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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.
Public Discourse

The Case of the Pro-Life Movement: On Demography and Marriage

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The future of marriage in the United States may look grim, but so did the pro-life cause look forty years ago. Embattled social conservatives should find hope in the demographic shifts that trailed the legalization of abortion.
Public Discourse

The Unsoundness of Judicial Supremacy

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Decisions of the Supreme Court that go beyond power delegated to the judicial branch or are contrary to the Constitution are null and void. To protect our constitutional republic, citizens, states, and the other branches of the federal government must resist any such decision.
Public Discourse

Religion and the Republic

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A true republic respects religious speech. Such speech represents a different authority from governing power and affirms its limited nature.
Public Discourse

Marriage and the Constitution: What the Court Said and Why It Got It Wrong

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The Supreme Court’s ruling is a significant setback for all Americans who believe in the Constitution, the rule of law, democratic self-government, and marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Will the right of Americans to speak and act in accord with the truth of marriage be tolerated?
Public Discourse

Thanks for Everything, Justice Kennedy

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As a legal opinion, Obergefell is an utter failure, relying as it does on a tenuous and historically ungrounded jurisprudence of “dignity.” The debate over same-sex marriage is not over. A constitutional ruling so shoddily reasoned, so completely and easily dismantled by the dissents, must paper over a cause that cannot ultimately win in an open debate.
Public Discourse

The Practical Wisdom of Chief Justice Ellsworth: Reconsidering the Separation of Church and State

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If good morals are essential for a free republic to endure, and if a certain group of institutions successfully promote those morals, then it follows that a well-governed state may be friendly to those institutions—even if they are churches.
Public Discourse

The Ambiguous Quest for Marriage Equality

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Do proponents of marriage equality want marriage equality or not? The rhetoric of marriage equality does not match the reality. Only if marriage is the union of a man and a woman does it make any sense to have paternity presumed without consent, incest and polygamy prohibited, and custody bestowed upon biological or presumed parents except for cause.
Public Discourse

Lessons from a Life of Hope: Learning from Father Richard John Neuhaus

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Those who would follow in Father Richard John Neuhaus’s footsteps would do well to note these lessons of his life. Religion and vocation matter more deeply than political wrangling, and we must continue to build intellectual families that combine conviviality with fighting for the greatest causes.
Public Discourse

Public Debt, Political Paralysis, and the West

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The West’s struggle with high public debt highlights the inertia and indecision of both governments and citizens in the face of difficult economic choices.
Public Discourse

Democracy Isn’t the Problem: The Benedict Option Meets the Buckley Option

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The “Benedict Option” isn’t the only way for Christians to confront the reality of an increasingly hostile and secular culture.
Public Discourse

Riches, Religion, and the New Atheism

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It’s not that in misery and suffering human beings grasp at foolish theories that give them some hope. Rather, amidst prosperity, human beings can blind themselves to the reality of the human condition and so never ask the questions that, once asked, cannot be plausibly answered except in theistic terms.
Public Discourse

The Courage to Be on the Wrong Side of History: Lessons from Burke and Nietzsche

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Millennials who stand up for family, marriage, and the foundational institutions of civil society make possible a new cultural counter-revolution. The question is, will you join it?