Townhall Review | Commentaries

One of the most well-documented irrefutable trends of our times is the continued secularization of Western societies. A new study has come out about young people in Europe indicating that the future may be even more secular than we knew.

Commenting on the report, Steven Bullivant of St. Mary’s University in London says,

“With some notable exceptions, young adults increasingly are not identifying with or practicing religion. Christianity as a default, as a norm, is gone and probably gone for good or at least for the next 100 years.”

In the United States, we are ourselves looking at a speeded up velocity of this secularization, due to the political and moral change in the coming generations of the millennials and those identified now as Generation Z.

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Stephen Reinhardt, who was called the “liberal lion” of the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, passed away on March 29th in Los Angeles. During his almost 40 years on the appeals court bench, Reinhardt wrote opinions that struck down the constitutionality of the words “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance and overturned Proposition 8, California’s initiative defining marriage as a male-female union.

Reinhardt’s death means that there are now seven vacancies on the notoriously liberal Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. President Trump has an historic opportunity to remake the Ninth Circuit—and the entire federal judiciary. The vast majority of his judicial nominees thus far have been stellar. They will adhere to the rule of law and interpret the Constitution based on the words in it, not the ideas they want to be in it. 

The President should continue his good work in this arena.  Doing so will remake federal jurisprudence for decades to come.

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While CIA Director Mike Pompeo’s confirmation as the next secretary of state looks to be a done deal, whether his deputy, Gina Haspel, will be confirmed as the first female director of “the Agency” is less certain.

Haspel has dedicated her adult life to protecting the country, often in far-off, dangerous places, with great distinction. Nevertheless, it seems some on the left want to re-litigate the early years of the post-9/11 world. They want to debate “enhanced interrogation techniques” again, like waterboarding.

Serious people understand that all young intelligence operators will be watching this proceeding, deciding whether the hard choices they are being asked to make right now are going to be subject to show trials years or even decades down the road.

Gina Haspel ought to be confirmed.

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As if President Trump did not face enough legal challenges, there are now two threatened prosecutions of Americans at the International Criminal Court.

First, the Palestinian territories have filed a complaint against both President Trump and Prime Minister Netanyahu over relocating Israel’s capital to Jerusalem. While an important matter for Middle Eastern politics, it’s difficult to see how this could be a criminal matter for the court.

Second, the prosecutor is seeking authority to investigate whether the U.S. military is guilty of torture and other war crimes in Afghanistan. Although the U.S. is not a member of the court, Afghanistan, on whose territory the alleged crimes occurred, is. 

If either of these moves ahead, it would be the first time the ICC has sought to prosecute Americans and would set up a major confrontation between the U.S. and the court.

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If pro-life conservatives ever claimed that supporters of Planned Parenthood had “blood on their hands”, the mainstream media would howl in protest.

Why, then, do anti-gun activists who make precisely such claims about supporters of the NRA draw widespread acclaim for their courage and idealism?

The connection between abortion and killing is obvious—even if you deny that the procedure is equivalent to murder. But there’s no connection between backing gun-rights and endorsing killing. Disagreement over specific policy proposals doesn’t mean that those on the other side want to consign our children to early death or to obliterate our Constitutional rights.

Republican leaders in Washington have already moved ahead with common sense enhancements in our gun regulations but hysterical, polarizing rhetoric only makes constructive reform less likely.

 

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Larry Kudlow has been subject to unending attacks from the mainstream media since being announced as Trump’s chief economic advisor.

Kudlow is a devout Catholic who credits God for getting him through his years of substance abuse. On CNBC, Kudlow said that, whatever might happen during his tenure as Trump’s advisor, it would be the will of God. This sentiment isn’t actually controversial, but on their MSNBC show, Ali Velshi and Stephanie Ruhle found it worthy of incredulous laughter and snide sarcasm.

Velshi used to work for Al Jazeera—if someone there had said inshallah (God’s will) no one at MSNBC would have dreamed of treating them with such contempt!

Kudlow is a fine conservative economist and will serve the president well.

And his faith should be off limits.

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This Sunday is Easter, a great celebration day for Christians. The Church bears a mandate to proclaim the truth that God raised Jesus Christ from the dead. The resurrected Lord gave the Church a sacred commission to take the gospel—the message of Christ’s victory over sin and death—throughout the world.

So, as the Church gathers to celebrate the resurrection of Jesus Christ, Christians look back in thankfulness to that empty tomb and forward to the fulfillment of Christ’s purposes in us. The resurrection of Jesus Christ is the promise of our resurrection from the dead, and of Christ’s total victory over sin and death.

The resurrection of Jesus Christ is at the very center of the Christian gospel. The empty tomb is full of power.

Happy Easter to all. May the joy of the resurrection be yours.

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Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg has acknowledged that an app was able to gain and then to manipulate the personal data of about 50 million Facebook users for a political purpose. Zuckerberg said, “We will learn from this experience to secure our platform further and make our community safer for everyone going forward.”

Looming over this controversy is the entire world of modern social media.  In a way that even George Orwell and Aldous Huxley could not have foreseen in their worst nightmares, social media has lured millions and millions of us to surrender our own personal, private information to the world.

The most important thing to understand from this story is the two-edged sword of technology. Some technologies can bring about great good. Others bring about evil, but the reality is that even the most benign of technologies is still a technology that can almost always be misused.

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The Beltway establishment has reacted with horror to President Trump’s appointment of John Bolton as national security adviser. Ambassador Bolton, they claim, is a dangerous warmonger unfit for the office.

That’s wrong. As the president’s top security aide, Bolton will be an honest broker and someone who can drive decisions through molasses-thick resistance. These qualities, plus his top-shelf intellect, make Bolton the best national security player to join Trump’s West Wing team so far.

The bottom line is that Vladimir Putin’s worst nightmare just walked into the West Wing. Bolton can outlast and outthink anyone Putin, Kim Jong Un or Xi Jinping sends to negotiate quiet deals before the big public ones with the president.

There are rough waters ahead across the globe and the president is to be commended for surrounding himself with strong, competent and very smart foreign policy professionals.

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A new poll by the Economist/YouGov organization shows glaring contradictions in the way Democrats define morality, with big majorities saying they accept abortion, divorce, gambling, drinking alcohol, gay sex, pre-marital sex and doctor-assisted suicide.

One form of behavior, however, drew overwhelming condemnation: 82 percent found “hunting animals for sport” to be morally wrong!

If this reflects a tender concern for all living things, isn’t it worth asking if a baby in the womb is a living thing? Even if someone don’t consider the baby to be fully human before delivery, surely that unborn child deserves as much respect as, say, a deer.

Yet Democrats find abortion more acceptable than hunting, by a margin of three to one—showing obtuse inconsistency at best, utter derangement at worst.

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