Anderson, Ryan T.
48 Articles at Lifeissues.net

Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., researches and writes about marriage and religious liberty as the William E. Simon senior research fellow in American Principles and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation. He also focuses on justice and moral principles in economic thought, health care and education, and has expertise in bioethics and natural law theory. Read his research. (http://www.heritage.org/about/staff/a/ryan-anderson)

Website:http://www.heritage.org/about/staff/a/ryan-anderson

Articles

Ryan Anderson on a Decade of Debates, the Future of Conservatism, and a Time to Grow

Micah Watson and Ryan Anderson look back on his Piers Morgan interview, how the debate on same-sex marriage played out, what that might mean for our debates on transgender ideology, the nature of political discourse in America today, the future of the conservative movement, and what to look for in the next decade.

Date posted: 2023-05-19

Why the Arguments about "Bodily Autonomy" and "Forced Birth" Fail to Justify Abortion

Examining the bodily autonomy argument for abortion highlights a crucial pro-life point: abortion is wrong not only because strangers shouldn't kill each other but also and especially because parents have special obligations to their children, and it isn't governmental overreach to require parents to fulfill those obligations.

Date posted: 2022-07-12

Anthropological Fallacies

Body-self dualism, and its social manifestation in expressive individualism, underlie the rejection of our given human natures. Rather than seeing ourselves as somehow inhabiting bodies that are used as mere instruments, we should see ourselves as incarnate, bodily beings embedded in communities and bound by natural and supernatural laws.

Date posted: 2022-06-22

"He Knows What He Is About": Living a Life That Matters

How does each and every one of us live a life that matters, that makes a difference, that has meaning, purpose, and value - and that ultimately will be a happy life in the rich sense of the term, that will be blessed?

Date posted: 2021-07-03

Called to Courage

If we have a calling in life, it is because someone has called us. God calls each of us by name to a specific path of holiness and service to others. Important as professional success may be, the only success of ultimate importance is holiness. The only real tragedy in life is not to have been a saint.

Date posted: 2021-05-29

Protect Good Medicine, Stop the Censorship of Good Counseling

The law must protect the freedom of parents to seek, children to receive, and doctors to practice good medicine. The law must protect the ability of doctors and families to help children feel comfortable as what they actually are - namely, male and female children - not to radically and irreversibly transform their bodies.

Date posted: 2020-10-31

Pope Francis, Civil Unions, and Moral Truth

More deeply understanding the truth about marriage and human sexuality will help all of us flourish. And that is what a pastor like Pope Francis desires. We can understand - indeed we share - the frustration of our fellow Catholics with the ways in which the Holy Father conducts interviews and the ways in which the media distorts them, but we must not do anything to undermine the truth that sets us free.

Date posted: 2020-10-31

Religious Liberty Is Important, But It's Not Enough

The religious liberty triumphs of the past several days are important, but they're not enough. Not nearly so. We need to contend about the truth of the matter. Through legislation and litigation, we need to make it clear that it's lawful to act on the convictions that we are created male and female and that male and female are created for each other. Privacy and safety at a shelter, equality on an athletic field, and good medicine are at stake for everyone - religious or not.

Date posted: 2020-07-27

The Supreme Court's Mistaken and Misguided Sex Discrimination Ruling

Justice Gorsuch's position would either require the elimination of all sex-specific programs and facilities or allow access based on an individual's subjective identity rather than his or her objective biology. When Gorsuch claims that "transgender status [is] inextricably bound up with sex" because "transgender status" is defined precisely in opposition to sex, he presumes the very sex binary his opinion will help to further erode.

Date posted: 2020-07-04

Physical Interventions on the Bodies of Children to "Affirm" their "Gender Identity" Violate Sound Medical Ethics and Should be Prohibited

Rather than teaching children to identify based on how well they fit prevailing cultural expectations on sex, we should be teaching them that the truth of their sexual identity is based on their bodies, and that sometimes cultural associations attached to the sexes are misguided or simply too narrow. There is a wonderfully rich array of ways of expressing one's embodiment as male or female.

