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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.
Public Discourse

The Wealth of Nations Depends on the Health of Families

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Family, church, and school are the three basic people-forming institutions, and it is no wonder that they produce the best results—including economic and political ones—when they cooperate.
Public Discourse

Bad Science and Failed Freedom Protections in the HHS Mandate

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The latest proposed amendment to the HHS mandate still draws on empirically unsound data and violates religious freedom.
Public Discourse

Simple Justice: Kids Deserve School Choice

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Rather than cave to self-interested protests against school choice from teachers unions, we should do what we can to make Catholic schools a viable school option for low-income children.
Public Discourse

Reflections of a Former Fetus and Former Incubator

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Radical pro-choice rhetoric attacks the most basic facts of our human existence: that the human body comes in two different but complementary types, male and female. They cannot forgive women who embrace femininity rather than neuter themselves.
Public Discourse

A New Way Forward on Abortion

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Pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike should consider a constitutional amendment that would allow, but not require, states to ban abortion in the second trimester.
Public Discourse

Is Religion Outdated in the Twenty-First Century?

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Religion isn’t outdated simply because some people claim that we can only know what the natural sciences tell us. Philosophy and theology are the next steps in our search for truth about nature, human nature, and God.
Public Discourse

An Unrecognizable America

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If the HHS mandate is enforced, our government may provoke a schism in the American Catholic Church and will reduce faithful Catholics to second-class citizenship.
Public Discourse

Abortion and the Constitution in Another Forty Years: A Right to Life for 2053

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As we recognize the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, pro-lifers should consider supporting a constitutional amendment to abolish abortion forty years from now.
Public Discourse

The Paradox of Persons Forty Years After Roe

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The Roe Court’s suppression of a foundational question—who is the law for—means that the decision could be overturned by any of several feticide cases that could reach the current Court.
Public Discourse

The Real Reason to Criticize Roe

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Pro-lifers need to better understand the history of the pro-life movement and what Roe did to it.
Public Discourse

Abortion Promises Unfulfilled

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Forty years after Roe v. Wade, the promise that legal abortion would guarantee fewer out-of-wedlock births, less child abuse, and lower crime rates remains unfulfilled.