Cuban President Fidel Castro used the Jan. 21–25 papal visit to burnish his self-image as champion of the wretched of the earth, welcoming Pope John Paul II in a speech laced with anti-imperialist rhetoric and stock Marxist critiques of the Catholic Church.
With its hip survival-of-the-fittest posturing, its cool website getting 150,000 hits a day, its corporate sponsors like Budweiser and the U.S. Army ponying up $10,000 per second for ad time, you could call it “too good to be real TV” for CBS stockholders. But the smash summer hit “Survivor” is more than a stodgy old network’s desperate bid for a…
What commentary could we add to “The State of Our Unions,” a report issued earlier this month by the nonsectarian, nonpartisan National Marriage Project? Analyzing statistical indicators and survey data from the past 40 years, the study found marriage rates to be at an all-time low. In 1960, there were 88 marriages per every 1,000 unmarried women. Today, there are…
A tenured professor at an Ivy League school who defends murder and genocide? No, it can’t be, you say. Probably he said or wrote something that was taken out of context. Well, let’s let Peter Singer, the new chair of bioethics at Princeton University, speak for himself: “Human babies are not born self-aware, or capable of grasping that they exist…
An expert committee of the American Medical Association has made an extraordinary and horrifying recommendation—that doctors be allowed to “harvest” hearts, kidneys, livers and other organs from babies. The proposal concerns anencephalic infants, babies who come into the world missing a large part of their brain. While they can eat and breathe, these babies often die within a few days…
The honeymoon was over before it began for the new Pope Benedict XVI. Minutes after the conclave curtain lifted, the airwaves and internet were clogged with the new conventional wisdom—former Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger was a hard–line extremist, a former Nazi, a sinister “grand inquisitor” who racheted the rack against all who dared debate his vision of the faith. American Catholics,…
On Feb. 27, the first state to legalize assisted suicide announced that it will start funding suicides for terminally ill poor people under the state’s Medicaid program. Although Congress last year forbade the use of federal tax dollars for Medicaid assisted suicides, Oregon’s Health Services Commission said that the state would spend its own taxpayers’ monies to cover what it…
There is a certain bureaucratic crispness to the report issued Feb. 17 by Oregon’s Health Division. In 15 of the 29,000 deaths reported in the state last year, the cause of death was “drug overdose, legally prescribed.” Each of the 15 had filled out a simple, one-page form titled “Request for medication to end my life in a humane and…
Not a week goes by in which this newspaper couldn’t be filled with accounts of anti-Catholic crudities. A lot of it comes from political and cultural elites. That’s understandable, because the Church is the single greatest threat to their desires for a world unrestrained by belief in any alternative to the idols of individualism, materialism, and consumerism. But sadly, a…
“Stem cells” are those primordial elements of the human organism that are capable of developing into any cells or tissue in the body. Scientists believe that from these stem cells they might one day be able to grow heart muscle, bone marrow, or even kidney and brain cells. These could then be implanted in patients to replace damaged or diseased…