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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.

A Spiritual Aeneid

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Public Discourse

Obama’s New Beginning in Cairo: Now He Needs One in Washington

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President Obama’s “New Beginning” speech in Cairo featured wise and strategically astute language regarding Muslims. Yet coverage of the event by the U.S. State Department office responsible for communication to foreign audiences undermined Obama’s message. Before more outreach to foreign audiences, the Obama White House needs to reach out to its own State Department.
Public Discourse

Obama and His Pro-Life Apologists

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Three months into President Obama’s first term, one of his most prominent pro-life opponents, Robert P. George, engaged in a discussion with one of his most prominent pro-life supporters, Douglas W. Kmiec. The article below is adopted from George's remarks, which called for candid speech on Obama's abortion record.
Public Discourse

Notre Dame and Obama’s Roe Problem

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President Obama’s calls for honest dialogue on the abortion issue can only get off the ground if both sides agree that abortion is a contestable issue. But if it is a contestable issue, it should be settled by democratic processes—not judicial fiat.
Public Discourse

Obama, Muslims, and Religious Freedom

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Muslims who favor religious freedom deserve to have their voices heard. One way President Obama could be respectful of and show his appreciation for Islam would be to nominate an Ambassador-at-Large for Religious Freedom and support religious freedom in his administration’s foreign policy.
Public Discourse

Can Secularism Save the Islamic World?

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What the Muslim world needs is not Western-style secularization that stresses the privatization of religion, but a form of authentic faith at ease with modernity
Public Discourse

The Eugenicist Structure of U.S. Family-Planning Policy

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From the Clinton Administration to Nancy Pelosi, American family-planning policy continues to preserve the eugenicist principle that America would be better off if poor children were never conceived. In fact, Clinton tied Medicaid funding to state promises that it would save the government money in the long run by “averting births” of children who were likely to be a drain on the welfare system. But there is an alternative. The third in a three-part series.
Public Discourse

The Racist Origins of U.S. Family-Planning Policy

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The senators who originally designed our family planning policies believed that the mostly black welfare population was incurably lazy, promiscuous, intellectually substandard, and a burden on public schools, and, moreover, that they probably would remain so indefinitely. Birth control, therefore, was in their eyes a way to reduce the number of these undesirable people. This article is the second installment in a three-part series.
Public Discourse

Forcing the Poor to Stop Having Children

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Nancy Pelosi’s widely reported comments on family planning were simply a restatement of a view shared by both political parties. This article is the first installment of a three-part series on the racist origin and eugenicist structure of U.S. family-planning policy.
Public Discourse

Torture: What it is, and Why it is Wrong

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The recent publication of the Torture Memos and of the International Red Cross report on the treatment of high-level detainees in the aftermath of 9/11 has returned to national prominence the discussion of the morality of torture and “enhanced interrogation” techniques. It is important to be clear, as a moral matter, on what boundaries should be accepted in interrogation of human beings; a responsible and non-politicized discussion is essential on this difficult issue.
Public Discourse

Cognitive Enhancing Drugs

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Recent calls for the widespread use of cognitive enhancements are based on a narrow, mechanistic view of what it means to be human.
Public Discourse

Freedom in Muslim Countries: An Endangered Species

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Encouraging peaceful, reformist Muslims requires freedom of speech and religion. Yet U.S. policies in Egypt and elsewhere support governments which actively work against Muslim reformist efforts.
Public Discourse

Politics and Science

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The “rightful place” of science is not as obvious as the President thinks.
Public Discourse

Dividing the Child: The Problems with the Saletan Abortion Compromise

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William Saletan’s proposals for abortion compromise would do little to relieve the plight of women or save the unborn.
Public Discourse

What Obama Will Give the Left

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With political realities preventing Obama from satisfying his left-wing base on economic and foreign policy questions, look for Obama to give the left the barn on social issues. And expect him to do so in significant measure through the courts.
Public Discourse

Sartre Debates an Islamist

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The play “Madah-Sartre,” both funny and poignant, provides a glimpse into the contradictions, logical impoverishment, and inhumanity of Islamist ideology, while also offering a dose of basic human decency to parties in a conflict which is more often characterized by violence than civil debate.
Public Discourse

Pro-Life Secularists and the Future of Abortion Politics

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If opposition to abortion is not necessarily tied to a religious worldview, pro-life advocates may see victory in the culture wars.
Public Discourse

The Impact of Parental Notification Laws

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Professor Michael New writes that, contrary to claims by the Guttmacher Institute, parental involvement laws do have a significant effect in reducing abortions.
Public Discourse

A Diverse Bioethics Council?

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President Bush created a council that represented the range of viewpoints held by reasonable and responsible Americans on the most urgent and divisive bioethics questions facing the country. Will President Obama do the same?
Public Discourse

Our Struggle for the Soul of our Nation

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In remarks delivered yesterday at the Cardinal O’Connor Conference on Life, Robert P. George reflected on the history of the pro-life movement and offered advice for its future.
Public Discourse

Hillary Clinton, Public Diplomacy, and the Middle East

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America’s public diplomacy should be focused on fostering ideas in our interest that matter in key foreign audiences, not just on pro-America image marketing.
Public Discourse

Islamists Killed Tahar Djaout: We Should Give Life to His Ideas

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The Algerian novel The Last Summer of Reason provides a powerful and strangely beautiful reminder of the danger of letting violent ideological fundamentalism fester. We would do well to heed this reminder now, not later.
Public Discourse

An Absolute Liberty of Conscience?

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Freedom of conscience is an important, though limited, right. In some cases a state may prevent someone from acting on her conscientious judgments. But in other cases—such as those in which a pro-life doctor is required to perform an abortion—the violation of conscience is intrinsically unjust.
Public Discourse

What We Should Do About Natural Embryo Loss

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While abortion opponents decry the deliberate destruction of human embryos, as many as half of all embryos are lost naturally. How should pro-life advocates address this problem?
Public Discourse

Will Islam in Germany lead to Mufti Merkel?

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The German government’s attempts to promote moderate Islam may have the opposite effect.
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