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Public Discourse

Grounding Our Right to Religious Freedom

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Our right to religious freedom is best grounded in the universal duty to seek ultimate truth, and not in human autonomy.
Public Discourse

Now That We’re All Haters…

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To defend marriage, we must reframe the narratives that shape our culture and our minds.
Public Discourse

Why Is It So Difficult to Discuss Marriage?

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Redefining marriage will bring profound and perhaps unintended consequences for the ways in which we think of ourselves as men and women, and for the kind of society we live in. Adapted from the Foreword to The Meaning of Marriage (2006).
Public Discourse

Jean Bethke Elshtain: Gifted Thinker and Courageous Woman

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Jean Bethke Elshtain, our editorial board member and Witherspoon Institute Senior Fellow, fearlessly pursued truth irrespective of the prevailing orthodoxies in the academy and the broader intellectual world.
Public Discourse

Losing My Religion: Faith, Family, and the Real Story of Secularization in the West

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In her new book, Mary Eberstadt argues that the West started losing God when it started losing the natural family. If she is right, then churches need to encourage and promote family formation, and religious believers need to form families.
Public Discourse

Dissecting Political Correctness

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To resist the manipulative forces of political correctness, we must speak out and overcome the social isolation that breeds silence.
Public Discourse

A Pulpit for Bullies

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To campaign against the bullying of LGBT people as if disagreement with the gay lifestyle were an evil is itself a form of bullying.
Public Discourse

Collaborative Reproduction and the Things We Should Not Do

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The city council of Washington, DC should consider the psychological damage to children that would come of a new bill legalizing surrogacy contracts.
Public Discourse

Principled Entitlement Reform: Private Ordering Needs Room to Grow

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Private, not public, law enables healthy dependencies by carving out space for communities of people to deliberate together about what to do with the resources available to them.
Public Discourse

A Moral Foundation for Entitlement Reform

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Entitlement reform cannot succeed by eliminating dependence. Instead we should aim to promote healthy dependencies.
Public Discourse

The New Article of Faith for Canadian Law Schools: Same-Sex Marriage

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More evidence from Canada of the danger of allowing the endorsement of same-sex marriage to become a prerequisite to participation in public life.
Public Discourse

Lessons on Conscience Protection from the UK

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Unless Americans respond to the Supreme Court’s recent marriage decisions with greater protections for the rights of conscience, our first freedom is sure to lose force, just as it has in the UK.
Public Discourse

What Are the Rights of Donor-Conceived People?

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Third party reproduction corrupts the parent-child relationship and disrespects the humanity of donor-conceived people.
Public Discourse

The Layman and the Scientist: A Response to Miller

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The layman’s understanding of the world can’t be considered mere guesswork—it’s the necessary starting point for understanding reality.
Public Discourse

Aristotle Can’t Refute Evolution: A Response to Seagrave

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While evolutionary theory shows us that we can’t divide living things into stable, distinct species, this doesn’t mean that it imperils the foundations of knowledge.
Public Discourse

With Malice Toward Some

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Lincoln’s Order of Retaliation—a command to kill Confederate prisoners as punishment for the South’s massacre of black Union soldiers—can help frame our view of presidential military power today.
Public Discourse

My Isl@m’s Quest for Truth

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A young Muslim author learns to seek the truth about God through questioning instead of blind faith.
Public Discourse

The “Mystery of Life” Makes Law a Mystery

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Since our culture has embraced Justice Kennedy’s “mystery of life” philosophy, we lack a coherent framework for making laws that don’t just cater to personal preferences.
Public Discourse

Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Employment Law

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The Employment Non-Discrimination Act would equate sexual orientation and gender identity, ambiguous and malleable concepts, with immutable features like race, color, and ethnicity as classes worthy of special legal protection.
Public Discourse

What Is Religious Freedom?

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In its fullest and most robust sense, religion is the human person’s being in right relation to the divine. All of us have a duty, in conscience, to seek the truth and to honor the freedom of all men and women everywhere to do the same.
Public Discourse

Mary Ann Glendon and the Structure of Religious Freedom

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For its protection and flourishing, religious freedom needs not only limited government but also a social order that gives plenty of room to civic institutions and associations.
Public Discourse

The Legal Circus That Killed Proposition 8

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The process that killed Prop 8 in California should concern anyone who cares about democracy and the rule of law. The cheaters won.
Public Discourse

A Lincoln for Our Times

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In his new book on Abraham Lincoln, Rich Lowry depicts our famous president as a lover of freedom, commerce, and progress whom we revere on the same plane as the founders because he, like them, articulated enduring principles that we still value.
Public Discourse

First New England, Then the Nation: The Spread of Physician-Assisted Suicide

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The expansion of physician-assisted suicide from the West to the East coast makes its legalization in other neighboring states much more likely.