RedState.com is suggesting that the 114th Congress “may be the most pro-life Congress Washington has ever seen.” Exhibit A is the reintroduction of the “Pain-Capable Unborn Child Protection Act” (HR 36). The bill, which has had many incarnations, most recently was passed by the House in the previous Congress, before dying in the Senate Judiciary...
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“I got rights, I got rights, too.”
Few people have heard Hank Williams, Jr.’s song about a man getting revenge on the man who killed his wife and got himself acquitted, but it raises the question of what rights are. For the killer and his lawyer, rights are something governments use to protect criminals; or, to be less tendentious, they are state-backed...
The Audacity of Dopes
No one expected the vote to be so close. After Sarah Palin’s acceptance speech in St. Paul, the Republicans were certain they had found a rock star to compete with Barack Obama. They could ride the crest of Palinmania all the way to the Oval Office. All they had to do was keep the hockey...
Obama and the Bishops
The U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops has had a rough time of it lately, and I won’t say they don’t deserve it. Barack Obama is their President, after all, when it comes to most political issues; for example, immigration and immigrants’ rights, tax policy, economic inequality, “social justice,” peaceful internationalism, and national healthcare. The exception,...
A Just and Honest Man
In its almost 60 years, much has been written about National Review, especially about those present at its creation. Most attention, of course, has been given to founder William F. Buckley, Jr., but others there at the beginning, such as James Burnham and Frank Meyer, have not been neglected. Yet no one, until now, has...
It Won’t Be Easy to Make America Great Again
Election 2024 will not end or save humanity. What’s at stake in a presidential election is something far different from the all-or-nothing outcome that the rival campaigns envision.
Hanging Rudy Out to Dry
Back in 1987, this writer was invited by friends to advise them on a press conference they had called to oppose President Reagan’s signing of an INF treaty to remove all nuclear missiles from Europe. My advice: Deplore the treaty; do not attack the president. The next day, Howard Phillips declared that Ronald Reagan had...
Results Are In
The election results are in, and those who are reading this piece have an advantage I do not: They know whether George W. Bush or John Kerry has won. (This issue went to press the day after the election.) Regardless of the outcome, however, we already know a good deal about what the next President...
Everything in Its Place
On December 9, 2008, as I read through the federal criminal complaint against the latest Illinois governor to be indicted for the merest portion of his crimes, I could not help but feel uneasy. Sure, it was great fun to imagine Governor Hot Rod sweating it out in his holding cell, awaiting arraignment later in...
Sentimental Democracy
Several months ago I spoke briefly at the Baltimore Bar Library against passage of the Maryland Dream Act, the state version of the federal initiative that has been hanging around the capitol for a dozen years now. My remarks were countered by two supporters of the act, a pair of earnest young men: both Catholic,...
A Look Ahead
IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES on writ of certiorari to the court of appeals June 26, 2013 (Justice Kennedy delivered the opinion of the Court.) The jurisprudence of liberty is a bright and shining star. Its twinkling arc across the sky of our constitutional polity signals the nation’s fundamental commitment to the...
Pigs Is Pigs
Politics is like the weather: No matter how blue in the face we talk ourselves, no matter how many virgins we sacrifice to Odin, our leaders do not improve, and the drought continues. The fates who determine the destinies of nations are no more obedient to our words than the little gods of wind and...
J.D. Vance is Both Right and Wrong about Kids and Cat Ladies
We should all be for the proposition that Americans ought to have more children, but the truth is that we may have our hands full with trying to improve the quality of the population we’ve got.
Is Third World America Inevitable?
Thousands of U.S. troops safeguard the border of South Korea. U.S. warships patrol the South China Sea to stand witness to the territorial claims of Asian allies against China. U.S. troops move in and out of the Baltic States to signal our willingness to defend the frontiers of these tiny NATO allies. Yet nothing that...
SSM: Yawning at SCOTUS
There are two sides to the same-sex “marriage” debate, as SCOTUS sees it: Decide now for federally mandated pretend marriage, or rule in favor of “wait and see,” which amounts to a declaration that “gay marriage is inevitable.” We don’t need to wait with baited breath for the ruling. Like old milk, the culture has...
