Recent Viewpoints

Penna Dexter Elizabeth Warren is perhaps not the most exciting candidate in the field of Democrats looking to challenge President Trump. But she’s formulating bold proposals other candidates must react to. She’s targeting a millennial voting block with proposals like universal child care, affordable housing, and now, a plan she claims would completely eliminate student loan debt for 75 percent of all borrowers and cut indebtedness for the rest. The plan would cancel up to $50,000 in student loan debt…

Kerby Anderson Columnist David Brooks has a new book coming out, so he wrote a New York Times column about the “Five Lies Our Culture Tells Us.” He believes we have created a culture based on lies.  Columnist Robert Samuelson responds to David Brooks in a Washington Post column by telling him to “lighten up.” Let’s look at the five lies. They are that we believe that “career success is fulfilling” and that “I can make myself happy.” They also include the…

Kerby Anderson Today is the National Day of Prayer. It is a vital part of our American heritage. The first call to prayer happened before the American Revolution. In 1775, the Continental Congress called on the colonists to pray for wisdom as they considered how they would respond to the King of England. Perhaps one of the most powerful calls to prayer came from President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War. In 1863, he issued a proclamation for a day…

Kerby Anderson The Attorney General William Barr caused quite a stir the other day when he concluded the government had been engaged in spying. The sentence that generated the outrage was this: “I believe the government spied on the Trump campaign.” His statement led to another round of commentators arguing that this was merely surveillance not spying. But in a recent article in The Hill Kevin Brock explains that even attempting to make a semantic difference misses what was done….

Kerby Anderson Just about anyone who sets out to defend Western civilization will be criticized and vilified. Jonah Goldberg wrote about Western civilization in his book, the Suicide of the West. Ben Shapiro has recently written about The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great. In a future commentary, I plan to discuss Shapiro’s book but for now will merely look at two incidents that prove my point. First, when his book came out,…

Kerby Anderson While I was doing a radio program, news outlets were reporting that the Cathedral of Notre Dame was burning. My producer asked if we wanted to start covering it. Since I already had guests on the program, I suggested we wait and see if it was an accident or an attack. His response was that never occurred to him. So, you may wonder, what is wrong with me that I would consider the possibility that the fire might…

Penna Dexter The Washington Post reported this:  “A procession of clergy dressed in white carried a simple black cross through the streets of Île St. Louis on Friday, continuing a Good Friday ritual even while the charred hulk of Notre Dame Cathedral loomed behind them. Thousands of Parisians and visitors gathered for the “stations of the cross” devotion, a symbolic reenactment of Christ’s passion that commemorates the trajectory from his sentencing to his burial in 14 stops.” Human beings are moved by…

Kerby Anderson Funerals are starting to look very different. An article in the Washington Post predicts that “the funeral as we know it is becoming a relic.” Many of our time-honored rituals are being set aside. One of the first books I wrote was on the subject of death and dying. I noted then that we were a death-denying culture. The elderly used to die in our homes, but now we’re dying in hospitals and care facilities. And we tried to…

Kerby Anderson We often hear the campaign slogan “Defund Planned Parenthood.” But we don’t always hear why government should defund this organization. Alexandra DeSanctis has put together four arguments for defunding Planned Parenthood because she is concerned that pro-life politicians need to learn how to articulate them. The first argument is that Planned Parenthood performs the most abortions in the US, even as our abortion rate steadily drops. Organizations like the Guttmacher Institute report that the number of abortions performed…

Kerby Anderson Executives from Facebook and Twitter testified on Capitol Hill two weeks ago. All the big tech companies deny they are engaged in any censorship, but the members of the Senate Judiciary subcommittee provided a number of examples. The executive from Twitter stressed that his platform “does not use political viewpoints, perspective, or party affiliation” in making decisions about content or rankings. The other executive wanted to “state unequivocally that Facebook does not favor one political viewpoint over another,…

Kerby Anderson Last year I wrote about how the state of Connecticut’s vote brought the nation one step closer to dismantling the Electoral College. More than a decade ago, states started passing the National Popular Vote compact. Each state agrees to ignore the votes of its citizens and cast their electoral votes for the winner of the popular vote. The compact only goes into effect when enough states holding 270 electoral votes approve the plan. This attempt to dismantle the…