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Pillar

Politics & Law

The third pillar of a decent society is a just system of politics and law. Such a government does not bind all persons, families, institutions of civil society, and actors in the marketplace to itself as subservient features of an all-pervading authority. Instead, it honors and protects the inherent equal dignity of all persons, safeguards the family as the primary school of virtue, and seeks justice through the rule of law.

The End of a Regime? Understanding the Extraction of Maduro

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Public Discourse

The Equality Act: Bad Policy that Poses Great Harms

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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.
Public Discourse

Justice Kennedy and the Lonely Promethean Man of Liberalism

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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.
Public Discourse

The Case of the Pro-Life Movement: On Demography and Marriage

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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.
Public Discourse

The Unsoundness of Judicial Supremacy

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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.
Public Discourse

Religion and the Republic

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A true republic respects religious speech. Such speech represents a different authority from governing power and affirms its limited nature.
Public Discourse

Marriage and the Constitution: What the Court Said and Why It Got It Wrong

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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?
Public Discourse

Thanks for Everything, Justice Kennedy

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As a legal opinion, Obergefell is an utter failure, relying as it does on a tenuous and historically ungrounded jurisprudence of “dignity.” The debate over same-sex marriage is not over. A constitutional ruling so shoddily reasoned, so completely and easily dismantled by the dissents, must paper over a cause that cannot ultimately win in an open debate.
Public Discourse

The Practical Wisdom of Chief Justice Ellsworth: Reconsidering the Separation of Church and State

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If good morals are essential for a free republic to endure, and if a certain group of institutions successfully promote those morals, then it follows that a well-governed state may be friendly to those institutions—even if they are churches.
Public Discourse

Lessons from a Life of Hope: Learning from Father Richard John Neuhaus

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Those who would follow in Father Richard John Neuhaus’s footsteps would do well to note these lessons of his life. Religion and vocation matter more deeply than political wrangling, and we must continue to build intellectual families that combine conviviality with fighting for the greatest causes.
Public Discourse

Democracy Isn’t the Problem: The Benedict Option Meets the Buckley Option

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The “Benedict Option” isn’t the only way for Christians to confront the reality of an increasingly hostile and secular culture.
Public Discourse

Riches, Religion, and the New Atheism

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It’s not that in misery and suffering human beings grasp at foolish theories that give them some hope. Rather, amidst prosperity, human beings can blind themselves to the reality of the human condition and so never ask the questions that, once asked, cannot be plausibly answered except in theistic terms.
Public Discourse

Professor Paulsen and Justice Scalia: A Qualified Defense of the Smith Decision

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There are some problems in the reasoning of Justice Scalia’s opinion in the 1990 religious freedom case. But in its holding, and in its rejection of a quarter century of jurisprudence that could not be squared with the First Amendment, the judgment was correct.
Public Discourse

There Is a Fundamental Right to Marriage, and We Must Preserve It

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Whether or not Locke would approve of it, there is a fundamental marriage right. It is ancient, not recent, and it secures the integrity of the natural family. In fact, nothing is more fundamental to our legal edifice than the ancient liberty of the natural family.
Public Discourse

The Value of Children: Economics, Faith, and the Problem of Underpopulation

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The overpopulation crisis predicted by Malthusians has failed to materialize. Instead, developed nations face serious underpopulation. To solve this problem, we must rediscover the importance of children.
Public Discourse

There Is No Fundamental Right to Marry

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It’s easy to confuse fundamental rights with intensely-desired goods—and thus to wrongly invest the latter with the moral urgency and primacy of the former.
Public Discourse

Persecution, Past and Present: Candida Moss’s Unintentional Gift to Christians

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Candida Moss’s book on the history of Christian persecution is a case study in how scholarship gives way to politicized polemic—but it’s also an important reminder for contemporary Christians.
Public Discourse

Citizens, Unite! Part Two of Your Constitutional Primer

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“Constitutional law” is not the exclusive domain of the courts, or even of government officials. Faithful interpretation is the duty and responsibility of faithful citizens.
Public Discourse

Everything You Need to Know About Constitutional Law

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Reading and understanding the Constitution is not an especially complicated intellectual exercise. It takes lawyers, judges, and law professors to turn it into something difficult and convoluted.
Public Discourse

Religious Freedom and Sexual Identity: A Proposal for Peace

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If law can declare certain reasons for a private business owner to refuse service—such as sexual orientation—invalid, then it can also designate other reasons as valid—such as religious convictions about the nature of marriage.
Public Discourse

Correcting Six Mistakes from the Same-Sex Marriage Oral Arguments Last Week

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Although there were many good arguments and questions at the Supreme Court last week, there were also some significant errors.
Public Discourse

Civil Rights, Civil Liberties, and the Price of Progress

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In the old America, there were laws regulating sexual conduct, but freedom of association was largely unimpeded. In the new America, there will be no laws regulating sexual conduct, but freedom of association will be limited in defense of sexual liberation.
Public Discourse

Same-Sex Unions and the European Court of Human Rights

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The European Convention on Human Rights does not require European nations to redefine marriage to include same-sex relationships. However, the European Court of Human Rights may rule in the future that member states must recognize same-sex civil unions.
Public Discourse

Marriage and Equal Protection

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For the Court to strike down laws defining marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife would be to abolish the idea that men and women matter—equally—in the lives of the children they create. And it would be both a judicial usurpation of legislative authority and a federal intrusion into a matter left by the Constitution in the hands of the states.
Public Discourse

Supreme Court Debates Meaning of Marriage and Consequences of Judicial Redefinition

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Rather than rush to a fifty-state “solution” on marriage policy for the entire country, the Supreme Court should allow the laboratories of democracy the time and space to see how redefining marriage will impact society as a whole.

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