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The Chinese Communist Party suppressed the truth about this virus and allowed it to spread around the world, creating a catastrophe. When the pandemic is finally under control, the rest of the world must come together to confront the CCP. In a globalized world, when dictators are in power, it’s not only the people they directly rule who are in harm’s way. It’s all of humanity. If free nations do not eradicate communist authoritarianism, they will become its victims.
As much as I would like to believe that the COVID-19 crisis will produce a future where evidence-based policies triumph over other forms of governance, the sad reality is that the COVID-19 crisis will leave us in a much more authoritarian Venezuela.
Assisting a gender dysphoric patient in “transitioning” without laying out the full panoply of medical, psychological, and social consequences violates the physician’s ethical obligation to obtain truly informed consent. The first of two essays.
Many policies provide public-health benefits in pandemics, such as making facemasks mandatory, cancelling school, and banning large assemblies and long-distance travel. But ordering people to cower in their homes, harassing people for having playdates in the park, and ordering small businesses to close regardless of their hygienic procedures has no demonstrated effectiveness.
What is the value of human companionship or gathering together on Easter? What is the value of knowing that your elderly parents are safe from a highly infectious disease? There is no way to put either one into epidemiological or economic models. The debate between those insisting we need to follow the advice of epidemiologists and those insisting we ought to prioritize the economic effects of that advice may actually be a proxy war about what constitute the most important things in a society.
I am astonished by how many people think a deadly pandemic is the right time to foment the spirit of rebellion and pick a fight with the government over what many will inevitably see as our right to infect others. That’s what it looks like to our neighbors. They do not see this as a testimony of our unshakable faith, but as evidence of callous unconcern for their lives and the lives of the police, grocery workers, mailmen, health workers, and garbage men with whom we all interact.
Easter is the victory of life over death, our deliverance and liberation in the resurrection of God’s Son. But if our Easter joy this year is mixed with a taste of Good Friday’s myrrh and loss, and a hunger for the Eucharist we can’t satisfy, we should accept it as a gift. It’s a reminder of the precious things we too easily take for granted.
As we prepare for the worst and hope for the best, we have daily opportunities to make meaningful impacts on each other and on our communities. We have come together in a new way, and I suspect this will ultimately reshape the future landscapes of our medical practice and our health-care system.
In the next few weeks, as the pandemic perhaps reaches its zenith, we will have the opportunity to decide once again what sort of society we intend to be. We should eschew all invidious discrimination and recommit ourselves to treating all who are ill as bearers of profound, inherent, and equal worth and dignity.
In fighting Coronavirus, the precautionary principle is reasonable: we need to act so as to bring as close to zero the probability of the most extreme results. However, the precautionary principle does not point in only one direction. Closing down an entire society for a prolonged period of time is uncharted territory, with many perils. We must also bear in mind the pre-eminent importance of the common good to avoid a catastrophic social collapse.
While medical experts’ job is to save lives from the coronavirus, it is the responsibility of citizens to ask and decide what makes a worthwhile life. There is more to life than mere living; our own self-respect as responsible agents, who govern ourselves under the law (human and moral), ought not be so easily jettisoned.
Our confrontation with suffering and death provides an important opportunity for reflection. What is it that we value most? What relationships need forgiveness or reconciliation? How should we understand our lives and our own mortality? Both empirical data and religious traditions show that, by engaging in such interior reflection, it can be possible to grow and flourish even amidst great suffering.
Schools are closed. Sports and music lessons are cancelled. Everyone is at home. What are you going to do? Instead of allowing coronavirus to control your life, why not plan for leisure? We can make this evil an occasion for despair, or we can choose to see it as a “severe mercy” for our benefit, our joy, and ultimately our sanctification.
The promises of virtualization and automation are often exaggerated, as are their dangers. It is possible for an increasingly virtualized and automated economy to actually be more humane, but only if such an economy does justice to the human realities of incarnation and relation.
It is helpful for older teens to understand and admire the ideal of sexual integrity. Call them to greatness, while also setting down clear guidelines of what is and isn’t permitted in their opposite-sex friendships while they are under your care. We advise parents to initiate advanced conversations with both sons and daughters about how sexual desire is tricky to control, but absolutely manageable with time-tested strategies. Teens should also be taught about the dangers—and avoidability—of STDs, and encouraged to show compassion and empathy towards peers who don’t know how to live sexual integrity. Finally, let your teens know that you have great confidence in their ability to live out sexual integrity and practice true love and authentic friendship. But even if they make a mistake, they can always make amends, rectify, and start again.
In this segment, we continue our Tips by turning to the early teenage years, when conversations should be less about the mechanics of sex and more about the philosophy—or the meaning of sex. Remind them that sexual activity can lead to babies, and that babies born outside of wedlock suffer an injustice. Give them more advanced strategies for mind and body safety in today’s world, and balance it all out with positive messages about sex as a beautiful gift-of-self in marriage.
A major source of political division in America is the difference between those who believe in essences and those who follow intersectionality. Those who hold theories of intersectionality believe that human identity and much of reality itself is a construct that they can revise, not an objective reality that we can all know. This limits the possibility of political discourse: we cannot reason together if one side no longer believes in the capacity of reason to discern what is true.
As a parent, you are in the best position to teach your children about sex. Mom and dad should be the first to introduce the subject—better a year too early than five minutes too late. By instilling good habits and ideas from an early age and having honest conversations with your children as they grow, you will help them to understand their sexed bodies; practice body safety; be on guard against porn; and marvel at how babies are made.
Hadley Arkes and Robert Miller go one more round on the moral norms that govern speech and the government’s authority in prohibiting immoral speech.
Why would Scientific American urge a ban on therapies that may free some from an identity associated with greater depression and suicide, and yet never question “treatments” for gender dysphoria that lead to increased confusion, depression, and suicidal tendencies?
Free markets and a limited state require a culture of liberty that says “yes” to responsibility and “no” to soft despotism.
Is the world of private money an inevitability? Do we all need to get used to the fact that whether we like it or not, Facebook and Apple and Microsoft and Google are going to dominate the monetary landscape of the future? Not at all.
Donor conception is an unethical practice that separates family members under the guise of charity. It’s okay to believe that the method of your conception was wrong and still give thanks for your life.
Robert Miller’s defense of free speech risks removing the moral ground that could explain the rightness or goodness of the freedom we seek to preserve. In place of a moral defense in principle, we would simply have a set of utilitarian guesses: that if we pretend we have no standards of judgment, things will work out better for us in the long run.