The Odd Couple and Abortion Culture

  I was seven years old when Neil Simon’s Broadway play The Odd Couple became a TV series. Forty-five years later, I still remember Oscar and Felix as perfect embodiments of the liberated and the oppressed—which, I suppose, might reveal something about my own organizational...
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HOT TOPIC: The Human Factor

While New York’s numbers have been stable for a while, the first weekend of October brought unsettling reports of a rising number of positive tests for coronavirus in certain New York City neighborhoods (and a couple of adjacent counties).
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HOT TOPIC: President Trump and His Executive Order

When the president announced his new Executive Order, I was called by the redoubtable Cathy Ruse, who was one of my own main allies on Capitol Hill thirty years ago when I was going door to door, trying to sell this bill.  Cathy sent me congratulations, for it looked like a...
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Life is Expensive

  “Life is cheap” is an expression usually reserved for primitive peoples or violent times, be it warring tribes and clans slaughtering each other like chickens or the showdown-at-noon culture of the American Wild West. At least drawing six-shooters was between two men...
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Thank you, Amy!

  Watching Amy Coney Barrett with her family in the Rose Garden while she was being nominated for the Supreme Court was a moving and inspiring experience for all working women—or should have been. A relatively young mother of seven children who is also a law professor,...
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The Sorry State of Love and Marriage

  I had just started high school at the beginning of the Seventies when Erich Segal’s best-selling tearjerker Love Story and its theater-filling movie version were released to harrow the souls of the romantic. Segal had set out to write an elemental love story in a...
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HOT TOPIC: Are Abortions Ticking Up? (National Review)

https://www.nationalreview.com/corner/are-abortions-ticking-up/ The Charlotte Lozier Institute has a new report compiling preliminary 2018 data, based on reporting from 38 states. (Like many national statistics, abortion numbers are gradually reported by state agencies, on a...
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A Prophetic Editorial: Fifty Years since “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society”

  This month marks the fiftieth anniversary of “A New Ethic for Medicine and Society,”  a remarkably foresighted editorial published in the September 1970 issue of the professional journal California Medicine.  The editorial, which has been reprinted many times over the...
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Perpetuating Castes through Special Hate Crimes Penalties

If my act of blind anger against my declassed neighbor will be punished less severely than the same act against the specially classed neighbor, then this “hate crime” law invites me to attack one victim in the other’s place. This, indeed, is raw and ruthless discrimination!
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Walking Away

  When my second son was born, the nurse did not proclaim “It’s a boy!” as one would expect. Instead her words were “Looks like you got a redhead.” Indeed, he was pink from tip to tail with a shock of red hair that stood up like a sail, or, in my imagination, like Woody...
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