The price of passage of same-sex marriage legislation in the District of Columbia has just risen dramatically. Refusing to include robust religious liberty protections in the bill that has just been approved by a Council subcommittee, the City appears poised to impose requirements that will drastically cut social services for some of the city’s most hard-pressed residents. The impact will be severest on food pantries, health care providers, services for the homeless and adoption and foster care assistance. The conflict focuses on the scope of the religious liberty exemption included …
The social and political drama that played out across Eastern Europe in the decade before the fall of the Berlin Wall had a profound spiritual dimension. From the time of John Paul II’s visit to his Polish homeland in 1979 to November 9, 1989, what historians have called a “revolution of conscience” occurred that led to the collapse of communism with little loss of life – the combined result of President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s policies of peace through strength and the Pope’s relentless messages of spiritual …
Sometimes the best-known lines of famous speeches are only indicators of the rest of their content. “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall” may be the best known excerpt from President Reagan’s speech in Berlin, but the whole is well worth a read. Several paragraphs near the end especially highlight the significance of faith, love, and virtue to free society, and the totalitarian world’s self-destructive antipathy for these. Like that most famous quotation, these prophetic lines show too that successful statesmen must be sober realists about men’s ideals: In a word, …
President Obama signed the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act into law last month. More precisely, he signed into law the fiscal year 2010 National Defense Authorization Act, which contains the hate crimes measure as a ride-along amendment. Either way it’s viewed, the measure is misnamed with respect to the hate crimes provision, as it neither provides for national defense nor adheres to principles of local law enforcement. Instead, the bill makes a federal matter out of certain violent crimes committed against individuals based on their real or perceived …
Yesterday in a victory that was not as close as the final pre-election polls had suggested, voters in Maine adopted a “people’s veto” to protect the traditional definition of marriage as the union of a man and a woman. The margin was 53-47. The voting was closely watched for several reasons, as each of the other 30 states that have held popular votes on marriage redefinition has seen popular majorities approve the traditional understanding. Even more important, had proponents of same-sex marriage prevailed in Maine, it would have marked the …
Visiting the complicated world of emerging adults (young people between the ages of 18 and 29, with data now available up to age 23), Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker report back with findings that raise challenges for the future of marriage as an institution. Some of their findings, which will appear next year in a volume from the Oxford University Press titled Premarital Sex in America, were presented last week at a Heritage Foundation conference on what scholarly research says about religious practice in America. The good news is that …
A new ad on health care from Family Research Council plants tongue firmly in cheek to make a serious point: [youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aXHSw8-YP3w[/youtube] The earliest identified use of the phrase, “there’s no such thing as a free lunch,” dates, fittingly enough, to the Depression Era. And what is true of free lunches, is true of free health care: they do not exist. The deficits being contemplated in the bills now being crafted behind closed doors in Washington, D.C. stretch as far as the eye can see, and what the eye sees are …
As citizens in Maine and Washington state near votes on measures to protect traditional marriage, a subtheme of the debate on this issue is being raised anew: the harassment and intimidation of advocates of traditional marriage by their opponents on the issue. On Wednesday of this week, the U.S. Supreme Court voted 8-1 to preserve a stay on Washington state’s planned publishing of the names of citizens who signed the petition that put marriage-equivalent benefits for same-sex couples on the November 3 ballot. Washington’s law SB 5688 is controversial because …
One of the illusions about comprehensive sex education is that it is, well, a comprehensive treatment of the science of human sexuality. Dr. Miriam Grossman, who has upfront and personal knowledge of the psychological and physiological challenges of sexually involved collegians from her years as a campus psychiatrist at UCLA, does more than beg to differ with the reigning orthodoxy. She shows the difference between good science and contemporary sex education in her new book You’re Teaching My Children What? She’ll summarize her conclusions at a Heritage Foundation lecture today …
