There is a tedious meme making its weary way around FB. It shows a smiling British soldier and informs the viewer that the USA, a country that once fought a revolution against taxation, has just hired 87,000 more IRS agents. Where are the FB fact-checkers? There was no revolution against taxe
I wrote this some time in the early 1980s before moving to Rockford. It’s been printed in one or two places. Lovers of Ernest Dowson will recognize the line I have borrowed from one of his best poems.
The Liberal Premise is not so much a collection of ethical and political positions as it is an ideological posture, or, to take a metaphor from everyday life in the new millennium, it is a virus that is forever mutating to meet new challenges to its advance.
Reading the media coverage of the recent hit on the head of al Quaeda, I asked myself the question: When is a terrorist not a terrorist? Answer: When he works for the government of the United States.
Most modern schools of philosophy base morality on the principles of reason, and the principal accounts of moral development emphasize growth in moral reasoning rather than moral behavior. To be a human person in this sense would mean that an individual is conscious of his own existence and capable of making rational decisions, including the decision to remain alive.
On abortion and other forms of infanticide, Nature gives us the sort of answer she always gives–general rules and statistical averages to which there are exceptions, but, from the Christian perspective, Nature is the tarnished mirror in which we can only glimpse, obscurely, the true reality
So Joe Biden got caught actually reading the script instructions his handlers had given him. In claiming it was a joke, they are asking us to believe Joe is capable of telling a joke.
The obligation to care for one’s offspring is a human universal, like the incest taboo or the prohibition of murder. Human and primate mothers, as a rule, devote themselves to their children, and mother-love is regarded conventionally as the most selfless and irrational forms of human attachment.
No argument can be put forward for abortion that cannot be applied to infanticide. When does a woman’s right to control her body stop? If she gives birth in the wild, does a mother have a moral obligation to nurse a newborn and warm it with her body?
By Liberal Tradition, I am referring to an intellectual current that begins in the Renaissance, takes ideological shape in the 17th and 18th centuries and is decked out as a complete ethical, political, and economic theory by such writers as Adam Smith and the Utilitarians, and ultimately spawns its socialist mirror image in Marx.
