Two thousand fifteen was the year that we Americans broke history. By “breaking history,” I do not mean something like “breaking news,” or “breaking records,” or even “breaking the Internet” (though the Internet certainly played a role). Yes, the “historic moments” of the Summer of #LoveWins and #HateLoses—the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Obergefell v....
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Affirmative Agitprop
The University of Michigan is now the scene of the most important battle over affirmative action since the Bakke case at Stanford, settled so inconclusively some 25 years ago by the Supreme Court. There is absolutely no question that Ann Arbor’s undergraduate and admissions policies are based on a principle of racial preference that, in...
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Peaceable Kingdoms
“The consent of all nations is the law of nature.” —Cicero On the Law of Nations is a powerful brief in favor of what the United States Supreme Court in 1900 declared to be “the customs and usages of the civilized world.” (In Paquete Habana, the highest court declared international law to be “part of...
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The Spanish Civil War and the Battle for Western Civilization
After a lengthy legal battle concluded in September, Spain’s Supreme Court gave its approval to the socialist government’s plans to exhume and remove the remains of General Francisco Franco from the Valley of the Fallen, where they have lain since his death in 1975. The controversial general led Spain’s Nationalist forces to victory over their...
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Ten Days That Shook the Presidency
What a difference a week can make. Saturday, Sept. 26, was among the best days of the Trump presidency, or so some of us thought watching the president introduce in the Rose Garden his sterling candidate for Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s seat on the Supreme Court. The academic and professional credentials of Amy Coney Barrett, 48,...
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‘War Between the States’
Judge John Roberts can rest assured that his Supreme Court confirmation will go very smoothly, judging from the weak 11th-hour attacks the left is mounting against him in the media. A “shocking” discovery about his record appeared in an August 26 report in the Washington Post that took issue with a phrase Roberts used while...
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Putin’s Got Problems, Too
Before the first Trump-Biden debate, moderator Chris Wallace listed the six subjects that would be covered: The Trump and Biden records, the Supreme Court, COVID-19, the economy, race, and violence in our cities, and the integrity of the election. According to a recent Gallup survey, Wallace’s topics tracked the public’s concerns—the top seven of which...
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On Segregation and Education
I enjoyed Samuel Francis’s lucid analysis of the 1954 Supreme Court decision, Brown v. Board of Education (“Forty Years After,” May 1994), but I take exception to his argument that “the only feasible moral defense of the Brown decision today is not that it replaced force with freedom, but that it replaced one kind of...
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Outgrowing the Past
When the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in the case of Kelo v. City of New London, a chill wind blew across the rural South. The Court upheld the decision of the city fathers of New London, Connecticut, to grant a private development corporation the right to condemn a middle-income residential neighborhood, evict the property owners,...
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An Undereducated Admiral
Since there are no pressing global issues that cannot wait until next week, I’ll devote my column to a book I’ve just finished reading. Its title, Sea Power: The History and Geopolitics of the World’s Oceans (Penguin, 2017), and the reputation of its author—retired admiral James George Stavridis, who ended his career as NATO Supreme...
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Life and Death in a House Divided
The Supreme Court’s recent decision to review a Missouri abortion case has raised the spirits of the pro-life movement. In his appeal, Missouri’s attorney general asked the Court to reconsider Roe v. Wade, the landmark civil rights decision that made pregnant women and their physicians sole arbiters over who is born and who is not...
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Dreams of My Daughters
President Barack Obama surprised even battle-hardened pro-life Americans with his official remarks on the 39th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court decision that has, since 1973, littered garbage dumps across America with the corpses of 50 million babies, 32 percent of them African-American. In a White House press release praising the landmark case...
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Functionally atheist government schools
A couple of times in my writings for Chronicles I’ve mentioned “functionally atheist government schools.” That’s what they’ve been since the early 1960s, when several U.S. Supreme Court edicts effectively banned any mention of religion, or anything approaching religion, from public schools. I remember sitting in my 6th grade class at Elliott Elementary School in...
