Ryan T. Anderson, Ph.D., researches and writes about marriage and religious liberty as the William E. Simon senior research fellow in American Principles and Public Policy at The Heritage Foundation. He also focuses on justice and moral principles in economic thought, health care and education, and has expertise in bioethics and natural law theory. Read his research. (http://www.heritage.org/about/staff/a/ryan-anderson)
Examining the bodily autonomy argument for abortion highlights a crucial pro-life point: abortion is wrong not only because strangers shouldn't kill each other but also and especially because parents have special obligations to their children, and it isn't governmental overreach to require parents to fulfill those obligations.
Date posted: 2022-07-12
Body-self dualism, and its social manifestation in expressive individualism, underlie the rejection of our given human natures. Rather than seeing ourselves as somehow inhabiting bodies that are used as mere instruments, we should see ourselves as incarnate, bodily beings embedded in communities and bound by natural and supernatural laws.
Date posted: 2022-06-22
How does each and every one of us live a life that matters, that makes a difference, that has meaning, purpose, and value - and that ultimately will be a happy life in the rich sense of the term, that will be blessed?
Date posted: 2021-07-03
If we have a calling in life, it is because someone has called us. God calls each of us by name to a specific path of holiness and service to others. Important as professional success may be, the only success of ultimate importance is holiness. The only real tragedy in life is not to have been a saint.
Date posted: 2021-05-29
The law must protect the freedom of parents to seek, children to receive, and doctors to practice good medicine. The law must protect the ability of doctors and families to help children feel comfortable as what they actually are - namely, male and female children - not to radically and irreversibly transform their bodies.
Date posted: 2020-10-31
More deeply understanding the truth about marriage and human sexuality will help all of us flourish. And that is what a pastor like Pope Francis desires. We can understand - indeed we share - the frustration of our fellow Catholics with the ways in which the Holy Father conducts interviews and the ways in which the media distorts them, but we must not do anything to undermine the truth that sets us free.
Date posted: 2020-10-31
The religious liberty triumphs of the past several days are important, but they're not enough. Not nearly so. We need to contend about the truth of the matter. Through legislation and litigation, we need to make it clear that it's lawful to act on the convictions that we are created male and female and that male and female are created for each other. Privacy and safety at a shelter, equality on an athletic field, and good medicine are at stake for everyone - religious or not.
Date posted: 2020-07-27
Justice Gorsuch's position would either require the elimination of all sex-specific programs and facilities or allow access based on an individual's subjective identity rather than his or her objective biology. When Gorsuch claims that "transgender status [is] inextricably bound up with sex" because "transgender status" is defined precisely in opposition to sex, he presumes the very sex binary his opinion will help to further erode.
Date posted: 2020-07-04
Rather than teaching children to identify based on how well they fit prevailing cultural expectations on sex, we should be teaching them that the truth of their sexual identity is based on their bodies, and that sometimes cultural associations attached to the sexes are misguided or simply too narrow. There is a wonderfully rich array of ways of expressing one's embodiment as male or female.
Date posted: 2019-12-19
Activists are asking the Court to rewrite our nation's civil rights laws in a way that would directly undermine one of their main purposes: protecting the equal rights of girls and women. Congress did not legislate such an outcome, and the Court should not usurp Congress's authority by imposing such an extreme policy on the nation. Biology is not bigotry, and the Court should not conclude otherwise.
Date posted: 2019-10-05
The early Church saw challenges to truths about God, the Reformation-era Church saw challenges to truths about the Church herself, and today's Church is confronted by challenges to truths about man - the being made in the image and likeness of God whom the Church is tasked with protecting. This essay is based on Ryan T. Anderson's inaugural lecture as the St. John Paul II Teaching Fellow at The University of Dallas.
Date posted: 2019-05-20
Why should a doctor perform surgery when it won't make the patient happy, it won't accomplish its intended goal, it won't improve the underlying condition, it might make the underlying condition worse, and it might increase the likelihood of suicide? Sound medicine isn't about desire, it's about healing.
Date posted: 2018-11-27
Modern medicine can't reassign sex physically, and attempting to do so doesn't produce good outcomes psychosocially. Here is the evidence.
Date posted: 2018-03-24
A transgender future is not the "right side of history," yet activists have convinced the most powerful sectors of our society to acquiesce to their demands. While the claims they make are manifestly false, it will take real work to prevent the spread of these harmful ideas. The claims of transgender activists are philosophically incoherent.
