Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson One of the cases rendered by the Supreme Court before the justices left town has great significance in terms of government programs and religious freedom. As I said in a commentary two months ago, tires and religious liberty don’t seem like topics that would go together. But a religious dispute over playground surfaces made its way to the Supreme Court and established a very important precedent. Trinity Lutheran Church in Missouri applied to a state grant program to…

Kerby Anderson One place where donors often go to check out a charity is GuideStar. Although it has been described as a “neutral” aggregator of tax data on charities, its latest actions call that designation into question. It originally placed “hate group” labels on certain groups so designated by the Southern Poverty Law Center. The Southern Poverty Law Center at one time was respected for their work. But it has chosen to label many Christian and other conservative groups as…

Penna Dexter Right around the time we celebrate Independence Day, Canada celebrates Canada Day. July 1st marked 150 years since Canada became a self-governing dominion within the British Empire. The US has a longer history of independence. But when it comes to implementing radical social policy, Canada is outpacing the United States. Wisely, the US Defense Department decided last week to take a step back for a moment — actually six months — to look at whether it’s really a…

Kerby Anderson You have probably heard comments about certain people living in a bubble. They live in affluent communities cut off from some of the realities that most Americans face. Due to the research by Charles Murray, we can now identify where these bubble communities are located. In his book, Coming Apart, he argued that a high-IQ, highly educated upper class was formed over the last half century that is disconnected from the culture of mainstream America. Charles Murray put…

Kerby Anderson Pastor Ray Johnston has a new book out that talks about how the church has become like the culture. He illustrates this by describing the “seven decades that have changed everything.” We talked about these remarkable changes recently on Point of View The 1950s were a time when America lost its innocence. Rock music was born. Teenagers were liberated from the parents by cars. Every home got a television set. The 1960s were a time when America lost…

Kerby Anderson What does it take for normal people to start slaughtering others? A commentary in the Jerusalem Post with the title “The Genocide Mechanism” showed how demonization could lead to genocide. The writer talked about “a very specific kind of demonization.” The example he used was Rwanda. In 1994, the majority Hutu population was able to massacre some 800,000 Tutsis. The violence was unimaginable: neighbors slaughtering neighbors, mostly with machetes. The estimates are about 9,000 men, women, and children…

Kerby Anderson Today is the 4th of July, and I thought I would take a moment to talk about the origin of the ideas in the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson said that many of the ideas in the Declaration came from John Locke. Jefferson also gave credit to the writer Algernon Sidney, who in turn cites most prominently Aristotle, Plato, Roman republican writers, and the Old Testament. Legal scholar Gary Amos argues that Locke’s Two Treatises on Government is…

Kerby Anderson Are non-citizens voting in our elections illegally? One side says this is a non-existent problem. The other side believes it takes place more than we might imagine. Who is right? A groundbreaking study by professors at Old Dominion University in Virginia attempted to compile scientifically derived illegal voting numbers using the extensive Harvard/YouGov study that asks questions of thousands of voters. They concluded that as many as 2.8 million non-citizens voted in 2008. But the Harvard/YouGov professors who…

Penna Dexter The July 4th holiday is another reminder of military sacrifice. Fighting for a fledgling nation, the troops faced death, injury, and extreme discomfort in service of their cause. It’s no different today. That our military maintain its focus on national defense and readiness for war is as important as ever, perhaps more so given their responsibilities around the world. It’s a blow to military readiness that all branches have been forced to prepare for this month’s deadline to…

Kerby Anderson President Trump has vowed that his one trillion dollar infrastructure plan won’t repeat Obama’s “shovel-ready” mistakes. We will see. Some believe his plans will fizzle. But even if he is able to get funding for these needed repairs, he will face a regulatory blockade that will make it hard to get much done quickly. George Will’s column earlier this month talked about “America’s Endless Infrastructure Mess.” He quotes from Philip Howard who believes we must revamp the way…

Kerby Anderson More and more social commentators are starting to write and express their deep concern about what has been happening on university campuses. Bernard Goldberg recently wrote about the “Cowards of Academia.” He welcomed the summer so that we don’t have to hear about “those sanctimonious liberal snowflakes” that have taken over college campuses and prove that “the lunatics have taken over the asylum.” One asylum that got his attention was Evergreen State College in Washington State. They have…