Religion & Liberty Online Archives

Family Issues

February 28, 2019

Socialism contributes to a global baby deficit

Polarizing figures throughout history – from doomsday cults to political extremists – have advised their followers not to have children. Expert commentators and a groundbreaking new study show that this, when mixed with government pressure, has led countless mothers to lifelong remorse and deprived nations of a better standard of living. Continue Reading...
February 20, 2019

Democrats proposed subsidies do not make the rent any less high

Democratic Senators and Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Cory Booker have both recently proposed legislation to address the issue of rising housing costs. Senator Harris’ bill ‘The Rent Relief Act’ and Senator Booker’s bill ‘Housing, Opportunity, Mobility, and Equity Act’ both focus on assisting people who pay more than 30% of their gross income on rent or, in the case of Senator Harris’s bill, rent and utilities. Continue Reading...
January 18, 2019

Europe’s most pressing problem

“Most urgently of all,” asked George Weigel in The Cube and the Cathedral, “why is Europe committing demographic suicide?” Weigel’s book was published almost fifteen years ago, but his question on Europe’s infertility is as urgent as ever—even more urgent now, in fact. Continue Reading...
January 16, 2019

Homeschooling a parent’s choice, not the state’s

Decades ago, when I was first ordained a priest, I shared a prejudice that many people hold: I thought homeschooling families were odd. I believed schooling children at home deprived such children of opportunities to be with other children causing them to be less able to communicate with others, socially awkward and reclusive and narrow in their experience and understanding of the world that they would one day have to grow up in and navigate. Continue Reading...
November 28, 2018

Demographic decline: Ben Franklin’s two cents

Not one of Benjamin Franklin’s better-known works, but one worth reading nonetheless, is a brief 1751 essay called Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, &c. Franklin covers a lot of ground in just a few pages, and brings up quite a few ideas worth commenting on, but I wanted to highlight one paragraph and its relevance for the “birth dearth” we see in the West today. Continue Reading...
November 05, 2018

Judges: Parents must pay children’s bills into their 30s

Michael Rotondo rose to infamy earlier this year as the 30-year-old whose parents had to sue in order to evict him from their home. But across Europe, judges have ruled that parents must financially support their children well into their 30s, until they finish schooling – or until they find a job in the same field as their sometimes-esoteric degrees. Continue Reading...