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SCOTUS hateus
There are some real stunners in today’s convoluted ruling from the Supremes regarding Arizona v. United States. Here are some of my favorites: “As a general rule, it is not a crime for a removable alien to remain in the United States.” “Federal governance is extensive and complex.” “Removal is a civil matter, . . . ” . ....
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Sex and Marriage in San Francisco
The California Supreme, in a recent decision striking down the state’s ban on same-sex “marriage,” has issued a declaration of independence from the human race. Progressives have inevitably hailed this latest break-through, comparing it to the legalization of inter-racial marriage, but the same progressives just as inevitably will hail the inevitable legalization of cross-species marriage...
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The Beauty of Holiness: Building for Eternity—December 2005
PERSPECTIVE The Beauty of Holinessby Thomas Fleming Fixing our gaze. VIEWS The Romantic Reactionby Joseph PearceTranscending the divide. The Loving Lookby Hugh Barbour, O.Praem.A cure for the epicure. Conservatism as Medicineby Claude PolinNature versus the state of nature. Pugin and the Gothic Dreamby James PatrickTheology in the architecture. NEWS Did the Supreme Court Destroy Property...
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Wimin’s Work
The women’s movement is in considerable disarray. While most self-described feminists are concerned mainly with job prospects, equal pay, and abortion rights, the radical wing of the movement is busy advocating everything from witchcraft to lesbianism. This was never more apparent than at NOW’s recent convention. While most delegates were content with denouncing the Supreme...
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The Importance of Being Mean
The three pillars of liberal morality are engagement, compassion, and inclusiveness; its corresponding demons apathy, hatred, and exclusiveness. The shorthand word for the three cardinal virtues is niceness; for the three supreme vices, meanness. Nice is a word familiar among middle-middle class Americans, who have been liberalized whether they know it or not: the sort...
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DUE PROCESS: FROM JOE FRIDAY TO JACK BAUER—May 2008
PERSPECTIVEBeastie Boysby Thomas Fleming VIEWSFederales, Gringo Styleby Roger D. McGrathThe exponential growth of federal police. Do We Want a Federal Police Force?by William J. QuirkThe Supreme Court and Congress versus the people. Jack Bauer, Agent of Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A.by R. Cort KirkwoodAmerica’s most wanted. NEWSThe Surge “Success”by Ted Galen CarpenterTriumph of hope over experience. REVIEWSTowers of...
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The Politics of a Death
It is difficult to think of a case comparable to the murder of Sergei Mironovich Kirov. Here one of the top leaders of a great country was killed—most probably by the wish of the supreme dictator, the murder being used as full or partial justification for the arrest, torture, exile, or execution of many, then...
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Liberty, Justice, and Abortion For All
Last June, the Supreme Court decided that the ObamaCare individual mandate passed constitutional muster under Congress’s taxing power. It left undecided a host of other issues that are now being litigated in the lower courts. Under the HHS mandate that followed ObamaCare, employers with 50 or more full-time employees must offer health-insurance coverage for sterilization...
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What has Happened to Masculinity in 21st Century?
On Saturday morning, September 22, I switched on Fox News and there witnessed a gaggle of five garrulous women, all talking at the same time, all vacuous and empty headed, and all saying basically nothing—a so-called “panel” discussing the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the last-minute and largely-unfounded accusations hurled...
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The Dirty Fact About College Admissions
Pitting the state of Texas against four students who had been denied admission to the University of Texas School of Law because of their skin color, the recent Hopwood v. Texas case could spell doom for racial preferences in public education if affirmed by the Supreme Court. The Sth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, whose...
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Stealth Candidates
I have no desire to defend President George H.W. Bush or his execrable appointment of David Souter to the Supreme Court, but I was confused by the chronology of the Turnock v. Ragsdale case laid out by Scott P. Richert in the February issue (“Robert Bork, R.I.P.,” Cultural Revolutions). In December 1989, when that case...
