After two weeks of increasingly intense criticism over Obamacare’s disregard for religious liberty, the White House woke up this morning in a mood to “accommodate” its critics. Perhaps White House officials should have signaled that to Senate Democrats yesterday before Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid blocked an amendment sponsored by Sen. Roy Blunt (R-MO) to preserve faith-based groups’ religious liberty and not force them to take actions contrary to their beliefs and teachings. Instead, the White House maintains its goal-overriding objections of conscience to mandate insurance coverage for birth control, …
On January 20, U.S. Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius finalized regulations for preventive services under Obamacare that require religious institutions beyond churches to provide and pay for contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs, and sterilization in their health coverage. The mandate violates the teachings and beliefs of many religious institutions and puts their ministries of service to millions at risk. It tramples religious liberty, and it has rightly offended many Americans. The quotations below from sources across the political spectrum are just a sampling of the outcry against the Obamacare …
No Child Left Behind (NCLB) turned 10 yesterday, and the anniversary is a good time to assess the toll of federal education intervention and to identify steps Congress can take now toward restoring constitutional governance in education. Eight legislative generations before NCLB, Washington first ventured into local school policy with the Elementary and Secondary Education Act of 1965 (ESEA). The 31-page, $1 billion Great Society program funded low-income districts in an effort to close the achievement gap between needy students and their peers. Nearly a half-century later, the situation is …
Gratitude, it’s been observed, is a hallmark conservative virtue. We prize the heritage passed down to us through the generations. We look beyond ourselves to the wisdom of the ages to shape our outlook and to the enduring principles of America’s founding to ground our decisions today. Gratitude for what we’ve received makes us respond by giving, especially at this season. This year, the season of gifts is particularly poignant, as Heritage research fellow Ryan Messmore writes in an op-ed this week: Christmastime is a season of gratitude. Whether it’s …
When Pam Tebow was counseled to abort her baby to save her own life, the doctor referred to him as a “mass of fetal tissue.” “(M)aybe she just called me that to toughen us up for the names I would be called the first time I played at LSU,” Tim Tebow, who became the Heisman Trophy-winning quarterback for the University of Florida, writes in his 2011 book “Through My Eyes.” Now that Tebow is a Denver Bronco and under intense scrutiny in the role of starting quarterback, his congenital instinct …
Many of us will give thanks for family this week. Sadly, more than one hundred thousand children awaiting adoption from the foster care system don’t have a family to be thankful for. More than 400,000 children are in the foster care system, and about a quarter are in circumstances that will prevent them from being reunified with their family of origin. They need adoptive homes. November is National Adoption Month, and this year’s initiative aims to find permanent parents for these 107,000 foster children. That’s a call advocates of limited …
For population control advocates, it’s fitting that the projected birth of the world’s seven billionth child falls on Halloween. To them, it’s a scary development that portends more risk of poverty, famine, and financial instability. From another point of view, however, “this baby is a boon.” That’s how Kathryn Lopez of National Review Online describes the event in her interview with Anna Halpine, founder and CEO of the World Youth Alliance (WYA). This year the pro-family international youth organization is focusing on Population & Economics: Investing in the Human Person. …
Nineteen Chinese pastors have joined together to send a remarkable petition to the National People’s Congress on behalf of one of Beijing’s largest underground churches. The Shouwang church is the most recent target of Communist authorities’ crackdown on the unauthorized house church movement that now numbers some 50–70 million Chinese Christians. The Shouwang church began in a home but has grown to 1,000 members in recent years, with many well-educated and affluent congregants. Forced out of rented meeting space in 2009, the church bought its own property—only to be denied …
Royal Wedding Highlights the Importance of Marriage: The excitement and expectation of the more than 2 billion people who watched Prince William and Kate Middleton wed last Friday highlighted the enduring ideal of marriage. In the royal wedding, people around the globe recognized some of our deepest human aspirations and the shared nobility of the institution of marriage. The widespread coverage and esteem for marriage is a particularly welcome development for the institution that has endured many cultural challenges in recent decades. Americans are marrying at half the annual rate …