Emerging Majority?
It is reported that when British General Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington at Yorktown, thus effectively ending the War of Independence, his regimental band played a tune called “The World Turned Upside Down.” As we approach the end of the second Christian millennium, one begins to wonder if the band was not just a bit...
The Bubble Economy
“Why,” Sheila Ramus asked, “if there are so many pro-lifers here, does Rockford have an abortion clinic?” Sheila, my wife and I, and our pastor, Fr. Brian Bovee, were waiting to check in at Rockford’s annual Pro-Life Banquet. An hour before the dinner was scheduled to begin, the Holy Family Room (yes, that is its...
Whither the Republic?
This month, we shall have an answer to an all-important question: Which arm of our bipartisan party state will occupy the White House for the next four years? This is an issue second in importance only to such urgent American questions as “When will Britney Spears be allowed to see her kids?” “How much weight...
The Allure of Mass Murder
“Seems the more people you kill, the more you are in the limelight.” That blog post on the email address of Oregon mass-murderer Christopher Harper-Mercer was made after Vester Lee Flanagan shot and killed that Roanoke TV reporter and her cameraman. “I have noticed,” said the blog post, “that people like [Flanagan] are all alone...
Rudy the Unready
Not so long ago, Rudy Giuliani was the consensus front runner for the Republican presidential nomination. He had won the first beauty contest of the primary season, from the nation’s most self-important electorate, the neoconservative punditariat: George Will, Norman Podhoretz, John Podhoretz, David Frum, and Richard Brookhiser all lined up behind Giuliani, together with an...
Our Heads Cut Off
“Language is the armory of the human mind; and at once contains the trophies of its past, and the weapons of its future conquests.” —Samuel Taylor Coleridge This remarkable French mathematician has written extensively on what he considers the fundamental spiritual problem of our day, the perversion of language, which he...
For the Children
“I figured if he was there, I’d make sure he wasn’t there [again],” Harlan Drake, a 33-year-old truck driver, told Det. Sgt. Scott Shenk of the Shiawassee County Sheriff’s Department. But on the morning of September 11, 2009, James Pouillon was there, sitting across the street from Owosso High School as he had on so...
Are Republicans Ready for Biden’s Counterattack?
Republicans need to be wary about becoming complacent about their chances in November or adopting the Democrats' framework on rhetoric and violence lest they make a strength out of Biden’s mediocrity.
The End of Obamaworld
In denouncing Republicans as “scared of widows and orphans,” and castigating those who prefer Christian refugees to Muslims coming to America, Barack Obama has come off as petulant and unpresidential. Clearly, he is upset. And with good reason. He grossly, transparently underestimated the ability of ISIS, the “JV” team, to strike outside the caliphate into...
The Promise and Peril of Identity Politics: Hope in a Dismal Season
George W. Bush is a stunningly and deservedly unpopular president. His approval ratings rival Nixon’s after Watergate, and the Republicans largely avoided any mention of him at their convention in St. Paul, a convention from which Bush was conspicuously absent. Under his leadership, we have become embroiled in a war that has cost thousands of...
Gay Marriage in the Dock
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...
Looking Backwards
Gil Santana had it all: He was the model conservative for the new millennium. Gil was born and reared in Southern California, naturally, and his given name evoked the rich diversity of the state that had once symbolized the American dream: Kim Kwame Kaplan Santana, each part representing one fourth of his Korean, African, Jewish,...
Slouching Towards the Gulag
The Trump “hush money” verdict should serve as a wake-up call to all freedom-loving Americans. If the best-known man in the world can be railroaded in a rigged kangaroo court, any of us could be.
Will the Oligarchs Kill Trump?
Narrow victories in the Kentucky caucuses and the Louisiana primary, the largest states decided on Saturday, have moved Donald Trump one step nearer to the nomination. Primaries in Michigan, Mississippi and Idaho on March 8, and in Florida, Ohio, Illinois, Missouri and North Carolina on March 15, may prove decisive. If Marco Rubio does not...
God, Man, and Family
The first chapter of the Bible forms the basis of the Christian understanding of the nature and dignity of man—and woman: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him, male and female created he them” (Genesis 1:27). The next verse contains the first command given to the...
