Recent Viewpoints

Kerby Anderson Last month, the Department of Health and Human Services announced the creation of a new division within its Office of Civil Rights. There will now be a Conscience and Religious Freedom Division. The division will protect doctors, nurses, and other healthcare providers “from being coerced into participating in activities that violate their consciences, such as abortion, sterilization, or assisted suicide.” The proposed rules will empower the division to enforce multiple statutes that have been passed by Congress and…

Kerby Anderson With another set of elections on the horizon, it is time to consider how to clean up the voter rolls. As I’ve mentioned in previous commentaries, we do have a problem. A report that came out in September found that there are 248 counties in this country that have more names on their voter rolls than the total number of people of voting age in those counties at the time of the 2016 election. Last month, the Supreme…

Kerby Anderson It was inevitable that the tragic case of the Turpin’s thirteen starving children found in filthy conditions would be used to question the value of homeschooling. Of course, this was abuse. And the abuse of the children happened because the laws in California concerning home schools allowed them to “hide in plain sight.” The vast majority of home schooling parents are doing a great job. But it is worth taking a look at the rules and regulations so…

Penna Dexter Capping off a dramatic seven-day hearing last month, a Michigan judge delivered a 175-year prison sentence to former USA gymnastics team doctor Larry Nassar, for sexual abuse of patients. Nassar, a physician at Michigan State University, was also the team doctor for the school’s gymnastics club. Testimonies from 156 of Nassar’s victims and 169 victim impact statements, revealed that for some of the gymnasts, the abuse began when they were children and continued for years. How could this…

Kerby Anderson The Environmental Protection Agency has unveiled an online tool that is supposed to help local officials see the dangers of climate change in their community. The Climate Change Adaptation Resource Center provides a map that warns of the danger of climate change to each of the eight regions of the United States. These dire warnings were too much for Dr. William M. Briggs, who has been questioning many of the claims of climate change activists. In his column,…

Kerby Anderson The fastest growing religious group of our time is the group of young people who check “none” or “none of the above” on religious survey questions. Social scientists therefore refer to them as “the nones.” A few years ago, I did some commentaries about the “nones” but wanted to revisit this topic because we now have more survey statistics that illustrate their growth. From the 1930s to the 1990s, the percentage of “nones” in America was less than…

Kerby Anderson An LGBT group known as Campus Pride has published a list of more than 100 Christian colleges and universities that are deemed dangerous because they don’t affirm the homosexual lifestyle. They hope that corporations will use this “Shame List” to blacklist graduates from these Christian institutions. Rod Dreher is concerned that this is exactly what will happen. Companies and corporations that take pride in being inclusive and diverse may decide to avoid recruiting on these campuses and might…

Kerby Anderson Over the last two decades, Christian Smith has helped us understand what is in the heads and hearts of young people. He is the coauthor of such books at Soul Searching, Souls in Transition, and Lost in Transition. In his books, he coined the now famous term “Moralistic Therapeutic Deism.” The term came up in a discussion on my radio program with Kara Powell about her book, Growing Young. She and her coauthors have identified a number of…

Kerby Anderson Economic inequality is one of the themes that ran through the presidential election and congressional races. Edward Conard has been challenging many of the myths surrounding this debate. That is why I had him on my radio program to talk about his new book, The Upside of Inequality: How Good Intentions Undermine the Middle Class. Four years ago, he wrote the controversial bestseller Unintended Consequences, which attempted to set the record straight on the 2008 financial crisis. He…

Penna Dexter The feminist Left may not admit it, but the #MeToo movement is a sign that the sexual revolution has failed women. Accounts of real sexual assault and harassment are pouring in, resulting in heavy costs to the perpetrators. But there’s also a simmering discontent among women with the sexual culture as a whole. A recent account of a date-gone-bad resulted in the very public humiliation of comedian, Aziz Ansari. An anonymous woman called “Grace” accuses him of violating…

Kerby Anderson You have probably seen campaign yard signs popping up in your neighborhood. That is a vivid reminder that we are headed to another election season. The general election isn’t until November, but party primary elections will be taking place in the next few months. What will be the agenda for the candidates for these political parties? The Republican agenda should be fairly easy to predict. Incumbents will point to the recently passed tax reform bill and ask to…