Reflections on African American Family Dynamics in the Twentieth Century “How does it feel to be a problem?” asked sociologist W.E.B. Dubois in the opening chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903). African Americans have faced a perennial struggle with “double consciousness,” he explained, seeing themselves simultaneously from the perspective of their own black […]
Read MoreHow to Make Health Care Pro-Marriage, Pro-Life, and Affordable The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act no doubt has lowered out-of-pocket financial costs for some Americans, but at the moral cost of requiring many Americans to participate in the funding of contraception against the dictates of their conscience and at the social cost of diluting […]
Read MoreThe Story behind America’s Most Enduring Oxymoron When language aficionado Bo Mitchell judged 461 entries for the “Great Oxymoron Contest” in 1983, he ranked “wedded bliss” in third place. In fourteenth place came “happily married.” Mitchell distinguished two kinds of oxymorons: “linguistic oxymorons, which contain two words with opposite or conflicting meanings” (such as, “Positively […]
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On the Meaning of Sex J. Budziszewski ISI Books, 2011; 145 pages, $27.95 Noah Webster was no intellectual slouch. Proficient in the languages of the ancient Near East as well as of modern Europe, he painstakingly compiled the etymology, orthography, and signification of 70,000 words for the great American Dictionary of the English Language published […]
Read MoreThe Irrationality of American Food Policy About twice every decade, Congress enacts a gargantuan piece of agricultural legislation. The 2008 Farm Bill1 weighed in at 1,769 pages, with roughly half the word count of the King James Bible or three-fourths the length of the behemoth Patient Protection and Affordable Health Care Act of 2010.2 Although […]
Read MoreSome Other Problems That Have No Name In 1963, Betty friedan named the problem. The opening chapter of her Feminine Mystique is aptly titled, “The Problem That Has No Name.” There Friedan verbalized what countless housewives thought and felt but did not know how to say: the American dream was a disappointment for women. Marriage, […]
Read MoreWhat Helps, and What Hinders, the American Dream What more sacred, what more strongly guarded by everyholy feeling, than a man’s own home? —Cicero America’s founding fathers inherited from English common law the doctrine that “a man’s house is his castle.”[1] Property ownership and political autonomy are two sides of the same coin. John Locke […]
Read MoreAs Goes the Middle-Class Family, So Goes the Nation The middle-class family—as both a cultural ideal and a social reality—has contributed significantly to American prosperity. From the yeoman farmers of Jefferson’s republic to the white-collar workers of today, the middle-class family has passed the torch of liberty to the rising generation. The heterogeneity of America’s […]
Read MoreThe American Law Institute’s Role in Deconstructing the Family Legislative reforms that have prohibited American courts from finding fault when a man and a woman divorce are now leading the nation toward a situation in which no state would be permitted to deny a same-sex couple’s application for marriage. This turn of events owes its […]
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