Our wise ideologues are never short on assurances that every last one of their society-changing initiatives are brimming with “guarantees” and “safeguards.” The obvious one is abortion. In 1996, Bill Clinton said “abortion should not only be safe and legal, it should be rare.” In New York in 2012, more African-American babies were aborted than...
Children’s Minister Frances Fitzgerald’s recent proposal to give adopted people greater access to information about their biological parents is a genuinely good idea. If they don’t run afoul of the constitutional right to privacy, Minister Fitzgerald’s proposals could end up So I’m curious as to why the same government currently advocating common-sense reforms helping many adoptees to trace...
David Quinn was on the Sean O’Rourke programme yesterday discussing childcare with Roisin O’Hara, who juggles work with having four small children; Evanna Boyle, also a mum of four who gave up work as a solicitor to mind her kids at home; Independent Senator Jillian Van Turnhout and Theresa Heaney, Chairperson of the Mothers’ Alliance...
The first same-sex marriages took place in the UK over the weekend. Brendan O’Neill, the editor of the online magazine, Spiked, has an article today asking a very pertinent question: how did support for gay marriage become the conventional wisdom so quickly? It hasn’t been all that long since same-sex marriage was barely thought of...
There’s a great guest post over at the Washington Post’s Volokh Conspiracy blog from Prof. Michael McConnell of Stanford university, taking an in-depth look at the Hobby Lobby religious freedom case currently before the US Supreme Court. Some of it’s written in pretty detailed legal language, but it’s well worth a read if you want...
Alan Shatter has other things on his mind these days to be sure, but the other day he still managed to provide a written answer to a question from Mattie McGrath on whether religious schools will still be allowed to teach that marriage is between a man and a woman in the event of same-sex...
There’s a growing trend in Ireland which is worth highlighting – namely, the growing hostility of third-level institutions to groups representing advocating Christian and pro-life ideas. The phenomenon of universities excluding those who disagree with the current consensus on sexual morality, or the prevailing academic view of abortion, has already been happening for awhile in the...
Breda O’Brien was on RTE’s Prime Time on Tuesday evening, debating surrogacy with Dean Hutchinson of the American for-profit company Circle Surrogacy. Watch it here (start of the programme).
Evidence that fatherlessness can have a bad effect on children is becoming harder and harder to ignore. Christopher A. Brown at the Huffington Post writes about a new review of studies on the effects of “Father Absence” which show that causation and not merely correlation is at work. There’s a lot of interesting and...
Chastity group, Pure in Heart, has been under heavy media fire lately. The Iona Institute’s Ben Conroy was on a number of programmes in the last few days talking about Pure In Heart and responsible sex education. He argued that sex education in schools should be less about providing information about contraception, and more about providing...
