Metronews

The Supreme Court’s decision on Jack Phillips and his Masterpiece Cakeshop is expected in the next two to three weeks. While the outcome could surprise us all, the result both sides of the political spectrum predict is a substantial win for the Left packaged as a favorable verdict for the Right. That is, the court will rule “for” Phillips but against his cause. The reason is pretty simple: Justice Anthony Kennedy is the swing vote, and in the oral arguments last December, his mind seemed made up. Kennedy knows that if Phillips’ speech as a cake artist is protected, then the speech of creative designers of every kind in the wedding industry must also be protected. “It means there’s basically an ability to boycott gay marriages,” Kennedy said, an outcome he made clear was not acceptable. “The problem for you,” Kennedy explained to Phillips’ attorneys, “is that so many of these examples—and a photographer can be included—do involve speech.” Protecting such speech would be “an affront...

The no longer quiet alliance between Never Trump conservatives and liberals does not offer an alternative to a choice between the Democratic “resistance” and Republicans. It’s not as if it was a great secret but last week’s New York Times feature about the open ties between prominent conservative critics of President Donald Trump and liberals made it official. The last stalwarts of the “Never Trump” conservative movement are preparing to do more than merely complain about the object of their disdain; they’re now ready to join forces with liberals to oppose the president both in court and perhaps in future political campaigns. Contrary to their hopes, this is not a harbinger of a political realignment. While the majority of Republican primary voters in 2016 voted for candidates other than Trump and a significant number of them continued to voice displeasure with their party’s nominee throughout that campaign, the overwhelming majority of GOP voters eventually voted for Trump that Nov...

Jorge Bergoglio found his Leni Riefenstahl in Wim Wenders. I went to see Wenders’ “Pope Francis: A Man of His Word” expecting hagiography. What I watched came closer to pornography. It was the pornography of blatant propaganda, that notorious key to “the heart of the broad masses.” Lust for dominance is airbrushed into a semblance of piety; avarice for celebrity is lighted and staged to look like humility. Contrary to the court press, Damon Linker recently ascribed “psychological acuity and Machiavellian cunning” to Pope Francis. And he is correct. But Linker’s interest lies in the Catholic Church’s eventual alignment with contemporary mores, especially legitimization of homosexuality. Yet there remains a larger, more compelling issue: the sacralization of politics via the person of the pope himself. Francis is not reforming the church but denaturing it, reducing it to a social tool. Commissioned by the Vatican, the film ups the ante on papalolotry. Its deluge of glorifying images s...

Ireland voted to repeal its long-standing abortion ban on Friday, overturning a constitutional amendment that protected “the right to life of the unborn,” requiring legislators to consider the inherent worth of the fetus in all legislative decisions. In the span of just 35 years, Ireland’s overwhelmingly Catholic population has drifted, in public attitudes and votes, from entrenching the rights of the unborn to laying the foundation for stripping them away. Newspapers around the world are hailing the decision as an “historic” mandate to expand women’s rights across the nation, which is abandoning its Catholic sensibilities for the trappings of progressivism at warp speed. But what the overflow of laudations is failing to see is that the voters in Ireland, in the name of “women’s rights,” are trampling upon rights that are key to the existence of the liberal democracy that allowed for such a referendum in the first place. Let’s start with the rights on which the “Yes” Vote (that is, t...

In their continuing coordinated effort to criticize all things Trump, the mainstream media has unwittingly dragged illegal aliens out of the shadows — and into the sight of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement Agency. Now open-border activists are telling the press to pipe down because the attention is both unwarranted and unwanted. The negative coverage began following the April 26, 2018, testimony by Steven Wagner, the acting assistant secretary of the Administration for Children and Families of the Department of Health and Human Services, before a Senate subcommittee on Homeland Security and Governmental affairs. During the hearing, Wagner, who oversees the work of the Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR), which in turn holds responsibility for the care and placement of unaccompanied alien children (UAC), detailed the current state of the UAC program, as well as improved policies implemented since February 2016. While Wagner catalogued the many improvements implemented by ORR, ...

What does the Holocaust really have to do with the Palestinian conflict? On May 14, 1948, David Ben-Gurion declared the state of Israel was established. That’s 70 years ago. That’s so long ago that my mom was watching “Kukla, Fran and Ollie” and my dad, well, his family didn’t even have a TV yet. On June 10, 1967, at the close of the Six-Day War, Israel took control of East Jerusalem and the West Bank from Jordan and of the Gaza Strip from Egypt. That’s more than 50 years ago, two years before we landed on the moon. Yet there are about 5 million individuals today classified as Palestinian refugees. Why? Here’s the background. Who Survived the Holocaust? Not long ago, my family and I paid a visit to the  Illinois Holocaust Museum  in Skokie. The museum, as one might expect, takes one from Nazis’ pre-war treatment of the Jews to the Polish ghettos to the death camps, then extends the story, past the “Schindler’s List” happily-ever-after to the postwar displaced pe...

The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon a rock; the way of a ship in the midst of the sea; and the way of a man with a maid. —Proverbs 30:19 In order to understand what guidance natural law gives us about war and peace in our time, it is first necessary to have some understanding of what “natural law” is. Far from being a hazy concept peculiar to some philosophers, natural law is quite simply how the world works. It is reality. Our very civilization is based on understanding that nature and man exist and behave according to laws that our minds can grasp by observation and study. Only recently has it become customary to distinguish between facts and values—that is, between what is and what we want. Formerly, the fundamental distinction was between truth (reality) and opinions (the thoughts we winnow to understand reality). The people who built the United States believed that attention to the laws of nature and of nature’s God was the key to thriving because they kn...