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Pillar

The Human Person

The first pillar of a decent society is respect for the human person, which recognizes that all individual human beings have dignity simply because of the kind of being they are: animals whose rational faculties allow them to know, love, reason, and communicate. It also recognizes that human beings are persons, members of the human family who flourish in a community that respects their fundamental rights and who long to discover transcendent truths about the nature of reality.

Courage to Engage the World: Thomism at 750

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The Christian Baker’s Unanswered Legal Argument: Why the Strongest Objections Fail

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The Supreme Court is about to decide whether a baker has a First Amendment right not to be compelled to design and create cakes celebrating same-sex weddings. The baker’s best legal argument is simple, and it survives the best objections filed by the ACLU and Progressive scholars.

Making the Case for Complicity-Based Religious Liberty Accommodations

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Two Yale law professors say religious liberty should not be accommodated in “complicity” cases such as Masterpiece Cakeshop and Arlene’s Flowers. Their argument fails to recognize that such accommodations are a traditional and necessary part of the American legal framework.

American Muslims, Lot’s Wife, and the Christian Baker

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Several progressive Muslim organizations have signed an amicus brief supporting the same-sex couple in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. This not only distorts Islamic teaching and anthropology, it also fuels the increasingly powerful movement of militant irreligious orthodoxy.

Embryology and Science Denial

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The HHS has recently—and rightly—described life as beginning at conception. Dr. Richard Paulson’s denial of this claim contradicts the standard scientific position, and his arguments against that claim are fallacious and inaccurate.

The Impoverishment of Law and the Loss of Ordered Liberty

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In their new book, Ryan T. Anderson and Sherif Girgis make a strong case for pluralism and ordered liberty, while John Corvino drafts a blueprint for a comprehensive despotism that would consume the preconditions and legal safeguards for ordered liberty. Part two of a two-part review essay.

Contract Pregnancies Exposed: Surrogacy Contracts Don’t Protect Surrogate Mothers and Their Children

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The United States currently has a hodge-podge of state-level legislation regulating surrogacy. High-profile disputes over surrogate pregnancies demonstrate this is not a workable solution. Regulating surrogacy does not protect women and children. It only commodifies them more.

A Proposal for the Healthcare Professions: It’s Time To Refuse to Deal in Death

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The healthcare professions are rightly devoted to the restoration and maintenance of health. Deliberately delivering death is in direct opposition to these goals. For the sake of their profession and those whom they serve, healthcare professionals should refuse to participate in acts that are so utterly incompatible with their profession.

Radical Autonomy: A Dangerous Metaphysical Myth

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As a bioethical principle, respect for autonomy asks far too little of our minds and hearts. When the moral stakes are highest, we degrade patients by treating them as though they were simply bundles of self-interest.

Why the Government Shouldn’t Force Bakers—Or Anyone—to Express Support for Same-Sex Marriage

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Antidiscrimination laws are fully within the government’s authority—but only when the government is not using such laws as part of a campaign to compel people to express “by word or act” their support for a government-prescribed orthodoxy. The second in a two-part series.

What Masterpiece Cakeshop is Really About

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The vendor-marriage cases are part of the centuries-old pattern in which governments have attempted to compel dissenters to publicly affirm and acquiesce in the dominant orthodoxy. The first in a two-part series.

Embryos and Five-Year-Olds: Whom to Rescue

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Both human embryos and human five-year-olds are human beings equal in fundamental worth and dignity. But there are differences between the embryos and five-year-olds that are or can be morally relevant to the decision concerning whom to rescue.

An Absurd Fate: What Happens to Abandoned Embryos?

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A recent embryo custody battle highlights the plight of the hundreds of thousands of frozen embryos in the United States today.

Seattle Coffee Shop Illustrates Bedlam Surrounding First Amendment

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A Seattle coffee shop owner’s refusal to serve “these people” stands in stark contrast to artists’ cases.

The Transgender Matrix: It’s Time to Choose the Red Pill

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The transgender community isn’t sympathetic to members of the trans-matrix who want to leave. Even so, the red pill population is growing every day.

New York Courts Rule Against “Aid in Dying” and Warn of Its Dangers

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The New York Court of Appeals has dealt a resounding blow to the state’s assisted suicide lobby.

Gift-Motherhood, the Prius, and the Peace Corps: Reducing Abortion by Incentivizing Adoption

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Making adoption more viable by providing economic incentives and social support is pro-life without being anti-choice, and it is a cause that could be embraced by liberals as well as conservatives. The second in a two-part series.

A Path to Détente in the War over Abortion

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How can we make it more attractive, and more beneficial to everyone, for women facing unwanted pregnancy to choose to carry their babies to term? The first in a two-part series.

Surrogacy Reaches the Supreme Court

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Surrogacy is out of control in the United States. All those who care about justice, the Constitution, and human rights must fervently hope that the Supreme Court will decide to hear this case.

Can We Stop an International Roe v. Wade?

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We must act now to protect unborn children not just at home, but around the world.

The Contagion of Euthanasia and the Corruption of Compassion

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The contagion of assisted suicide, once the command “Thou shalt not kill” is set aside, quickly spreads elsewhere. True compassion does not abandon people at their most vulnerable.

The American Medical Association vs. Human Nature

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The AMA’s Code of Medical Ethics is a cautionary tale of what happens when medical ethics are grounded in social policy and personal intuitions rather than timeless, universal, and immutable moral truths.

Ten (Bad, But Popular) Arguments for Abortion

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A philosophy professor reflects on the poor arguments that convince his students of the justice of abortion.

St. Louis’s Unholy War on Religious Liberty

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An ordinance passed in St. Louis, Missouri, prohibits discrimination in housing or employment on the basis of “reproductive health decisions.” Promoted as an anti-discrimination measure, the law’s actual purpose is to destroy the self-government of religious and pro-life organizations.

In Defense of Elizabeth Harman: Taking Pro-Choice Philosophers Seriously

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If we believe that all human beings deserve respect, we ought to act like it. That means we should use our rational faculties to understand and answer bad arguments, not ridicule those who make them.
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