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Judge Roberts
As the U.S. Senate prepares to consider President George W. Bush’s nominee for the U.S. Supreme Court, John Roberts, there seems to be a certain ambiguity about Judge Roberts’ position on Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision that made abortion-on-demand the “law of the land.” On the one hand, he is on record as saying...
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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.
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On Thomas Szasz
On New Jersey In your January issue, you published an article (“Our Platonic Guardians“) on “Justice” Wilentz of the New Jersey Supreme Court by a Hamilton Township attorney named Gregory J. Sullivan. As a lifelong resident of the Garden State, I can only reaffirm what he has written. And add: what this state needs is...
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The Post-Abortive Culture
The recent passage of the Texas Heartbeat Act, signed into law by Gov. Greg Abbott on May 19, has resulted in feverish alarums across the land. These came after the U.S. Supreme Court’s refusal to block the law in late September, following an emergency application made by over a dozen Texas abortion providers and their...
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MONKEYS IN THE CLASSROOM: September 2006
PERSPECTIVE Let’s Call the Whole Thing Off by Thomas Fleming The right to an opinion. VIEWS Educated at Home by Hugh Barbour, O.Praem. The pleasure that comes with struggle. The Supreme Court, Globalization, and the Teaching of Religion by Tom Landess Shaping society. Education to the ...
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Off the Hook
Officer Laurence Powell is off the hook, at least for now. Dealing a severe blow to the civil rights establishment and federal police power, the Supreme Court has overruled the Ninth Circuit Court’s motion to stiffen the sentence handed down in the federal trial of Powell and Stacey Koon, who were found guilty of violating...
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Let’s Stop Equating Slavery and Abortion
Frequently, pro-life leaders draw a parallel between slavery and abortion. “You Say Abortion Is Legal? The Supreme Court Also Legalized Slavery,” reads one popular bumper sticker. The motivation for this comparison is understandable, since slavery and the Civil War occupy central places in the American historical imagination. By gesturing toward one of the issues associated...
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Fueling Culture Wars
“Discrimination” is one of today’s buzzwords, and laws and regulations prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation are fueling some of the sharpest skirmishes within America’s culture wars. A New Jersey Supreme Court ruling against the Boy Scouts’ ban on homosexual Scout leaders has gained the most publicity of late. But a public feud between one...
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Where Trump’s and Bibi’s Interests Clash
On Monday, President Donald Trump designated the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps a terrorist organization, the first time the United States has designated part of another nation’s government as such a threat. Iran’s Supreme National Security Council responded by declaring U.S. Central Command a terrorist group. With 5,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and 2,000 in Syria,...
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The Royal Prerogative
The Supreme Court’s decision in Kelo v. City of New London has disclosed one of America’s dirtiest secrets: In this country founded, so we are told repeatedly, on the liberal trinity of rights to life, liberty, and property, our claims to property are as tenuous as the liberty of Christian parents with children in public...
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Kim Jong-il, the Leader from Hell
Kim Jong-il, the North Korean “Dear Leader” (as well as Secretary-General of the Workers’ Party of Korea, Chairman of the National Defense Commission, Supreme Commander of the Korean People’s Army, etc, etc.) is dead at 69. The news that the diminutive leader of the most unpleasant despotism in the world is no longer going to regale us with his...
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Happiness in Chernobyl
The lives of the babushkas in Chernobyl are evidence that God exists everywhere, and that while destruction can often reign supreme, creation, however small, affirms our propensity for the good.
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Joe Biden, the New Brezhnev
Leonid Ilych Brezhnev presided over the irreversible decline of the USSR during his 18 years in power, initially as Secretary-General of the Soviet Communist Party and later also as chairman of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet. He was two years younger than Joseph Biden is today when he died in 1982, but – just...
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Who Wants This War with Iran?