Date posted: 2019-12-19

Sex at the High Court: On the Redefinition of "Sex" in Civil Rights Law and Faulty Accounts of "Discrimination"

Activists are asking the Court to rewrite our nation's civil rights laws in a way that would directly undermine one of their main purposes: protecting the equal rights of girls and women. Congress did not legislate such an outcome, and the Court should not usurp Congress's authority by imposing such an extreme policy on the nation. Biology is not bigotry, and the Court should not conclude otherwise.

Date posted: 2019-10-05

Catholic Thought and the Challenges of Our Time

The early Church saw challenges to truths about God, the Reformation-era Church saw challenges to truths about the Church herself, and today's Church is confronted by challenges to truths about man - the being made in the image and likeness of God whom the Church is tasked with protecting. This essay is based on Ryan T. Anderson's inaugural lecture as the St. John Paul II Teaching Fellow at The University of Dallas.

Date posted: 2019-05-20

The New York Times Reveals Painful Truths about Transgender Lives

Why should a doctor perform surgery when it won't make the patient happy, it won't accomplish its intended goal, it won't improve the underlying condition, it might make the underlying condition worse, and it might increase the likelihood of suicide? Sound medicine isn't about desire, it's about healing.

Date posted: 2018-11-27

Sex Change: Physically Impossible, Psychosocially Unhelpful, and Philosophically Misguided

Modern medicine can't reassign sex physically, and attempting to do so doesn't produce good outcomes psychosocially. Here is the evidence.

Date posted: 2018-03-24

Transgender ideology is riddled with contradictions. Here are the big ones.

A transgender future is not the "right side of history," yet activists have convinced the most powerful sectors of our society to acquiesce to their demands. While the claims they make are manifestly false, it will take real work to prevent the spread of these harmful ideas. The claims of transgender activists are philosophically incoherent.

Date posted: 2018-02-25

The Philosophical Contradictions of the Transgender Worldview

The thinking of transgender activists is inherently confused and filled with internal contradictions. Activists never acknowledge those contradictions. Instead, they opportunistically rely on whichever claim is useful at any given moment.

Date posted: 2018-02-11

The Continuing Threat to Religious Liberty

Religious liberty is not an embrace of relativism. As we disagree about religious truth, we need to agree to leave legal room for that disagreement to play out in worthy and healthy ways - among people who are free to persuade and convert. People are free to try to convince Jack that he should bake the cake, but the government shouldn't be allowed to force him to do so.

Date posted: 2017-08-14

Faith and Reason, Beauty and Holines

We have the obligation to propose with the apostle Paul the more excellent way. And this only intensifies as you graduate today and enter a world that is simultaneously hungry for and resistant to your message.

Date posted: 2017-06-02

Natural Law, Social Justice, and the Crisis of Liberty in the West

Since I have just said a few words on natural law and economic freedom, I want to say a few words about a natural law conception of social justice and how it can help us now. Some people think social justice is a twentieth century invention of left-leaning thinkers, but this starts the history of social justice midstream. To understand its true meaning, we must look farther back to its real historical origins.

Date posted: 2017-03-20

How to Think About Discrimination: Race, Sex, and SOGI

Sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) antidiscrimination laws are unjustified, but if other policies are adopted to address the mistreatment of people who identify as LGBT, they must leave people free to engage in legitimate actions based on the conviction that we are created male and female and that male and female are created for each other.

Date posted: 2017-03-04

The Public Case against Human Cloning

A new report from the Witherspoon Council on Ethics and the Integrity of Science forcefully makes the case against all forms of human cloning. Below is an excerpt from the report on the moral case against cloning-to-produce-children and cloning-for-biomedical research.

Date posted: 2015-10-18

Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Are Not Like Race: Why ENDA is Bad Policy

Sexual orientation and gender identity are conceptually different from race, and beliefs about marriage as the union of man and woman are conceptually and historically different from opposition to interracial marriage. Adapted from testimony delivered on Monday March 16 before the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

Date posted: 2015-06-15

Global Experience Shows that Physician-Assisted Suicide Threatens the Weak and Marginalized

This Issue Brief focuses on how PAS threatens the weak and marginalized. It explores who is most likely to be coaxed into PAS and how PAS has led to voluntary - and even involuntary - euthanasia in Europe. This lethal logic has even been extended to children and the non-terminally ill disabled.

