Class of ‘59: Our Kids by Robert Putnam
The nature of poverty has changed substantially over the past fifty years. In Our Kids, esteemed social scientist Robert Putnam compares the conditions and opportunities of the rich and the poor in Port Clinton, Ohio, his hometown, both in 1959 and today. But the government programs that Putnam proposes won’t solve a problem that starts with the family.
Conservatives and Transgenderism: A Response to Jennifer Gruenke
Adopting a gender persona is not given. It is something that is developed in response to one’s given sexual identity, which provides a sort of vocation—not a fully determinate life plan, but a structure nonetheless.
Rethinking the Conservative Approach to Transgenderism
Conservatives do not take the introspective reports of transgendered people seriously, but there are good scientific reasons for supposing that subjective experience of gender is legitimate, even when it contradicts apparent biological sex.
Science Contra Hubris
Good scientific training is strenuous and humbling, because science is unforgiving. To spare society from the imposition of subjective pipe dreams, the prudence characteristic of valid scientific thinking needs to permeate the entire intellectual order.
What Dante, Tolkien, and Harry Potter Fan Fiction Can Teach Us about the Contemporary Quest for Immortality
From Dante to Tolkien to Harry Potter fan fiction, mankind has been tempted by the desire to transcend human limitations. This impulse is dangerous, but its dangers are not inexplicable.
The Equality Act: Bad Policy that Poses Great Harms
If passed, the Equality Act would empower the government to discriminate against those who do not accept a sexually permissive understanding of human nature that denies sexual complementarity.
The End of Single-Sex Higher Ed
As transgender people have increasingly come under the public eye, all-female colleges have caved to pressure to admit trans women—that is, persons identifiably male at birth who now identify as female. But doing so undermines these colleges’ mission of educating the next generation of female leaders. Let’s celebrate our differences and our similarities. But let’s not call ourselves something we’re not.
Surrogacy and Same-Sex Marriage: A Tale of Two Countries
As skeptics in Ireland feared and the naïve in the United States are now realizing, “marriage equality” inevitably leads to the push for “family equality” through third-party reproduction.
Popular Culture and the Male Body: A New Challenge
All those concerned about sexual exploitation must pull together and fight a two-front war against female and male dehumanization.
Same-Sex Marriage and Interracial Marriage: Not the Same Thing
Proponents of same-sex marriage often liken opposition to the bigotry that defended anti-miscegenation laws, preventing interracial couples from marrying. The analogy is specious, for the two movements differ entirely in motivation. One seeks to defend an intelligible understanding of marriage; the other sought to achieve racial purity.
Talking Past Each Other: “Love Wins” vs. Human Nature
There remain two views on the question of marriage, but they keep talking past each other. One holds that “love wins”—so one shouldn’t stand in the way of love. The other respects the anthropological truth about marriage.
Defining Marriage
It is important to hold up the truth about marriage for everyone to see. The first step of explaining, defending, and teaching marriage is defining it.
“Defactualization” Is Causing American Schools to Become Bastions of Anti-Intellectualism
Truth has been relegated to a secondary position in the nation’s public schools, universities, political forums, and public squares.
Gender Identity
Gender is a way of communicating truths or falsehoods about one’s sex and its corresponding social and cultural roles. An age of gender confusion and rejection calls for reflection on important issues that, in an upright age, would hardly arise. The second in a two-part series.
Sex Identity
As animals that reproduce sexually, humans in the paradigm case are either male or female, with the sexes specified by reproductive roles they can potentially fulfill. According to this account, it is impossible for someone to change his or her sex, and all attempts to do so involve mutilation. The first of a two-part series.
Boyhood: A Profoundly Human Story
Richard Linklater’s new film is powerful because it reminds us that the dull, plotless events of our fleeting lives matter in the way in which all quotidian things matter: as Joycean “epiphanies of the ordinary.”
Justice Kennedy and the Lonely Promethean Man of Liberalism
Justice Kennedy’s Obergefell v. Hodges decision is anchored in the liberty to “define and express” one’s identity. But this view of man is not as exalted as it seems. According to Kennedy, self-defined man, if he’s unmarried, remains tragically lonely, and without state recognition, might even doubt his own dignity.
The Case of the Pro-Life Movement: On Demography and Marriage
The future of marriage in the United States may look grim, but so did the pro-life cause look forty years ago. Embattled social conservatives should find hope in the demographic shifts that trailed the legalization of abortion.
The Unsoundness of Judicial Supremacy
Decisions of the Supreme Court that go beyond power delegated to the judicial branch or are contrary to the Constitution are null and void. To protect our constitutional republic, citizens, states, and the other branches of the federal government must resist any such decision.
Religion and the Republic
A true republic respects religious speech. Such speech represents a different authority from governing power and affirms its limited nature.
Marriage and the Constitution: What the Court Said and Why It Got It Wrong
The Supreme Court’s ruling is a significant setback for all Americans who believe in the Constitution, the rule of law, democratic self-government, and marriage as the union of a man and a woman. Will the right of Americans to speak and act in accord with the truth of marriage be tolerated?
