The majority’s refusal to address the free speech issue in Masterpiece explains the intractability of debates over the scope of its free exercise ruling because, surprisingly, the two issues are linked. Two concurrences implicitly address the free speech issue. There the conservatives’ case is stronger, and supported explicitly by Justices Ginsburg and Sotomayor in dissent. In light of it, the Court’s Masterpiece ruling should provide robust protection for other creative professionals.
The Supreme Court is about to decide whether a baker has a First Amendment right not to be compelled to design and create cakes celebrating same-sex weddings. The baker’s best legal argument is simple, and it survives the best objections filed by the ACLU and Progressive scholars.
If we believe that all human beings deserve respect, we ought to act like it. That means we should use our rational faculties to understand and answer bad arguments, not ridicule those who make them.
Some people hope that Pope Francis will change the Church’s teaching on contraception. He won’t. He couldn’t even if he wanted to—as Church history and Scriptures show. Part two of two.
The Catholic Church’s teaching on contraception, common to all Christian denominations for 1900 years, is not arbitrary. It reflects a moral truth. And the Catholic Church can never revise it. Part one of two.
Courts heighten scrutiny of policies that classify people by sex and other “suspect” traits. But laws defining marriage as a male-female union are different in structure. The very form of policies based on the male-female pairing—unlike every other classification—demonstrates their connection to the common good. So courts shouldn’t subject them to the special scrutiny applied to other laws that classify by sex.
The Supreme Court closely scrutinizes policies involving racial, sexual, and other “suspect” classifications. But unlike almost every other classification imaginable, marriage laws use a criterion necessarily linked to an inherently good social purpose that we didn’t just invent. This criterion isn’t truly suspect and shouldn’t get heightened scrutiny.
We are all called to defend marriage so that the truth can change hearts, minds, and lives. As the early pro-life activists did, we must invest the long-term political, legal, cultural, and spiritual capital to win down the line. The final installment in a three-part series.
The next generation of true culture-makers will be shaped purely by bad philosophy if its arguments go unanswered. As individuals and communities, we will be swayed by moral thought no matter what: the only question is whether it will be well thought out. The second in a three-part series.
Many Christians question the value of philosophical arguments for conjugal marriage, preferring to appeal to revelation. But our natural moral knowledge in some ways precedes revelation and helps us to understand it. The first of a three-part series.
Prof. Charles Reid thinks love makes a marriage. He claims we think sex makes a marriage. In truth, comprehensive union makes a marriage. And getting marriage right matters for everyone.
What happened yesterday at the courthouse matters, and we must keep up our witness to the truth about marriage, by word and deed, until it is safely beyond judicial overreach.
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.
The controversy over the HHS mandate is not a spat about wonkish detail or tribal privilege. It remains a struggle for the principle of religious freedom, the soul of civil society.
Morality is not about keeping as long a leash as you can on the harms you cause. It is about keeping upright intentions and rejecting unfair tradeoffs—neither of which Obama’s proposed revision even pretends to affect.
In a discipline whose point is dispassionate reasoning and discourse, some would shut down debate and silence dissenters on a deep and complex moral-political issue. And the view they would anathematize, far from irrational, is more coherent and more compelling than their slippery and ill-defined 'default'.
A recent compromise on the same-sex ‘marriage’ debate granted too much to revisionists and too little to traditionalists. A better compromise will respect the societal importance of marriage while also providing for the real needs of domestic partners.
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