persona is not given. It is something that is developed in response to one’s given sexual identity, which provides a sort of vocation—not a fully determinate life plan, but a structure nonetheless.
Public Discourse

Rethinking the Conservative Approach to Transgenderism

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Conservatives do not take the introspective reports of transgendered people seriously, but there are good scientific reasons for supposing that subjective experience of gender is legitimate, even when it contradicts apparent biological sex.
Public Discourse

Science Contra Hubris

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Good scientific training is strenuous and humbling, because science is unforgiving. To spare society from the imposition of subjective pipe dreams, the prudence characteristic of valid scientific thinking needs to permeate the entire intellectual order.
Public Discourse

What Dante, Tolkien, and Harry Potter Fan Fiction Can Teach Us about the Contemporary Quest for Immortality

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From Dante to Tolkien to Harry Potter fan fiction, mankind has been tempted by the desire to transcend human limitations. This impulse is dangerous, but its dangers are not inexplicable.
Public Discourse

The Equality Act: Bad Policy that Poses Great Harms

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If passed, the Equality Act would empower the government to discriminate against those who do not accept a sexually permissive understanding of human nature that denies sexual complementarity.
Public Discourse

The End of Single-Sex Higher Ed

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As transgender people have increasingly come under the public eye, all-female colleges have caved to pressure to admit trans women—that is, persons identifiably male at birth who now identify as female. But doing so undermines these colleges' mission of educating the next generation of female leaders. Let’s celebrate our differences and our similarities. But let’s not call ourselves something we’re not.
Public Discourse

Surrogacy and Same-Sex Marriage: A Tale of Two Countries

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As skeptics in Ireland feared and the naïve in the United States are now realizing, “marriage equality” inevitably leads to the push for “family equality” through third-party reproduction.
Public Discourse

Popular Culture and the Male Body: A New Challenge

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All those concerned about sexual exploitation must pull together and fight a two-front war against female and male dehumanization.
Public Discourse

Same-Sex Marriage and Interracial Marriage: Not the Same Thing

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Proponents of same-sex marriage often liken opposition to the bigotry that defended anti-miscegenation laws, preventing interracial couples from marrying. The analogy is specious, for the two movements differ entirely in motivation. One seeks to defend an intelligible understanding of marriage; the other sought to achieve racial purity.
Public Discourse

Talking Past Each Other: “Love Wins” vs. Human Nature

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There remain two views on the question of marriage, but they keep talking past each other. One holds that “love wins”—so one shouldn’t stand in the way of love. The other respects the anthropological truth about marriage.
Public Discourse

Defining Marriage

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It is important to hold up the truth about marriage for everyone to see. The first step of explaining, defending, and teaching marriage is defining it.
Public Discourse

“Defactualization” Is Causing American Schools to Become Bastions of Anti-Intellectualism

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Truth has been relegated to a secondary position in the nation’s public schools, universities, political forums, and public squares.
Public Discourse

Gender Identity

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Gender is a way of communicating truths or falsehoods about one’s sex and its corresponding social and cultural roles. An age of gender confusion and rejection calls for reflection on important issues that, in an upright age, would hardly arise. The second in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Sex Identity

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As animals that reproduce sexually, humans in the paradigm case are either male or female, with the sexes specified by reproductive roles they can potentially fulfill. According to this account, it is impossible for someone to change his or her sex, and all attempts to do so involve mutilation. The first of a two-part series.
Public Discourse
  • Art

Boyhood: A Profoundly Human Story

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Richard Linklater’s new film is powerful because it reminds us that the dull, plotless events of our fleeting lives matter in the way in which all quotidian things matter: as Joycean “epiphanies of the ordinary.”
Public Discourse

Justice Kennedy and the Lonely Promethean Man of Liberalism

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Justice Kennedy’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision is anchored in the liberty to “define and express” one’s identity. But this view of man is not as exalted as it seems. According to Kennedy, self-defined man, if he’s unmarried, remains tragically lonely, and without state recognition, might even doubt his own dignity.