To say two men who live together and engage in sex can be married renders the idea and ideal of marriage meaningless. The court may declare it, but it cannot redefine an institution that nature and nature’s God have already defined. As they say in Texas, you can put lipstick and earrings on a pig, and call her Peggy Sue, but … [Read More]

Why are liberals so desperately attached to egalitarianism, of an extreme and entirely this-worldly variety? Why has it become an article of faith to which they cling against all evidence—to the point where they resist the use of epidemiological data that breaks down heart disease rates, for instance, by race? In his recent response to me, Richard takes this attachment as … [Read More]

As someone who wasted a few years of his life teaching in undistinguished academic institutions, I could never figure out why Hollywood would bother making movies about college professors and why anyone would want to spend his time or money watching for two hours a disheveled and grumpy middle aged man, portrayed as a misogynist and a misanthropic, trying to overcome … [Read More]

It seems everyone wanted to be on the side of progress in the Seventies, but today everyone’s a Burkean.  Gay marriage advocates, Barack Obama supporters, and defenders of the welfare state all identifiy themselves as the rightful heirs of Edmund Burke, the grandfather of conservative philosophy.  This is a strange development.  Burke and the conservatism he preached have long been relegated … [Read More]

The Ron Paul campaign, which crossed many ideological lines to draw together an inspiring coalition, was a great moment of hope for American politics. If all it did was to make a best-seller of a book that touts real conservative principles, the whole adventure might well have been worth it. I’m not sure if we’ve just been through a “Goldwater moment,” … [Read More]

In endorsing the nomination of a fellow Californian to the U.S. Supreme Court, Pete Wilson told the Senate Judiciary Committee in 1987 that Anthony Kennedy “subscribes to the conservative principles which the framers of the Constitution adopted 200 years ago.” As conservatives painfully learned through Planned Parenthood v. Casey, Kelo v. New London, and Lawrence v. Texas, Kennedy subscribed to no … [Read More]

Count Arnaud de Borchgrave Altena is better known to old journalistic hands as simply Arnaud, the last of the great postwar foreign correspondents. No one has covered more wars or met more heads of state than Arnaud, for Newsweek, the Washington Times and for U.P.I. He is now in his 81st year, healthy, thin, and as ambitious as an 18 year … [Read More]

To declare an interest, I should say that I have had some ancestors in this country, or more technically on this continent, for 370 years, one of whom helped found the town of Newburyport, Massachusetts, and most of the families I am descended from have been here longer than the Republic has existed, so when I read Kathleen Parker’s column about … [Read More]

So ladies and gentlemen, if I say I am an Americanist you will agree. ~There Will Be Blood (modified)  A few days ago, I saw the original story that reported the remark of one Josh Fry of West Virginia, which has since been widely discussed: He would just be more comfortable with “someone who is a full-blooded American as president.” Now … [Read More]

Yglesias says: The crux of the matter is that while truly conservative foreign policy thought has a long history of wrongness in the United States it’s rarely genuinely held sway on the big issues. Presidents Eisenhower, Nixon, and Reagan all at key moments broke with elements of their conservative base to preserve containment, to initiate détente, to continue with the bilateral … [Read More]