Besides doing something about certain lawless decisions made by our black-robed masters, something must also be done about how we came to such a place where they can cast their gaze across the fruited plain and whatever catches their fancy becomes the law of the land, indeed higher than the Constitution. Roe was bad enough, … Read more
I have added my name to a friend of the court brief in the case of Little Sisters of the Poor vs. Burwell. Professor Nathanial Oman of the law school at William and Mary proposed and took the lead in writing this brief, which was joined by a number of concerned law professors. It was written … Read more
Defenders of marriage and the traditional family continue to lose battle after battle to the purveyors of sexual liberation. So predictable have their defeats become that the judicial coup at the US Supreme Court over same-sex “marriage” surprised no one. Moreover, it finally but slowly seems to be dawning on Christian leaders that much more … Read more
As I wrote recently, I do not believe Scott Lively has had any serious impact on the laws in Russia or Uganda with regard to those countries’ laws on homosexuality. I have argued that he is a “monster” created by the LGBT movement for their own purposes—to raise money and frighten their base. In reality … Read more
By now, most people are aware of the Colorado baker who refused to bake an elaborate wedding cake for a gay couple’s so-called “marriage.” The various commissions and courts have ruled that the gentleman’s religious objections to an act that implicitly required him to approve gay marriage violated the law. The court said that any … Read more
“You must not abandon the ship in a storm because you cannot control the winds…. What you cannot turn to good, you must at least make as little bad as you can.” ∼ St. Thomas More, Utopia In Obergefell v. Hodges, the Supreme Court didn’t just confect a new right to same-sex civil marriage. In some ways, it inaugurated … Read more
I’ve never quite felt at home on earth. I get sick sometimes, and that’s just wrong, and I am mildly afflicted when I have to tear out poison ivy in bunches, and that also is wrong. Sometimes I meet people who aren’t very nice, or who think that I am not very nice. Sometimes there … Read more
We have seen all this before. The Supreme Court takes on an important and controversial case. One side aims clearly at an end-result based on personal and ideological predilections. It knows that it has the votes to win a majority of the court and to impose its decision on the nation. Yet, it is not … Read more
In a recent issue of Crisis Magazine, Jennifer Roback Morse gave three reasons why religious liberty arguments do not seem to be working for conservatives in their battle to save traditional marriage. First, many people no longer believe in God, and thus simply don’t care much about religious liberty. Second, we are asking people to … Read more
We have won the argument over marriage. We have won 34 statewide elections where traditional marriage was on the ballot. We did this even though the polls showed us losing most of them, perhaps all of them, prior to the vote. We won even in liberal states like California. We won even during Democratic primaries … Read more
The Supreme Court’s recent refusal to hear lower court cases over marriage is, as I noted elsewhere, a setback for sound constitutional self-government and a setback for a healthy marriage culture. Rather than a single Roe v. Wade of marriage, where the Supreme Court would redefine marriage across the nation, the Court, by refusing to hear any … Read more
Many people believe that the momentum to legalize same-sex marriage in all states is now unstoppable—not because all states would do it on their own but because the federal courts seem determined to impose it by judicial decision. A series of district-court judges, claiming to follow the Supreme Court’s decision striking down federal marriage law … Read more
The issues that now put Catholics in opposition to secular public thought are too basic to ignore. The Church accepts God as our reference point, and views freedom to develop our relation to Him and act by reference to it as basic to our good and our dignity. In contrast, secular society has made our … Read more
Traditional marriage has been taking quite a beating ever since the U.S. Supreme Court, in its Windsor case handed down in June 2013, ruled that same-sex unions must be considered true marriages wherever they have been legally enacted as such, whether by legislative action, court action, or referendum. Since then it has been rapidly and … Read more
In late May, Governor Tom Corbett of my home state of Pennsylvania decided to throw in the towel on same-sex “marriage” and not appeal a federal district judge’s decision to strike down the state’s law that permitted marriage licenses to be issued only to male-female couples. While Corbett is to be commended for legally defending … Read more
At this hour, we all bear witness to the spectacle of laws accurately defining marriage being dismantled in order to establish a rhetorical equivalence between genuine marital unions and those rare associations formed out of same-sex desires. One substantial club in this act of moral viciousness is an appeal to sentiment that tries to persuade … Read more
Conservative voices are railing against excessive presidential power in this Obama era of government by executive order to advance a destructive leftist political agenda. Their criticism is “spot-on,” but they need to consider that the strong exertion of presidential power may be the best way after Obama to restore liberty and begin to mend the … Read more
Serious Catholics and political conservatives since the 1950s have strongly criticized the Supreme Court for making public policy and acting as a kind of “super-legislature” to further a leftist socio-political agenda, instead of interpreting the law and judging. We have seen such judicial lawmaking on pornography, abortion, legislative reapportionment, sodomy laws, and the list could … Read more
Two recent court cases illustrate the incoherence and remarkable intolerance of “liberal” views regarding conscience. One involves the bottomless pockets of the atheist Michael Newdow, who most recently joined several plaintiffs in a lawsuit against the U.S. Treasury Department demanding the words “In God We Trust” be scrubbed from U.S. currency. Newdow advocates what Richard … Read more
The Left has always held a dim view of parental rights, seeing them as an obstacle to centralized planning. But usually the Left’s spokesmen are a little more circumspect in their pronouncements than MSNBC’s Melissa Harris-Perry, who blurted out in a promotional ad for the channel that “we have to break through our kind of … Read more