The lastingness of each person’s reality as male or female is so integral to the faith’s architecture, that to deny it—even to equivocate about it—is to undermine Catholic faith itself. No Catholic institution should risk that effect.
Author: Gerard V. Bradley (Gerard Bradley)
Post
Trump Administration Fights the Establishment Clause Virus, Too
When the Trump administration’s clarifying guidelines go to court, they not only should be upheld. One hopes, and even dares to expect, that the compelling circumstances of this public benefit program will bring forth a needed clarification of Establishment Clause law, one which finally buries the impetus behind any confusion surrounding the CARES Act and religious eligibility.
Post
Moral Truth and Constitutional Conservatism
The Constitution itself directs us to use metaphysical and moral truths that lie beyond it in its interpretation. Indeed, a contemporary judge can be faithful to the Founders only by relying on these truths.
Post
Learning from Integralism
Although they often have the flavor of thought experiments, the arguments of integralists are nonetheless worth taking very seriously. Their reflections include spot-on diagnoses of many pathologies affecting our political community.
Post
Compelled Sexual Affirmation in the School Bathroom
The case against compelled affirmation policies needs to be more explicitly and vividly sexualized. The argument against these policies must be rooted in the civil liberties of objecting students and the right not be forced to be the object of another’s sexual gaze. Opening intimate facilities to anyone of the opposite sex imposes psycho-sexual trauma on countless non-consenting youths, and constitutes a form of sexual exploitation.
Post
Stigmatizing and Prosecuting Pornography
Unless adults are willing to make dramatic changes to their own moral and legal rules about pornography, we shall keep playing what amounts to game of Russian roulette with the formation of our children when it comes to one of the most precious parts of their lives.
Post
Sexual Identity Politics and Religious Freedom in a Secular Age
For the first time in American history, it has become respectable to publicly oppose religious liberty and its supreme value in our polity. This unprecedented turn is ominous. It will not only diminish our constitutional law. It will remap our common life, for religious liberty has always been a linchpin of our political culture.
Post
Learning to Live with Same-Sex Marriage?
The city of Philadelphia is targeting Catholic Social Services for its policy, based on religious beliefs about marriage, of not placing foster children with same-sex couples.
Post
Notre Dame Swallows the Pill
The University has announced it is to be the sole funder, unaccompanied proprietor, and director of distribution of what it has solemnly declared for years to be an immoral service. But the Holy Spirit is not a consequentialist. God does not want us to weigh up pros and cons of adhering to the moral truth. And the greatest respect we can show others is to bear faithful witness to the truth.
Post
Religious Liberty and the Common Good
To detach religious liberty from truth is to decapitate it.
Post
Common Core Catastrophe
It is time to refocus President Trump’s attention upon Common Core and persuade him to ignite a national movement to roll it back. Catholic education, in particular, is undermined by adopting these national standards.
Post
The Future of Pro-Life Legislation and Litigation
In her landmark 1971 paper, Judith Jarvis Thomson tried to defend abortion by appeal to norms of justification consistently applicable in a range of other cases. By contrast, the courts in and after Roe and Casey have treated the right to abortion as an unquestionable legal principle. This inverted approach is doomed to fail as it continues to reveal the anomalous character of abortion rights.
Post
President Obama’s Sex-Driven War on Science
President Obama has sacrificed the well-being of our nation’s youth on the altar of ideology.
Post
For Christian Judges, Is Compromising Religious Beliefs “The Price of Citizenship”?
In our emerging legal climate, Christians are to be admired for their dedication to moral principle, and they are welcome to act in accordance with it at home and at church. But once they venture into public, our new legal overlords tell us, they must act according to a different set of norms.
Post
The Implications of Extending Marriage Benefits to Same-Sex Couples
It is morally indefensible for Catholic institutions to recognize and incentivize same-sex marriages by extending marriage benefits to employees who declare themselves legally married to a person of the same sex.
Post
Religious Liberty at a Crossroads?
US religious liberty law is not perfect, but it still deserves our support. Religious exemptions witness to the value of religion as a transcendent good. And nothing in the Supreme Court cases requesting religious liberty exemptions for Muslim citizens undermines that effort.
Post
The Supreme Court on Prayer
Justice Kennedy’s opinion in Greece v. Galloway is the Court’s best piece of Establishment Clause work in decades—and a happy omen for religious liberty in our country.
Post
The Family Matrix
The lifelong, unbreakable chords of fealty and identity that family members possess for each other depend upon the biological matrix created by the marital union of man and woman.
Post
The Pro-Life Movement, Forty-One Years After Roe
The pro-life movement has won a great battle by convincing the American public that an unborn child is a person. But that is not enough. Now, we must make an ethical argument against the horrific injustice of abortion.
Post
The State Marriage Defense Act
The age in which all states were united in understanding marriage as the exclusive union of man and woman for life has passed away. Now, new legislation seeks to protect the right of each state to define marriage for those who reside within its borders.
Post
Praying in Greece
Judicial precedent, historical awareness, and the very nature of prayer all make it clear: legislators have the right to begin their assemblies with a prayer.
Post
Faith and (Dorm) Life
Faith-based dorms at secular universities offer a positive alternative to the indoctrination and debasement present on many campuses.
Post
Sexual Orientation, Gender Identity, and Employment Law
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.
Post
The Paradox of Persons Forty Years After Roe
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.
Post
What’s Behind the HHS Mandate?
The HHS mandate illustrates three liberal ideological commitments that treat religious freedom as an afterthought.