On Tuesday at 10:00 a.m. ET, the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. and Conestoga Wood Specialties Corp. v. Sebelius, both of which will have a profound impact on the future of religious liberty and freedom of conscience in America. Thus,Hobby Lobby supporters across the country have been invited to offer their prayers in support of pany, and I encourage you to participate.You can help spread the word by changing the avatar on...

“Social Justice” is a term you hear almost every day. But did you ever hear anybody define what it actually means? In the latest video for Prager University, Jonah Goldberg says that if you ask ten liberals to define social justice you’ll get ten different responses. Goldberg, referencing Frederick Hayek, says that underlying the term “social justice” is a pernicious philosophical claim that freedom must be sacrificed in order to redistribute e. A few years ago on his radio program,...

Given the press the Koch brothers (David and Charles) get, one would expect to see a photo of them sporting devil’s horns with blood dripping from their fangs. Here are just a few examples: They have a pattern of lawbreaking, political manipulation, and obfuscation. I’ve been in Washington since Watergate, and I’ve never seen anything like it. [The New Yorker] Today, the Kochs are being watched as a prime example of the corporate takeover of government. [Greenpeace] [W]hen Barack Obama...

I won’t bother reviewing all the details of the Hobby Lobby case before the Supreme Court regarding the HHS mandate (you can do more reading here, here and here.) I’d like to talk about why this issue is of particular interest for women, and why the voices of all women need to be heard. The organization Women Speak For Themselves has been vocal in the fight against the HHS mandate. They want to make it known that the call for...

Over at The Federalist, Gabriel Malor runs down some interesting “illusions” (okay, he calls them lies) regarding the HHS mandate and the Supreme Court. Here’s a quick run-down: The HHS mandate is all about women’s rights. Nope: women don’t lose a thing if Hobby Lobby et al. win. What will happen if Hobby Lobby and others like them win their case is that women who do not wish to pay for others’ birth control and/or abortions will not be forced...

When bank robber Willie Sutton was asked why he robbed banks, he is (mis)quoted as having said, “Because that’s where the money is.” Turns out that is also why there is more street crime in poorer neighborhoods: because that’s where the cash is. Or at least it’s where the case was. It has been long recognized that cash plays a critical role in fueling street crime due to its liquidity and transactional anonymity. In poor neighborhoods — where street offenses...

Images of Mississippi needing federal assistance are iconic. Robert F. Kennedy’s 1967 trip to Mississippi’s Delta region produced images of poverty not unlike LBJ’s War on Poverty tour. Jennifer Haberkorn has written a piece at Politico titled, “Obamacare enrollment rides a bus into the Mississippi Delta.” Her snooty lede to the story reads: “In the poorest state in the nation, where supper is fried, bars allow smoking, chronic disease is rampant and doctors are hard e by, Obamacare rolls into...

“Next year will mark the 60th anniversary of the decapitation of Catholic Life in Shanghai,” writes Father Raymond J. de Souza in a National Post article titled “Catholics in Chains” published last week. This strong and unfortunately true es at the heels of the passing of the 97-year-old legitimate Catholic bishop of Shanghai, Bishop Joseph Fan Zhong-Liang last week. His death underscores the continuing reality of government religious restrictions imposed on Catholicism, which hinder bishops’ ability to lead their flocks...

The Becket Fund for Religious Liberty has released a helpful infographic highlighting some key facts regarding Sebelius v. Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc., which will be argued before the Supreme Court tomorrow. Upon digesting all of this, it’s worth emphasizing how meek and mild the Greens’ plaint actually is. The demands of the State are awfully high for a feature of the faith as small and tolerable as this. As Ross Douthat once wrote: If you want to fine Catholic hospitals...

This past Saturday, I attended the Alleviating Poverty Through Entrepreneurship (APTE) 2014 summit. APTE is a student group at OSU in Columbus, OH, and they put together a wonderful cast of ten speakers on the subject of the future of social entrepreneurship. With seven pages of notes (front and back), I unfortunately cannot cover every detail of the conference, but instead I will briefly focus on a theme that recurred throughout the afternoon: private, often for-profit, solutions to public service...