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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.

When Does an Intellectual Failing become a Moral One? Insights from Bonhoeffer

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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

The Right to Life and the Irrelevance of Rape

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Rape is tragic, awful, horrible, gut-wrenching—an unspeakable crime of great emotional harm—but rape is essentially irrelevant to the morality of abortion.
Public Discourse

The Surrogate Uterus: The AGR Case and Melissa Brisman

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The question of surrogacy has always been more about us than about the participants in the relationship. Will we use the power of the people to take a child from the arms of her mother when the mother is perfectly fit, loves her child, and desires to discharge her duties to her child?
Public Discourse

The Surrogate Uterus: Baby M and the Bioethics Commission Report

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Governor Christie’s recent veto of a “gestational” surrogacy bill should prompt us to look at the legal history of surrogacy and the terrible injustices that it causes.
Public Discourse

Respecting Uncle Jack: On Death With Dignity

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A new effort to legalize doctor-prescribed suicide in Massachusetts reminds us that we are not our own to dispose of at will.
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

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

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

A Eugenics Common Sense?

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Calling fetuses defective if they are prenatally diagnosed with genetic conditions foreshadows a dangerous path toward eugenics.
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.
Public Discourse

Abortion, Conscience, and Health Care Provider Rights

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A faulty understanding of conscience as an instrument of subjective preferences and feelings is fueling efforts to undermine conscience protection for doctors who oppose abortion and provision of contraceptives.
Public Discourse

Marriage, Religious Liberty, and the “Grand Bargain”

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In the name of “marriage equality” and “non-discrimination,” liberty—especially religious liberty and the liberty of conscience—and genuine equality are undermined.
Public Discourse

Here’s Twenty Bucks: Don’t Have Babies

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Melinda Gates and the Family Planning Summit will waste 4.6 billion dollars on contraception for women in third world countries instead of addressing the educational and healthcare-related challenges pregnant mothers face.
Public Discourse

Casey at Twenty: Pro-Life Progress Despite a Judicial Setback

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Since Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the pro-life movement’s incremental strategies—strengthening parental consent laws, advancing legal protection on the basis of fetal pain, and defunding Planned Parenthood—give us reason to be optimistic about the future of the pro-life movement.
Public Discourse

Will the Obamacare “Tax” Trump Religious Liberty?

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Though the Supreme Court has long been hostile to tax exemptions for religious reasons, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and the Establishment Clause should give religious organizations reasons to hope that they won’t be penalized by the Obamacare “tax.”
Public Discourse

HHS Mandate: Unjust (as well as Illegal)

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To recap two major problems with the HHS mandate: it restricts the natural right of religious freedom and imposes a false view of religion.
Public Discourse

Casey at Twenty: Lessons from a Judicial Disaster

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The lesson of Casey is that the nomination and confirmation of judges with a sound judicial philosophy is an essential foundation stone of a culture of life.
Public Discourse

Casey: Enduring, Entrenched, Intentionally Evil Egregious Error

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Casey is not a sound exposition of the Constitution, and its authority should be repudiated by all other actors in our constitutional system The second in a two-part series on the deadly significance of Planned Parenthood v. Casey
Public Discourse

Planned Parenthood v. Casey at Twenty: The Worst Constitutional Decision of All Time

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In its effects, methodology, substantive doctrine, conception of the judicial role and of judicial authority, and conception of what constitutes the rule of law, Casey is terribly significant and terribly wrong. The first in a two-part series on the deadly significance of Planned Parenthood v. Casey.
Public Discourse

At the Door of the Temple: Religious Freedom and the New Orthodoxy

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The new orthodoxy of secularism fails to understand that the virtues generated by religious freedom underpin and encourage a healthy democracy.
Public Discourse

Religious Freedom: Use It or Lose It

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Recalling the history of Americans’ and their British ancestors’ dedication to religious freedom offers lessons for our own struggles that lie ahead.
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