Townhall Review | Commentaries

The state Senate in Utah has now approved by a unanimous vote a bill that would decriminalize polygamy—making it a mere infraction akin to jaywalking.

This development is Utah is the logical extension of the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision in 2015 that legalized same-sex marriage. Once you redefine marriage so that it is no longer the union of a man and a woman, then you’ve eroded your foundation to defend marriage against a change in number. Once you’ve changed gender, the logical obstacle to a change in number is far less significant.

In fact, polygamy is an objective wrong and it’s a deformed human relationship, and it can never be made non-abusive. It can never be made “safe.”

Valerie Hudson—a distinguished professor at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M—made the point well: “The harm” she said, “has been found to be inherent in the practice.”

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On March 3rd, Americans in 14 states will vote in primaries collectively known as “Super Tuesday,” but the day before, Israelis will cast ballots for the third time in less than a year and few citizens see anything “super” about it.

Polling indicates yet another tight race, with neither the center-right Likud Party of Prime Minister Bibi Netanyahu nor the center-left Blue and White Party of General Benny Gantz winning enough parliamentary seats to assemble a government. This time the pressure for the two big parties to join a “national unity government” may become overwhelming, with Netanyahu and Gantz taking turns as Prime Minister. Israelis want leaders to put aside ambitions and animosities for the sake of the country.

In America, after the bitterness of impeachment and the brutal battle for the Democratic nomination, the public may want our leaders to do something similar—placing patriotism above pettiness and compromise above confrontation.

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As we look at the coronavirus today, we do well to remember that serial under-response was the tragic story of U.S. and global reaction to the mislabeled Spanish flu of 1918. That pandemic claimed at least 675,000 lives in the United States and as many as 100 million around the world. The best guess of where it originated was—of all places—rural Kansas.

There’s no worse strategy than secrecy for safeguarding the public from a pandemic. It’s true that panic is a threat, but secrecy and innuendo fuel panic. Already, the U.S. government is behind the curve despite Trump’s demands that it get and remain ahead of coronavirus worries.

The appointment of Vice President Pence to lead is a very good development.

A virus can’t be killed with words, but panic can be steamrolled with information. Hopefully, Vice President Pence and the entire task force won’t settle for business as usual, because this isn’t a usual flu.

Better to be accused of overreaction today than convicted later of indifference.

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If I told you that a bartender born into relative poverty became a Congresswoman earning a six-figure salary, I bet you’d think it sounds like a story of the American dream.

But Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez said this:

“It’s a physical impossibility to lift yourself up by a bootstrap, by your shoelaces? It’s physically impossible. The whole thing is a joke.”

It is true that people face real difficulties in overcoming poverty in any society. We do well to pay attention to such challenges.

But the story of the firebrand Congresswoman shows us just how much one can be “lifted up” by American enterprise and traditional grit. In one life, you can go from poverty to six-figure success—not just one life, in a matter of a few years. See the “#Ibootstrapped” hashtag.

Even today: hard work and perseverance ordered by wisdom in the context of a free market can facilitate great things.

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A story coming out of Connecticut reveals one of the most inevitable collisions on the current cultural landscape.

The policymaking panel for interscholastic sports in Connecticut says a high school student must be able to compete according to the student's declared gender identity.

The parents of three female track athletes are now suing in federal court—charging that allowing biological males to compete as females destroys the very idea of female athletic competition.

The attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom said, “Forcing girls to be spectators in their own sports is completely at odds with Title IX, a federal law designed to create equal opportunities for women in education and athletics. Connecticut’s policy violates that law and reverses nearly 50 years of advances for women.”

Well, that’s an inevitable collision.

The current policy is an attempt to try to posit moral autonomy—one’s stated or claimed gender identity—over biological, creational reality.

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The point of “diversity” in the marketplace should be for people with different points of view contribute different things to the business.

But ideologues today typically use diversity as little more than a code-word for identity politics. They don’t care about genuine diversity—diversity that would include different points of view, different worldviews. In truth: They really just want progressives from various identity groups.

According to a new study by the Religious Freedom and Business Foundation, this thinking is now dominant in the corporate world. Among Fortune 100 companies, “protected categories” such as race and gender were emphasized by corporations over religion by a factor of 34 to 1.

Corporations love to talk about “diversity” and “inclusivity”—but their concern is really only skin deep.

It’s time to go deeper and add religious and viewpoint diversity to America’s largest companies.

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In the nasty, ferocious, astonishingly unpleasant Democratic debate on Wednesday night in Las Vegas, no one thought to ask the contenders if they viewed any of their rivals as outside the Democratic Party mainstream.

Obviously, Bernie Sanders, self-proclaimed “democratic socialist,” is far removed from the traditions and values of the party he now seeks to lead. In fact, the Vermont Independent and former member of the Socialist Workers Party has never even identified himself as a Democrat.

If his brand of left-wing extremism takes over one of our two great political parties, it will be a disaster for that party and for the country.

If the Democrats are so far gone in their leftward journey that they can’t rule out a democratic socialist as their candidate for president, then the party and its candidates have disqualified themselves from serious consideration for national leadership.

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"The 1619 Project doesn't seem to believe in America or black people,"—those words come from Brown University Economics Professor Glenn Loury, talking about the New York Times' project that's pushing a revisionist history of slavery and the United States.

The 1619 Project aims to redefine America's founding date and its founding values.

The 1619 Project presents a stilted view of American history. It tells of slavery (almost exclusively) but not the Civil War. It covers the Tuskegee Experiment but not the Tuskegee Airmen.

Theirs is a demonstrably false story of America as the forever oppressor and black Americans as the forever victims.

But the battle has now been joined.

A group of leading black intellectuals—led by Civil Rights Movement veteran Bob Woodson—have launched "1776 Unites" as a direct response to 1619's divisiveness.

Woodson is correcting the historical record, as he said, "in the spirit of 1776, the date of America's true founding."

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What do coronavirus and the national debt have in common?  The answer is China.  Due in part to secrecy and poor management in China, suddenly the world confronts a major pandemic.  We’re reminded how interconnected our world is and how vulnerable we are to China.

Perhaps this is a reason to take the national debt more seriously.  China owns approximately 5 percent of our debt and some surprise there could have a major economic effect on the US.  It could be the next housing bubble and we are woefully unprepared.

A recent report by the Congressional Budget Office says our debt will equal 98% of the nation’s total economic output by 2030.  President Trump promised to eliminate the deficit in 8 years but what we’ve seen is a nearly 50 percent increase.

Let’s tell Washington to take the debt seriously and beware a bad surprise.

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The New York Times ran an article recently that should have our attention:

The headline: “Belgium Acquits Three Doctors in Assisted Suicide Case.” The article tells the story of the first three medical professionals charged under Belgium’s euthanasia law.

The manslaughter charge came because they had brought about the death of a woman who had not really been qualified as a candidate for euthanasia because—at least one member of her family argued—she was not incurably ill.

Why were the doctors acquitted? Not because of the facts of the case, but rather because they argued, that if the doctors were found guilty and imprisoned, it would have a chilling effect upon other physicians who were conducting euthanasia or assisted suicide.

The argument evidently won in court, with the court deciding that there would be a chilling effect upon physicians killing people if these three doctors were found criminally guilty of having killed a person wrongly.

And there, once again, we have a taste of the logic of the culture of death.

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