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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.
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.
Social capital has been studied by a variety of scholars across the political spectrum for decades now. But one area that deserves more focus from policymakers is the crucial formation we receive in earliest years of life, ages zero to three. As attachment theory suggests, the care and support we receive—or don’t receive—during these years play a vital role in our ability to attain and preserve social capital throughout our lives.
On both a social and individual level, we should structure our work in ways that leave margin for relationships, allowing us the space to respond to the unpredictable needs and gifts of the people we encounter in our homes and communities.
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.
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.
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.
Any talk about masculinity today can easily veer into predictable patterns: a left that paints with uncritically broad brushes, and a right that gets defensive and in the process dumbs down its beliefs. But Richard Reeves’s book Of Boys and Men avoids predictability, blending statistical insight and easygoing wit to craft a fruitful exploration of male malaise.
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.
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.
The Soviet regime is formally gone, but the legacy of its formidable security apparatus lives on. There was never a “decommunization” process in the wake of the USSR’s collapse. The vast majority of those who had participated in its structures and atrocities escaped punishment, and many of them created political careers in the post-communist era. People like Vladimir Putin were deeply marked by their socialization within that apparatus.
In The Classical and Christian Origins of American Politics, Kody Cooper and Justin Dyer successfully refute the still (somehow) influential interpretation of the American Founding as a secular-not-Christian project. However, they do so without successfully establishing their preferred alternative, the Christian-not-secular interpretation. There is a vast middle between these two extremes whose existence slips through the authors’ fingers again and again like a well-greased elephant.
What would happen if we dropped that charged word “liberalism” from the conversation and got down to specifics? I suspect much of Patrick Deneen’s postliberal magic would disappear.
In The Myth of Left and Right, Hyrum and Verlan Lewis certainly succeed in proving to the reader that the pieces within each ideological bundle have shifted over time and do not inevitably go together, but they go well beyond that in concluding that each coalition’s bundle is fundamentally random. Though labels and coalitions may be quite movable, at any given time (including now) ideological identifications can tell us something intelligible about our politics.
Prose is not poetry, yet it has its own rhythms; and the writer’s meaning—conveyed not in bare words alone but in emphases, inflections, punctuations—can be clarified by speaking and hearing it as well as by seeing it. But reading well aloud takes practice.
Fred Kaplan’s new biography of Thomas Jefferson, His Masterly Pen, gives us the Jefferson we deserve: Jefferson the writer, the listener, and the aesthete.
Micah Watson and Ryan Anderson look back on his Piers Morgan interview, how the debate on same-sex marriage played out, what that might mean for our debates on transgender ideology, the nature of political discourse in America today, the future of the conservative movement, and what to look for in the next decade.
Reconceiving of marriage in terms of “self-expression” has been a terrible, value-laden mistake, betraying the pretensions to liberal neutrality. Plural marriage is inferior for raising children and for maintaining marital harmony; but most of all, in today’s climate, it creates a culture dedicated to adult sexual self-expression rather than the good of children and deep love.
The bad good (or great) books must be read and taught in just the same way as the good great books. The teacher must be a wrestling coach, instilling in his students a readiness to grapple equally with every kind of argument, accepting nothing on which they have not tested their own grip.
“Stigmarketing,” which is appealing to claims of stigma to motivate social change, has become the backbone of legal efforts toward that end. Stigmarketing capitalizes on gay–straight differences, and the way these disparities can be measured by the absolute surge in research on “minority stress theory,” or MST.
Our culture has shifted drastically, but children haven’t changed. In fact, they continue to be victimized by practices and policies that prioritize adult desires above children’s rights. It’s past time to start putting them at the center of our national conversation. That begins with clearly and courageously defending children’s rights by shaping culture, reforming law, and rethinking our approach to technology.
There are several ways to define sex precisely. Any good definition will capture the central concept of biological sex—the orientation of male and female bodies for reproduction. It will also refer to what happens under normal development while accounting for disorders. Finally, it will accommodate the fact that organisms have and do different things at different stages of development.