Somehow, five days a week—-week in and week out—- Public Discourse , the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute, manages to post an illuminating and engaging essay on a significant issue in our public life. Yesterday it was Matthew Franck’s powerful reflection on abortionists in contemporary culture as “providers of necessities” (as Lincoln said of slave-sellers) who are at the same time “utterly despised.” Today it is a tightly argued piece by Charles Capps on meeting the practical needs of unmarried domestic partners (whether their relationship is platonic or otherwise) without “defining out of existence the only legal category whose purpose is precisely to integrate the kind of act that can result in conception with the kind of environment best suited for a child’s development.”
