Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson Here we go again. This time the San Antonio City Council banned Chick-fil-A from serving food at the San Antonio airport. If this sounds familiar, the same thing happened about four years ago at the Denver airport. Taking a stand for traditional marriage can get you banned by progressive council members. That was the issue in Denver. But the ban in San Antonio added another twist. The council members also took issue with the fact that Chick-fil-A gives…

Penna Dexter Have you heard about the drag queen story hours taking place at various public libraries across the country? These events started popping up a couple of years ago. They feature flamboyant drag queens reading stories to children mostly in libraries, sometimes in schools or bookstores. One Detroit drag queen who read to kids at Huntington Woods Library marvels that the little girls thought she was “a princess.” The Washington Post reports that Drag Queen Story Hour “aims to…

Kerby Anderson The Connecticut Supreme Court is allowing a lawsuit from the Sandy Hook shooting to go forward. Kevin Williamson refers to it as a “Bogus Lawsuit Against Remington.” He raises important questions about the propriety and constitutionality of the legal case. First, he reminds us that in tort law the focus is usually on the entity with deep pockets. That couldn’t be Adam Lanza who killed himself. It probably couldn’t be the institutions that counseled him. Therefore, the focus…

Kerby Anderson The Democratically-controlled House of Representatives just passed a signature piece of legislation. The bill clearly illustrates what the congressional leaders would like to do in America if they could control both houses of Congress and the presidency. The editors of National Review call it a “legislative buffet of bad ideas.” The Institute for Free Speech calls it, “The For the Politicians Act.” The American Civil Liberties Union wrote a letter to the members of Congress urging them to vote…

Kerby Anderson Medicare for All has been in the news for months, and it will be a key campaign issue in the upcoming elections. Although I wrote about some of the problems with the concept months ago, that was based upon predictions about what might be in the legislation. Since the Medicare for All Act has been filed, we can clearly see what implementing this might mean for you and your family. Bioethicist Wesley J. Smith has written an excellent…

Kerby Anderson Neal Gabler, writing in The Atlantic, begins his essay with this disturbing statistic from a survey conducted by the Federal Reserve Board. The survey asked respondents how they would pay for a $400 emergency. They found that 47 percent of respondents said they would cover the expense by borrowing or selling something. In other words, they could not come up with the $400 any other way. Gabler asks: Who knew? He then answers that he knew, because he…

Kerby Anderson For decades, sociologists have documented the phenomenon of extended adolescence. This is where someone who is an adult still acts like a teenager. One classic example would be a 35-year-old who has part of their rent and bills covered by parents and continues to take college classes. Jean Twenge in her latest research on the trailing edge millennials (who she calls iGen) are extending this phenomenon even further. She documents that teenagers are becoming adults even later than…

Penna Dexter In the aftermath of the recent college admissions scandal, the Wall Street Journal’s Peggy Noonan issued a warning in a column she titled: “Kids, Don’t Become Success Robots.” Ms. Noonan sees a certain kind of narcissism in these parents who have attained great success themselves, but who will cheat to get their kids in schools they don’t qualify for. We’ve gotta ask: Is this really about their kids? Or about them? These parents, she explains, “aim their children at…

Kerby Anderson Americans don’t know much about the Constitution, and it apparently is getting worse. Nine years ago, I wrote and recorded a commentary about constitutional illiteracy. Back then I quoted John Whitehead (Rutherford Institute) who testified before a subcommittee of the Senate Judiciary Committee concerning the rule of law. He provided some alarming statistics based upon a survey done about ten years ago. They found that only one in four Americans could name more than one of the freedoms…

Kerby Anderson We are a divided country, but it may be worse than we imagined. An article in The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences discussed what is called “motive attribution asymmetry.” That’s a technical term for the assumption that your ideology is based on love and your opponent’s is based on hate. Put another way: we are the good guys, and they are the bad guys. They discovered that the average Republican and the average Democrat today are as…

Kerby Anderson Earlier this month the Federal Reserve reported that credit card debt for Americans hit $870 billion as of December. That makes it the largest amount ever. Obviously, credit card debt goes up in December because of shopping for Christmas, but this number is way above the credit card debt load in the past. Nearly 480 million credit cards are in circulation, which is up 100 million from a decade ago during the recession. Using credit cards to purchase…