Date posted: 2018-02-25
The thinking of transgender activists is inherently confused and filled with internal contradictions. Activists never acknowledge those contradictions. Instead, they opportunistically rely on whichever claim is useful at any given moment.
Date posted: 2018-02-11
Religious liberty is not an embrace of relativism. As we disagree about religious truth, we need to agree to leave legal room for that disagreement to play out in worthy and healthy ways - among people who are free to persuade and convert. People are free to try to convince Jack that he should bake the cake, but the government shouldn't be allowed to force him to do so.
Date posted: 2017-08-14
We have the obligation to propose with the apostle Paul the more excellent way. And this only intensifies as you graduate today and enter a world that is simultaneously hungry for and resistant to your message.
Date posted: 2017-06-02
Since I have just said a few words on natural law and economic freedom, I want to say a few words about a natural law conception of social justice and how it can help us now. Some people think social justice is a twentieth century invention of left-leaning thinkers, but this starts the history of social justice midstream. To understand its true meaning, we must look farther back to its real historical origins.
Date posted: 2017-03-20
Sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) antidiscrimination laws are unjustified, but if other policies are adopted to address the mistreatment of people who identify as LGBT, they must leave people free to engage in legitimate actions based on the conviction that we are created male and female and that male and female are created for each other.
Date posted: 2017-03-04
A new report from the Witherspoon Council on Ethics and the Integrity of Science forcefully makes the case against all forms of human cloning. Below is an excerpt from the report on the moral case against cloning-to-produce-children and cloning-for-biomedical research.
Date posted: 2015-10-18
Sexual orientation and gender identity are conceptually different from race, and beliefs about marriage as the union of man and woman are conceptually and historically different from opposition to interracial marriage. Adapted from testimony delivered on Monday March 16 before the United States Commission on Civil Rights.
Date posted: 2015-06-15
This Issue Brief focuses on how PAS threatens the weak and marginalized. It explores who is most likely to be coaxed into PAS and how PAS has led to voluntary - and even involuntary - euthanasia in Europe. This lethal logic has even been extended to children and the non-terminally ill disabled.
Date posted: 2015-05-13
The Hippocratic Oath proclaims: "I will keep [the sick] from harm and injustice. I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect." This is an essential precept for a flourishing civil society. No one, especially a doctor, should be permitted to kill intentionally, or assist in killing intentionally, an innocent neighbor.
Date posted: 2015-05-13
Our nation's legal elites think that the belief that marriage is the exclusive union of husband and wife is "bigotry akin to racism." That's a problem. And it explains the growing intolerance showed toward ordinary Americans who believe the truth about marriage.
Date posted: 2015-05-11
Allowing physician-assisted suicide would be a grave mistake for four reasons. First, it would endanger the weak and vulnerable. Second, it would corrupt the practice of medicine and the doctor-patient relationship. Third, it would compromise the family and intergenerational commitments. And fourth, it would betray human dignity and equality before the law. Instead of helping people to kill themselves, we should offer them appropriate medical care and human presence. We should respond to suffering with true compassion and solidarity. Doctors should help their patients to die a dignified death of natural causes, not assist in killing. Physicians are always to care, never to kill.
Date posted: 2015-05-05
Doctors should help their patients to die a dignified death of natural causes, not assist in killing. Physicians are always to care, never to kill. Citizens and policymakers need to resist the push by pressure groups, academic elites, and the media to sanction physician-assisted suicide.
Date posted: 2015-04-22
Allowing physician-assisted suicide (PAS) would be a grave mistake for four reasons, as explained in a Heritage Foundation Backgrounder, “Always Care, Never Kill.” First, it would endanger the weak and vulnerable. Second, it would corrupt the practice of medicine and the doctor–patient relationship. Third, it would compromise the family and intergenerational commitments. And fourth, it would betray human dignity and equality before the law. Instead of helping people to kill themselves, we should offer them appropriate medical care and human presence.
Date posted: 2015-04-22
The Hippocratic Oath proclaims: "I will keep [the sick] from harm and injustice. I will neither give a deadly drug to anybody who asked for it, nor will I make a suggestion to this effect." This is an essential precept for a flourishing civil society. No one, especially a doctor, should be permitted to kill intentionally, or assist in killing intentionally, an innocent neighbor.
Date posted: 2015-04-15
Here is the latest case in the United States of people threatened with legal sanctions for following their conscience and declining to be involved in a same-sex wedding.
