This November will you vote the values that will stand the test of fire? Some things are more important than high gas prices or a faltering economy. They are life, marriage and freedom.
Moral issues
Bleeding Heart Tightwads
by Nicholas D. Kristof –
The problem is this: We liberals are personally stingy.
Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.
Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.
Other research has reached similar conclusions. The “generosity index” from the Catalogue for Philanthropy typically finds that red states are the most likely to give to nonprofits, while Northeastern states are least likely to do so. [Read more…]
Free Enterprise and Fiscal Sanity Aren’t Social Darwinism
by Jay W. Richards –
On Tuesday, President Obama denounced Representative Paul Ryan’s budget proposal, which would modestly reduce the rate of growth in the federal budget. Ryan’s plan is a “radical vision,” says the president, which amounts to “thinly veiled Social Darwinism.” Understandably, Ryan has called the comments “surreal,” since the Wisconsin Republican seeks to reform entitlements such as Medicare in order to save them. That doesn’t sound like Social Darwinism.
In fact, “Social Darwinism” is an old left-wing catch phrase used to disparage free enterprise. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes reportedly said that one good catch phrase can stop thinking for fifty years. This one certainly has. [Read more…]
Betrayal Then and Now: On Great Wednesday
by Fr. Alexander Iliashenko –
On Great Wednesday the Church remembers how Judas betrayed Christ the Savior. In the following talk, Archpriest Alexander addresses the betrayal of Judas, how Christ was questioned, and the story of Marshal Rokossovsky’s refusal to name names.
Why was it necessary to have a traitor? After all, it would seem that tracking down the Savior would have been easy, since He neither hid nor concealed Himself. He could have been located without any trouble. They could have just sent a detachment to seize Him. But, for some reason, it was necessary to have a traitor – so that this frightful act would take place from within.
This serves as a warning to us all that we must guard our inner unity, not allowing ourselves even to entertain thoughts against those of like mind with us or against those people who are close to us, which can ruin a great thing. [Read more…]
Progressive Inhumanity, Part Two: The State against the Churches
by Anthony Esolen –
A small town in Vermont has recently been ordered to cease its immemorial tradition of opening meetings with a prayer. …
The order came from a judge who does not live near. A public school in the city where I am writing these words has banners hanging from its gymnasium ceiling, one of which featured a prayer written by a student of the school many decades ago. It has been removed, also by order of a distant judge. Since the citizens of the town and the school district no longer govern themselves but have become dependent upon regular infusions of green federal blood, they could not reply, “You and whose army?” The prayer and the banner are gone.
We Catholics hold that man, unique among creatures on earth, finds his fulfillment only in what transcends him. He will not compose symphonies in honor of a good housing market. He does not whistle an air for low inflation. He will pen poetry born of love, but if the object of his love is a Clodia rather than a Beatrice, even his love poetry will degenerate into satire and cynicism. Man is made for God. [Read more…]
On Restoring American Individualism
by Daren Jonescu –
Much of the political crisis facing America today stems from a disintegration of the ethical basis of the free society. That is why the core of the 2012 election fight is not tax rates, job growth, or the national debt. These issues, though of enormous practical importance, are merely the policy manifestations of underlying moral sentiments. The fundamental battle to be waged concerns nothing less than the nature of man, and the moral implications of that nature. If public disapproval of particular Obama policies is to become a lasting movement toward societal renewal, then the conservative’s primary objective must be the restoration of American individualism.
The problem is that the warm quilt of entitlement and dependency which the left has so cozily tucked around American society not only restricts freedom of movement; it also effectively reinforces the anti-individualist morality that makes the left’s advances possible. In the doublethink names of “fairness” and “security,” soft despotism of the modern leftist sort produces a siren-song promise of carefree mother’s love forever — with its corresponding appeal to a toddler’s moral myopia, the inability to concretize and respect the wishes and wills of other people. Thus, creeping socialism ushers in a hitherto unknown ethic, which we might dub “collectivist self-absorption.” [Read more…]
Progressive Inhumanity, Part One: The State against the Family
by Anthony Esolen –
The family is that natural society where individual liberty and the common good are most nearly reconciled. To deprive it of its rights is to rob people of a great part of what it is to be human.
…
The beauty and the divine order of the family is the very soul of his social teaching, because it is there, within the walls of the home, that society begins. Thus we hear him declare, against the statists of his time, that by the command of God “we have the family; the society of a man’s house — a society limited indeed in numbers, but no less a true society, anterior to every kind of State or nation, invested with rights and duties of its own, totally independent of the civil community.” This is the doctrine of subsidiarity at its core.
The Pope does not justify the family on utilitarian grounds. He does not affirm (what is true in any case) that there are many things the family can do that the State cannot do as well, or cannot do at all. Instead he founds the rights of the family in nature, and the God of nature. It is a society both human and divine. It is within those bonds of love or duty that children and parents both put faces upon law that would otherwise remain abstract, distant, sometimes threatening, sometimes impotent, but always extrinsic, and therefore not quite real. It is there, and only there, that law and love may be found growing together. [Read more…]
Declaring War on Newborns
by Andrew Ferguson –
The disgrace of medical ethics.
On the list of the world’s most unnecessary occupations—aromatherapist, golf pro, journalism professor, vice president of the United States—that of medical ethicist ranks very high. They are happily employed by pharmaceutical companies, hospitals, and other outposts of the vast medical-industrial combine, where their job is to advise the boss to go ahead and do what he was going to do anyway (“Put it on the market!” “Pull the plug on the geezer!”). They also attend conferences where they take turns sitting on panels talking with one another and then sitting in the audience watching panels of other medical ethicists talking with one another. Their professional specialty is the “thought experiment,” which is the best kind of experiment because you don’t have to buy test tubes or leave the office. And sometimes they get jobs at universities, teaching other people to become ethicists. It is a cozy, happy world they live in.
But it was painfully roiled last month, when a pair of medical ethicists took to their profession’s bible, the Journal of Medical Ethics, and published an essay with a misleadingly inconclusive title: “After-birth Abortion: Why should the baby live?” It was a misleading title because the authors believe the answer to the question is: “Beats me.” [Read more…]
The Welfare State and the Selfish Society (Prager University)
Does capitalism and the free market make you selfish? Dennis Prager answers this question and challenges what for many has become conventional wisdom.
Rev. Ragsdale Goes to Congress: Time to Expose Counterfeit ‘Christianity’
The unbroken teaching of the Christian Church has been – and continues to be – that every procured abortion is the taking of an innocent human life.
Rev. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale is the “go to” witness these days for the radical abortion on demand lobby. She not only makes for good optics when she wears that clerical collar, she feigns outrage that anyone would attempt to stop any abortion for any reason. After all, she has now openly identified her position that abortion is a “blessing”. She has the audacity to defend this position as consistent with the Christian faith she claims to profess.The early Church lived through similar examples of apostate leaders claiming the authority of the Church. ..
On Thursday March 8, 2012, Rev. Dr. Katherine Hancock Ragsdale, the President and Dean of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Massachusetts, appeared in a clerical collar to testify in the United States House of Representatives. Her testimony was an example of the counterfeit which now claims to be Christianity. [Read more…]
