“The Personal is Political” was a slogan engineered by Marxist feminists of the 1960s and 1970s. Few people realized at the time exactly what that slogan entailed. “The personal is political” should have telegraphed loud and clear that these women intended to politicize every aspect of our personal lives. Many people dismissed extreme feminism as … Read more
Recently in Ireland a body called the Irish Citizens’ Assembly took steps long feared by supporters of the right to life. The assembly is not a regular constitutional component of the Irish government. Rather it is a body called into being by the government to make suggestions as to potential constitutional amendments for the legislature … Read more
“Abandonment of Christian sexual morality is the core of the Church’s self-secularization.” ∼ Gabriele Kuby, The Global Sexual Revolution From time to time, the church finds itself with egg on its face because of its failure to speak out in the face of grievous injustices. The Nazi episode, the Civil Rights movement in the United … Read more
On April 12, the attorney general of California, Xavier Becerra, said that North Carolina will remain on the list of states to which California employees may not travel using state money. The reason for the ban is simple: California wants you to know how virtuous it is. In other words, the state is virtue signaling. … Read more
With the confirmation of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court, many social conservatives breathed a sigh of relief. From what we know of his record, Justice Gorsuch does seem to be a worthy successor to Justice Antonin Scalia. Even if Gorsuch is somewhat less distinguished as a legal mind than Scalia, he is clearly … Read more
Many Catholics look upon Islam as an ally in the struggle against militant secularism. Since Muslims are opposed to permissiveness, pornography, same-sex “marriage,” and other aspects of the secularist agenda, many Catholics assume that they must share similar values about marriage and sexuality. But this is not the case. The Islamic emphasis on modesty and … Read more
Not long ago I lectured to a class of seniors at Catholic University of America on the topic of the UN and the development of international law and human rights. Among the new efforts to develop human rights, I discussed “sexual orientation and gender identity” (SOGI), the hottest of topics anywhere. During the discussion, as … Read more
The Founding Fathers envisioned the Supreme Court of the United States as an apolitical branch of government, co-equal to the others but devoid of any partisanship or politicking. Alexander Hamilton wrote that judges in the new American system would have “neither force nor will, but merely judgment.” The question of confirming a justice to the … Read more
Whereas T.S. Eliot wrote that “April is the cruelest month” in The Waste Land (a fact empirically verified for me by living in Alaska for 9 years), I’ve found that, at least in the decade of the 2000s, October sometimes became my crankiest. 2004 and 2008 come to mind. Both involved a significant pre-election immersion … Read more
I recently wrote a piece about the civilizational struggle with Islam. In response, a reader asked for some specific practical ways that Catholics could resist Islam. I replied with a short list of steps Church leaders could take: Break off dialogue with Muslim Brotherhood-linked groups such as ISNA and ICNA. Stop lending them legitimacy. Stop … Read more
In February, a group of pro-abortion doctors penned a commentary for the New England Journal of Medicine explaining why the drug Mifepristone should be available in pharmacies, citing safety and convenience. This group was spearheaded by Dr. Daniel Grossman of the ANSIRH program at the University of California, San Francisco, the same program that produced … Read more
A couple of months ago I was savaged on my campus on account of a title supplied by one of my editors: “My College Succumbed to the Totalitarian Diversity Cult.” I don’t know that Providence College has succumbed, but the next day somebody had written on the blackboard of my class, “Diversity is not a … Read more
In February, female members of an official Swedish delegation to Iran donned headscarves and long coats so as not to offend their Iranian counterparts. At about the same time, Marine Le Pen, the leader of France’s National Front Party, cancelled a meeting with Lebanon’s Grand Mufti after he insisted that she wear a headscarf. “You … Read more
Last week, California brought fifteen criminal counts against our client David Daleiden. Counts one through eight deal with the 2014 National Abortion Federation Annual Meeting. Counts nine through eleven deal with the two restaurant visits with Planned Parenthood personnel in the Los Angeles area (the videos that reveal “crush above, crush below,” and “I want … Read more
We hear a lot nowadays about the polarization in American politics, between the two parties and between conservatives and “progressives” (as liberals have come to be called). What is not mentioned is that, due especially to ideology, the great casualty of our current politics has been integrity. While politics is not known as a field … Read more
There was always something Disneyesque about the 1980s preachers of the prosperity gospel. Of course there was no corpus on their cross, but that sacrilege had been achieved by earlier versions of Protestantism. What was really galling about the perpetually smiling televangelists was their soft-lens obliteration of the cross, which had at least remained a … Read more
At a recent talk, I compared our days to the times of the barbarian invasions and the fall of the Roman Empire. It is a fairly common comparison that applies to decadent societies like our own. In the end, I highlighted the need to continue to fight the Culture War and thus oppose the neo-barbarians … Read more
President Erdogan, who is rapidly turning Turkey into a Caliphate, once said that “Democracy is just the train we board to reach our destination.” Is religious liberty also a train that Islamists ride until they reach their stop? That’s an increasingly urgent question now that mosques are popping up all over the landscape of Europe, … Read more
The success of a man may be measured in this life by the love of his friends and even by the hatred of his enemies. By this measure, Dr. Joseph Nicolosi was a very successful man when he passed utterly unexpectedly a few weeks ago from complications of the flu. His enemies danced on his … Read more
Recently, I took my son swimming at a local rec center. Entering the men’s locker room, we encountered a sign: “Children over 6 must use the appropriate locker room.” For a moment, I was tempted to speed dial the ACLU and Human Rights Watch to roust some federal judge that Sunday morning who could save … Read more