Carson Holloway is a political scientist and the author of The Way of Life: John Paul II and the Challenge of Liberal Modernity.
The Christmas message is one of joy, even "great joy," but not superficial joy. Christmas confronts us with the sobering claim that humankind is in a state of sin - a state from which we cannot save ourselves. Hence the need for a savior, and hence the joyful Christian claim that God himself offers the salvation by coming to live among us.
Date posted: 2020-12-24
For the considerable body of people in the western world who still believe in self-government, and in the preservation of their nations' traditional moral identities, the overreaching of the contemporary human rights project will perhaps lead them to reconsider natural law, presented in a prudently modest formulation. This is a crucial undertaking to which Pierre Manent's new book is a worthy contribution.
Date posted: 2020-06-13
Proponents of same-sex marriage often liken opposition to the bigotry that defended anti-miscegenation laws, preventing interracial couples from marrying. The analogy is specious, for the two movements differ entirely in motivation. One seeks to defend an intelligible understanding of marriage; the other sought to achieve racial purity.
Date posted: 2015-09-05
The normalization of polygamy would undermine our commitment to human dignity - our sense that each human being is to be valued as an end in him - or herself, and not merely as a means to others' ends.
Date posted: 2014-08-30
To hear some commentators talk, America's struggle over the meaning of marriage is already over, and conservatives have lost. Like latter-day Edgar Allan Poes, they are busily preparing a premature burial for marriage as a male-female union. Conservatives should imitate Poe's protagonist and refuse to cooperate with this ghoulish enterprise, showing their opponents that they and their cause are very much alive.
Date posted: 2014-08-21
The Boy Scouts' new policy allowing openly gay members will fall to aggressive gay rights activists if not first to its own incoherence.
Date posted: 2013-07-19
The oral arguments on Proposition 8 at the Supreme Court suggest that there is very good reason to believe that the declaration of a "right" to same-sex marriage will set us on the path to polygamy.
Date posted: 2013-06-08
We cannot embrace same-sex marriage and live in continuity with our past as a civilization. To embrace it is to deny that tradition, revelation, reason, and nature have any authority over us.
Date posted: 2013-04-09
The negative side-effects of contraception are often ignored in our public discourse, but a truly free decision to use or not use them - and whether to use government to promote them - depends on a frank acknowledgement of their costs along with their alleged benefits.
Date posted: 2012-04-24
Accordingly, if homosexual conduct really is, as its natural law critics contend, a perversion of human desires and capacities, a wrenching of them away from their natural purposes, then such conduct will be a source of frustration and unhappiness regardless of whether society bestows its "recognition," and hence its approval, on it. On this view, there is nothing of substance to be gained from same-sex marriage even for homosexuals. Indeed, if traditional natural law theorists are correct in their assessment of homosexual conduct, then same-sex marriage would be not only pointless but positively damaging, to the extent that it could mislead people to their own harm by bestowing a spurious respectability on an objectively disordered way of life.
Date posted: 2011-06-04
Promoting a sexually permissive pop-culture in the Muslim world gets the true foundations of ordered liberty wrong. In defining our ideals by rejecting our enemy's, we go from one extreme to another, and miss the virtuous mean.
Date posted: 2011-03-26
Laws regulating immigration are analogous to those requiring the payment of taxes or the licensing of physicians. Granting amnesty to illegal immigrants is not in itself unjust, but it may be imprudent.
Date posted: 2011-01-04