Social Issues

Donald Trump, Social Conservative?

Featured image Donald Trump addressed the National Rifle Association’s Leadership Forum today. Just before he spoke, the NRA announced its endorsement of him. Trump’s speech was good. He contrasted his support for gun rights with “Heartless Hillary”‘s effort to disarm women and render them unable to protect themselves. He said that Mrs. Clinton wants to repeal the Second Amendment, which is essentially correct since Clinton says she will appoint justices who will »

Boys and Girls Together at Verizon [Updated]

Featured image A reader forwarded this photo–taken on an iPhone!–that constitutes, apparently, a Verizon ad on the back of the current issue of Sports Illustrated: Our reader writes: Attached is a scan from the Verizon ad on the back of this week’s issue of Sports Illustrated. It is very sweet until you notice that the boy and girl are seated in a locker room, complete with tile floors and benches. How topical. »

Shower Wars, Circa 1971

Featured image I spent the summer after graduating from college in Hanover, New Hampshire, working in a menial capacity on the Daniel Webster Papers project and mostly having fun. One day that summer, I had lifted weights at Dartmouth’s field house and was in the men’s locker room, preparing to take a shower, when the locker room was “liberated” by feminists. This was first wave, or possibly second wave, feminism. Feminists of »

States Protest Obama’s Crazed Transgender Order

Featured image The Departments of Education and Justice have issued a letter to every school district in America, directing all public schools to allow “transgender” students to use bathrooms and showers normally reserved for the opposite sex. The administration’s letter doesn’t have any legal force, but carries an implied threat of litigation or cutting off of federal funding to any district that fails to comply. I have scoured the Constitution, but have »

The Latest Planned Parenthood Video: Did the Mothers Really Consent?

Featured image The latest Center for Medical Progress Planned Parenthood video was released yesterday. It features Holly O’Donnell, the same young woman who appeared in a prior video. O’Donnell, who describes herself in the most recent video as pro-life, is a former blood and tissue procurement technician for StemExpress, which buys babies’ body parts from Planned Parenthood. The main theme of this installment is that, contrary to PP’s repeated assurances, it isn’t »

Carly Shows How It’s Done

Featured image Reporters love to cross-examine Republicans about social issues and their supposedly “extreme” positions. Of course, they never challenge Democrats on the positions that really are extreme–e.g., advocating the sale of aborted babies’ body parts. Republicans need to push back against these transparent attempts not only to make Republicans look bad, but equally important, to change the subject away from $18 trillion in debt, a collapsing foreign policy, runaway illegal immigration, »

So Planned Parenthood Sells Babies’ Body Parts: Is It a Scandal?

Featured image As you undoubtedly know, a group called the Center for Medical Progress (CMP) has made a series of undercover videos of high-ranking Planned Parenthood officials. So far, two videos have been released. In both, representatives of CMP are negotiating to buy fetal tissue in the form of intact organs from Planned Parenthood. The videos have caused a firestorm of controversy. Planned Parenthood has denied any wrongdoing and has denounced CMP »

Anthony Kennedy Discovers a Right to Gay Marriage [Updated]

Featured image Two hundred twenty-four years after the Constitution was ratified, Anthony Kennedy and four loyal Democrats have discovered, hidden somewhere in its provisions, a right to gay marriage. This so-called right, deemed “fundamental” by the five-justice majority, was undreamed of until a few years ago. If you want to read the decision, it is here. Yesterday’s Obamacare decision told us that we do not live under the rule of law. Today’s »

Josh Duggar and Caitlin Jenner? Seriously?

Featured image These are trying times for Democrats. They control neither the Senate nor the House, and fare even worse at the state and local levels. The economy, after six plus years of the Obama presidency, is so-so. President Obama’s foreign policy has produced setback after serious setback. To make matters worse, the Democrats are almost certain to nominate for president the co-architect of Obama’s failed foreign policy. And Hillary Clinton’s campaign »

The Long View on Baltimore

Featured image Does it seem like we’re re-running the 1960s, with rolling riots and liberals talking about “root causes” again? Bill DeBlasio is playing the John Lindsay role in New York quite ably, and Baltimore mayor Rawlings-Blake offered a decent reprise of Hubert Humphrey’s infamous remark that if he’d been born in a ghetto, he might start a riot too. How long until the New York Review of Books runs a diagram »

Re-Education In Manhattan

Featured image On April 20, two gay men hosted a dinner for Ted Cruz in their Manhattan apartment. Presumably they are conservatives who favor sane fiscal policies, and so on. But when the New York Times reported that they had introduced some of their friends to Senator Cruz, the wrath of the gay thought police descended on them. The Times reports the sequel: Ian Reisner, one of the two gay hoteliers facing »

The Limits of Liberalism?

Featured image Utopiastic liberal enclaves (usually college towns like Boulder, Berkeley, Cambridge, etc.) pride themselves on their enlightened caring and sharing mentality, their generosity toward the oppressed and underprivileged, etc.  The residents are always happily smug about their moral superiority to the grasping, bourgeois middle classes of suburbia. But I couldn’t help notice during my year as an inmate at Boulder that everyone had a really beefy lock for their bicycles. Apparently »

Tim Cook, End the Hypocrisy!

Featured image Tim Cook, Steve Jobs’s successor as CEO of Apple, authored an op-ed in the Washington Post condemning laws that protect religious freedom. Cook, who is himself gay, concluded with these words: Opposing discrimination takes courage. With the lives and dignity of so many people at stake, it’s time for all of us to be courageous. We agree with that, and we would like to see Apple show some courage. Not »

Some Indiana Interrogatories

Featured image The whole Indiana RFRA controversy prompts a few interrogatories.  Such as: • If a member of the Westboro Baptist Church asks for a bakery to create a cake with their motto “God hates fags,” will the baker be charged with discrimination if she refuses? • If a baker agrees to bake a cake for a gay wedding, but as matter of practice includes the slogan “God hates fags” in, say, »

Memories Pizza and the gay rights movement’s flirtation with totalitariansim

Featured image In his excellent post about the “insane” reaction to Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), John argues that the brouhaha is entirely political. Liberals, John says, “have decided that the social issues are winners for them, and one suspects that they are desperate to distract attention from the Obama administration’s economic and foreign policy failures, Hillary Clinton’s prevarications, and so on.” John may well be right. However, polling strongly suggests »

Indiana Insanity [Updated]

Featured image Other than a brief discussion here, we haven’t written about the firestorm over Indiana’s Religious Freedom Restoration Act. Yesterday Minnesota’s governor, Mark Dayton, joined the chorus of denunciation: “‘I abhor the actions taken by the Legislature and governor of Indiana,’ Dayton told the Star Tribune.” Dayton, like a number of other governors, says he is considering a ban on official travel to Indiana. So Minnesota’s bureaucrats may no longer be »

NCAA, the New PC Police?

Featured image Yesterday the NCAA announced that it is deeply concerned about Indiana’s just-passed Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and intends to scrutinize Indiana carefully to determine whether the state is fit to host events like the Final Four, scheduled to take place in Indianapolis next week: The NCAA national office and our members are deeply committed to providing an inclusive environment for all our events. We are especially concerned about how this »