Natural Law is neither Useless nor Dangerous: A Response to Hart and Potemra
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.
Understanding Natural Law: A Response to Hart and Potemra
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.
Population Decline and the Birth Dearth
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.
Blessed Are Les Misérables: For Theirs Is the True Philosophy of Law
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.
Coolidge: A Man to Be Followed
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.
Who Am I? The Building of Bionic Man
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.
Why We Can’t Just “Lighten Up” Over the HHS Mandate
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.
Direct Killing as Intentional Killing
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.
Check Your Blind Spot: What Is Marriage?
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.
Our National Sex Day
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.
Why and How We Should Tackle the Sperm-Sale Industry
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.
Why Sperm Donation is Bad for Dads and Kids
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.
Truth, Metaphor, and Race in the Marriage Debate
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.
The Least of These
Our government has failed to admit that its own selfishness is the root of many societal problems it has tried to address.
Deciding Who Gets Religious Freedom: The Latest HHS “Accommodation”
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.
The Wealth of Nations Depends on the Health of Families
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.
Bad Science and Failed Freedom Protections in the HHS Mandate
The latest proposed amendment to the HHS mandate still draws on empirically unsound data and violates religious freedom.
Simple Justice: Kids Deserve School Choice
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.
Reflections of a Former Fetus and Former Incubator
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.
