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Search Results for: constitution – Page 9

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Colorado’s Anti-Discrimination Law: Justifying Harms to Religious Minorities with Ideological Science

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While the minority stress theory has been effective in helping advance an “ideological agenda” for “social change,” it has been much less effective in explaining the negative health disparities found among sexual minorities, disparities which remain despite ever-broadening social acceptance. Invoking minority stress theory is not about protecting LGBT-identified people from harm. It’s about stamping out dissent and vilifying those who disagree.
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Hannah Arendt’s Vision of Freedom

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In the face of totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt’s independence of spirit—her reluctance to attach herself to a partisan or intellectual movement—exemplified precisely the sort of political action that she believed to be the foundation of freedom. In our own age of polarization, she stands as a powerful reminder of the necessity—and even the nobility—of political engagement.
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The Piety of Patriotism: A Reply to Susan Hanssen

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As the American story enters its fifth century, the list of those who have earned the right to be called fathers and mothers of our country grows ever longer. As we retell our national story to each generation, we will of course continue to argue about whether some of the characters were really heroes or villains—a debate that is part of every nation’s storytelling. But unless we can recover a certain generosity towards those who came before us, we will find ourselves with nothing to pass on to those who come after.
LGBT protest

What Happened to “Live and Let Live”?

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Liberalism cannot survive as a political philosophy capable of fostering human flourishing if it abandons its supposed virtues of protecting freedoms of religion, speech, and commerce. Yet, as we observe the march of the left on human sexuality, we see an incredible Javert-like intensity in hounding those who offend its sensibilities. We’ve forgotten that liberalism means winning incomplete victories and living with disagreement.
Church building in the fall

Minimalist Religious Freedom as a Self-Inflicted Wound

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Philip Muñoz’s new book helps illuminate the “social contract–natural rights” style of reasoning that was undoubtedly influential at the Founding. But I find it hard to follow—or, for that matter, to fathom—when this sort of reasoning from fictions is deployed normatively to justify contemporary prescriptions that would otherwise seem unjust or undesirable.
Painting of James Madison

Before Critiquing the American Founding, We Should First Understand It

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According to Steven Smith, it’s meaningless to speak of our inherent natural rights. He dismisses the Founders without properly understanding them. A return to the Founders’ natural rights constitutionalism may not offer the best alternative to protect religious liberty today. But we cannot even entertain the possibility that it might if we do not understand the principles of justice or the practical meaning of the philosophy that originally animated the Constitution.
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Bare-Bones Religious Freedom

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In Religious Liberty and the American Founding, Phillip Muñoz believes that there is a kind of natural rights logic that leads to his minimalist version of religious freedom. His central premise is that the Constitution should be interpreted according to the “natural rights” logic that was prevalent in the Founding period; and he tries to follow this logic to its conclusions, come hell or high water.
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What Is Abortion?

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No particular terminology that is adopted in medicine or law determines the moral issues of abortion, nor does any common usage of the word. Pro-life and pro-choice advocates alike are capable of recognizing that a range of medical interventions can end an unborn human being’s life. They differ, often radically, about the justice of most such interventions.
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America Needs Pro-Family Politics: Announcing Patrick T. Brown as Contributing Editor

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A healthy culture, nearly every Public Discourse reader would agree, needs strong families. There is a growing number on the right—and I count myself among them—who recognize the family as possessing an inherent economic logic, in addition to its essential culture-shaping role. Families are influenced by market forces, starting from the very fundamental decision of whether to form a household or not. This requires some amount of getting our hands dirty in the nitty-gritty of politics and policy design.
Painting of the signing of the Constitution in Independence Hall

What’s Wrong with Social Contract Theory

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Although social contract theory is a prominent feature of the American founding, it is both unsound and harmful to a proper understanding of politics. This fact presents a challenge to any form of conservatism that is based on protecting and promoting the principles of the American founding.
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Confessions of a Comatose Son of Liberalism

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Even the healthiest patriotism does not address whether America’s political regime ought to re-main basically neutral about whether its citizens flourish. If what our politics can give us is fair procedures for resolving disputes, and protections for speech and property, and a broad enough distribution of power that tyranny has difficulty taking hold, that is remarkable and we should be grateful. That still isn’t living well.
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Where Does National Review Stand Today? A Conversation with Ramesh Ponnuru and Matt Franck