Why Some of Us Can’t Dine in Peace
The recent harassment of Supreme Court Justices is a continuation of years of abuse and violence against conservative public figures in both public and private spaces. Some of us can't even dine in peace.
Same-Sex Marriage: The Continuing Conversation
Immanentizing the eschaton via Obergefell v. Hodges, Justice Anthony Kennedy has achieved his long-sought goal—namely, to be to 21st-century America what Bonaparte was to 19th-century Europe. In respectable quarters Justice Kennedy is considered a world-historical personage, having made the oxymoron “same-sex marriage” the law of the land. Several years ago, in a letter to the...
Kansas Bleeds Again
The politically correct are breathing a sigh of relief. A proposed piece of Kansas legislation that would permit businesses not to provide services to same-sex “married” couples has been pronounced “dead in the water.” At least we’ll be spared another round of mindless name-calling between the “libtards” and “wingnuts” who prowl the internet seeking the...
Is Mitt on a Suicide Mission?
“It’s a suicide mission,” said the Republican Party Chairman. Reince Priebus was commenting on a Washington Post story about Mitt Romney and William Kristol’s plot to recruit a third-party conservative candidate to sink Donald Trump. Several big-name Republican “consultants” and “strategists” are said to be on board. Understandably so, given the bucks involved. With the...
The Evil Party Rides Again
There are many reasons to criticize the the Republicans as the Stupid Party, and I have often done so. But we need to remember that, in Sam Francis’ dichotomy, the other major party is the Evil Party. And some of what the leader of the Evil Party is doing has no real precedent in American...
Don’t Just Wound It: Kill It
The Department of Education must be destroyed. This holdover from the Carter administration costs us $80 billion per year, for which we have received in return a centralized educational bureaucracy beholden to wildly leftist teachers’ unions and the proliferation of ignorance. Cut this monstrous budget in half, and federal spending on education is still not...
Powers, Principalities, Spiritual Forces
In Ephesians 6, the Apostle Paul writes, “We wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places” (6:12). Political scientist and lay theologian Jacques Ellul went beyond the usual interpretation of these “spiritual forces” as demons to see...
The Struggle for the Soul of the Supreme Court
During Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign for president, when his fortunes were at their nadir, Joe Biden promised that he would nominate the first black woman to the United States Supreme Court. He reportedly made this pledge to James Clyburn (D-S.C.), the powerful African-American congressman, in return for Clyburn’s help in securing the black vote in...
Latest Symptoms of a Disintegrating Nation
America is disintegrating alarmingly fast in a manner not seen since the final years before the War Between the States.
Getting Back to Nature
“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...
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...
Missed Opportunities of the Great Debate
With few exceptions, Trump did not engage the queries that he should have answered and missed several opportunities to land blows to his opponent.
Nixon, LBJ & the First Shots in the Judges’ War
The Democrats’ drive to defeat Neil Gorsuch is the latest battle in a 50-year war for control of the Supreme Court—a war that began with a conspiracy against Richard Nixon by Chief Justice Earl Warren, Justice Abe Fortas and Lyndon Johnson. By June 1968, Nixon, having swept his primaries, was cruising to the nomination and...
Crashing Under the Fourth Wave
Professional Democrats, like the proverbial dog who returns to his vomit, cannot quit the idea that their grotesque caricatures of those who hold traditional views of marriage and family, men and women, borders and citizenship, and meaningful employment will appeal to enough of the electorate to return control of the government to them. Donald Trump...
Begging the Question
The Defense of Marriage Act is history—a development that should have surprised no one. I’m tempted to say, “Good riddance to bad rubbish,” but the fact that passing DOMA in the first place was one of the most disastrously stupid moves the Republican Party has made over the past 20 years does not change the...
And Injustice for All
The elevation of Ketanji Brown Jackson to the Supreme Court formalizes state-sponsored injustice in the very institution charged with upholding justice.
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....
No Quarter to the LGBTQIA+ Mob This Pride Month, Or Ever
The right deludes itself in declaring victory over the LGBTQIA+ mob because of 2024’s scaled-back Pride Month celebrations.
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...