Date posted: 2014-11-20
While it is a self-evident truth that all men are created equal and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including the right to life, what is self-evident in the technical philosophical sense is not always readily assented to, or immediately obvious. In many ways this is the story of debates throughout American history, and it is true today in the debate over unborn human life.
Date posted: 2014-09-20
What is marriage, why does marriage matter for public policy, and what are the consequences of redefining marriage? Adapted from testimony delivered on Monday, January 13, 2014 to the Indiana House Judiciary Committee.
Date posted: 2014-03-11
Prof. Charles Reid thinks love makes a marriage. He claims we think sex makes a marriage. In truth, comprehensive union makes a marriage. And getting marriage right matters for everyone.
Date posted: 2014-02-11
What happened at the courthouse matters, and we must keep up our witness to the truth about marriage, by word and deed, until it is safely beyond judicial overreach.
Date posted: 2013-07-07
Regent University Class of 2013: Live in truth. Love your families and your friends. Be a faithful spouse and parent. Take care of your parents as they age. Be a good employee and, one day, a good employer. Serve the poor. Welcome the stranger. Live out the truth of what you have learned at Regent, and you will set the world ablaze.
Date posted: 2013-06-15
Marriage is founded on the anthropological truth that men and women are different and complementary, the biological fact that the union of a man and woman also creates new life, and the social reality that children need a mom and a dad.
Date posted: 2013-06-15
Americans and their elected officials have constitutional authority to make marriage policy. When Americans hear the case for marriage as the union of a man and a woman and its importance to children and limited government, by and large they support it and stand for this timeless institution.
Date posted: 2013-06-08
Good public policy can meet the needs of all Americans without redefining marriage.
Date posted: 2013-03-20
How successful can a "new conversation on marriage" be when its leaders can't even say what marriage is?
Date posted: 2012-12-18
"Strong marriage norms help guide and shape decisions that lead to optimal choices." Other research shows both that marriage causes behavioral change and that non-marriage can explain cultural pathologies. As the late Steve Nock demonstrated, after their wedding men tend to spend more time at work, less time at bars, more time at religious gatherings, less time in jail, and more time with family.
Date posted: 2012-02-08
A reply to Northwestern Law Professor Andrew Koppelman's second critique of "What is Marriage?"
Date posted: 2011-01-12
In his latest reply to our argument in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy that marriage is the conjugal union of husband and wife, Kenji Yoshino presents a truncated and distorted version of our view. Nevertheless, his answers to our challenges to him and others who demand the redefinition of civil marriage force Yoshino into awkward moral and political positions - including one that seems directly at odds with a stance he has prominently taken.
Date posted: 2011-01-03
Deutsch claims that our argument is a non sequitur because there is "no non-metaphorical sense in which the spouses become 'one flesh'" in light of the fact that "the man and the woman ... remain two separate entities," as can be confirmed by a "DNA sampling." As most readers will have noticed, Deutsch's claim against us is itself a non sequitur.
Date posted: 2010-12-30
We are grateful for Andrew Koppelman's recent reply to our argument in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy that marriage is the conjugal union of husband and wife. Thanks to his honesty and candor, the ensuing exchange should set in stark relief the implications of redefining civil marriage.
Date posted: 2010-12-29
A response to NYU Law Professor Kenji Yoshino...Yoshino directs much of his scorn at an analogy we use to defend our view (and the view historically embodied in our law) that marriages, being comprehensive interpersonal unions, are consummated and uniquely embodied in coitus -- in acts that extend spouses' union of hearts and minds along the biological dimension of their beings, much as various organs unite to form one body: by allowing them to coordinate together toward a biological function (in this case, reproduction) of the whole (in this case, the couple as a unit).
Date posted: 2010-12-17
Recently, the editor of Public Discourse sat down with Robert P. George to discuss the state of the marriage debate. While supporters of same-sex "marriage" claim that history is on their side, it turns out that supporters of traditional marriage have more reasons for hope than they may realize.
Date posted: 2009-07-03
A recent compromise on the same-sex 'marriage' debate granted too much to revisionists and too little to traditionalists. A better compromise will respect the societal importance of marriage while also providing for the real needs of domestic partners.
Date posted: 2009-02-24
Every fall, kids arrive on college campuses and learn that their basic moral intuitions on sexual matters don't square with the reigning ideas. Thanks to debased campus culture and overreaching on the part of administrators and professors, students are beginning to respond systematically - and they're having an impact. Here's how.
Date posted: 2009-02-03