The President, Planned Parenthood, and “Quality Health Care”
President Obama’s recent address to Planned Parenthood’s National Conference sweepingly mischaracterized abortion restrictions and pro-life views as culturally inaccurate and outdated.
The End of Meaningless Sex
Donna Freitas’s new book on the hookup culture rightly encourages students to see its harms, but fails to give them moral reasons for opting out of it.
Total Brain Death: Valid Criterion of Death
Total brain death is a valid criterion for pronouncing the death of human beings.
Proposition 8 and Discrimination: Marriage on Trial at the Supreme Court
Proposition 8 does not, contrary to Judge Vaughan Walker’s claims, treat equals unequally.
Sheer Hart Attack: Morality, Rationality, and Theology
Natural law theory makes a very limited, but very important claim—that there is common ground between all human beings, and particularly between religious believers and non-believers, on which moral disagreements can be rationally adjudicated.
A Boy’s Life with Unisex Scouts
The Boy Scouts are en route to holding that there is nothing to being a boy, and nothing to the boy’s becoming a man; they might as well be the Unisex Scouts, as they are in Canada, where the scouting movement has collapsed.
Terrorism Triangle in Boston
Complex rather than single causality is the norm, not the exception, for terrorism.
Ambition Explains America: From Bobos in Paradise to Obama
While the ambition guiding today’s young Americans is not the robust, risk-taking ambition of earlier generations, it is still essential to American life; President Obama’s grandiose goals offer just one example. The second of a two-part series.
Ambition Explains America: From Benjamin Franklin to Ronald Reagan
As an essential part of our character and a reason for our nation’s exceptionalism, ambition in America has been portrayed both as a sentiment to be contained and a virtue to be cultivated. The first of a two-part series.
Religion: A Public or a Private Right?
Our public debate about religious liberty is missing a clear definition of religion. The absence of that definition has generated confusion, frustration, shrill voices, and short tempers.
To Whom Do Children Belong?
Children’s relationship to the political community is fundamentally different from that of adults, because it is mediated through their belonging to a family and living under the authority of their parents.
Same-Sex Marriage Fever: Prohibition Parallels
Media voices and progressive activists for same-sex marriage are appealing to judicial fiat because they know they won’t always have public opinion on their side.
What Fiction Can Tell Us about Afghanistan
People are at the heart of what we are doing in Afghanistan. Novels can help us understand them and their cultures in all their subtlety and complexity.
Abortion After Tiller
A new documentary on late-term abortion providers shows us that the abortion debate is much more about why life is valuable than about when human life begins.
Memo to Lady Gaga: “Born This Way” Doesn’t Mean “Act This Way”
It remains unclear whether sexual orientation is genetically determined. Even if it is, that doesn’t justify advocacy for same-sex marriage.
“Good Thing I’m Not a History Major”
Until higher education throws out the text books and replaces them with primary sources, and professors begin talking with their students instead of to their students, our graduates will remain content to gain no other knowledge than what is required for their major.
If Knot Now, When? The Impact of Delayed Marriage Among Twenty-somethings
Young adults desire stable marriage and family life even while they engage in unmarried sex and parenting. We should encourage and help young adults achieve these goals instead of trying to make birth control “sexy.”
An American Decline?
As Stephen Krason’s new book argues, America has departed from the founders’ design, and the founders may be partially responsible. But this claim is only as strong as the interpretation of the founding behind it.
Justice Sotomayor and the Path to Polygamy
The oral arguments on Proposition 8 at the Supreme Court suggest that there is very good reason to believe that the declaration of a “right” to same-sex marriage will set us on the path to polygamy.
Cats and Dogs and Marriage Laws
When we define our terms based on the results we want, rather than on the reality of the thing being defined, all hell breaks loose.
Marriage, Religious Liberty, and the Ban Myth
It’s a myth that marriage law “bans” same-sex relationships because it treats marriage as the union of a man and a woman.
