As is my custom, I celebrate the birthday of Ayn Rand by opening one of her novels to a random page and reading. Here is something I read today, from The Fountainhead, Part Two, Chapter 5: His great voice was soft and persuasive. It filled the room, but it made his listeners realize that it […]
Amid the problems and rancor regarding our federal government, it is essential to establish and maintain good local government. The phrase “all politics is local” refers to the idea that political contests, no matter how broad geographically, are won or lost at the local level of cities, towns, and even neighborhoods. Having relocated from blue […]
Suppose there are three sick people: my wife, a stranger, and a person I despise. Under socialism, the state will force me to care for all three equally. Under capitalism, the state will defend my right to care exclusively for my wife, or to allocate my time however I choose. Capitalism is good. Socialism is […]
Religious Liberty Cannot Stand Without Liberty In the first two parts of this essay, I identified two important ways in which Ryan T. Anderson, in his book Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, makes fundamental concessions to the postmodern Left in his defense of marriage. Here I identify yet another such fundamental […]
Romantic Love As Integration of Reason and Emotion Even more important than the legal reason I explained in Part 1 of this essay, there is a cognitive and romantic reason why the concept of marriage must refer only to a union of man and woman. And there is a way in which Ryan T. Anderson, […]
In his book, Truth Overruled: The Future of Marriage and Religious Freedom, Ryan T. Anderson argues that, for the concept of ‘marriage’ properly understood, sex matters. That is, Anderson argues that marriage can be only between one man and one woman. In praising this book on its back cover, Princeton’s Robert P. George calls Anderson […]
The following is a slightly edited version of an open letter I wrote in May, 1995. Dear Artist: I urge you to consider this argument for the dissolution of the National Endowment for the Arts. The United States was founded on the principle of individual rights: life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. Everyone has […]
Now that the presidential election and inauguration are past, and President Trump may be buying some time for civilization against the plague of postmodern Leftism, I am returning to a more contentious subject: sexual orientation. In the coming weeks, I will publish a three-part essay critiquing some traditional conservative ideas regarding sexual orientation. I will argue […]
It seemed like a nightmare when Americans elected a president with such evil ideas in 2008. Since then, the Obama administration has waged relentless and multifaceted war against individual rights—against the unalienable individual rights of life, liberty, property, and the pursuit of happiness. This blog has largely been a journal of the Obama administration. See […]
I relocated for politics. It was one of the best decisions I ever made. What I discovered was not only a better political environment but also a much better culture, which of course was the basis for the politics. I encourage everyone, whatever his politics, to consider an analogous relocation. In my case, I went […]