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Public Discourse

Supreme Court Take Notice: Two Sociologists Shift the Ground of the Marriage Debate

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Judges and justices who reasoned in favor of same-sex marriage based on social scientists’ “no differences” thesis must now contend with better research: Heterosexual married couples offer the best family structure for children, according to a new, rigorously researched sociological study.
Public Discourse

The Kids Aren’t All Right: New Family Structures and the “No Differences” Claim

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Two new peer-reviewed studies show that family structure matters and children do best when reared by their married biological mother and father.
Public Discourse

Franciscan, Ave Maria, and Obamacare

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Two Catholic universities’ decisions to drop student health-care plans show Obamacare’s long-term goal: Force Americans to choose government-subsidized plans over no insurance at all.
Public Discourse

The Conflict Really Lies within New Atheism

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In his new book "Where the Conflict Really Lies," Alvin Plantinga levels a devastating critique against the “new atheism” espoused by thinkers such as Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens.
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Taking (Conscience) Rights Seriously

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As a pluralistic liberal democracy, we should craft our laws so that individuals will never be unnecessarily coerced into violating their consciences.
Public Discourse

He Was He, I Was I

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Neo-Darwinian models of human behavior cannot provide us with authentic self-knowledge; we need to revive the humanist disciplines—rhetoric, the arts, history, and above all things, poetry.
Public Discourse

Early Religious Freedom in America

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The Founders’ nuanced views of religion and politics prevent us from reading modern concerns about the separation of church and state into their words.
Public Discourse

Cruelty Well Used: Machiavelli, Walker, and Romney?

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Machiavelli’s advice to princes holds important lessons for Mitt Romney if he is elected president.
Public Discourse

What’s Behind the HHS Mandate?

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The HHS mandate illustrates three liberal ideological commitments that treat religious freedom as an afterthought.
Public Discourse

Abortion and the Limits of Philosophy

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Unlike civil rights advocates of the 1960s, pro-life and pro-choice activists can be ambivalent about their causes because they are torn between their reason and their sentiments.
Public Discourse

Why Sexual Integrity Isn’t Out-of-Date

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A book about sex by J. Budziszewski uses natural law arguments to persuade young adults of the moral benefits of purity.
Public Discourse

Why Birtherism Won’t Die

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Birtherism survives as an unreasonable surrogate for the public discussion that the left has stifled.
Public Discourse

One Human Heart: Wordsworth’s Old Cumberland Beggar and the Sweetness of Being Human

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Wordsworth denounces those who reduce human worth to utility and teaches us that the goodness of being is absolute. We must learn to love those incomparably useless and precious beings, the child, the elderly, the unborn, and the dying, because they and we are one.
Public Discourse

Good Religion: In Defense of Ross Douthat

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By showing the triumph of the therapeutic over the orthodox in American Christianity, Ross Douthat’s latest book gives Americans on both sides of the political divide much to consider.
Public Discourse

Liberalism, Relativism, and the Novel: A Reply to Ramos

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How many Solzhenitsyns are occupying the pipelines of novelists in America?
Public Discourse

The Problem isn’t Liberalism, the Problem is “You”

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Even if the marriage plot has dissolved, the human drama remains. It just resurfaces in a different context.
Public Discourse

Neo vs. the Karate Kid

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The Matrix and The Karate Kid offer two competing views of the relationship between how we learn and how we understand human nature.
Public Discourse

Marriage in Islam

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While Islam opposes same-sex marriage, its opposition to it and to President Obama’s stance is not a matter of hate or bigotry but a matter of principle.
Public Discourse

Self-Government and Judicial Review

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Liberals and conservatives alike often complain hypocritically about judicial activism. If we are to avoid letting judicial activism become rule in favor of whatever causes justices approve, then we should make the presumption of constitutionality a basic principle of judicial review.
Public Discourse

The Perils of Polygamy

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Recent empirical research suggests that, in virtually every respect, polygamy is socially detrimental—to society in general, to men, to women, and to children.
Public Discourse

The Audacity of Faith

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The views about faith and religion that President Obama expressed in his Commencement Address at Notre Dame pave the way for his HHS mandate. He would protect the state from the church, not by privatizing faith, but by redefining it.
Public Discourse

A Constitutional and Wise Way to Protect the Unborn: A Response to Paul Linton

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We should pass Unborn Child Protection Acts and begin the conversation about the pain of the unborn.
Public Discourse

The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act: Unconstitutional and Unwise

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The Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act does not deserve the support of the public because it is unconstitutional and represents poor public policy.
Public Discourse

Explaining Obama’s Evolution

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The electorate will often forgive—and can even embrace—a clean conversion story, where a politician honestly changes his mind and admits to it. But on marriage, such a story should not be available for the President, who was either alarmingly befuddled for several years or merely lying.