I had done This Thing for the simple reason that I felt I couldn’t be a single mother—because I was desperately scared of being ostracized by my community, judged for my irresponsible fornication.
Pillar: Sexuality & Family
Sexuality & Family
The second pillar of a decent society is the institution of the family, which is built upon the comprehensive sexual union of man and woman. No other institution can top the family’s ability to transmit what is pivotal—character formation, values, virtues, and enduring love—to each new generation.
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Conscience, Fertility, and Holocaust Education
Strange as it may sound, the Holocaust education at my school shaped my sexuality and fertility well into adulthood by teaching me that the Holocaust brought about a complete break in the continuity of mankind. In the face of such immense suffering and slaughter, no responsible woman would choose to have children.
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Selling the Rainbow: Why Rainbow-Washing Is Actually Bad Marketing
When you hitch your brand to a cause or movement that nearly every other brand is co-opting, you are not differentiating but rather genericizing your brand. That’s anti-branding. And when the cause or movement you choose has political overtones, you end up alienating, dividing, and disappointing your customers.
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Is Billy Graham the New Jim Crow?
Laws like the Equality Act fail to acknowledge the reasonableness of Christian belief, assuming that only irrational bigotry can animate those who hold traditional views on marriage and sexuality. This loss of reason and regression to emotion-based policymaking is at the heart of our civic mistrust and zero-sum policy prescriptions.
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Cash for Kids: Does Public Assistance Undermine Family Life?
Currently, public assistance in the United States damages vital social institutions like marriage. But the problem is not the public assistance itself: the problem is that we only provide guaranteed financial support to single people. When you don’t punish people for being married or reward them for being unmarried, but just provide simple, flat benefits to support family life, these benefits actually support family life.
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Gender Ideology and the Catholic Church
Many people have difficulty with the Catholic Church’s teaching on sex and gender because they fail to recognize its philosophical dimension. As inheritors of twentieth-century positivism, many today assume that the quantitative sciences are the arbiters of truth, and that any other way of knowing, except that privileged and direct access to one’s own internal subjectivity, can be no more than private opinion or pseudoscience. This philosophical error silences objection and shuts down dialogue by defining disagreement with itself as hateful and anathematizing.
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Why the Gay and Lesbian Equality Movement Must Oppose Surrogacy
As gay people, we cannot insist on the right to carry out practices that harm the rights of others. Rather than being an LGBT rights issue, surrogacy is a women’s rights issue and a children’s rights issue; and like the sale of human organs, it is not an activity that should be promoted or indeed permitted.
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Eugenics and Other Evils
The eugenic search for good genes comes at the cost of human dignity and human equality, and leaves by the wayside the dogma of the sanctity of human life. Rather than warning us that eugenics can happen here, Thomas’s dissent lays out the case that it already has happened here, and the state has a compelling interest in preventing its return.
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Casualties of Surrogacy
We have no business building a multi-billion-dollar fertility industry at the risk of the health and well-being of women and children. A woman’s body is not designed to carry another woman’s baby. This essay is adapted from remarks delivered at the Heritage Foundation.
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It’s Time to Promote Good Social Science on Same-Sex Parenting
Social scientists who conduct research on the politically charged question of the wellbeing of children in the care of same-sex parents have emphatically asserted unqualified and universal support for the finding of “no differences.” In his meticulously researched new book, Professor Walter Schumm turns this scenario on its head. Through a detailed review of virtually all extant research, Schumm demonstrates decisively that contrary evidence not only exists, it is abundant and methodologically strong.
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What Makes People Have Babies? The Link Between Cultural Values and Fertility Rates
If fertility declines because child mortality is falling, then almost any moral system would encourage most people to accept the trade-off. But if fertility is falling because Western countries promote a set of cultural narratives telling women in Africa, Asia, and Latin America that children are antithetical to a happy life, that the lifeways of their national communities are outdated and backwards, and that cultural legitimacy comes from emulating the family patterns of white Westerners, then there may be strong reasons to reject this model.
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Four Things Every Woman Should Know about Birth Control
How much longer are we going to believe the lie that women need to suppress or even harm their healthy, properly functioning bodies in order to be successful women? How much longer are we going to let pharmaceutical companies and abortion providers determine what is best for women?
