Free Republic

The headline read "3 in 4 say religious rights trump law." The article went on to explain that "In the Knights of Columbus-Marist Poll, nearly three in four Americans, 74 percent, said freedom of religion should be protected 'even if it conflicts with other laws.'" The juxtaposition of the headline and the explanation provide a perfect illustration of the way in which rights and freedoms are carelessly conflated these days, in a way that could have very damaging unintended consequences. For example, if religious freedom per se trumps other laws, what about the so-called "honor killing" permitted by Islamic law...

Washington DC - -(Ammoland.com)- A recent article in The New Yorker titled “American Battleground,” by Harvard’s Jill Lepore, has been gnawing at me ever since I critiqued it last week for The Daily Caller. As I wrote then, it is a convoluted piece of quasi-academic work that is intended to make gun owners question the founders’ position on private gun ownership and, if possible, open 21st-century American minds to the idea of more gun control. Lepore does this via subtle and not-so-subtle attacks on the Second Amendment throughout the article. By attacking the Second Amendment, she hopes to somehow convince...

The Delusion of Darwinian Natural Law Marc D. GuerraIn a short, inconspicuous paragraph in the conclusion to the first edition of On the Origin of Species, Darwin speculates that "in the distant future … psychology will be based on a new foundation, that of the necessary acquirement of each mental power and capacity by gradation." One hundred and forty years later, Darwin's eerie prediction about the revolutionary effect of his work on human beings' self-understanding seems all too prophetic. After a century of dissemination, the once-novel theory of evolution is widely accepted as established scientific fact. Given the quasi-religious hold...