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.

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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.
If opposition to abortion is not necessarily tied to a religious worldview, pro-life advocates may see victory in the culture wars.
Professor Michael New writes that, contrary to claims by the Guttmacher Institute, parental involvement laws do have a significant effect in reducing abortions.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
The German government’s attempts to promote moderate Islam may have the opposite effect.
The advice of a recent report by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists seeks to impose one contested moral view on an entire field of medicine.
John Haldane has reminded social conservatives in America of important political and moral truths, but he overlooks the necessity of engaging in partisan politics with eyes wide open to political realities.
Spend some time traveling in this “Axis of Evil” nation and you’ll meet many people who will challenge conventional wisdom. Understanding the mixed-bag of Syrian social, political, and cultural allegiances will be key for U.S. foreign policy.
One need not be religious to oppose abortion. A simple look at what it does to new human life and what it has done to contemporary society is more than reason enough. New horrors loom on the horizon, but there is reason for hope.
Michael New's criticism of a recent study has come in for criticism itself. He responds that the study suffers from methodological mistakes and faulty presentation.
As the recent film "Obsession" points out, Islamist radicalism poses a grave threat to the freedoms of constitutional democracies. But "Obsession" largely ignores potential solutions and a host of moderate Islamic voices that have gone unheard.
The author of a recent abortion study answers Michael New's criticisms.
Social Conservatives in America would do well to consider recent events in the U.K.
Archbishop Chaput writes to the editors of Public Discourse
Doug Kmiec writes a public letter
The Obama apologists are at it again, this time attacking Archbishop Charles Chaput for speaking out against their candidate's pro-abortion views. But the latest salvo from Doug Kmiec is a tangled web of falsehoods and fallacies.
Can the Democratic Party's awkward position on infanticide and abortion be regarded as simply a lesser matter in an ensemble of "other issues" of higher standing? Or does that position challenge the very coherence of everything else that a liberal party proclaims itself to be?
Catholics in Alliance recently released a study questioning the effectiveness of pro-life legislation and arguing that greater spending on welfare programs was a better strategy for reducing abortion. Unfortunately, their study is seriously flawed. Rigorous analysis of their own data indicates that increased welfare spending only has little to no impact on abortion. Public funding restrictions and informed-consent laws, however, are effective at reducing abortion rates.
Nearly half of all African-American pregnancies end in abortion, and social inequality isn't the only reason why.

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