Louis A. Ruprecht

How can a secular state justify its desire to discriminate between married persons and single persons? What compelling state interest is served by creating such social groups? I suspect that when this debate has made its way through the courts, a new issue will have emerged: that the state has no business in the marriage business, period.

That’s what the posters are saying. And lest you think they just mean happy-go-lucky, the image on the broadsheet shows…

A new four-volume work from the Vatical Library suggests that the concerns of the papacy in the early modern period were focused almost entirely on the new threat posed by the Protestants. If some scientists, especially the astronomers, got caught in the cross-fire, then this was only because they were perceived to be Protestant-style “free thinkers.”