Stanley Kurtz is a conservative writer and senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He contributed to The Weekly Standard on topics including marriage policy, Middle Eastern culture, and critical examinations of Barack Obama's background and associations. He is also known for his writings on higher education and social policy at National Review Online.
Barack Obama's neighborhood newspaper, the Hyde Park Herald, has a longstanding tradition of opening its pages to elected officials-from Chicago aldermen to state legislators to U.S. senators. Obama himself, as a state senator, wrote more than 40 columns for the Herald, under the title "Springfield…
To the question of the moment--What did Barack Obama know and when did he know it?--I answer, Obama knew everything, and he's known it for ages. Far from succumbing to surprise and shock after Jeremiah Wright's disastrous performance at the National Press Club, Barack Obama must have long been…
Culture and Conflict in the Middle East
IT TOOK A TELEVISION SERIES about a Viagra-popping patriarch with three friendly/jealous wives and tightly scheduled evenings to set off a serious public debate about polygamy. And that was precisely the intention of the creators of this now infamous television show--no, not Big Love, the American…
ON SEPTEMBER 23, 2005, the 46-year-old Victor de Bruijn and his 31-year-old wife of eight years, Bianca, presented themselves to a notary public in the small Dutch border town of Roosendaal. And they brought a friend. Dressed in wedding clothes, Victor and Bianca de Bruijn were formally united with…
HAS SAN FRANCISCO SECEDED FROM the United States? The passage on Election Day of Measure I, dubbed "College, Not Combat," would seem almost to amount to that. By a margin of 60 percent to 40 percent, San Francisco's voters told military recruiters to stay out of the city's high schools. Although…
[img nocaption float="right" width="540" height="395" render="<%photoRenderType%>"]1136[/img] ONLY A FEW YEARS AGO, two prominent demographers hailed the Dutch family as a model for Europe. Somehow the Dutch had managed to combine liberal family law and a robust welfare state with a surprisingly…
MARRIAGE IS SLOWLY DYING IN SCANDINAVIA. A majority of children in Sweden and Norway are born out of wedlock. Sixty percent of first-born children in Denmark have unmarried parents. Not coincidentally, these countries have had something close to full gay marriage for a decade or more. Same-sex…
AFTER GAY MARRIAGE, what will become of marriage itself? Will same-sex matrimony extend marriage's stabilizing effects to homosexuals? Will gay marriage undermine family life? A lot is riding on the answers to these questions. But the media's reflexive labeling of doubts about gay marriage as…
REGARDLESS OF HOW the Supreme Court rules this summer on affirmative action at the University of Michigan, its decision is bound to bring change to our racial spoils system. Because affirmative action is an intrinsically unstable practice, the awaited ruling, far from settling the issue, will only…
Unholy War Terror in the Name of Islam by John L. Esposito Oxford University Press, 196 pp., $25 OSAMA BIN LADEN may be hunkered down, half-starved in some Pakistani village right now, yet he continues to sow considerable confusion among America's leftist academics. Take, for example, John L.…
AS CONGRESS prepares to convene hearings on the intelligence failures exposed by September 11, it is important to recognize that the failures go beyond the dearth of agents on the ground in the Middle East and the shortage of Arabic speakers at the CIA. Our neglect of the terrorist threat is of…
CONSERVATIVES HAVE BEEN RAILING AGAINST the leftist takeover of the academy for a generation, with little to show for their efforts. A scholarly attack on Jane Austen for her unwitting complicity with British imperialism in Mansfield Park is, after all, unlikely to stir public outrage. But what…