Since my posts last week triggered such strong reactions from the Left — both here and on NRO — I thought I’d take some time to respond to some of the more thoughtful reader critiques. First, from Mark Mays: Any anti-poverty effort should include components aimed at getting kids to complete their HS degree and strive towards college. That should be a given, and many programs do. But the aims of any anti-poverty effort would be truly ill-served by the... Read more
My statement that it is “simply a fact that people who work hard, finish their education, get married, and stay married are rarely — very rarely — poor” has kicked up a hornet’s nest here on the Revolution, on NRO, at the Gospel Coalition, and elsewhere. While I unpacked my theological arguments a bit more in this post, I thought I’d share some core facts about unemployment, eduction, education, and marital status. Unemployment rate of civilians with less than a high... Read more
After my Revolution post on poverty and depravity, I took the argument over to NRO, and a lively discussion broke out in the comment boards. My first post began: Kathryn, thanks for linking to Rubio’s excellent speech. I completely agree with both of the Rubio quotes you highlighted. The free-enterprise system has lifted more people out of poverty than any government program, and yes, our “social problems create our poverty.” But there’s a tension inherent in these two points. It’s not precisely... Read more
After reading my post on our depraved poor, an LDS reader sent me this, from Ezra Taft Benson: The Lord works from the inside out. The world works from the outside in. The world would take people out of the slums. Christ would take the slums out of people, and then they would take themselves out of the slums. The world would mold men by changing their environment. Christ changes men, who then change their environment. The world would shape... Read more
If you’ve never been infertile, you simply can’t comprehend the unique pain and anguished complexity that comes every month, like a bill in the mail you don’t have the emotional currency to pay. So women struggling through fertility treatments frequently confide in friends who simply don’t understand. There are smiles and understanding nods as the months pass and the money is spent, masking the unspoken question. “Why don’t you just adopt?” This is the rudest question you can ask a... Read more
It is past time to admit a very hard truth: America’s poverty problem is also a depravity problem. It is simply a fact that people who work hard, finish their education, get married, and stay married are rarely — very rarely — poor. There is no other proven formula for lifting Americans out of poverty. None. Food stamps don’t do it. Medicaid doesn’t do it. Soup kitchens don’t do it. Good intentions don’t do it. Hundreds of billions of dollars... Read more
David unpacks his ideas a bit more here. What do you think? Why would women carrying twins abort one of them? Read more
Nancy, one of the most disturbing aspects of the article you link is the frank selfishness displayed by many of these women. They know what they’re doing and why’re they’re doing it. So often in the abortion debate we speak the language of women as “victims” of the abortion industry. That may be true of some women, but not those in the article. This is pre-meditated killing for the sake of personal convenience. While destructive self-indulgence is perhaps most dramatically... Read more
In West Africa’s pre-colonial period, the Igbo people believed twins were a bad omen. Single births were considered “human,” but multiple births belonged to the realm of animals. When a mother delivered two healthy babies instead of one, the parents would leave one newborn to die in the ojoo ofia (“bad bush”) outside the town, or simply suffocate one. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Christian Europeans so lamented these barbaric twin killings that it became one of... Read more
Last week in the Washington Post, a leftist named Gregory Paul claimed not only that Jesus was “pro-socialist” but also that his apostles implemented “a form of terror-enforced-communism imposed by a God who thinks that Christians who fail to join the collective are worthy of death.” This is pure nonsense, and today my ACLJ colleague Jordan Sekulow and I responded: Socialism is a relatively modern construct, a governmental system invented roughly 1,800 years after Christ’s death, not a biblical mandate.... Read more
The French Revolution
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