Scott Yenor is Associate Professor and Chair of Political Science at Boise State University.
Reconceiving of marriage in terms of "self-expression" has been a terrible, value-laden mistake, betraying the pretensions to liberal neutrality. Plural marriage is inferior for raising children and for maintaining marital harmony; but most of all, in today's climate, it creates a culture dedicated to adult sexual self-expression rather than the good of children and deep love.
Date posted: 2023-05-02
All the science in the world does not answer the deepest questions of political importance. Pretending that questions of political priority are merely technical or scientific questions is the lie of modern times. Conservatives must relearn this lesson in order to defend essential public goods like marriage and the family.
Date posted: 2019-08-11
A genuinely moderate feminism must begin with an acknowledgement of the goodness in human love, human community, and responsibility, not with a radical embrace of independence and self-created identities. It must acknowledge and respect some differences between the sexes and see them as part of human being.
Date posted: 2019-01-06
Though it was now almost three years ago, the Supreme Court's Obergefell decision provides us with an opportunity to ask some important questions about our culture. How did same-sex marriage come to America? Where is an America with same-sex marriage headed next? What does it imply about us that it did? Darel Paul's meticulous, courageous account of how the elites brought same-sex marriage to America deserves to be read by all who would understand where we are and where we're going.
Date posted: 2018-04-29
In today's culture wars, yesterday's common sense is often tomorrow's bigotry. No one thirty years ago imagined same-sex marriage; now opposition to it may be officially proscribed. Yesterday every kindergartener knew that boys have a penis and girls have a vagina, but the ascendancy of transgender rights seems to render questionable - even demeaning - some of the most familiar aspects of life, like sex-specific bathrooms and showers.
Date posted: 2017-08-06
Radical autonomy does not capture the webs into which we are born, our experiences of deep neediness and equally deep love, our embodied nature, our reaction to tragedies and unforeseen obstacles, or our response to our children once they arrive. Autonomy resists the dependence at the heart of loving relationships.
Date posted: 2016-09-21
Anyone interested in defending marriage and family life must first expose the built-in biases and hidden moral teaching within the contemporary liberal perspective.
Date posted: 2015-12-27
Jonathan Last's new book attributes population decline and the birth dearth to two trends that started in the Enlightenment era - first, an effort to limit death; second, an effort to control birth. Both trends are guided by a desire to control nature.
Date posted: 2013-04-09
Marital love implies dependence on another instead of autonomy, and it shows that certain goods (sex and procreation, love and marriage, marriage and parenthood) are connected. We must recover the language of self-giving.
Date posted: 2011-06-20
The logic of contract and the movement to conquer nature have resulted in the triumph of autonomy and demise of the family.
Date posted: 2011-06-20