Category: Vital Signs

Equality is a pernicious and dangerous political policy, but that’s exactly what President Obama declared in full voice in his Second Inaugural Address in January as the cause and preoccupation of his administration for the next four years. Of course equality in the abstract is meaningless.  It becomes concrete only when we figure out what...

Justice [Antonin] Scalia: [W]hen did it become unconstitutional to exclude homosexual couples from marriage?  1791?  1868, when the Fourteenth Amendment was adopted? . . . Has it always been unconstitutional? . . . You say it is now unconstitutional. [Theodore Olson, attorney arguing that Proposition 8 is unconstitutional]: Yes. Justice Scalia: Was it always unconstitutional?...

There’s no way a man can sidestep trouble writing about the prospect of women as combat troops.  You know, mowing the enemy down with machine guns; blowing up things, not to mention people; cutting, slicing, jabbing, stabbing, whatever it takes.  For such is war, the elements little different in a high-tech age from those prevalent...

In the 2012 election, same-sex marriage made gains at the ballot box for the first time—however narrowly—in all four states where “marriage equality” was presented to the voters for decision.  Have the American people been successfully fooled? Maybe the more germane question is, Are large numbers of the American people self-deceived about homosexuality?  We must...

When George McGovern died, aged 90, two weeks before the last general election, the obituaries rightly praised his long and fitfully distinguished record as a U.S. representative and senator, his years of military service, his plucky presidential campaign against Richard Nixon, and his principled opposition to the Vietnam War, among other such causes.  Unlike the...

Commencement speech to the Class of 2012, Veritas Preparatory Academy, Phoenix, Arizona Thank you for allowing me a few moments to address these graduates.  I am truly honored.  This is an impressive group of young people, so much so that I must admit I am especially grateful to be speaking before the valedictorians, and not...

It was sort of like being caught in a raging stream, and swimming hard against the current, inch by inch, to reach safety.  The time was many years ago, when, as a college freshman, I fell into the currents of liberalism.  And they were powerful.  Just go with the flow, and you could get approval,...

My title, borrowed from Sir Philip Sidney, is deliberately misleading; that is, it does not mean here what he intended when he used it for his posthumous work (1595), known in another edition as The Apologie for Poetrie.  In the past, poetry needed no defense—if that means pleas to a hostile or indifferent audience.  Sidney,...

Whether it ends with a whimper or a bang, the American Empire is ending.  WikiLeaks shows that the empire can no longer control the dissemination of information.  Afghanistan, Somalia, and Yemen show it can no longer militarily defeat insurgencies.  Brazil, China, Iran, Russia, Turkey, and even Bolivia show it can no longer dictate the foreign...

Leftists love to obsess about hate.  It seems to be on their tongues all the time, and it may have already surpassed racist as their expletive of choice to hurl at conservatives, traditionalists, Middle Americans, and other folks they detest.  You don’t have to be a psychologist to understand the meaning of projection—that, when people...

“A tremendous victory for property rights”—that’s how the Castle Coalition described voter approval of Initiative 31, which placed limitations on the power of eminent domain in Mississippi.  The November 8, 2011, results made Mississippi the 44th state to modify the power of eminent domain in response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling in Kelo v....

Two years ago, in one of the history seminars I offer to homeschoolers, I remarked on Robert E. Lee’s convictions regarding duty.  We had just finished reviewing his life—his youth spent as acting head of his small household, his years at West Point both as a cadet and as superintendent, his heroism in the war...

On the evening of September 7, 1919, 60-year-old Arthur Conan Doyle sat down in a darkened room in Portsmouth, England, to speak with his son Kingsley, who had died in the Spanish-influenza epidemic ten months earlier.  “We had strong phenomena from the start,” Conan Doyle later wrote to his friend and fellow occultist Oliver Lodge:...

Sometimes a great book and the place in which it was read combine to cast a spell so potent and so enduring that both book and place become forever entwined in the memory of the reader. Whenever I see a copy of War and Peace, I think not only of Pierre and Natasha but of...

