“Human rights are fictions—but fictions with highly specific properties.” —Alasdair MacIntyre In 1960 John Courtney Murray, S.J., warned of the possibility that America was slipping into a new barbarism. In his best known work, We Hold These Truths, Father Murray said that barbarism “threatens when men cease to talk together according to reasonable laws.” Argument...
313 search results for: Roe v. Wade
In Focus – Embattled Preacher
Dinesh D’Souza: Falwell, Before the Millennium; Regnery Gateway; Chicago. The Rev. Jerry Falwell is one of the most frequently pilloried men in America today. Journalists and liberal politicians are fond of comparing him to Hitler, Khomeini, and Jim Jones and brand him a “racist,” “fascist,” and “intolerant bigot.” Ultrafundamentalists like Bob Jones denounce him as...
Dishonest Coverage of the Battle in the Bronx
Conservative media covering a Democratic primary in New York portray the contest as between leftist “goons” and a political moderate. It is actually about which candidate is more agreeable to the Israel lobby.
Trump Dumps the Do-Nothing Congress
Donald Trump is president today because he was seen as a doer not a talker. Among the most common compliments paid him in 2016 was, “At least he gets things done!” And it was exasperation with a dithering GOP Congress, which had failed to enact his or its own agenda, that caused Trump to pull...
On Neoconservatives and the Religious
Right Samuel Francis’s remarks (“The Abortion Gambit,” October 1994) on the efforts by neoconservatives, especially Bill Kristol, to co-opt the religious right are convincingly presented. Francis rightly notes that Kristol, Bennett, and other neocon movers and shakers are working to control the religious right and thereby to provide themselves with a mass base that they...
Recapturing the Constitution
In a landmark five-to-four decision last spring, in United States v. Lopez, the Supreme Court announced—for the first time in almost 50 years—that Congress had exceeded its interstate commerce powers. At issue was a federal statute—the Gun Free School Zones Act of 1990—which forbade the carrying of firearms within one thousand feet of a school....
Judge Moore & God’s Law
When elected chief justice of the Alabama Supreme Court in 2000, Judge Roy Moore installed in his courthouse a monument with the Ten Commandments that Moses brought down from Mount Sinai carved into it. Told by a federal court his monument violated the separation of church and state, Moore refused to remove it and was...
Angels of Death, Arrayed in White
The state of the Union is divided, as we were reminded not only after but during the President’s speech of February 5. Republicans chanted “USA! USA!” several times in response to lines delivered to elicit the same; Democrats (upon whom the camera lovingly lingered) competed for the honor of “best sour expression/sneer by an elected...
The Mystery of Gay Marriage, Solved
The U.S. Supreme Court, in a 5-4 decision, has struck down all remaining state bans on gay “marriage.” The decision was authored by Justice Anthony Kennedy, a putative Catholic and a Republican appointee. That such a decision was coming should have surprised no one; the only question was how far-reaching that decision would be. Just...
On Life and Law
Aaron D. Wolf’s condemnation of civil disobedience by pro-life activists (Cultural Revolutions, October) strikes me as a classic case of sloppy thinking, characterized by what Hannah Arendt called the inability to grasp elementary distinctions. Wolf’s sweeping denial that one may break the law even for a good cause is not good law. There exists in...
Rending the Seamless Garment
People often ask me, “What is wrong with our priests?” or “Why don’t our bishops say more about abortion? They seem to have no trouble whatsoever speaking out quite freely when it comes to war or capital punishment.” On the surface, this is disturbing. I find it even more disturbing, however, that I, a layman,...
Parochial Formalism
Justice Hugo Black remains something of an anomaly in the history of the Supreme Court. A textualist who was contemptuous of the arbitrary mysticism of substantive due process, he nevertheless advocated the most extreme position on the issue of incorporating the Bill of Rights against the states through the 14th Amendment, a revolutionary doctrine that...
