J. Budziszewski: A Primer on Natural Law
July 28, 2011 By 2 Comments
This is a nice interview of my friend, J. Budziszewski, Professor of Government and Philosophy at the University of Texas. The gentleman interviewing J is Any Nash of Inside Academia. Here’s an outline of the interview, as found on the YouTube page on which the video has been embedded:
1:30 — What is Natural Law? (3 mins)
5:00 — We’re not at war with our nature when we reason (40 sec)
6:00 — How discipline and virtue define character (1 min)
8:00 — Challenges of a disordered moral culture (3 mins)
11:30 — The false promise of the sexual revolution (2 mins)
Interracial Marriage and Same-Sex Marriage: Why the Analogy Fails
July 28, 2011 By 8 Comments
That is the name of an article I published last year on the website, Public Discourse: Ethics, Law, and the Common Good, an online publication of The Witherspoon Institute. Here’s how it begins:
While doing research for an academic paper on the topic of same-sex marriage and political liberalism, I was struck by how many authors, including judges, draw an analogy between bans on interracial marriage and the present law in almost every state in the United States that recognizes marriage as a union between one man and one woman.
The court cases most frequently cited by these writers are Loving v. Virginia(1967), the U. S. Supreme Court case that declared interracial marriage bans unconstitutional, and Perez v. Sharp (1948), a California Supreme Court case that did the same in relation to its state constitution. Here’s how Massachusetts’ highest court in Goodridge v. Department of Public Health (2003) employsLoving and Perez in order to make the analogy between interracial marriage and same-sex marriage:
“In this case [Goodridge], as in Perez and Loving, a statute deprives individuals of access to an institution of fundamental legal, personal, and social significance—the institution of marriage—because of a single trait: skin color in Perez and Loving, sexual orientation here. As it did in Perez and Loving, history must yield to a more fully developed understanding of the invidious quality of the discrimination.”
Although the focus of my paper is not this analogy, the ubiquitous use of it in the literature, including some very important court cases, piqued my curiosity. What I discovered astounded me.
A Lesson on Rhetoric from the “West Wing”
July 26, 2011 By 2 Comments
President Obama should hire Rob Lowe’s character as a speech writer.
Jesus, Other Myths, and My Wife’s Stained Glass
July 25, 2011 By 6 Comments
Go here to find an outstanding video of my friend and co-author Greg Koukl (Founder and President of Stand to Reason) answering the question, “Is the account of Jesus in the Bible just copying earlier mythical traditions with similar stories? Behind Greg you will notice a stained glass panel. It was created by my wife, Frankie. The panel is owned by Stand to Reason’s Director of Operations, Melinda Penner. Here’s a close-up photo of the panel:
If you want to see some of her other work, go here.
Surprise: The Reformation Happened!
July 22, 2011 By 10 Comments
That’s the title of my latest entry over at the Catholic Thing. Here’s how it begins:
The Atlantic has discovered the Reformation, albeit nearly five centuries too late.
Writer Joshua Green reports that the denomination in which presidential candidate Michelle Bachman was a member, the Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS), believes that Martin Luther was right about the Catholic papacy. Imagine that. Lutherans who believe ideas espoused by Luther. Shocking, isn’t it? Perhaps next week the Atlantic will inform its readers that the pope is Catholic, that Methodists are enamored by John Wesley, or that the Great Schism put a damper on Catholic-Orthodox relations.
The headline of Green’s article is “Michele Bachmann’s Church Says the Pope Is the Antichrist,” though Bachmann and her family had stopped attending that Lutheran church two years ago. Green, it seems, has a problem in understanding the simplest nuances of church membership, how they differ widely between denominations, and that one can stay on the membership rolls of one church while attending another church for years.
So unsurprisingly, he writes that Martin Luther, “broke with the Catholic Church,” when in fact he was excommunicated by Pope Leo X. (Luther was, to employ a popular neologism, unfriended). Thus, by Green’s own logic, if he were employed by the Atlantic in 1521, he could have written this headline, “Martin Luther’s Church Says Martin Luther Not Member of Martin Luther’s Church.”
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