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Public Discourse

We Don’t Need to Redefine Marriage to Fix Policy Problems

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Good public policy can meet the needs of all Americans without redefining marriage.
Public Discourse

Abortion and Our “Moral Sense”

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When intellectual arguments against abortion fail to persuade, recourse must be had to images and strategies that awake what David Hume considered our “moral sense.”
Public Discourse

The Supreme Court’s First Assault on Marriage

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The Supreme Court first put marriage on its track of decline forty-one years ago, when it ruled that states could not limit the sale of contraceptives to unmarried couples.
Public Discourse

I’m Gay and I Oppose Same-Sex Marriage

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While religion and tradition have led many to their positions on same-sex marriage, it’s also possible to oppose same-sex marriage based on reason and experience.
Public Discourse

The Feminine Mystique at Fifty: Time for a New Feminism

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No one wants to return to the 1950s as Betty Friedan characterized them, where women felt blocked from pursuing interests outside the home. At the same time, to insist that stay-at-home moms are trapped, desperate, and unhappy is naïve, insulting, and even damaging to the roots of society.
Public Discourse

Liberalism’s Logic and America’s Challenge: A Reply to Schlueter and Muñoz

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The Founders’ vision of the “common good” was not the pre-modern natural law conception of an objective human good, but a conception of “mutual advantage” shaped by the social contract framework. This logic of liberalism has driven our country to its current political and cultural problems.
Public Discourse

Sustaining American Liberalism in Principle and Practice

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While we should reject misguided claims that our founders adopted political voluntarism, we should follow suggestions for strengthening civic life—and thereby sustain American liberalism—through local government, families, churches, and other civic associations.
Public Discourse

Natural Law Liberalism Beyond Romanticism

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To reject the presence of natural law in documents of the Founding era is to embrace both cynicism and romanticism.
Public Discourse

Sky Fall: Gender Ideology Comes to the Schoolhouse

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Since redefining marriage requires us to deny sexual differences, even school children now have to conform to that principle at the risk of punishment.
Public Discourse

Natural Law is neither Useless nor Dangerous: A Response to Hart and Potemra

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A recent claim to reject the natural law for its uselessness and false claims to neutrality misunderstands the first-personal perspective of contemporary natural law. The second in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Understanding Natural Law: A Response to Hart and Potemra

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A recent claim to reject the natural law risks misunderstanding the role of reason and overlooks the difference between practical reasoning and morality. The first in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Population Decline and the Birth Dearth

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Jonathan Last’s new book attributes population decline and the birth dearth to two trends that started in the Enlightenment era—first, an effort to limit death; second, an effort to control birth. Both trends are guided by a desire to control nature.
Public Discourse

Blessed Are Les Misérables: For Theirs Is the True Philosophy of Law

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Hollywood’s new musical masterpiece illustrates a classical legal philosophy, long lost to our liberal establishment, that serves as a golden mean between tyrannical legalism and libertine antinomianism.
Public Discourse

Coolidge: A Man to Be Followed

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Calvin Coolidge is an exemplar for conservative leaders because he was the very opposite of an ideological dreamer; he saw his vocation as a duty to provide the country that elected him with honest and frugal government that respected limits.
Public Discourse

Who Am I? The Building of Bionic Man

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The invention of Rex, a bionic man with artificially created organs, helps us see why it is impossible for any machine to be a human being.
Public Discourse

Why We Can’t Just “Lighten Up” Over the HHS Mandate

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Preserving the freedom to witness to the truths one believes, not merely avoiding cooperation with evil, is what’s primarily at stake in the HHS mandate debate.
Public Discourse

Direct Killing as Intentional Killing

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True doctors and abortionists are different kinds of persons because they perform different acts as they carry out different proposals: the one, a proposal to remove a non-viable child to save the mother; the other, to kill that child for the mother’s benefit.
Public Discourse

Check Your Blind Spot: What Is Marriage?

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Marriage as a human good, not marriage law, has an objective core whose norms the state has an interest in tracking and supporting—in a way that respects everyone’s freedom.
Public Discourse

Our National Sex Day

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To persuade people effectively that a sexual morality does indeed exist, we need to help them arrive at that conclusion on their own by asking thought-provoking questions and treating them with dignity, love, and respect, not by force-feeding them arguments and statistics.
Public Discourse

Why and How We Should Tackle the Sperm-Sale Industry

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With money as the biggest incentive for sperm donation, donors are set up to be absent fathers. Politicians, charitable organizations, academics, and donors themselves should counter the ills of sperm donation through law, journalism, and funding for anti-sperm donation advocacy. The second of a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Why Sperm Donation is Bad for Dads and Kids

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Commercialized sperm “donation” degrades and objectifies men, promotes a culture of irresponsible parenting, and hurts children conceived through donation. The first of a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Truth, Metaphor, and Race in the Marriage Debate

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Whatever same-sex marriage is, that’s not what gays are after. They are after a symbolic vehicle that can make them equal to people who can do something they cannot—procreate.
Public Discourse

The Least of These

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Our government has failed to admit that its own selfishness is the root of many societal problems it has tried to address.
Public Discourse

Deciding Who Gets Religious Freedom: The Latest HHS “Accommodation”

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In the latest proposed version of the HHS mandate, the government presumes to say which employers get religious freedom and how much they get, but all religious employers are obligated to live out their beliefs and should have the freedom to do so.