Free Republic

The coronavirus is bringing about a strange revival of neighborhood life, which has been atrophying for a half-century. We should pay attention. Something unexpected has happened to neighborhoods across the country in the wake of coronavirus lockdowns and business closures: they’re coming to life.With schools and restaurants closed, and a huge swath of the workforce stuck at home either working remotely or not working at all, usually quiet and empty neighborhoods are suddenly bustling. Patterns of life and work that have become entrenched in American society over the past half-decade—kids in school and both parents away at jobs during...

Should fiscal conservatives and libertarians join social conservatives to promote social conservative policies? Is the political divide between wings of the GOP based more on perception or passion than on reality? Higher government spending is driven by social issues – and liberal policies regarding families and children. In fact, fiscal conservatives can never achieve their goals of limited government, balanced budgets, and low tax levels without working on the concerns raised by social conservatives. Focusing only on government spending ignores factors that lead to the desire to spend more by some politicians and some voters. Major drivers of skyrocketing national...

The Congressional Budget Office didn't exactly say ObamaCare would cost the nation 2.5 million jobs. What it did say is vindication of what conservatives have preached since Barry Goldwater stood in the pulpit 50 years ago: The more liberal the welfare state, the greater the disincentive to work and the more ruinous the impact upon a nation's work ethic. According to the CBO, the ObamaCare subsidies will cause some to quit work, others to cut back on the hours they work, and others to hold off going to work, so as not to lose the benefits. The cumulative impact will...

A British organization is suggesting that monogamy is out of date and “multiple partners’ is the coming norm, says a report from The Christian Institute. Now that many nations have abandoned the biblical concept of marriage being between one man and one woman, given formalized government support for same-sex duos in New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States in recent days, BBC show host Jo Fidgen openly is questioning whether there still is room for sexual fidelity in a “society where choice is everything.” Several prominent individuals in those nations have warned lately that society’s fast adoption of...

How often does the Office of Policy Planning and Research of the United States Department of Labor produce anything worth reading, let alone a report that reverberates 45 years later? Such was the brilliance of Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan that it happened once, when he wrote his prescient 1965 report “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” He wrote it on a typewriter over a few weeks and had the publications office in the basement of the Labor Department print 100 of them, marked “For Official Use Only.”

A Massachusetts city is investigating an apparent teenage "pregnancy pact" that has at least 17 high-school girls expecting babies, four times more than last year, including many aged 16 or younger. A high school health clinic in the city of Gloucester became suspicious after seeing a surge in girls seeking pregnancy tests. Local officials said on Thursday nearly half of those who became pregnant appear to have entered into a pact to have their babies together over the year. "Some girls seemed more upset when they weren't pregnant than when they were," Gloucester High School principal Joseph Sullivan told Time...

April 14, 2008, 6:00 a.m. The Hispanic Family: The Case for National ActionLooking at and for honest numbers. By Heather Mac Donald Those of us who have documented the growing underclass culture among second- and third-generation Hispanic Americans have grown accustomed to being called bigoted “xenophobes” by open-borders conservatives. For some reason, these same conservatives don’t object to anyone decrying the consequences of black illegitimacy rates, or the toll of black gang culture on community life. But point out the high Hispanic illegitimacy and school drop-out rates, or the march of ever-younger Hispanics into gangs, and you can be...

Breakdown in families 'as destructive as effects of global warming' By Sarah Womack, Social Affairs Correspondent Last Updated: 9:46am BST 05/04/2008 Britain is suffering from an epidemic of family breakdowns affecting all levels of society from the Royal family downwards, one of the country's most senior judges will say today. Mr Justice Coleridge, who presided over the preliminary divorce hearings of Sir Paul McCartney and Heather Mills, will accuse Gordon Brown of prioritising the abolition of plastic bags over support for families, and say the Government is "fiddling while Rome burns". "Family breakdown is at all levels of society -...

I am in shock. I have just read two books that expose Britain’s teenagers as vicious, lawless, contemptuous of authority, alienated from family and society, fixated on drugs, drink, crime and lethal weapons, and wrapped up in a gang culture that leads nowhere except incarceration or an early grave. Yes, the youth of 1938, when Graham Greene wrote Brighton Rock, must have been a ghastly lot. Surpassed, perhaps, only by the young thugs of 1962, as portrayed in Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange — though the author said that he based that novel’s most violent scene on a horrific attack...