Doing Well by Doing Evil
The revelation that Planned Parenthood is selling body parts from children that they have aborted in their clinics is shocking, even though it is hardly surprising. Pro-lifers have argued for years that Planned Parenthood is less concerned with the lives of the women that they claim to “help” than they are with making a profit....
On Chronicles’ Straight Eye
Your March 2004 issue (“Straight Eye for the Queer Guy”) was valuable in many ways, not least because the cascading phenomenon of enthusiasm for “gay marriage” or “civil unions” both reveals and contributes mightily to our society’s increasingly rapid slide into what Pitirim Sorokin called the “social sewer.” Stephen B. Presser puts his finger on...
The Living Constitution and the Death of Sovereignty
As this is written, the United States and its NATO allies are bombing the Serbian forces of Slobodan Milosevic. This is the first offensive action for NATO, and the first time that jellied armed forces have been unleashed against a sovereign nation with which the United States is not formally at war without an express...
The Logic of ‘Laci and Conner’s Law’ is Undeniable
A society that treats the death of the unborn son of Scott Peterson at the hands of his father as an unspeakable crime but would have licensed his death at the hands of his mother will eventually be forced to confront its own incoherence.
Another Politician Abandons The Unborn
Earlier this week, Democratic Congressman Tim Ryan of Ohio wrote an opinion piece in the Akron Beacon Journal announcing that, after much soul-searching, he no longer considered himself pro-life. Ryan wrote that listening to constituents who have had abortions convinced him “that we must trust women and their families—not politicians—to make the best decision for...
A Necessary Realignment
As I write on the morning of Super Tuesday, March 1, the Republican establishment is in hysterics. The writing is on the wall. By the end of the day, Donald Trump will have all but sewed up the 2016 Republican nomination for president. And I write those words confidently, even though voting has just begun...
What Matters?
The November 2011 issue of Chronicles has a major problem on page five. In “Aborted Economy” (American Proscenium), John C. Seiler, Jr., writes, and the editors boldly highlight in a pull-quote, a statement about “the 1973 class of ‘fetal matter,’ as the pro-aborts call them.” I have reread the article several times looking for support...
The Next Abortion Battle
Abortion opponents in South Dakota had a simple message for voters in the mid-term election: Vote what you know in your heart is right. More than 148,000 people heeded the call, voting to retain a state law that banned virtually all abortions in South Dakota. Their numbers, however, amounted to just 44 percent of the...
Dress Rehearsal for Impeachment
Judge Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court was approved on an 11-10 party-line vote Friday in the Senate Judiciary Committee. Yet his confirmation is not assured. Sen. Jeff Flake, Republican of Arizona, has demanded and gotten as the price of his vote on the floor, a weeklong delay. And the GOP Senate has agreed...
The GOP’s Clinton
During the Republican presidential debate on May 15, Ron Paul, the constitutionalist from Texas, flatly stated that the terrorist attacks on September 11 were retaliation for U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Rudy Giuliani shot back a mendacious rejoinder: “That’s an ...
Missed Opportunity
Last November, South Dakota’s pro-life community was a united force. Conditions had changed significantly by the end of February, when the effort to ban almost all abortions in the state suffered its second major defeat in less than four months, this time through the votes of eight state senators who killed a bill in committee...
Jefferson’s Cousin
There are probably more judicial biographies of Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall than of all the rest of the Supreme Court justices combined, so why another one? R. Kent Newmyer, historian and law professor at the University of Connecticut School of Law, undertook to write a work that would not mirror the standard hagiographical...
Sacrificing Northam Will Not Be Enough
“Once that picture with the blackface and the Klansman came out, there is no way you can continue to be the governor of the commonwealth of Virginia.” So decreed Terry McAuliffe, insisting on the death penalty with no reprieve for his friend and successor Gov. Ralph Northam. Et tu, Brute? Yet Northam had all but...
A Teacher of Doctrine
Last week I was busy preparing for the upcoming meeting of the John Randolph Club in Cleveland. But on Wednesday of that week, I came across an item promoting another event being held in Cleveland on the Friday the Randolph Club began that I knew I needed to attend. This event was a Mass to...
