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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.

Why Is School Choice So Controversial? 

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Public Discourse

Governing the Medical Profession: How Obamacare Undermines Medical Practice

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Applying new governance methods to medicine will undermine physician autonomy and make doctors more liable to malpractice claims. The second in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Governing the Medical Profession: Obamacare and New Governance

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Obamacare purports to improve medical quality through dynamic processes that involve government-supported private actors, quality benchmarks, and participation by practitioners and patients. The first in a two-part series.
Public Discourse

Emergency Contraception Won’t Decrease Teen Pregnancies

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A pilot program in New York City to give minors emergency contraception in school without telling their parents is an ineffective response to a non-existent “epidemic” of teen pregnancy.
Public Discourse

Individualism, Community, and Moral Obligation in the Hebrew Bible

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The Hebrew Scriptures, read as a work of political theory, offer egalitarian, communitarian, and individualistic themes; two recent books incompletely capture the presence of all three.
Public Discourse

Constitutions, Culture, and the Economy

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Constitutional law has often been used to shape economies, but there are limits to the law’s ability to influence economic culture, especially when societal priorities no longer accord with constitutional principles.
Public Discourse

Inequality and Elite Failure

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Is inequality the cause of our worst social ills?
Public Discourse

Slavery and the Constitution

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Slavery was a great evil, but the Constitution was neither its source nor its guarantor.
Public Discourse

Political Metaphors in Hebrew Scripture

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The authors of the Hebrew Scriptures shape their presentation of God by using three metaphors from the political realm: law, covenant, and teaching.
Public Discourse

The Overlooked Meaning of Bill Clinton’s DNC Address

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Praise for Bill Clinton’s recent address at the Democratic National Convention overlooks the fact that his promiscuity and perjury as president make his presence there a scandal.
Public Discourse

Poverty, Abortion, and Budgets: Democrats for Life Need Better Arguments

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A recent address encouraging Democrats for Life to re-elect President Obama is marked by flawed reasoning and misleading statistics.
Public Discourse

Why California’s Three-Parent Law Was Inevitable

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A California bill allowing children to have three legal parents will not help children, but instead will unnecessarily complicate their lives. The supposed need for California’s SB 1476 flowed directly from the drive to normalize same sex parenting and recognize same sex unions.
Public Discourse

In Defense of Voting Regulations

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Though many liberals are eager to denounce regulations of the right to vote as “voter suppression,” requiring citizens to show that they can cast a properly-informed ballot ensures that the right to vote, like other rights, is exercised prudently.
Public Discourse

A Glimpse into the American Mosque

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A new book of essays by 45 American Muslim men provides a timely response to popular anti-Shariah rhetoric by showing that American Muslims love their country and their fellow citizens.
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.

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