The new issue of The Economist has a long feature on the declining confidence in the high estimates of climate sensitivity. That this appears in The Economist is significant, because this august British news organ has been fully on board with climate alarmism for years now. A Washington-based Economist correspondent admitted to me privately several years ago that the senior editors in London had mandated consistent and regular alarmist climate coverage in its pages. http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/03/climate-change-endgame-in-sight.php Read more

The higher ed press has been abuzz lately with a story out of Florida Atlantic University, which began with a student claiming that he had been “suspended” for his refusal to take part in a classroom exercise. The student, a Mormon, was enrolled in a course in intercultural communication in which the professor “asked students in the class to write the word ‘Jesus’ on a piece of paper, fold it up, and step on it,” according to the student’s account.... Read more

The Constitution is silent — obviously silent — about which side is correct, and that is reason enough for the Court to allow California to decide the matter as it wishes, which of course means to allow it to change its mind. The Court should forthrightly declare that the Constitution gives it no authority to choose one side or the other. It should reject calls for it to “punt” by ruling that defenders of the law have no standing to... Read more

* There’s no reason for opponents of same-sex marriage to get stampeded into abandoning the field. That’s been the purpose of the media blitz over the last few weeks: to convince conservatives (and any jurists who might—*cough* Ron Joberts *cough*— be particularly sensitive to public opinion) that the general sentiment is snowballing in favor of overhauling the traditional definition of marriage. http://www.weeklystandard.com/print/blogs/high-noon-marriage_712033.html?page=3 Read more

Last year, Isabel Sawhill, a widely respected liberal economist at the Brookings Institution, wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post titled “20 years later, it turns out Dan Quayle was right about Murphy Brown and unmarried moms.” http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/344000/wisdom-dan-quayle-jonah-goldberg Read more

Both sociological evidence and the teachings of Christianity show that religion is a powerful ally for promoting the equality and dignity of women. Adapted from remarks delivered at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women. http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2013/03/9679/?utm_source=RTA+Bachiochi+UN+Feminists+Holy+See&utm_campaign=winstorg&utm_medium=email Read more

Oral arguments on gay marriage take place before the Supreme Court the last week of March, and the pile of amicus briefs filed by interested parties long ago passed the point of redundancy. We prefer briefs filed by disinterested parties, such as the one put before the Court earlier in the month by Leon Kass of the University of Chicago and Harvey Mansfield of Harvard University. The Kass-Mansfield brief is silent on the larger question of gay marriage as social... Read more

What bothered Plato was that he believed the written word would fall prey to evil or incompetent readers who would do anything they want with the text, leaving the writer unable to defend or explain himself. He feared the text would take on a life of its own, independent of its author, as is indeed characteristic of the written word. Even more interesting is his observation that a written text actually becomes a “pharmakon”—a drug that can either heal or... Read more

“Pediatrics Group Backs Gay Marriage, Saying It Helps Children,” proclaims a headline in The New York Times. But the advocacy group presented no new studies, no new data, to support this claim. And the studies the group cites have been shown to be insufficient to come to this conclusion about same-sex parenting. http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/22/opinion/anderson-states-same-sex-marriage/index.html?utm_source=RTA+media&utm_campaign=winstorg&utm_medium=email Read more

By DAVID BROOKS New York Times The Catholic Church in North Africa was in crisis at the beginning of the fourth century. The Roman emperor Diocletian had persecuted the Christians, and many bishops and priests had collaborated with the regime. Priests had turned over Christian believers to the pagan magistrates. Bishops had surrendered Holy Scriptures to be burned in the public square. An air of corruption and lewdness hung over the church. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/15/opinion/brooks-how-movements-recover.html Read more