Things to Read

Daumier. Two lawyers conversing

Straightaway, my apologies for yesterday’s Mail Chimp broadcast that misspelled the name of the first respondent cited on the 303 Creative case. It is Aubrey Elenis—plus nine other parties. (Respondents are adversaries of the petitioner.) In my hurry to post on the selfsame day of oral arguments before the Court, I wrote Ellis instead of Elenis. Web designer Lorie Smith owns 303 Creative. She is the sole petitioner, meaning that she alone asked the court to review her case. The number and tenor of arguments both for and against her refusal—on conscience grounds—to create a design celebrating same-sex marriage are an education in the thicket of legal argument. Continue Reading
Two Flags; Two Wars; Two poets

My town hall boasts two flag poles. One flies the requisite Stars and Stripes. But it is the companion pole standing next to it that stirs the local blood. This one flaunts the colors dearest to a well-appointed community that congratulates itself on its civilized progressivism. Ukraine’s bicolor tops the second pole. It is paired with the rainbow colors of the LBGTQ Nation. The duet proclaims the town fathers’ common purpose: celebration of those chic causes that thrill The Better Sort. Continue Reading
ventriloquist and dummy

Leonardo Boff is Pope Francis’ unacknowledged point man on the environmental creed. His name and work were not mentioned anywhere in Laudato Sí, not even in the footnotes. The omission was no oversight. Boff works most effectively as the man behind the curtain. He is the wizard of liberation theology’s protective metamorphosis—chameleon-like—into climate justice. Forget those priests carrying AK 47s alongside the Sandanistas in the 1980s. That was yesterday. Today, care for creation is every Earthling’s commission in order to liberate the poor and forsaken from ecological aggression by the developed world. Continue Reading
pregnant pro-abortion protester

The Dobbs decision has been thoroughly analyzed and discussed elsewhere. What appears here are notes jotted in the margins. Begin with the anarchic trajectory of Justice Kennedy’s “mystery passage” of thirty years ago. Roe v. Wade invented a Constitutional right out of whole cloth. Planned Parenthood v. Casey exalted the grounds of that invention. The 1992 decision codified Justice Kennedy’s madcap dictum: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Continue Reading