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The militant Russian religious conservatism of the twenty-first century, paradoxically, mirrors the Soviet anti-religious socialism of the twentieth century. Their common feature is a shameless instrumentalization of religion, with the consent of the latter.
The United States must apologize for treating blacks with contempt and compensate with reparations those American blacks who lived through racial segregation. But reparations for all black Americans will not erase the wealth gap between blacks and whites, nor improve the significant educational achievement gap rampant throughout the black communities in this country.
Slavery, Jim Crow, and distributive discrimination assaulted natural rights and the dignity of persons made in the image of God on which these rights are based. They leave behind wounds, the most central of which is the standing victory of injustice, the moral fact of injustice itself that persists in time unless it is repudiated. While constitutional amendments, legislation, and policies have countered and delegitimated these injustices, the lack of a formal apology and reparations has left them still standing.
Trump—and more broadly, the style of politics he represents—did not rise to power on the shoulders of the religious right, but rather the post-religious right. Indeed, his presidency was made possible by the very process of secularization that the religious right has long sought to combat.
The deterioration of housing affordability suggests that we must reorient current policies on land use  and focus on more fundamental objectives: people’s need for housing
Modern life in the United States is atomizing, lonely, and hard on family bonds. Improving the housing stock would help alleviate these challenges.
Being pro-family must also mean being pro-housing reform. If we want more neighborhood children playing in our front yards, we should be pushing their elected officials to make it easier for developers to build, baby, build.
A book in its entirety, once given to the world, is a kind of integer, a whole from which nothing should be subtracted if it is to remain what it is.
303 Creative prevents a First Amendment violation where it would be most keenly felt—the government commanding an individual to use her creative talent to create and promote a message antithetical to her conscience or beliefs. The relative rarity of prior cases involving attempts to compel creative commercial speech may have reflected a tacit consensus that this was a First Amendment redline, not lightly to be crossed.
Prioritizing support to homemakers who care for children and the elderly is not only the right thing to do—it’s also a smart economic decision for the federal government.
Conservatives are defenders of traditional communities, not atomized individuals fending for themselves. We do not oppose the growth of the federal government merely because it is dangerous to individual liberty, but because the bureaucratization of American society violates our conception of the human good.
A timely book on the thought of Harry Jaffa and Walter Berns reminds us that patriotism needs to be about ideas and principles, but it cannot only be about ideas and principles. To win—and deserve to win—elections, conservatism must also inspire love of country and serve the immediate interests of the ordinary man.
In her 2022 book The Ideology of Democratism, Emily Finley contends that democracy, or democratism, has become “perhaps the dominant political belief system in modern Western society.” In other words, democracy has become more than a regime type; it has become a secular religion, complete with its own dogmas, practices, clerics, and eschatology.
Rather than sandlot games and diving contests, June is, for us, a month of contested visions about the body, about sex, gender, race, birth, and death. Perhaps the poet was wrong in declaring April the cruelest month—perhaps that title should go to June. 
Like the Bible, Russian literature came to be perceived “not as a series of separate books but as a single ongoing work composed over many generations.” It is a conversation with both the present and the past simultaneously.
In our cultural moment, an embodied, relational feminism—one that does not see sexual difference as a threat—has to be reactionary; it is counter-cultural by default. Those hoping to realize that vision need to be against progress, but also for something more stable and enduring: a feminist movement that recognizes and embraces the limits of our nature, as well as norms that steward that nature; that guard it from pathological excess and enervation.
Museums assume, both for the country and the individual, a special trust of preservation and civic encouragement. That encouragement need not involve glossing over the failings of our past. We distort our history both when we whitewash it and when we overemphasize our shortcomings.
People of all faiths have heard enough talk about children’s “bodily autonomy,” or their supposed ability to express informed consent. As we are witnessing, mothers and fathers remain a powerful bastion of reason in our new post-gender turn, because they display with and in and through their bodies the reality that Roe sought to hide or ignore.
It is not always easy to buy books for friends—or even for family. The nature of the relationship one has with another, and the knowledge of the other’s interests and capacities, will affect one’s choices. Of books in the pleasure reading category, we have as many choices as our knowledge of our friends’ and loved ones’ tastes and reading history allows. But it is in the third category of books, the ones Francis Bacon said must be “chewed and digested . . . with diligence and attention,” that a real challenge arises.
June 24th is the feast day marking the birth of John the Baptist, and it is also the anniversary of the Dobbs decision that overturned Roe v. Wade’s false declaration that there is a constitutional right to abortion. John the Baptist is an appropriate hero of faith for us this month: he began his life as a witness for the sanctity of unborn life, and ended it as a martyr for marriage.
Juneteenth, coming as it does just weeks before July Fourth, provides a perfect opportunity for us—both individually and collectively—to engage in a season of contemplating and celebrating the complexities and nuances, highs and lows, of this American experiment that has at its core the achievement of freedom.
The principal irony of Juneteenth is that slavery was still a legal institution in the United States on June 19, 1865—if not in Texas because of the Emancipation Proclamation, then certainly in Kentucky and Delaware, where slavery would not be blotted out until the ratification of the thirteenth amendment. This would not, however, be the only irony in the history of American emancipation, and certainly not the last.
Playing a strictly defensive game of knocking down attempts to legalize physician-assisted killing—especially as the United States secularizes and becomes more like Canada—seems like an untenable strategy for protecting the most vulnerable from this deadly violence. Locking in dignity and radical equality of all human beings will require more. In short, it is time to go on offense.
We will never offer our beloved sisters the ghoulish pseudo-compassion of the abortionist’s knife. We will offer, instead, the healing balm of genuine compassion, compassion born of love, compassion that offers, not a quick and easy, but deadly, “solution,” but rather an open-ended, open-hearted, self-sacrificial commitment.