The right to a noun

My favorite magazine is the Claremont Review of Books. It is a quarterly that is the flagship publication of the Claremont Institute, the think tank whose mission is to restore the principles of the American Founding to their rightful, preeminent authority in our national life. Each issue of the CRB is full of essays and book reviews by outstanding scholars and intellectuals who are sympathetic to the institute’s mission. (Subscriptions are only $19.95; subscribe online here.)
I am not alone in my enthusiasm for the CRB. The White House has 30 copies air-shipped upon publication of each issue. Seeking to take advantage of my enthusiasm for the CRB, the CRB’s editors have kindly allowed me to select a few pieces from the just-published spring issue to premiere on Power Line. I’ve selected three or four that we’ll highlight today and tomorrow to display different sides of the magazine.
Once the courts the courts became the home for the ACLU’s generation-long war on the Boy Scouts and began to usurp the legislature on issues related to same-sex marriage, these issues were addressed by institute scholars in essays and a famous conference. (See “Fear and loathing in L.A.” by Ney Professor of Jurisprudence and American Institutions Hadley Arkes of Amherst College.) Apart from elaborating the ongoing judicial usurpation on these issues, the conservative voice seeems to have become muffled.
One of the great projects of the Progressive movement is the abolition of nature as supplying the standard of human conduct — the kind of standard to which the Founders appealed in adverting to “the Laws of Nature” in the Declaration of Independence. What the heck were they talking about? The folks at the Claremont Institute not only mean to remind us, they mean to do something about it.
The debate over same-sex marriage calls to mind both George Orwell’s 1984 and the classic medieval debate between “realists” and “nominalists.” Bradley C.S. Watson’s aptly titled “Love’s Language Lost” explains what you may already have suspected –

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