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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.

Should We Decouple Technology from Everyday Life?

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Public Discourse

Religious Freedom and Sexual Identity: A Proposal for Peace

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If law can declare certain reasons for a private business owner to refuse service—such as sexual orientation—invalid, then it can also designate other reasons as valid—such as religious convictions about the nature of marriage.
Public Discourse

The Wrong Kind of Rights: Same-Sex Marriage, Third-Party Reproduction, and the Sexualization of Children

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In our culture, there is a chasm between two irreconcilable conceptions of the meaning and purpose of human sexuality and equality. For children most of all, the wrong kind of sexuality and equality has devastating effects.
Public Discourse

Justice Scalia’s Worst Opinion

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Antonin Scalia is one of the most brilliant, principled, sound, and thoughtful jurists ever to sit on the Supreme Court. But twenty-five years ago today, his legal skills utterly failed him.
Public Discourse

Passover, Abortion, and Rabbi Ruth Bader Ginsburg

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Justice Ginsburg praises the heroic women who defied Pharaoh’s authority to save the Hebrews’ baby boys from death. Apparently, she does not have an eye for contemporary parallels.
Public Discourse

The Perils of Political Propaganda: Mass Hysteria over Indiana

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It’s fine for people to express disagreement with the Indiana RFRA—if they know what’s in it. We must not allow ourselves to be manipulated by political propagandists into mob hysteria.
Public Discourse

Preach from the Rooftops: Evangelium Vitae at Twenty

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We cannot address the unraveling of our culture without addressing the consequences of contraception and abortion. We must rightly understand the relationships between love, truth, freedom, and justice.
Public Discourse

Nature vs. Synthetics: What’s at Stake in the Dolce and Gabbana Controversy

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Dolce and Gabbana, whether they use the term or not, are strong advocates of natural law.
Public Discourse

The Shopkeeper’s Dilemma and Cooperation with Evil

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A shopkeeper who objects to sex-same weddings but who nevertheless provides services at such weddings generally acts in a morally permissible way if he acts to comply with a validly-enacted law, to preserve the goodwill of his business, and to make a just profit. Nevertheless, a law that in this way coerces a shopkeeper to cooperate with actions he reasonably believes immoral is gravely unjust.
Public Discourse

Canada’s Supreme Court Creates Right to Assisted Suicide, Leaves Details Up to Parliament

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Most Americans are probably not aware that the push to create a right to assisted suicide is an international effort. The Canadian Supreme Court has just ruled that parliament must enact laws allowing assisted suicide.
Public Discourse

Three-Parent Embryos: Harming Women to Save Lives

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The UK has passed a bill that allows for genetic engineering of children through nuclear transfer technology and germ-line modification. Young women will be needed to supply their eggs. But egg donation—or more accurately, egg selling—is risky business.
Public Discourse

An Insider’s View of the Pro-Life Movement

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A new book offers the first truly comprehensive history of the pro-life movement.
Public Discourse
  • Islam

Islam and the “Islamic State”: What Does the Quran Really Teach about Christianity?

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True Islam condemns the violence of the so-called “Islamic State.” Christians and Muslims must work together to achieve peace and justice.
Public Discourse

The Oldest Trick in the Book Reviewer’s Book: On Misreading Conscience and Its Enemies

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James M. Oleske’s “review” of my new book is no review at all. It’s an intellectually dishonest hit piece.
Public Discourse

What We Don’t Know Just Might Kill You

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The fertility industry has absolutely no interest in doing the studies and the research that are needed to protect women.
Public Discourse

Here Come the Irish: Notre Dame Marches for Life

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The March for Life, on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, is the largest annual civil rights event in the world. As long as it continues, the University of Notre Dame will be there.
Public Discourse

Protecting the Vulnerable: Why We Must Fight for the Inviolability of Life

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A new book clearly examines and answers the most important questions surrounding medical law and ethics, especially in the realm of end-of-life issues.
Public Discourse

Charlie Hebdo, Intolerance, and the Problem of Double Standards

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The terrible massacre in Paris could be a “teachable” moment on the meaning of tolerance, but it will require soul searching by America’s cultural leftists.
Public Discourse

Teach Your Children: Assisted Suicide and My Family

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No one wants pain. But the debate about assisted suicide is not just about those who are terminally ill and in pain. It is about all of us. By voting for assisted suicide, we are implicated in an intrinsically immoral act.
Public Discourse

Charlie Hebdo and #MuslimApologies

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In the wake of Islamist attacks, non-Muslims express concern and confusion not because they are indifferent, but because they are afraid. They want to understand. Muslims have an opportunity to embrace this opportunity for understanding.
Public Discourse

Flirting with Death

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Did New Jersey’s Assembly approve an assisted suicide bill without understanding it? The bill is bad public policy, shot through with dangerous loopholes and contradictions that threaten to push many vulnerable citizens of New Jersey toward death.
Public Discourse

J.S. Mill and the Pro-Life Cause

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In spite of its many problematic aspects, the political thought of J.S. Mill provides a low but solid foundation for the essential convictions of the pro-life movement: that the unborn, in virtue of their common humanity, deserve the full protection of the law.
Public Discourse

Children’s Rights, or Rights to Children?

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If it’s okay to buy and sell sperm, eggs, and wombs, then why is it not okay to sell other human tissues or organs? If it’s okay to sell one’s reproductive parts, why is it not okay to sell one’s sexual parts, as in prostitution? If it’s okay to pre-sell and pre-order children via third-party reproduction, what is so wrong with buying and selling children who are already born or conceived?
Public Discourse

Austria’s Troubling Quran Law

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Austria’s attempt to mandate a single German translation of the Quran reflects ignorance about Islam and the factors contributing to violent extremism, obliviousness to the nature of modern media, and an attitude of cultural imperialism.
Public Discourse

Who’s Framing Brittany Maynard?

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The effort by pro-euthanasia group Compassion & Choices to use Brittany Maynard’s story to push physician-assisted suicide is part of a larger strategy. When talking about end-of-life issues, a strategically crafted frame points to only one logical conclusion: I’d rather be dead.
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