Editors’ Round Table on Sarah Palin: One Catholic’s View
John McCain’s selection of Sarah Palin to be his running mate was surprising, but the surprise pales in comparison to the reaction of conservative Christians, especially Catholics. In their race to endorse McCain-Palin, they have cast aside any questions about the complementarity of the sexes, or even the late John Paul II’s theology of the...
Taking Back the Culture
By the time you read this, “the most important election of our lifetime” will be headed for the history books. If the last six most important elections of our lifetime are any indication, however, we will once again have a chance to vote in the most important election of our lifetime in 2020. Or perhaps...
Kennedy Catholicism
The indifference of Catholic elected officials to Church teachings is so common that it rarely attracts attention, but there are occasional exceptions. When at least five fervently pro-abortion politicians took Communion at papal Masses this April, from the hands of the Pope’s representative to the United States, even the New York Times and the Washington...
Aborted Economy
“Demography is destiny,” sociologists and demographers tell us. No. Morality is destiny. Demography stems from that, as does economics. Americans now are learning that lesson the hard way. Tax rates, debt, deficits, trade policy, monetary policy, government spending, and other factors all affect economic growth and prosperity. But they’re all trumped by demographics—and above that,...
Appointing Supreme Court Justices
Michael McConnell, to use the overworked metaphor, is the “poster boy” for the Senate Democrats’ attempts to frustrate President Bush’s promise to appoint more Supreme Court justices like Antonin Scalia and Clarence Thomas. Scalia and Thomas are the two current justices who have most closely embraced a jurisprudence faithful to the understanding of the Framers,...
Mayor Pete and the Crackup of Christianity
“(T)here is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so,” said Hamlet, who thereby raised some crucial questions: Is moral truth subjective? Does it change with changing times and changing attitudes? Or is there a higher law, a permanent law, God’s law, immutable and eternal, to which man’s law should conform? Are, for...
The Inevitability of National Politics
Many conservatives have become disenchanted with national politics. This disenchantment is understandable. Strong support for Republicans seeking the White House and seats in Congress has done little to conserve the type of society most of those voting Republican wanted to conserve. By almost any measure, American society has moved steadily leftward in recent decades. Social...
Kennedy Funeral(s)
Eunice Kennedy Shriver died less than two weeks before her brother Edward, beginning a month of tributes to the Catholic left’s first family that reached a crescendo when Senator Kennedy was laid to rest. But there was a difference between the two Kennedy siblings that was seldom mentioned in the encomiums: Mrs. Shriver’s Catholic liberalism...
Tuberville Showed Courage in Facing Down Pentagon Abortionists Despite Little Help From the GOP
While Sen. Tuberville failed in his effort to curtail the Pentagon’s new plan to subsidize soldier abortions, his willingness to stand alone in opposition to the deep state juggernaut is inspiring.
Long Before Trump, We Were a Divided People
In a way, Donald Trump might be called The Great Uniter. Bear with me. No Republican president in the lifetime of this writer, not even Ronald Reagan, united the party as did Trump in the week of his acquittal in the Senate and State of the Union address. According to the Gallup Poll, 94% of...
The Never Trumpers: Sore Losers With Thin Skins
Emerald Robinson recently wrote a witty piece for The American Spectator puncturing the pomposity of the Never Trump wing of the conservative movement. At least one member of that wing, the thin-skinned Jonah Goldberg, now the holder of the “Asness Chair in Applied Liberty at the American Enterprise Institute,” was not amused, and he let...
Why No Evangelical Justice?
When Republicans were warned not to give Sonia Sotomayor the drubbing Democrats gave Robert Bork and Sam Alito—lest they be perceived as sexist and racist by women and Hispanics—the threat was credible, for it underscored a new reality in American politics. The Supreme Court, far from being the last redoubt of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant...
