Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson The opioid crisis is getting worse, but there is also good evidence that solving this crisis will require careful strategies because the problem is more complex than many might imagine. First, let’s look at the crisis. Americans are showing up in emergency rooms from opioid overdoses in record numbers. According to the CDC, suspected opioid overdoses increased by 30 percent from July 2016 to September 2017. But as soon as you look at the statistics in various states,…

Kerby Anderson This weekend students will hold demonstrations demanding gun control legislation. As I have said in previous commentaries, these young people have every right to express their views. And since they are making their arguments in the public arena, we have every right to discuss, debate, and correct what they say. Jonah Goldberg, writing in USA Today, focuses on a broader concern. We seem to be resurrecting “an old American tradition of celebrating young people as inherently wiser and…

Penna Dexter Two Washington Post columnists wrote opposing columns last week on Down syndrome babies’ right to life. The title of Mark Theissen’s piece is, “When will we stop killing humans with Down syndrome?” Ruth Marcus called hers, “I would’ve aborted a fetus with Down syndrome.” Ruth Marcus says she had two babies. If amniocentesis had revealed Down syndrome she would have aborted, “grieved the loss, and moved on.” She condemns laws passed in North Dakota, Ohio, Indiana, and Louisiana…

Kerby Anderson   Harvard University placed a Christian group (Harvard College Faith and Action) on “administrative probation” because they “pressured a female member . . . to resign in September following her decision to date a woman.” Andrew Walker, writing in The Weekly Standard, makes the issue very clear. He says, “Harvard is disciplining a Christian student group for the group’s expectation that its student leadership follow basic Christian ethical teaching on sexuality in accordance with Christianity’s 2,000-year-old doctrine on…

Kerby Anderson Teenagers are sending sexually explicit images and videos to each other at an alarming rate. That is the conclusion of a study posted recently in the journal Pediatrics. The journal article, “Prevalence of Multiple Forms of Sexting Behavior Among Youth,” is a meta-analysis of 39 worldwide studies that included 110,380 participants. They found that sexting is more common than most parents would even imagine. The studies focused on teens between the ages of 12 and 17. The researchers…

Kerby Anderson You may start seeing the phrase “opinion laundering” more often in news and commentaries. Journalists have used the phrase to identify something that has been taking place in the public relations industry. Politicians and journalists try to get legitimate third parties to validate their policy positions. That way they don’t have to look like they are taking a position. Instead, they use someone else to express their opinion. Kyle Smith documents the latest way this is being used…

Kerby Anderson One of the questions that surfaces repeatedly from the shooting in Parkland, Florida is why the FBI and local law enforcement didn’t do more to stop the shooter. He was a ticking time bomb who posted a number of threatening messages. And he assaulted students, cursed at teachers, kicked in classroom doors, started fistfights, and threw chairs. Despite all of this behavior online and in person, he was never arrested. He was transferred from school to school. He…

Kerby Anderson We are a divided nation in trying to decide what to do with immigrants who have come to this country illegally. That is why Congress has not passed legislation that will clarify the status of illegal aliens. That is also why we now have a number of sanctuary cities and sanctuary states. I have always wondered how far liberal politicians would go to protect these immigrants. Now we know. Look at what happened in Oakland, California two weeks…

Penna Dexter After the horrific school shooting in Parkland, Florida, a meeting of surviving students was convened at the White House. Fifteen-year-old Justin Gruber reminded the president he wasn’t even alive 19 years ago when the Columbine High School shooting took place. The Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan laments, “We’re in the second generation of public school terror.” Yet federal school discipline guidelines, complete with monetary incentives for districts, show we’ve learned nothing from these horrible massacres. The guidelines attempt…

Kerby Anderson Are boys in America broken? Many certainly are. We see them in our prisons, on the streets, and in news stories about domestic abuse or even school shootings. That is why Michael Ian Black wrote an op-ed with the title, “The Boys Are Not All Right.” His commentary surfaced lots of emotions, criticisms, and profanity from people who read what he had to say. At the outset, let me say that though I agree with much of his…

Kerby Anderson Ryan Anderson responds to our transgender moment in his new book, When Harry Became Sally. He begins his discussion by comparing two movies. The classic film, When Harry Met Sally, explored the question of whether a man and a woman can really be “just friends.” More recently, the film, The Danish Girl, asked a different question: Can a man really become a woman? The film was based on the true story of the first known subject of “sex…