“To me,” she said in a statement, “this has never been a gay or lesbian issue. It is about marriage and God’s word. It is a matter of religious liberty.” It’s telling that Kim Davis chose those words to defend herself last week. Davis, the clerk of Rowan County, a rural, impoverished and previously obscure […]

You frequently find fortune cookie aphorisms, yes, but it’s not often that you find searing insight within Twitter’s 140-character confines. Which is why a June tweet from one Dan Hodges — his profile describes him as a British political commentator — stood out. “In retrospect,” wrote Hodges, “Sandy Hook marked the end of the U.S. […]

“I’ve seen enough. I don’t want to see any more” — Bruce Springsteen, “Cover Me” When terrorists beheaded Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl in 2002 and posted video of the killing online, I refused to look. I explained my reasoning in this space. To watch that video, I wrote, knowing it was staged specifically […]

“To want what I have, to take what I’m given with grace … for this, I pray.” — From “For My Wedding,” by Don Henley America is a nation of faith. So it is often said. In faith, a baker refuses to bake a cake for a gay couple’s wedding. In faith, a minister prays […]

This is a column about three words of moral cowardice: “All lives matter.” Those words have risen as a kind of counter to “Black lives matter,” the movement that coalesced in response to recent killings and woundings of unarmed African-Americans by assailants — usually police officers — who often go unpunished. Mike Huckabee raised that […]

Here is a challenge for you. Reconcile the following: In 1791, the Bill of Rights was ratified, including the Fourth Amendment, guaranteeing “the right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures.” In 2015, a 21-year-old woman named Charnesia Corley says she underwent a public […]

He wanted to start a race war. That, you will recall, was what authorities say white supremacist Dylann Roof had in mind when he shot up a storied African-American church in June. It might have surprised him to learn that we’ve already had a race war. No, that’s not how one typically thinks of World […]

This will not be a column about Sandra Bland, although it could be. Certainly there is cause for outrage over the way a Texas state trooper escalated the routine traffic stop of an indignant African-American woman into a violent arrest; she died of an apparent jail cell suicide three days later. But Chuck would say […]

Here’s the thing about principle. Unless applied equally it is not really principle at all. He who climbs on his moral high horse when a wrong is done to him or his, but leaves the horse stabled when an identical wrong is done to someone else, acts from self-interest and that is the opposite of […]