October 16, 2019
by Jane Clark Scharl
Last week, presidential hopeful Beto O’Rourke said outright that if he is elected president, he will work to eliminate the tax-exempt status for churches that hold traditional views of gender and sexuality. And O’Rourke is not the only candidate taking aim at groups that defend age-old beliefs about marriage and gender. His Democratic rival Cory [...]
July 30, 2019
by Stephen M. Krason
Governor Mike Dunleavy of Alaska made national headlines with his novel challenge to a decision by state’s supreme court, which requires the Alaskan state government to fund abortions. Dunleavy vetoed a portion of the state’s appropriation for its judicial branch: a portion equal to the amount the court requires the government to provide for abortions [...]
July 2, 2018
by Bruce Frohnen
Justice Anthony Kennedy’s tenure on the Supreme Court was filled with irony. Had it not been for the smear campaign that defeated Judge Robert Bork’s nomination and the withdrawal of Judge Douglas Ginsburg’s nomination because of past drug use, Kennedy never would have risen to the judicial power he used with such gusto. Sadly less [...]
October 30, 2017
by Sr. Renée Mirkes, OSF
An ominous portent haunts the dissenting opinion in Obergefell v. Hodges. Chief Justice John Roberts, relying on the old maxim that it’s valid to infer from what has happened to what will happen, predicts the inescapability of sequels to the legalization of same-sex “marriage.” The SCOTUS, he avers, will be unable to discount future petitioners [...]
October 27, 2017
by Thomas Ascik
Is a long-standing commemorative cross on public land socially divisive and a governmental endorsement of religion? Or, to the contrary, is a constitutional challenge to that cross an act of gratuitous social divisiveness? Last week, in American Humanist Association v. Maryland, the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a ruling of the federal district court of [...]
October 6, 2017
by Regis Nicoll
With gay ersatzrimony having the imprimatur of the State, and homosexuality enjoying a positive swing in popular opinion, the only thing standing athwart homosexualism is the Church, which is finding itself increasingly the object of neosexualist agitations. Two weeks after Obergefell v. Hodges, a liberal firestorm erupted when a Catholic priest in Louisiana withheld communion [...]
April 26, 2017
by Scott P. Richert
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 [...]
August 22, 2016
by John M. Grondelski
The first reaction one might have to Henderson v. Adams, the June 30 decision of a federal district court declaring Indiana’s parenthood statutes unconstitutional because they treat "same-sex spouses" differently from the real ones is: further proof of the corrupt influence of the Supreme Court’s legalization of homosexual and lesbian “marriage.” That’s not necessarily untrue, [...]
June 24, 2016
by Paul Kengor
As a gleeful gaggle of the nature-redefining left celebrates the one-year anniversary of the horrific Obergefell decision, which magically discovered—nay, invented—a “constitutional right” to same-sex “marriage” in all 50 states, there is a name that likewise deserves recognition. It is a name that will not be mentioned but merits some credit in the secular left’s [...]
March 11, 2016
by Austin Ruse
Without a doubt Obergefell was crammed down our throats, as were all the lower court decisions that overturned 34 state laws and constitutional changes voted upon by citizens. But, it is hard to see that Obergefell would ever have happened if the ground had not been prepared, if those five Supreme Court justices could not [...]
February 18, 2016
by Robert Lowry Clinton
I was pleased to read in Crisis “The Origins of Modern Materialism,” in which Theodore Rebard notes the rediscovery of Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura in 1417 and its subsequent employment by Descartes, Hobbes and other modern philosophers in their efforts to formulate a modern synthesis of knowledge based on quantifiability. Professor Rebard also points to some [...]
January 13, 2016
by Bruce Frohnen
More than one commentator has noted that the majority decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, requiring states to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples, actually was decades in the making. No-fault divorce and our culture of sexual promiscuity, separating sex and even pregnancy from childbirth, inevitably dissolved the social consensus recognizing the natural family, including its children, [...]
December 4, 2015
by Crisis Magazine
Editor’s note: Below is an excerpt from an interview with Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) conducted by Professor Robert P. George of Princeton University that aired November 25 on EWTN. The interview series, titled “Candidate Conversations 2016,” will pose a number of questions to presidential candidates on topics of particular concern to Catholic voters. The passage [...]
November 10, 2015
by Caleb Henry
Two of America’s three branches of federal government have declared war on parental authority. President Obama’s Department of Education has been explicitly attacking schools that have the audacity to prefer traditional morality. However, making sense of the Education Department’s actions requires looking at the Obergefell same-sex “marriage” decision. The Obergefell decision explains why the Department [...]
October 13, 2015
by Steve Greene
It is always a little sad when the miracle doesn’t happen. So, when the Supreme Court waved its magic gavel last summer and rhetorically ended the citizens’ debate over the newly discovered “right” to same-sex "marriage," the decision was greeted with frustration and a deep sense of betrayal on the part of many faithful Catholics. [...]
October 2, 2015
by Austin Ruse
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, [...]
September 30, 2015
by James Kalb
The age of Jenner, Obergefell, and #BlackLivesMatter puts issues of identity at the center of public life. As Catholics and citizens we need to understand what that means. Personal identity orients us in the world. As such, it has both individual and social functions. It enables us to order our lives by telling us what we [...]
September 1, 2015
by Paul E. Gottfried
Ryan T. Anderson’s new book Truth Overruled achieves all the polemical aims that the accompanying promotional material claims that it does. It dissects the opinions and dissents of the Supreme Court justices who decided Obergefell v. Hodges; then the work explains how sexual orientation involves a more fundamental distinction than race. Anderson next offers compelling [...]
August 17, 2015
by Tom Venzor
In Obergefell v. Hodges, America was once again confronted with the pseudo-philosophical and theological ruminations of Justice Anthony Kennedy. Though one’s initial, reasonable tendency would be to assess any court decision on legal grounds, Justice Kennedy’s opinion is founded on a constitutional jurisprudence that went awry long ago. Instead, perhaps the more appropriate hermeneutic for [...]
August 5, 2015
by Stephen M. Krason
Many see the new putative constitutional right to same-sex “marriage” and the developments leading up to it as a result of a crisis of culture. It is that, to be sure, but it is also a result of a crisis of leadership. This has become further apparent in the aftermath of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell [...]