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National Review midwifed and nurtured the modern conservative movement into being. Conservatism today is in a very different situation from the one that Bill Buckley confronted in 1955. There is this vast conservative enterprise now; it’s kind of hydra-headed. But the basic need is, first, to think about the circumstances in which we find ourselves and how to apply conservative principles to them—or a conservative disposition, if one prefers—and second, how to build a coalition that is large enough to take these ideas off of the shelf.
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The Metaverse Is Not Morally Neutral Technology

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French philosopher Gabriel Marcel’s writings on “intersubjectivity” help us see why the metaverse impedes our ability to grasp reality’s most important truths. When every aspect of how I present myself to others is a choice, all my relations become objects of manipulation. Without the authentic connections of involved, concrete, and personal relationships, I become irretrievably disconnected from reality.
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What Conservatives Have Forgotten about Subsidiarity and the Common Good

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In the last decade or so, various strands of the “new right” have fallen prey to the lures of governmental consolidation. But despite these conservatives’ attempts to justify bold state action in the name of the common good, subsidiarity remains an indispensable guide. Subsidiarity is perhaps the greatest expression of a polycentric approach to the common good.
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Rights and Liberty in the Western Legal Tradition

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John Witte, Jr.’s The Blessings of Liberty offers a wonderful overview of the development of human rights in the West. He contends that natural rights are found in the Bible, were developed by Christian thinkers, and played an important role in the West long before Enlightenment thinkers wrote about them. Witte also focuses on religious freedom more narrowly as the preeminent right.
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California “Transgender Refuge” Bill Usurps Parental Rights and Endangers Children

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If Governor Newsom signs California’s transgender youth “refuge” bill into law, it will be one of the most explicit and radical assaults on parental rights that our nation has ever seen. While debates about how best to care for children with gender dysphoria are ongoing, one thing is clear: encouraging troubled children to run away from home and dividing them from their parents is certain to inflict great harm.
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How to Make a Monarch

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In an egalitarian age, the British monarchy not only persists but flourishes because of three related and often overlooked factors: British people don’t really know the monarch, so they construct one in their preferred image, and this results in a sense of ownership that provides an unexpected democratic dimension, while also offering the possibility of reform and renewal.
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The Bookshelf: Books in the Hand, Books in the Ether

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For all their convenience, e-books just can’t do for us what physical books do. Something about the physical act of reading a book—the intertwined visual and tactile experience—stamps these things on our memory. An ebook is just too ephemeral—too disembodied, literally.
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Loving Theory Instead of Literature

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After reading Terry Eagleton’s new book, Critical Revolutionaries, the message is quite clear for those who love literature: avoid graduate school, find others who share your passion, and recover a proud tradition now lost to ideology and politics.
Thomas Wyck painting, "Scholar in his study"

Why You Should Enjoy Being Perplexed

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Being perplexed means allowing other people and ideas to change or move you at times. Perplexity doesn’t seek cheap or easy answers to serious questions. And it isn’t satisfied with momentary highs from oversimplified and triumphant assertions, but prefers the rewards of prolonged contemplation. Perplexity also turns its sights from the grotesque, and doesn’t abuse its objects for the sake of stimulation or entertainment.

In Defense of Liberalism

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Francis Fukuyama offers a useful account of the pathologies of liberalism and argues that it still has the internal resources necessary to resist its critics. But his defense of liberalism seems designed only to appeal to likeminded centrists. Liberalism today should not be about splitting differences and seeking moderation, but staking out its ground and affirming its beliefs.
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Why Religious Freedom Can’t Protect Abortion

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According to a recent complaint filed by the Jewish congregation L’Dor Va-Dor, Florida’s new law restricting abortion limits the free exercise of religion for Jewish women in Florida who wish to have an abortion after fifteen weeks. But this complaint misunderstands the nature of religious liberty: no religion, or any adherent thereof, has the lawful or moral claim to kill an innocent person in the name of that faith.
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Patriotism in a Polarized Age

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We’re not born being patriots. It’s not something that’s inscribed in our moral DNA; rather, it’s something that has to be cultivated. It is love of country. But as Edmund Burke famously wrote, “To make us love our country, our country ought to be lovely.” What does it mean to have a lovable country, and what should the honest patriot do or think?
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Catholic, Black, and Pro-Life: An Interview with Gloria Purvis and Robert P. George

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Someone who is subjected to racist treatment is negatively impacted. That child of God is treated as less than who he or she is. Those engaging in racist behavior are negatively impacted too. Why? Because they are behaving beneath the dignity of who they are. Too often people look at racism as a one-way thing when it’s an all-the-way-round thing because it’s a human family issue. Racism is a rebellion against God’s plan for the human family and for human flourishing.
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