A Centenary Reflection This year marks the centennial of Hilaire Belloc’s curious book The Servile State. Recent commentators have been unsure where to place this volume on the ideological spectrum. In the Liberty Fund edition, Robert Nisbet labels Belloc a “libertarian Catholic,” a writer taking his inspiration from the nineteenth century’s Cardinal Newman and Lord […]
Read MoreHow the Erosion of American Family Life Fuels Illegal Immigration For the vast majority of ordinary Americans, particularly those who fall between the center and the right of the political spectrum, illegal immigration is a simple issue: The Law is the Law, and the Law should be enforced. As commentator George Rodriguez, himself of Mexican […]
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 MoreReclaiming Family-Wage Jobs in an Age of Globalization In his 2010 examination of the welfare state, Never Enough, William Voegeli spilled a lot of ink exposing the intellectual bankruptcy of liberalism. But the Claremont scholar also chided his fellow conservatives for failing to see the beam in their own eyes: an obsession with tax cuts […]
Read MorePaul Amato, one of the revered deans of American sociology, has shown courage in bucking his academic peers, as he did when he suggested that a “good divorce” is not all that good for children (see New Research, Summer 2012). Yet the scholar has not demonstrated the same resolve in dealing with the academic and […]
Read MoreAlthough the American Psychological Association (APA) boasts scholarly objectivity, the social-science guild has for years conducted studies that generate the results—from the alleged benefits of the “good” divorce to the virtues of homosexuality—that progressive activists’ itching ears want to hear. Consequently, it often falls to one brave solider to challenge the groupthink. Indeed, Mark Regnerus […]
Read MoreWhen it issued an official report on “lesbian and gay parenting” in 2005, the American Psychological Association (APA) made the bold claim, based on fifty-nine published studies on homosexual parenting, that “not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual […]
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Baby-Making: What the New Reproductive Treatments Mean for Families and Society Bart Fauser and Paul Devroey Oxford University Press, 2011; 292 pages, $29.95 What does it mean to “make” a child? The title of this book is presumably a nod to the euphemistic meaning of the term, but with the twist that it invokes the […]
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Adam and Eve after the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution Mary Eberstadt Ignatius Press, 2012; 171 pages, $19.95 As Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius’s mandate requiring all health-insurance plans to cover contraception “free of charge” to women took effect August 1 of this year, Mary Eberstadt’s collection of essays Adam and Eve […]
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Godly Seed: American Evangelicals Confront Birth Control, 1873–1973 Allan Carlson Transaction Publishers, 2012; 170 pages, $29.95 These days, the only time mainline Protestant denominations warrant headlines is when they talk about sex and marriage. Meeting this past summer in Indianapolis, the General Convention of the Episcopal Church attracted attention from journalists and editors when its […]
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