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As Long As They Spell Our Names Right

As Long As They Spell Our Names Right We are incessantly told that we live in a celebrity culture, and it is in large part true. If a celebrity is defined as someone who is well known for being well known, then publicity is the lifeblood of a celebrity culture. Any publicity is good publicity. As it . . . . Continue Reading »

The Truce of 2005?

In his influential book The Courage to Be Catholic, George Weigel wrote about the “The Truce of 1968.” By that is meant the decision not to discipline the many theologians and priests who, in a public and concerted campaign, rejected the teaching of the 1968 encyclical on human sexuality, . . . . Continue Reading »

The Necessary Amendment

Within the next two or three years, the Supreme Court will almost certainly climax a series of state court rulings by creating a national constitutional right to homosexual marriage. The Court’s ongoing campaign to normalize homosexuality—creating for homosexuals constitutional rights to . . . . Continue Reading »

Conciliating Hatred

These days, if you announce that the Supreme Court is doing politics rather than law you will provoke more yawns than protests. But what sort of politics is the Court doing? Justice Antonin Scalia frequently charges the Court with stepping out of its judicial role and taking sides in the culture . . . . Continue Reading »

“Thinly Disguised Totalitarianism”

In 2003, the chief appellate court of the province of Ontario unanimously ruled that the common law definition of marriage in force in Canada (“one man and one woman”) was unconstitutional, as it violated the equality guarantees of Canada’s Charter of Rights and Freedoms (an amendment to the . . . . Continue Reading »

Not So Gay Blades

The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subcultureby howard p. chudacoffprinceton university press, 341 pages, $29.95 Howard Chudacoff, a professor of history at Brown University, has written what amounts to a propagandist tract in the form of a purported sociological history of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Talking Straight

Homosexuality and American Public Life.Edited by Christopher Wolfe.Introduction by William Kristol.Spence. 320 pp. $29.95 Among activists who want to keep the “hetero” in “sexuality,” a consensus is developing that we need a “public philosophy,” a way to speak wisdom to the people. It . . . . Continue Reading »

On Bringing One’s Life to a Point

In February of 1994, in what was its March issue, First Things published a statement on the homosexual movement signed by twenty-one people, of whom I was one. An excerpt from that statement was published in the Wall Street Journal on February 24. I do not intend here to rehearse the argument of . . . . Continue Reading »

The Homosexual Movement

I. The New Thing Homosexual behavior is a phenomenon with a long history, to which there have been various cultural and moral responses. But today in our public life there is something new, a novum, which demands our attention and deserves a careful moral response.The new thing is a movement that . . . . Continue Reading »

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