Speaking on state TV of the prospect of a war in the Gulf, Iran’s supreme leader Ayatollah Khamenei seemed to dismiss the idea. “There won’t be any war. . . . We don’t seek a war, and (the Americans) don’t either. They know it’s not in their interests.” The ayatollah’s analysis—a war is in neither...
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Sobering Up With SSM
Same-sex marriage still does not exist. Yes, the Supreme Court of the United States issued an opinion, 5-4, covering Obergefell v. Hodges and three other cases, which effectively makes “same-sex marriage” the law of the land. But five “justices” or 50 million Facebook “likes” cannot change what is woven into the fabric of creation. Of...
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Look to the Altar, Not the Throne
The Supreme Court granted injunctive relief to houses of worship previously closed under New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s restrictions on public gatherings. Justice Neil Gorsuch chided the governor for his “color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues and mosques.” This is a tremendous step toward the restoration of order...
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Naked in the Public Square
The recent battle over the removal of a 5,280-pound monument to the Ten Commandments placed in the lobby of the Alabama Supreme Court by Chief Justice Roy Moore has deep religious and civil roots stemming from the Protestant Reformation and provides an excellent historical study of religion, law, and public policy in America. Two recent...
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Is Iran Taking the China Road?
Is the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the Supreme leader of the Islamic Republic, a RINO—a revolutionary in name only? So they must be muttering around the barracks of the Iranian Republican Guard Corps today. For while American hawks are saying we gave away the store to Tehran, consider what ayatollah agreed to. Last week, he gave...
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World War III With China: How It Might Actually Be Fought
[This piece has been adapted and expanded from Alfred W. McCoy’s new book, In the Shadows of the American Century: The Rise and Decline of U.S. Global Power.] For the past 50 years, American leaders have been supremely confident that they could suffer military setbacks in places like Cuba or Vietnam without having their system...
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Title X Funds
Title X funds to “family planning” clinics that dispense abortion counseling were prohibited last summer as a result of the Rust v. Sullivan U.S. Supreme Court decision, which single-issue organizations indignantly denounced. It is ironic that the very people who claim that government should stay out of abortion decisions are the very same people who...
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Re: Cheer, Cheer for Old Notre Dame
Tom, I’m pretty optimistic about the lawsuit filed by Notre Dame and 42 other Catholic organizations. Filing essentially the same case in multiple federal district courts increases the possibility of getting the right result out of at least one, and getting mixed results will kick this issue up to the Supreme Court. So it seems likely...
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Two Centuries of Resolve
This year is the bicentennial of the Virginia and Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, the foremost formulations of the compact theory of the United States Constitution. By 1798, the Republicans faced an 11-year losing streak. Federalism had reigned supreme in American politics from the end of the Revolution. Even before the institution of the government of...
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Doll Studies
In 1954, the Supreme Court held in Brown v. Board of Education that the state-sponsored segregation of children in public schools was a violation of the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th Amendment, and thus unconstitutional. The Court reasoned that segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority . . . that may affect their [black children’s]...
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Hands Off Honduras!
Last Saturday, Honduran soldiers marched into the presidential palace, bundled up President Manuel Zelaya and put him on a plane for Costa Rica. The ouster had been ordered by the Supreme Court and approved by the Congress, as Zelaya was attempting an illegal referendum to change the Honduran constitution so he could run for another...
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Justice for Tommy
Harvard’s Cass Sunstein recently complained that conservatives’ slippery-slope arguments about the left’s latest push to codify and enforce radical equality are intellectually “lazy.” Sunstein and his followers give the example of conservative opposition to gay marriage, which often includes the observation that “the Supreme Court shouldn’t force states to recognize same-sex marriages because, if it...
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Eisenhower, Nixon, Ford, Reagan, Bush, Bush
Thank God for Republican presidents who appoint strict constructionists to the U.S. Supreme Court. Otherwise, the Court today might have upheld ObamaCare.