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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 Legacy of White Supremacy: Why Confederate Monuments Should Come Down

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Public Discourse

Abortion and the Courts: Judicial Nominations Are Imperfect but Matter

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Criticism that Republican justices have only hurt the pro-life cause is misguided, because Republican presidents from Reagan onward have deliberately tried to advance judicial conservatism through federal court appointees—a commitment that has brought victories both for judicial conservatism and the pro-life cause. The second of a two part series.
Public Discourse

Abortion and the Courts: A Brief Political History of Judicial Conservatism

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Legalized, unrestricted abortion can’t be blamed on conservative judicial policy just because Republican justices voted for it. Judicial conservatism as we now understand it came after Roe. The first of a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Surrogates and Their Discontents

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Governor Christie’s recent veto of a bill that would lower restrictions on gestational surrogate mothers should prompt us to consider surrogacy’s harmful effects on mothers and children.
Public Discourse

Metaphysical Business

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Work is at the core of our humanity, and our ownership of what we produce precedes laws demanding that we give it back to “community” in the abstract.
Public Discourse

Honoring an Early Pro-Life Democrat

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Ellen McCormack’s 1976 presidential campaign offers today’s pro-lifers a valuable example of incrementalist strategy.
Public Discourse

Religion: Moving Beyond Emile Durkheim

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For Emile Durkheim, God and religion were nothing more than the idols of the tribe and the tribe's own self-worship; why do so many Western intellectuals take this as the last word on the subject? The second in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Religion as a Community-Bonding Fiction

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Although religion and God-belief are in some sense an illusion for Jonathan Haidt, they are seen as an often salutary fiction insofar as they help people to overcome their self-centeredness and direct their efforts to a greater collective good. The first in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

The Power to Destroy

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The Supreme Court’s ruling upholding the Affordable Care Act is constitutionally correct. This doesn’t prevent us from seeing the individual mandate as a tax on freedom—an exercise of Congress’s constitutional power to tax so as to destroy personal and institutional freedom with respect to health insurance.
Public Discourse

What Can We Learn from the Stem Cell Debates?

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A report from The Witherspoon Council, a newly-formed bioethics body, argues that even the noblest aspirations of the scientific enterprise must be guided by ethics and governed under political authority.
Public Discourse

Liberal Love and Sargent Shriver

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It’s far too easy when bickering about this or that policy, and particularly when the policy is morally charged, to miss the values modeled by good men and women when we disagree on the means.
Public Discourse

Building a Culture of Religious Freedom

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If we want a culture of religious freedom, we need to begin it here, today, now. We live it by giving ourselves wholeheartedly to God with passion and joy, confidence and courage; and by holding nothing back. God will take care of the rest. Adapted from remarks delivered yesterday at the Napa Institute’s 2012 annual conference.
Public Discourse

The Economic Crisis and Europe’s Rule of Law Problem

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Close attention to particular decisions by European institutions and governments before and during the present economic crisis suggests that many have significantly infringed the rule of law.
Public Discourse

Religious Freedom’s Legal and Moral Basis

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The right to religious freedom was crucial to the Founders’ vision of America. Religious freedom is a right to be protected because it enables us to fulfill our human obligation to seek the truth. The second in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Religious Freedom Under Fire

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The threats to religious freedom in our nation are real, and they’re serious. And things will get worse unless we defend our rights. The first in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Marriage, Religious Liberty, and the “Grand Bargain”

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In the name of “marriage equality” and “non-discrimination,” liberty—especially religious liberty and the liberty of conscience—and genuine equality are undermined.
Public Discourse

Here’s Twenty Bucks: Don’t Have Babies

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Melinda Gates and the Family Planning Summit will waste 4.6 billion dollars on contraception for women in third world countries instead of addressing the educational and healthcare-related challenges pregnant mothers face.
Public Discourse

The White House and Sexualityism

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Against what social science tells us about human happiness, the government is promoting sexualityism—a commitment to uncommitted, unencumbered, inconsequential sex—as the answer.
Public Discourse

Will the Obamacare “Tax” Trump Religious Liberty?

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Though the Supreme Court has long been hostile to tax exemptions for religious reasons, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Establishment Clause should give religious organizations reasons to hope that they won’t be penalized by the Obamacare “tax.”
Public Discourse

In Defense of John Roberts

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The Supreme Court should be an apolitical institution dedicated to enforcing the minimal and clear requirements of the Constitution.
Public Discourse

Chief Justice Roberts and the Changing Conservative Legal Movement

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The clash between Chief Justice Roberts’ opinion and that of the joint dissenters is best seen as a clash between two visions of judicial restraint, and two eras of the conservative legal movement.
Public Discourse

HHS Mandate: Unjust (as well as Illegal)

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To recap two major problems with the HHS mandate: it restricts the natural right of religious freedom and imposes a false view of religion.
Public Discourse

Immigration: He Who Is Without Sin

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Those who complain about illegal immigration are still morally complicit in the problem: they gladly take advantage of cheaper prices made possible by undocumented workers.
Public Discourse

Religious Freedom: Why Now? Defending an Embattled Human Right

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Vigilance on behalf of religious liberty is a just response to what is highest and noblest in human experience—mankind’s relation to something higher and nobler than itself. Adapted from a monograph by the Witherspoon Institute’s Task Force on International Religious Freedom.
Public Discourse

Casey at Twenty: Lessons from a Judicial Disaster

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The lesson of Casey is that the nomination and confirmation of judges with a sound judicial philosophy is an essential foundation stone of a culture of life.
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