Buffering Abortion Speech

On Thursday, the Supreme Court decided to strike down as unconstitutional the 2007 Massachusetts law which mandated a thirty-five foot buffer around medical facilities that offer abortions. Since the decision was handed down, the fallout has been contentious. One article, emblematic of a genre of literature which focuses on radicalism, sees little in the way of fruitful discourse happening outside of clinics: Continue Reading »

Allow Abortion—Or You’re Guilty of Torture

U.N. experts in Geneva were at it again last week telling the Holy See that Catholic teaching on abortion is a human rights abuse, revealing a chasm between the Church’s understanding of its mission and how U.N. officials perceive it. The episode is reminiscent of a time in history when secular leaders did not accept a separation of Church and State. Continue Reading »

Autonomy’s Triumph in Canada

The autonomous person, liberated from the constraints of the past and free perhaps even from the stigma of social disapproval of his chosen lifestyle, has become the new god of the Canadian civil religion, almost totally eclipsing whatever communitarian elements have managed to survive the cultural shifts of recent decades. Continue Reading »

Yale’s Agony Over Social Justice

Last night Yale’s campus pro-life group—after a year in which they participated in meetings and even helped raise money for the organization—became the first group in living memory to be denied membership in the Social Justice Network of Dwight Hall. Billing itself as an . . . . Continue Reading »

Are Christians Obsessed with Sex?

From time to time a member of the Christian left will admonish the Christian right to stop obsessing about sex. This is a clever move because in addition to undercutting traditional sexual morality it also suggests that those who are concerned with the topic are acting on some secret ulterior . . . . Continue Reading »

The Ancients on Abortion

Teaching Dante’s Divine Comedy last semester, I hoped to cruise through the Purgatorio to make sure we completed the Paradiso by semester’s end. But my students wouldn’t let me skip canto 25—they stopped there, awestruck. I think we spent longer in the seventh cornice on the . . . . Continue Reading »

Britain’s Baby Burning

The British public is currently being scandalized by the revelations that hospitals there have been incinerating the remains of aborted infants as clinical waste, in some cases doing so to generate electricity for hospitals. Even in that country which has so steadfastly refused to have the abortion . . . . Continue Reading »