Date posted: 2015-05-13

Four Problems with Physician-Assisted Suicide

The Hippocratic Oath proclaims: "I will keep [the sick] from harm and injustice. I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect." This is an essential precept for a flourishing civil society. No one, especially a doctor, should be permitted to kill intentionally, or assist in killing intentionally, an innocent neighbor.

Date posted: 2015-05-13

Big Law Thinks Gay Marriage Opponents Are Like Racist Bigots. That's a Problem.

Our nation's legal elites think that the belief that marriage is the exclusive union of husband and wife is "bigotry akin to racism." That's a problem. And it explains the growing intolerance showed toward ordinary Americans who believe the truth about marriage.

Date posted: 2015-05-11

Always Care, Never Kill: How Physician-Assisted Suicide Endangers the Weak, Corrupts Medicine, Compromises the Family, and Violates Human Dignity and Equality

Allowing physician-assisted suicide would be a grave mistake for four reasons. First, it would endanger the weak and vulnerable. Second, it would corrupt the practice of medicine and the doctor-patient relationship. Third, it would compromise the family and intergenerational commitments. And fourth, it would betray human dignity and equality before the law. Instead of helping people to kill themselves, we should offer them appropriate medical care and human presence. We should respond to suffering with true compassion and solidarity. Doctors should help their patients to die a dignified death of natural causes, not assist in killing. Physicians are always to care, never to kill.

Date posted: 2015-05-05

Physician-assisted suicide is a social contagion

Doctors should help their patients to die a dignified death of natural causes, not assist in killing. Physicians are always to care, never to kill. Citizens and policymakers need to resist the push by pressure groups, academic elites, and the media to sanction physician-assisted suicide.

Date posted: 2015-04-22

Purported Safeguards in Physician-Assisted Suicide Are Ripe for Abuse

Allowing physician-assisted suicide (PAS) would be a grave mistake for four reasons, as explained in a Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, “Always Care, Never Kill.” First, it would endanger the weak and vulnerable. Second, it would corrupt the practice of medicine and the doctor–patient relationship. Third, it would compromise the family and intergenerational commitments. And fourth, it would betray human dignity and equality before the law. Instead of helping people to kill themselves, we should offer them appropriate medical care and human presence.

Date posted: 2015-04-22

It's Not Compassionate: Four Policy Problems With Physician-Assisted Suicide

The Hippocratic Oath proclaims: "I will keep [the sick] from harm and injustice. I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect." This is an essential precept for a flourishing civil society. No one, especially a doctor, should be permitted to kill intentionally, or assist in killing intentionally, an innocent neighbor.

Date posted: 2015-04-15

"Celebrate same-sex wedding or go to jail"

Here is the latest case in the United States of people threatened with legal sanctions for following their conscience and declining to be involved in a same-sex wedding.

Date posted: 2014-11-20

Bear Witness to the Truth about Unborn Human Life

While it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including the right to life, what is self-evident in the technical philosophical sense is not always readily assented to, or immediately obvious. In many ways this is the story of debates throughout American history, and it is true today in the debate over unborn human life.

Date posted: 2014-09-20

Marriage Matters, and Redefining It Has Social Costs

What is marriage, why does marriage matter for public policy, and what are the consequences of redefining marriage? Adapted from testimony delivered on Monday, January 13, 2014 to the Indiana House Judiciary Committee.

Date posted: 2014-03-11

What Makes a Marriage? Love, Sex, or Comprehensive Union

Prof. Charles Reid thinks love makes a marriage. He claims we think sex makes a marriage. In truth, comprehensive union makes a marriage. And getting marriage right matters for everyone.

Date posted: 2014-02-11

The Supreme Court, You and Me, and the Future of Marriage by

What happened at the courthouse matters, and we must keep up our witness to the truth about marriage, by word and deed, until it is safely beyond judicial overreach.

Date posted: 2013-07-07

Truth, Responsibility, and Love

Regent University Class of 2013: Live in truth. Love your families and your friends. Be a faithful spouse and parent. Take care of your parents as they age. Be a good employee and, one day, a good employer. Serve the poor. Welcome the stranger. Live out the truth of what you have learned at Regent, and you will set the world ablaze.

