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Given the ongoing evolution of abortion law in the United States, it makes sense to engage and evaluate the constitutions and laws of other jurisdictions. Although these sources and materials do not determine the meaning of our Constitution, they can illuminate our scientific, medical, and ethical debates. A particularly valuable resource, which explores abortion jurisprudence across a variety of legal contexts, is Unborn Human Life and Fundamental Rights: Leading Constitutional Cases under Scrutiny, edited by William L. Saunders and Pilar Zambrano.
The question is not whether diversity is desirable or undesirable. Most of us can appreciate that there is value in diversity. The real question concerns what price we are willing to pay for it.
Allen C. Guelzo has written a perceptive character study (and military evaluation) of Robert E. Lee that is alert to the many contradictions that seem to pepper his life. What emerges is a portrait not unlike the one peering off the dust jacket: thoughtful and appealing, yet facing two directions at once.
Conservatives may hope that liberalism’s better angels prevail. But the ravages of ideological liberalism, especially the damage done by the sexual revolution to family and community, require active redress. Conservatives, drawing on the wisdom and traditions we have sustained (and which have sustained us), must help our culture relearn essential parts of being human.
For a conscience coddled by a culture of self-definition and consent, choice cloaked as grace will always look preferable. But hard, engraved truths such as fatherhood offer rescue from the hell of interminable deliberation—which, as Alasdair MacIntyre has argued, is the hallmark of modern moral theory.
“Much American (and British) media depiction of faith—sadly, but perhaps inevitably – tends to be primary colored, inadequately nuanced, and at odds with what I have found to be the case from my fifty years’ engagement with the United States.” An interview with the British historian of America, Richard Carwardine.
American “family values” before the baby boomers and Roe v. Wade and second-wave feminism were shaped more by modern notions of industrial progress than by eternal truths about the human person. The sexual revolution emerged from axioms that had already permeated the mainstream for decades. Even among social conservatives, those axioms still shape our discourse about the family today.
When the hits keep on coming, it’s difficult for series writers to resist the market demand. Success builds the writer’s treadmill, and it can lack an “Off” switch. Perhaps “keep them coming back for more” should be replaced as the series writer’s motto by “make them wish there had been more.”
Let Casey stand, and its abortion license fall.
The day you pass pro-life legislation, if you’re trying to win people over, should also be the day that you are passing new spending bills to support adoption, to support pregnant mothers—to support, not just crisis pregnancy centers, but crisis first-two-years-of-life centers! And that doesn’t have to mean bureaucratic welfare-state spending. But it means some kind of spending, in a way that I think many people active in the pro-life movement are comfortable with. Many people in the Republican Party institutionally are obviously not.
In Part I of this article, we established that many of the reasons some Jewish Americans passionately oppose overturning of Roe v. Wade are either overblown or baseless. Today, we highlight one of the ways in which overturning Roe will help to foster a political culture of federalism and subsidiarity that benefits religious minorities.
Roe is indefensible as a matter of honest constitutional interpretation. It short-circuited the political process and poisoned the Court. Its systematic flaws, widely acknowledged by a variety of progressive and pro-choice legal scholars, caused the judiciary to become the branch most, not “least[,] dangerous to the political rights of the Constitution.”
A functioning constitutionalism that protects the people’s rights and fosters good governance requires a sound political theory behind it. Times have changed since the American Founding, but Thomas is right that the natural law teaching in the Founders’ political theory remains as sound and useful as ever.
As the Democratic Party at the national level moves further into abortion extremism and the exclusion of those who dissent, it is hard to imagine the party embracing a more moderate and inclusive stance. But electoral consequences in the 2022 midterms could prompt this awakening.
Roe could be reversed in one of two strongly pro-life ways. The Court could declare that the child is a fellow human being and a person, and is thus constitutionally protected prior to birth. Or the Court could in effect encourage each state to recognize the child as one of us. The latter could well be politically preferable.
Texas’s refusal to choose between the mother and her prenatal child, despite some important questions about the method used to achieve their goals, constitutes a blueprint for the pro-life movement. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, many more vulnerable women across the country will be without the access to abortion our throwaway culture has diabolically forced them to rely on. Pro-lifers must follow Texas’s lead and be at the ready to assist these women. We must make good on our claims that their legal and social equality does not require redistributing oppression to another vulnerable population.
Moving books home has turned my mind toward publishers that seem to be of high value because of the enduring importance of their books. One such is Liberty Fund, which specializes in classic conservative and libertarian texts in politics and economics. Another is the Library of America, which has a broad mission to publish (in its own words) “America’s greatest writing.”
The history put forward in abortion litigation by advocates of abortion has never been about history. By their own admission, they “fudge it as necessary,” keeping up “the guise of impartial scholarship while advancing the proper ideological goals.”
If we understand that truth is inherently tentative and provisional and acknowledge that we must cultivate intellectual humility, we could mitigate many of the worst repercussions of social media on politics.
Our schools of business should be places where the whole academic community, which includes administrators, faculty, and the students themselves, can work together towards educating tomorrow’s business leaders, cultivating the very best in them. We should not allow the cheating subculture’s self-righteous and narcissistic agenda to undermine the higher quest for excellence.
After almost fifty years of abortion jurisprudence, the US Supreme Court has an opportunity to overrule the arbitrary viability standard, to expand states’ ability to regulate pre-viability abortions, and to narrow down Doe’s unconscionable definition of health. International and foreign law on abortion can provide legal support for such a ruling.
A 1937 novel by Carol Ryrie Brink offers a feminine version of the popular “kids shipwrecked on an island” plot. The protagonists do not have to spear boars or devise a polis. Rather, they must show that they can live as women, taking care of the four babies shipwrecked with them. Can the girls make the most of the resources available to them, remain cooperative and kind to each other under tremendous strain, and prioritize the well-being of the vulnerable people entrusted to their care?
Although the ideas presented in The Concept of Social Justice are just a start, they provide a crucial foundation for the salvific and eternal work that Catholics must complete in the political arena.
If conservatives are to abandon truth-seeking and engaging with political rivals, what then is the alternative? If we resign the enterprise of reasoned debate, of at least attempting to persuade, then where do we go from here? Do we simply line up with the one in six Americans in favor of military rule and hope that our side prevails in the coup?