Failure to communicate

Interview | Amherst College Professor Hadley Arkes on ways a pro-life and pro-family president could be more effective | Marvin Olasky

Despite success in the U.S. elections last year and Iraq’s success in its recent elections, many conservatives as we enter spring are walking around with wintry faces. Perhaps that’s because the left still dominates the realms that create cultural messages—media and academia—and because last week judicial imperialism reared its head once again, this time in the person of a California Superior Court judge who ruled that gay couples have a right to marriage licenses.

Hadley P. Arkes is one of the nation’s leading observers of how the interplay of law, media, and presidential leadership can change a culture. A political philosophy professor at Amherst College since 1966, he is the author of Natural Rights and the Right to Choose (Cambridge University Press, 2003) and five other distinguished books. He was the architect and main advocate of the Born-Alive Infants’ Protection Act, which he first proposed in 1988 as “the most modest first” step for legislating on abortion and pushing those who call themselves pro-choice to face the logic of their positions. President Bush signed the act into law in 2002.