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This article, published by the TRIB Live, quotes Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley J. Smith: The documents could lock a person into a decision before they understand the situation, said Wesley J. Smith, a senior fellow in human rights and bioethics at the Discovery Institute, a conservative Virginia-based policy group. “You can’t possibly know the circumstances in which you’ll find Read More ›

Defenders of Peter Singer like to say that his critics are just too dull to understand what he is really saying. As proof, Singer’s defenders note that opponents of his views often compare him to Hitler. And it is true: Some are so appalled by his advocacy for the permissibility of infanticide that they reflexively wield der Führer’s bones as relics of Read More ›

Norman Ornstein had a piece in the Washington Post railing against “death panels” in Indiana and Arizona, both of which involved Medicaid budget limits. He omitted the death panel in Oregon — perhaps because it is a liberal state? — which has explicitly rationed care under Medicaid since being allowed to conduct rationing under the Clinton administration. In Oregon, Medicaid has a list of Read More ›

This article, published by The Gospel Coalition, quotes Discovery Institute Senior Fellow Wesley Smith: “The new rules are a full frontal assault on religious liberty at an institutional level,” says Wesley Smith, a bioethicist who serves as a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute’s Center for Human Exceptionalism, as a consultant for the Center for Bioethics and Culture, and with the Read More ›

Phillip E. Johnson replies in Reason in the Balance to Nancey Murphy’s review of Darwin on Trial. “In her review of Darwin on Trial, Murphy faults me for failing to evaluate Darwinism on Lakatosian criteria. She concedes that it is difficult to determine whether a program is progressive or degenerative. (If Catholic modernism is an example of a progressive program, Read More ›

When I learned today that the federal bureaucracy had promulgated a rule compensating physicians for the time they spend counseling patients on end-of-life health-care decisions, I wasn’t surprised. A similar provision was dropped from the Obamacare bill, but anyone who understands the profoundly bureaucratic nature of contemporary government knew that that was not necessarily the end of it. The 2,700-page Read More ›

Hubris: No better word describes the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine’s plan to persuade Californians to borrow another $3 billion to keep it in business funding stem cell research. The CIRM was created in 2004 in the wake of President George W. Bush’s order restricting federal funding of embryonic stem cell research. Knowing that many Californians perceived themselves as “the Read More ›

‘Tis the season to be litigious. In Pittsburgh, Staten Island, Brookville, Ind., and Jackson, Miss., Nativity scenes have been challenged, sometimes removed, then (in Pittsburgh) eventually replaced. The manger scene has become such a potent symbol in the “war over Christmas” that its revolutionary meaning is being lost — even by some who “embrace the Christian label,” as news articles Read More ›