Ruth Institute Blog

by Ryan T. Anderson

February 2, 2012 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/02/4646

Neither liberal nor libertarian, a principled conservative way of helping the poor.

The loudest voices in our national debates about political economy tend to be libertarians and social welfare statists. To our detriment, most public policy discussions are filtered through these two lenses. At the same time, we tend to conflate the policy issues facing our nation as if they were one and the same. Read more…

by Charlie Butts

According to Paul Rondeau, executive director of the American Life League, “This administration treats Catholics as useful idiots” and generally undermines religious freedom. Read more…

by Maggie Gallagher

August 23, 2011 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/08/3761

Presidential candidates in the next election should uphold marriage as the union of one man and one woman.

The mainstream media have labeled marriage the “hottest front in the culture war.” Much to the media’s surprise, several of the GOP candidates have already signed the National Organization of Marriage’s (NOM) Marriage Pledge. They were surprised by major candidates’ willingness to sign NOM’s pledge because this was supposed to be the year the social issues did not matter. Read more…

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2011/11/15/obamas_catholic_strategy_in_shambles_112067.html

Obama’s Catholic outreach is being revealed as a transparent ploy a year before he faces re-election. A portion of the Democratic coalition — including civil libertarians and pro-choice activists — has decided to attack and marginalize Catholic leaders and institutions. And HHS is actively siding against Catholic organizations. Read more…

by Mary Kochan

Democrat Barack Obama, comments at a Pennsylvania town hall meeting on March 29, 2008:

I’ve got two daughters. Nine-years-old and six-years-old. I am going to teach them first of all about values and morals. But if they make a mistake, I don’t want them punished with a baby. Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

Programmes in the United States that promote marriage or fatherhood have received a new round of funding from the federal government — nearly $120 million, all up. The funding was begun by President George W Bush. Read more…

by Maggie Gallagher

September 7, 2011 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/09/3919

Monday’s Presidential Forum broke new ground.

The goal of the American Principles Project Palmetto Freedom Forum on Monday in Columbia, S.C., was a different kind of debate that would break new ground.

Boy, did it succeed. Read more…

by Helen Alvaré

August 26, 2011 http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2011/08/3800

Religious communities are an essential part of the fabric of America, even over and above the vital services they provide to weak and vulnerable members of our communities; we must protect their conscience rights against legal coercion. Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

The Obama administration thinks it can, but it has completely misdiagnosed the illness.

Forty years ago modern contraception was sold to women as part of a liberation package: at last they would be in control of their fertility and their lives. The pill was their passport to fewer children, economic independence and, as it soon appeared, the kind of sexual freedom that previously only men had enjoyed. Read more…

by Thomas C. Reeves

In a recent Gallup poll, only 21 per cent of Americans called themselves liberals.

A few years ago I wrote a piece on the eventual victory of the Left in America. Almost all of the most relevant indicators pointed in that direction: The mainstream media, the public schools, colleges and universities, and the major Protestant denominations were dominated by liberals. There were numerous stories of the federal government increasingly cracking down on free speech and thought. The traditional family and marriage were widely ridiculed. Porn was commonplace and available to all. Much of popular music was anarchic. Tattoos and assorted clips and mutilations were routine. The welfare state had hooked millions. Secularism seemed to dominate. The election of Barak Obama, a man of stern leftist ideology, seemed to seal the argument. America appeared to be on its way toward becoming modern-day England, a nearly bankrupt nanny state that flaunts its political correctness and base culture while at the same time being unable to defend itself against the internal violence generated by its own leftist commitments.  Read more…

By Francis J. Beckwith

With the increasing likelihood that Mitt Romney will be the Republican nominee for President, it is important for Catholics and other Christians to reflect on some concerns raised by Damon Linker in a 2007 New Republic article. Linker argues that Mormon theology does not have important resources that traditional Christians have at their disposal, such as natural-law theory.   Read more…

by Ryan T. Anderson

For most of us, the defining exercise of political judgment is voting. It is the central activity of democratic citizenship. In a system of republican self-government such as ours, the decision of whom to place in public office is of paramount importance. It sets the direction of our public policy and law, and it has profound consequences for our liberty, the justice of our relationships, and the common good of our political community. Read more…

From PublicDiscourse.com.

These quotes by Chesterton are the highlights of this article:

The English journalist and cultural critic G.K. Chesterton noted in the early twentieth century that the general disposition of modern men has been to “say something more like this: ‘We hold these truths to be probable enough for pragmatists; that all things looking like men were evolved somehow, being endowed by heredity and environment with no equal rights, but very unequal wrongs,’ and so on.” Read more…

A couple of months ago, Ari had posted about a San Francisco ballot initiative that would have banned male circumcision in that city.

Now, a Superior Court judge has ruled that the measure be removed from the ballot, saying that the state, not cities, has the right to regulate medical procedures.  She also found that ban would violate the free exercise of religion: Read more…

by Sheila Liaugminas

There’s a lot in the news about contraception and health care and Planned Parenthood right now. And a lot more that should be.

The scope of this is staggering.

Let’s go through just a few of the many stories. Read more…

By Steven Nelson

The four New York Republican state senators who voted to legalize same-sex marriage in the state are now raking in major campaign donations.

New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg gave the maximum amount possible — $10,300 — to the re-election campaigns of Sens. James Alesi, Mark Grisanti, Roy McDonald and Stephen Saland after the June vote. Read more…

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ALBANY (AP) — Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo, who led the effort to legalize same-sex marriage in New York, received $60,000 in campaign money from one of the state’s leading gay-rights groups, according to campaign finance records filed Friday with the State Board of Elections. Read more…

I Am a Man

Critics of the Catholic Church claim that the Church wields authoritarian control over all its members. The Pope and the bishops ruthlessly suppress all dissent, debate or disobedience.

To those who think this way, I have two words: Andrew Cuomo. 

Andrew Cuomo, Governor of New York, lives in the Governor’s Mansion with a woman to whom he is not married. The Catholic Church holds that he is living in a state of mortal sin.

The Catholic Church holds that marriage was instituted by God in the Garden of Eden, and that marriage is the lifelong union of a man and a woman, ordered toward the procreation and education of children and the mutual good of the spouses.

Andrew Cuomo pressured the legislature of New York to change the definition of marriage to the union of any two persons, instituted by His Divine Self in the Garden of Albany, ordered toward no particular purpose at all. 

If the Church were the ruthlessly conformist authoritarian institution she is taken to be, you might think someone in authority would have something to say to Andrew Cuomo.  He is an excellent candidate to be asked to go elsewhere to meet his spiritual and religious needs, such as they are.

No one in authority has made this rather obvious suggestion to him. Perhaps some ordinary New York Catholics ought to politely ask him to get lost.

A United Nations Treaty Will Undermine Both the Family & the US Constitution

by Stephen Baskerville

Imagine a law in America that could set children against their parents, centralize power away from the states toward the federal government, mandate increases in government spending regardless of taxpayer wishes, bypass the House of Representatives, and abrogate constitutional limitations on government power. Such a measure may soon come up for ratification by the US Senate: the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). Read more…