Date posted: 2013-06-15

On Marriage, Inevitability Is a Choice We Can Reject

Marriage is founded on the anthropological truth that men and women are different and complementary, the biological fact that the union of a man and woman also creates new life, and the social reality that children need a mom and a dad.

Date posted: 2013-06-15

Portman: Right on the Court, Wrong on Marriage

Americans and their elected officials have constitutional authority to make marriage policy. When Americans hear the case for marriage as the union of a man and a woman and its importance to children and limited government, by and large they support it and stand for this timeless institution.

Date posted: 2013-06-08

We Don't Need to Redefine Marriage to Fix Policy Problems

Good public policy can meet the needs of all Americans without redefining marriage.

Date posted: 2013-03-20

Can the President Have a Marriage Agenda Without Talking About What Marriage Is?

How successful can a "new conversation on marriage" be when its leaders can't even say what marriage is?

Date posted: 2012-12-18

Coming Apart, and Back Together?

"Strong marriage norms help guide and shape decisions that lead to optimal choices." Other research shows both that marriage causes behavioral change and that non-marriage can explain cultural pathologies. As the late Steve Nock demonstrated, after their wedding men tend to spend more time at work, less time at bars, more time at religious gatherings, less time in jail, and more time with family.

Date posted: 2012-02-08

Does Marriage, or Anything, Have Essential Properties?

A reply to Northwestern Law Professor Andrew Koppelman's second critique of "What is Marriage?"

Date posted: 2011-01-12

Marriage: No Avoiding the Central Question

In his latest reply to our argument in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy that marriage is the conjugal union of husband and wife, Kenji Yoshino presents a truncated and distorted version of our view. Nevertheless, his answers to our challenges to him and others who demand the redefinition of civil marriage force Yoshino into awkward moral and political positions - including one that seems directly at odds with a stance he has prominently taken.

Date posted: 2011-01-03

Marriage: Real Bodily Union

Deutsch claims that our argument is a non sequitur because there is "no non-metaphorical sense in which the spouses become 'one flesh'" in light of the fact that "the man and the woman ... remain two separate entities," as can be confirmed by a "DNA sampling." As most readers will have noticed, Deutsch's claim against us is itself a non sequitur.

Date posted: 2010-12-30

Marriage: Merely a Social Construct?

We are grateful for Andrew Koppelman's recent reply to our argument in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy that marriage is the conjugal union of husband and wife. Thanks to his honesty and candor, the ensuing exchange should set in stark relief the implications of redefining civil marriage.

Date posted: 2010-12-29

The Argument Against Gay Marriage: And Why it Doesn't Fail

A response to NYU Law Professor Kenji Yoshino...Yoshino directs much of his scorn at an analogy we use to defend our view (and the view historically embodied in our law) that marriages, being comprehensive interpersonal unions, are consummated and uniquely embodied in coitus -- in acts that extend spouses' union of hearts and minds along the biological dimension of their beings, much as various organs unite to form one body: by allowing them to coordinate together toward a biological function (in this case, reproduction) of the whole (in this case, the couple as a unit).

Date posted: 2010-12-17

Robert P. George on the Struggle Over Marriage

Recently, the editor of Public Discourse sat down with Robert P. George to discuss the state of the marriage debate. While supporters of same-sex "marriage" claim that history is on their side, it turns out that supporters of traditional marriage have more reasons for hope than they may realize.

Date posted: 2009-07-03

A Real Compromise on the Same-Sex Marriage Debate: An Invitation to Rauch and Blankenhorn

A recent compromise on the same-sex 'marriage' debate granted too much to revisionists and too little to traditionalists. A better compromise will respect the societal importance of marriage while also providing for the real needs of domestic partners.

Date posted: 2009-02-24

Collegiate Sex-Ed

Every fall, kids arrive on college campuses and learn that their basic moral intuitions on sexual matters don't square with the reigning ideas. Thanks to debased campus culture and overreaching on the part of administrators and professors, students are beginning to respond systematically - and they're having an impact. Here's how.

Date posted: 2009-02-03