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What We Don’t Know: Does Gender Transition Improve the Lives of People with Gender Dysphoria?
The studies assembled by the What We Know Project do not prove that transition is the best treatment for gender dysphoria, let alone that it should be the only permissible treatment. Rather, they show that the science is not settled.
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The Orwellian Dangers of the “Equality Act”
By establishing a national anthropology based on an ideology of self rather than embodied sex, the Equality Act would deepen cultural divisions and chill reasoned debate on complex bioethical issues. Those who do not accept the legislation’s totalitarian twisting of language would be open targets for a modern American parallel to Orwell’s “two-minutes hate.”
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Understanding Gender Dysphoria and Its Treatment in Children and Adolescents
In an era of evidence-based medicine, gender dysphoria is somehow exempt.
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A Message to Mayor Pete from a Latina Mama: “Don’t Force Your Sexual Ideology on Me and My Children”
Yes, be polite to us, and we will be polite to you. But we know that we are in an intense battle over the hearts and minds of our children. Mothers are very good at educating and protecting our children from harm when we believe they are in danger. This time, that danger is the harmful sexual ideology of the Left.
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The Medical Scandal that the Mainstream Media Ignores
Over the past few years, media stories about “transgender” kids have become increasingly common, but critical questions are seldom asked. These children’s identities are portrayed as immutable, while the ideologically-driven medical practices solidifying them are not investigated. Why won’t they report the truth: that these children and their families are victims of ruthless medical practices with no basis in science?
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Pro-Life Welfare is a Bad Idea
Rather than focusing on wealth transfers to the poor, we should seek to cultivate conditions that enable people to flourish through their own actions and relationships. When evaluating policies, we should ask: Does it give people an incentive to stay together, or does it subsidize their breaking apart? Does it encourage one particular kind of childcare, or does it enable all mothers to better care for their children in the way that they choose?
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Anti-Discrimination “Equality” Law Exemptions Do Not Lead to Fairness for All: An International Perspective
Although exemptions are often billed as a compromise, the evidence suggests that they will never be enough to satisfy those who think religious believers are discriminating and getting away with it. The “compromise” soon becomes a zero-sum game with only one winner.
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Can Hatred of Christians Lead to Support of Sexual Minorities?
We generally believe that those who support LGBT rights dislike Christians because of their opposition to progressive sexual values. But a new study suggests that animosity toward Christians actually causes support for sexual minorities.
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Politicizing Pediatrics: How the AAP’s Transgender Guidelines Undermine Trust in Medical Authority
The five-year-old boy who transitions to identify as a girl has taken a major step on a road that may lead to treatment with cross-sex hormones, castration, and infertility. Most five-year-old boys who say they are girls will not persist: fifteen years later, in the great majority of cases, that boy will say he is a man, not a woman. But the American Academy of Pediatrics is now on record prioritizing the opinion of a five-year-old over the considered judgment of the child’s parents.
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The Scandalous Academy: Social Science in Service of Identity Politics
Thanks to the work of sociologist Mark Regnerus, a prominent peer-reviewed journal has retracted a deeply flawed study on how social stigma affects the life expectancy of sexual minorities. This failure of peer review isn’t an isolated case: the more social science research supports the dogmas of identity politics, the less closely it is examined, and the more enthusiastically it is promoted.
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Birth Control, Blood Clots, and Untimely Death: Time to Reconsider What We Tell Our Teens?
By increasing the risk of blood clots, stroke, and heart attack, hormonal contraception leads to the death of 300-400 women every year. To give some perspective, meningitis killed forty-five people in 2017. Most states mandate meningitis vaccination for college and university students. Would they consider the same kind of prevention campaigns for the deadly blood clots caused by hormonal birth control?
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Equip Yourself to Become A True Trans Ally: Read Walt Heyer’s Trans Life Survivors
By sharing the stories of real people suffering real pain and struggling with enormous regret, Walt Heyer enables us to gain the first thing a person seeking to be a true trans ally needs: compassion.
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Are We All “Cat Persons” Now? How Modern Dating Destroys Intimacy
“Cat Person” powerfully reveals one of the most tragic costs of the sexual revolution: the fading possibility of true personal intimacy between a man and a woman.