In Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life, the concept of home ownership looms large. As the residents of Bedford Falls come to George Bailey’s rescue, one of the donors says that without George, he would not have a roof over his head. Indeed, George has devoted his life to building homes and increasing access to […]
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Primal Screams: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics Mary Eberstadt Templeton Press, 2019; 192 pages, $24.95 It is commonplace, though surely justified, to lament the extreme polarization of public life. With the launching of impeachment proceedings during an election year, those divisions seem unlikely to dissipate soon. Related and in some cases underlying this […]
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From Tolerance to Equality: How Elites Brought America to Same-Sex Marriage Darel E. Paul Baylor University Press, 2018; 256 pages, $39.95 Late last year, Romanian voters considered a constitutional amendment to confirm the nation’s definition of marriage as the union of a husband and wife (voter turnout did not meet the required threshold for the […]
Read MoreIn 1888, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Stephen Field wrote the majority opinion in a case involving the validity of an Oregon legislative divorce as it related to ownership of a land grant. In the opinion, Justice Field wrote: “It is also to be observed that, whilst marriage is often termed by text writers and in […]
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How Population Change Will Transform Our World Sarah Harper Oxford University Press, 2016; 160 pages, $24.95 Throughout the last 40-plus years of the no-fault divorce revolution, observers have noticed a phenomenon aptly labeled “divorce happy talk.” This is an attempt by adults to overcome the initial distress we might feel about the spike in divorces, […]
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Defenders of the Unborn: The Pro-Life Movement Before Roe v. Wade Daniel K. Williams Oxford University Press, 2016; 400 pages, $29.95 This summer, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas law requiring abortionists to have admitting privileges to a nearby hospital and abortion centers to meet the minimum legal standards for an outpatient surgical […]
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Beyond Price: Essays on Birth and Death J. David Velleman Open Book Publishers, 2015; 232 pages, £29.95 It is interesting that in a time of seemingly unprecedented opportunities for unfettered individual choice, when few of the social constraints traditionally indicted as barriers to human happiness remain in place, two of our more pressing political campaigns […]
Read MoreIn its last term, the U.S. Supreme Court decided two cases that implicated, in some way, privacy claims. One of these cases, Rodriguez v. United States, involved a claim that using a drug-sniffing dog at a traffic stop was unconstitutional. The other and far better known case involved the claim that the U.S. Constitution requires […]
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Jephthath’s Daughters Innocent Casualties in the War for Family “Equality” Robert Oscar Lopez and Rivka Edelman, Editors CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2015; 484 pages, $16.59 At the end of June, a majority of justices on the U.S. Supreme Court announced that the Fourteenth Amendment requires every state to redefine marriage to include same-sex couples. Following […]
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Generation Unbound – Drifting into Sex and Parenthood without Marriage Isabel V. Sawhill Brookings Institution Press, 2014; 212 pages, $32.00 For those concerned about family policy, the stark facts that Generation Unbound describes will be familiar. While teen parenting is down, for instance, “parenting by young unwed women has not declined. It has just moved […]
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