Frankenstein’s Children
“Monstrum horrendum, informe ingens.” —Vergil, Aeneid In 1974, I first encountered one of the creatures E. Michael Jones writes about in Monsters From the Id. It appeared in the guise of one of my graduate-school classmates. She was a bright, pretty woman who seemed unusually self-possessed and accomplished for a 22-year-old. My impression changed, however,...
Candidates and the Image of Reagan
With the presidential election still a year away, Bill Kristol decided to throw in the towel. “It seems clear that 2012 isn’t going to be another 1980,” Kristol lamented on the website of The Weekly Standard. Neither the Republican nominee nor the next president of the United States will be another Ronald Reagan. Kristol arrived...
Has America Lost Her Moral Gag Reflex?
Since 1935, a branch of psychiatry specializing in hereditary illnesses and abnormalities known as “behavioral eugenics” has been warning of rampant mental illness. Dr. Franz J. Kallmann, who came to America in the mid-1930’s after having served under Ernst Rüdin, head of Hitler’s “racial hygiene” program, argued in favor of “psychiatric genetics” even after he...
President Meets Pope
When President Obama met with Pope Francis, I was expecting a Walk to Canossa. It turned out the latest in a long line of reactionary disappointments. Afterward, the media people of pope and president conflicted on how much America’s latest church-vs.-state contretemps du jour was discussed. We fight a lot over religion for a country...
Will JFK’s Party Become Sanders’ Party?
Sen. Bernie Sanders may be on the cusp of both capturing the Democratic nomination and transforming his party as dramatically as President Donald Trump captured and remade the Republican Party. After his sweep of the Nevada caucuses, following popular vote victories in Iowa and New Hampshire, Sanders has the enthusiasm and the momentum, as the...
Pretenders
Revolutionary Road Produced and distributed by Dreamworks and BBC Films Directed by Sam Mendes Screenplay by Justin Haythe from Richard Yates’ novel The Lemon Tree Produced by Eran Riklis Productions and Heimatfilm Directed by Eran Riklis Screenplay by Suha Arraf Distributed by IFC Films British director Sam Mendes has turned Richard Yates’ 1961 novel,...
Abortion and the Murder of Meaning
“Say what you mean,” the March Hare advised Alice—a piece of counsel imparted by writing teachers of the old school. But, as we know nowadays, say-what-you-mean is a lot of old-fashioned baloney. If we were to take it seriously, which of course we can’t (don’t forget “mad as a March Hare”), we’d never get anything...
Crying “Halt!”
A federal judge whom I know lamented that the Supreme Court term that ended last June was the worst in recent memory. That judge loves the Constitution but could find few signs that this term’s key decisions were based on that document. A Court that can rule that medical marijuana grown for home use substantially...
Gay “Marriage” Fantasy
You really can’t have “gay marriage,” you know, irrespective of what a court or a legislature may say. You can have something some people call gay marriage because to them the idea sounds worthy and necessary, but to say a thing is other than it is, is to stand reality on its head, hoping to...
The Case Against Political Consensus
Jeffrey Bell is perhaps the most experienced conservative political advisor in Washington, D.C. Once a key Reagan campaign advisor, Bell later became a political candidate himself, scoring a stunning primary upset against a seated Republican senator in New Jersey only to lose in the general election to Democrat Bill Bradley. Bell, a graduate of Columbia...
Judging Judge Gorsuch
A guide to the Neil Gorsuch nomination uproar: If you want the federal government to exercise greater and greater power over daily life in America, with minimum backtalk from us, the people, you deplore the prospective elevation of Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. If, by contrast, you regard the expansion or contraction...
Supreme Court’s Drifting Days Are Done
This scrupulously objective book may be considered a gift to conservatives who have long despaired about the possibility of principled legal tenets regularly prevailing in Supreme Court opinions. For decades this long-suffering group has watched Republican Supreme Court appointees concur in various left-wing crackpot decisions that have become the law of the land. Thankfully, such...