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Pillar

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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Public Discourse

Same-Sex Marriage and Interracial Marriage: Not the Same Thing

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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.
Public Discourse

Talking Past Each Other: “Love Wins” vs. Human Nature

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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.
Public Discourse

Defining Marriage

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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.
Public Discourse

Gender Identity

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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.
Public Discourse

Sex Identity

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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.
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

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 Ambiguous Quest for Marriage Equality

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Do proponents of marriage equality want marriage equality or not? The rhetoric of marriage equality does not match the reality. Only if marriage is the union of a man and a woman does it make any sense to have paternity presumed without consent, incest and polygamy prohibited, and custody bestowed upon biological or presumed parents except for cause.
Public Discourse

The Courage to Be on the Wrong Side of History: Lessons from Burke and Nietzsche

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Millennials who stand up for family, marriage, and the foundational institutions of civil society make possible a new cultural counter-revolution. The question is, will you join it?
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

Is “Safe-Sex” Education the Reason Behind the Drop in Abortion?

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Honest citizens must resist the “safe-sex” propaganda and recognize this campaign for what it is: a deceptive crusade promising an easy solution to a complex problem.
Public Discourse

Don’t Use My Pain as a Weapon: Infertility and Same-Sex Marriage

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Infertility does not invalidate our marriage, but we constantly experience infertility as an inability to fulfill a basic aspect of marriage. It is a loss for us in a way that it can never be for a same-sex couple. Our relationship is ordered toward having children, even though it is frustrated and kept from this fulfillment.
Public Discourse

Transgenderism: A Pathogenic Meme

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The idea that one’s sex is a feeling, not a fact, has permeated our culture and is leaving casualties in its wake. Gender dysphoria should be treated with psychotherapy, not surgery.
Public Discourse

Public School LGBT Programs Don’t Just Trample Parental Rights. They Also Put Kids at Risk.

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No matter what well-intentioned teachers and administrators believe, LGBT acceptance programs designed by GLSEN and funded by the CDC are designed to encourage kids to question their gender identity and sexual orientation.
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

An African-American Woman Reflects on the Transgender Movement

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Supporters of transgender ideology believe that they are freeing people from restrictive understandings of gender. In reality, the more our society tries to free itself from gender stereotypes, the more it becomes enslaved to them. By saying that people can be born in a body of the wrong gender, transgender activists are saying there is a set of feelings that are only allocated to women and another set for men.
Public Discourse

Liberalism Can’t Understand Sex

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Because it reduces the human person into a mere vehicle for abstract rights, liberalism has no language to express the transcendence and sacrifice of human sexuality.
Public Discourse

Science-Gilding the Marriage Debate

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Citing tenuous social science that should not (and probably does not) change anyone’s mind merely obscures what people are actually divided over—namely, the purpose of marriage as a social institution.
Public Discourse

“There Must Be a Reason”: A Father’s Final Gift to His Same-Sex Attracted Son

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I’m attracted to people of the same sex, and I’m glad that I was raised by a devoutly Christian mom and dad. My dad’s acceptance of me as a man, with full knowledge of my attraction to other men, was his gift to me. And though it was late coming, I am utterly thankful for it.
Public Discourse

Why Moms and Dads Both Matter in Marriage

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Mothers and fathers are not interchangeable—they both add distinct benefits to the development of children. Courts and legislatures can change legal definitions, but they cannot alter biology or psychology.
Public Discourse

Modest Conscience Protections in Louisiana Elicit Hysteria

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The Louisiana Marriage and Conscience Act is timely, necessary, and well-justified. If passed, it will help preserve the State of Louisiana’s commitment to freedoms of conscience, religion, and expression.
Public Discourse

Making Differences Disappear: The Evolution of Science on Same-Sex Households

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Social science was never going to save marriage’s male-female infrastructure. What it can do—if the narrative the data reveals isn’t manipulated—is reveal what is really going on.

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