Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson One book that is often quoted and deserves to be read is, The Coddling of the American Mind. We invited the co-author, Jonathan Haidt, on the Point of View radio talk show to discuss his book. It began when he sat down with his co-author (Greg Lukianoff) a number of years ago to make sense of what was hapening on college campuses. They decided to write an article about it for The Atlantic with the title, “Arguing Towards Misery: How Campuses Teach…

Kerby Anderson Should US senators be allowed to apply a religious test to anyone nominated to serve in the government? Earlier this month, two Democrats in the Senate, Mazie Hirono (HI) and Kamala Harris from (CA), objected to the nominee to a US district court because of his membership in the Knights of Columbus, a Catholic fraternal organization. One senator wanted to know if he was aware of their stand on abortion. Of course he was. The senator also wanted…

Kerby Anderson The wife of the Vice President, Karen Pence, used to teach art at Immanuel Christian School in Virginia when her husband served as a member of Congress. Her office announced that she would once again be teaching art in the school on a part-time basis. That announcement was met with lots of criticism for one major reason. This Christian school (like so many others) requires students and parents to abide by a Christian code of conduct concerning sexual…

Penna Dexter Planned Parenthood’s former president Cecile Richards downplayed abortion as her organization’s core activity. She famously maintained that abortion only makes up 3 percent of Planned Parenthood’s services and that the organization is focused primarily on women’s health. We expected Planned Parenthood’s new president Leana Wen, a medical doctor, to continue in this mode. But she recently blasted media outlets Planned Parenthood has long depended on to underplay its abortion activity. She says they are  misconstruing her “vision for…

Kerby Anderson Earlier this month, I turned on the Tucker Carlson television program and heard him deliver a monologue that lasted nearly 15 minutes. It became the monologue heard around the conservative world. And nearly every commentator has had negative things to say about his comments. But I want to do just the opposite. Sure, there were things he said that were incorrect or overstated. But I want to affirm many of the things he said that were right on…

Kerby Anderson I believe the latest government shutdown has been a fiscal preview of financial problems that will hit the government and us in the next few years. I’m not the only person saying this. Kevin Williamson in a recent column says the shutdown could be a “dress rehearsal for a fiscal Armageddon.” Each day we see news reports of government bureaucrats who had to scale back their spending because they aren’t receiving a paycheck. There was even one story…

Kerby Anderson Earlier this month we saw two contrasting views of how to create jobs and raise wages. After Nancy Pelosi was reelected Speaker of the House, she gave a speech that outlined what she and her fellow Democrats wanted to do to help American workers. She said they would “be champions of the middle class, and all those who aspire to it.” How did she plan to do this? She said they would “increase paychecks by rebuilding America with…

Kerby Anderson Today is the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. When the Supreme Court removed most state restrictions on abortion back in 1973, who could have predicted the world we live in today? When the ruling came down, few understood the long-term implications. I remember speaking on the issue in college classrooms a few years later and wondering when the Supreme Court would reverse its decision. By the 1980s, it seemed like only a matter of time that abortion would…

Kerby Anderson On Martin Luther King Jr. Day, let me suggest that you take some time to read his letter from a Birmingham Jail. If you are young, I think it will give you a better idea of what the civil rights movement in the 1960s was all about. If you are older, it will remind you of some forgotten events and chapters in American history. Dr. King wrote the letter in response to a published statement by eight clergymen….

Penna Dexter A recent Wall Street Journal op-ed asks a difficult question. Writer Abigail Shrier addresses mothers of teen girls, asking them: what will you do “When Your Daughter Defies Biology.” She relates the experience of a woman, a prominent attorney, who has a college age daughter, whom the mom describes as a “girly girl”. The young woman was sometimes anxious, even depressed over being excluded from certain cliques in high school and from other pressures a college freshman faces….

Kerby Anderson Jean Twenge has been researching generational differences for a quarter century. But she noticed in 2012 abrupt shifts in teen behaviors and emotional states. Up until that time there were gentle slopes of line graphs. Suddenly they became steep mountains and sheer cliffs. That year is when the proportion of Americans who owned a smartphone surpassed 50 percent. Her article in The Atlantic asks the ominous question: “Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?” The generation she is thinking about would…