So, at this big funeral the other day for a local real-estate executive, the congregation is preparing to sing “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”  Great old hymn, yes?  Glad expectations arise.  That is, until the second verse: “Christians, we are treading where the saints have trod.”  Wait now—didn’t it used to be “Brothers”?  Sure did. A lot...

You would have thought that, at 17 percent of the U.S. economy, the healthcare industry would be much better understood than it apparently is by our Washington brethren.  I can’t help but look back and smile at the image of Nancy Pelosi standing at a podium and opining on how she couldn’t wait to get...

It took only 22 years after he left the White House for conservatives to turn Ronald Reagan into a totem.  The celebrations surrounding his 100th birthday on February 6 made George Washington look like a back-bench legislator.  Conservatives hailed Reagan as the apotheosis of political wisdom and prudent action.  Liberals conceded that he had done...

It has been about five years since the young, mostly Berber proletariat of the dingy Paris, Lyons, and Marseilles suburbs took to burning its proletarian neighbors’ cars, and there is a looming feeling among French Catholics that something is still not quite right in the woods.  There are indications that both French- and Church-government officials...

To date, Stephenie Meyer’s young-adult novels about a teenage girl (Bella Swan) and her vampire boyfriend (Edward Cullen) have sold well over 100 million copies worldwide, and the movie versions are still coming.  When a phenomenon is of this scale it doesn’t matter what a book is, artistically; you have to take such a cultural...

As I write, the lame-duck Congress is revving up for one last chance to do really lasting damage to the country, in the form of the cloyingly titled DREAM Act, which would grant an open-ended amnesty to illegal aliens who were brought here as children by their parents.  As Roy Beck of NumbersUSA warns, this...

A mortgage crisis still haunts the country like a credit collector calling you daily about your unpaid Visa bill.  It’s harder to get a mortgage than it has been in the memory of anyone living.  The banks “only accept the best credit now for a loan,” a mortgage broker told me.  She enjoyed the business...

Orthodox Archbishop Hilarion Alfeyev has recently warned Europeans of the dangers of building a completely atheist and secularized society.  That was the situation in Eastern Europe under communism.  Some of the methods may have been different, but the outcome is the same: the notion of God is expelled from society, religion is confined to the...

Of all the Republican successes in the midterm elections, perhaps none has the potential to be as consequential as the elevation of Rand Paul to the U.S. Senate from Kentucky.  Paul was the biggest and most genuine Tea Party triumph in November.  As the son and ideological heir of U.S. Rep. Ron Paul (R-TX), he...

On October 8, Americans awoke to government reports that the domestic economy had shed another 95,000 jobs in September.  Despite the billions of dollars mailed to select citizens in the form of stimulus checks and the politicized bailouts of protected industries, U.S. policymakers have failed to resuscitate the moribund economy or coax unemployment down from...

It was another day, you know—back when President James A. Garfield could define a university as “Mark Hopkins on one end of a log and a student on the other.”  Which was to say, a great teacher—Hopkins being the renowned president of Williams College—needed only the opportunity to sit down, unencumbered, and teach.  You know,...

“A crocodile has been worshipped, and its priesthood have asserted, that morality required the people to suffer themselves to be eaten by a crocodile.” —John Taylor of Caroline   “The Father of Waters now flows unvexed to the sea,” Lincoln famously announced in July 1863.  He was, according to a reporter, uncharacteristically “wearing a smile...

Ah, the good ol’ days! If only they were as frolicsome and fulfilling as they commonly seem in the rearview mirror!  All that notwithstanding, the shaky balance that, in university settings, once seemed to prevail between academics and athletics gives the past a certain golden glow. You know what I’m talking about if you recall...

A recent story in the Press-Enterprise of Riverside, California, gives the lie to the notion that illegal aliens are just here “to do the jobs Americans won’t do” and are largely a law-abiding class of the downtrodden, shifting where they can for work. In May, the newspaper reported that “activists” warn illegal-alien drivers about sobriety...