Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age by kay s. hymowitz ivan r. dee, 192 pages, $22.50 The foundations of national morality must be laid in private families,” wrote John Adams in 1778. Adams recognized, as did many of the founders, that the . . . . Continue Reading »
I’m a fan of old movies, the black-and-whites from the 1930s and 1940s, in part because of what they reveal about how American culture has changed. The adults in these films carry themselves differently. They don’t walk and speak the way we do. It’s often hard to figure out how old the . . . . Continue Reading »
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 »
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 »
Marriage in the United States shall consist only of the union of a man and a woman. Neither this Constitution or the constitution of any state, nor state or federal law, shall be construed to require that marital status or the legal incidents thereof be conferred on unmarried couples or groups. . . . . Continue Reading »
Anyone interested in improving relations between men and women today and tomorrow must proceed by taking a page from yesterday. For today’s tale regarding manhood and womanhood is, alas, both too brief and hardly edifying. True, as they multiply taboos on speech and gesture, our sexual harassment . . . . Continue Reading »
When my daughter was seven, her Austrian grandmother sent her three Erich Kaestner novels for Christmas. Her favorite was Das Doppelte Lottchen, a disarming tale about a pair of nine-year-old identical twins separated from infancy by an acrimonious divorce. When these girls meet accidentally . . . . Continue Reading »
From Sacrament to Contract: Marriage, Religion, and Law in the Western Tradition.By John Witte, Jr.Westminster/John Knox. 315 pp. $24. As its principal objective, this ninth volume in the series “The Family, Religion, and Culture” aims to illuminate the transformation of the institution of . . . . Continue Reading »
It is not exactly traditional to speak about the education of Abraham. Pious tales of the patriarch regard him as a precocious monotheist even before God calls him, a man who smashed his father’s idols, a man who sprang forth fully pious and knowledgeable about the ways of God. But, in my view, a . . . . Continue Reading »
Especially in America, when we think of the Catholic intellectual tradition we tend to think exclusively of the many varieties of Thomism. And for the decades between Leo XIII’s encyclical Aeterni Patris (1879) and the Second Vatican Council, this equation was largely accurate. Before . . . . Continue Reading »
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