Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson At the National Prayer Breakfast earlier this month, many people made comments and criticisms of the speech by President Trump. Most of those comments were accurate but they all ignored a very good message by Dr. Arthur Brooks. He is a Harvard professor and former president of the American Enterprise Institute. He has been on radio with me, and I often quote from his books and articles. He attempted to diagnose the political division and social upheaval in…

Penna Dexter During the past decade or so, pro-life state legislators have been passing laws placing commonsense, often very modest, restrictions on abortion.  It’s sad to see a lot of this progress wiped out when a different party comes into power. This is happening right now in the state of Virginia. The new democratic majority in Virginia’s house and senate is working to pass a package of bills that will reverse these protective laws. One bill removes Virginia’s requirement that…

Kerby Anderson Jonah Goldberg reminded his readers of a famous essay by Tom Wolfe entitled “The Great Relearning.” It was an essay about the Summer of Love in 1968 in San Francisco. It had great significance to me since I grew up in the San Francisco area during that time, but it also has significance to all of us concerned about our culture. He said that doctors at the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic “were treating diseases no living doctor had ever…

Kerby Anderson Jonah Goldberg talks about “The Miracle” in his book, The Suicide of the West. The major focus of his book is on tribalism and populism, but he begins with a description and an explanation of the remarkable change in western societies in the last few centuries. “The Miracle is about more than economics, but economics is the best way to tell the story of humanity’s quantum leap out of its natural environment of poverty.” People used to live…

Kerby Anderson The impeachment trial may now be history, but the Mueller investigation and the impeachment investigation and trial have set new norms for our federal government. Last month Victor Davis Hanson wrote about this in what he called “The New Post-Trump Constitution.” Here are just a few of them. First, private presidential phone calls will be leaked and printed in the media. This is how the impeachment inquiry started, and it seems likely that this will happen again and…

Kerby Anderson The Attorney General was in the news again because he was talking about the importance of religion in American life. You may remember that William Barr gave a speech at Notre Dame arguing that religious commitment provides the source of virtue and moral discipline necessary for self-government. Although that is true and was considered essential by the founders of this country, there were many secularists who criticized his speech. That was not surprising since he even mentioned in…

Kerby Anderson Last month the Supreme Court allowed the Trump administration to enforce a rule concerning foreign nationals. A separate opinion raised important questions about how one federal judge can stop the government by merely ordering an injunction. The new rule would deny green cards to foreign nationals who use taxpayers-funded social services. As you might imagine, the decision was controversial as evidenced by the fact that it fell along typical 5-4 liberal-conservative lines. The Immigration and Nationality Act dictates…

Penna Dexter A pro-life state law authored by a Louisiana Democrat is set to be heard at the United States Supreme Court on March 4th. In June Medical Services v. Gee, the abortion industry is challenging legislation requiring that any doctor performing abortions have admitting privileges at a hospital located within thirty miles of the facility at which those abortions take place.  State Representative Katrina Jackson, who has since been elected state senator, authored  Act 620, which simply requires that…

Kerby Anderson Will robots destroy jobs and put all of us in the unemployment lines? Some futurists seem to be predicting this scenario. Jay Richards disagrees. He says it is an old argument that is new again. He is the author of the book, The Human Advantage: The Future of American Work in an Age of Smart Machines. One report predicts that; “The future of robots appears to be a dystopian march to rising inequality, falling wages, and higher unemployment.”…

Kerby Anderson Here’s a trivia question. Why was the massive flu epidemic in 1918 called the Spanish flu? The pandemic originated in France and other countries. But news of it was censored during World War I. The pandemic only received greater press attention when it arrived in Spain in November. Spain was not involved in the war and had not imposed any wartime censorship. During that same time, the US government also tried to play down the Spanish flu lest…

Kerby Anderson Members of a very popular South Korean boy band were denied draft exemptions even though it would reduce revenue to the country. Why? Because there aren’t enough boys available to serve in the military. Lyman Stone uses this illustration to highlight the extremely low birth rate in South Korea. But that country is just one of many examples of what has become a global birth dearth. Fertility rates have been declining in all the developed countries of the…