Tag: Heritage Foundation

Pennsylvania Democrats Base Their Pay Equity Bill on Dubious Data

Bradley Vasoli

With Equal Pay Day occurring this Tuesday, Pennsylvania Democrats renewed a push to strengthen state and federal pay equity laws, citing workplace discrimination statistics that scholars often find questionable. 

State Senators Maria Collett (D-North Wales) and Steve Santarsiero (D-Doylestown) proposed a bill that would apply the commonwealth’s Equal Pay Law to a broader universe of workers and a greater scope of fringe benefits. The measure introduced unsuccessfully last session, would also bolster employees’ rights to inquire about the wages a company pays and permit workers to collect back wages from employers who courts find in breach of the law. The senators said these changes are necessary because women in Pennsylvania earn 79 cents for every dollar men receive, a disparity of over $10,000 per year.

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Pennsylvania House Republicans Want to Focus on Regulatory Reform

The Center Square

House Republicans want to prioritize the reform of regulatory issues in Pennsylvania, from concerns about taxes and health care to housing and infrastructure.

A Tuesday hearing for the House Republican Policy Committee for “common sense state regulatory reform” highlighted the challenges Pennsylvania faces.

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Nation Health Agency Spends Millions on Equity, LGBT Issues Instead of Researching Cures

The Center Square

Congress’ recent $1.7 trillion omnibus spending bill increased the budget for medical research funding at the National Institutes of Health to nearly $50 billion in 2023 alone. A closer look at the agency reveals that NIH is increasingly spending its time, and funds, on equity and LGBT issues as well as “systemic racism and inequities.”

The National Institutes of Health has devoted millions of taxpayer dollars toward these kinds of issues for their research, taxpayer money that did not go to the federal health agency’s primary research goal of finding cures and medical treatments.

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Pennsylvania State Senator Wants to Force Gun Owners to Carry Liability Insurance

Bradley Vasoli

State Senator Amanda Cappelletti (D-PA-Norristown) on Friday proposed legislation that would force Pennsylvania gun owners to carry liability insurance. 

In a memorandum describing her upcoming bill, Cappelletti wrote that gun-related injuries and deaths cost Pennsylvanians an estimated $12 million each year through lost wages, physical and mental healthcare payments, first-responder services and other expenses. She reasoned that some of these burdens should fall on firearm owners via insurance premiums. She added that insurers could then vary the size of those premiums according to whether policyholders take what she considers appropriate precautions. 

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Conservative Group Sues Biden Admin for Failing to Share How It Decided to Limit Deportations

Pennsylvania Daily Star Staff

The Heritage Foundation filed a lawsuit against the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Wednesday, seeking who the Biden administration consulted in its decisions to limit immigration enforcement, according to a copy of the lawsuit obtained exclusively by the Daily Caller News Foundation.

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Joe Biden Signs Executive Order Pushing Further Transgender Treatments for Children

Susan Berry, PhD

Joe Biden signed an executive order Wednesday that directs his Departments of Health and Human Services and Education to further push life-altering, “gender-affirming” treatments in children who claim gender confusion, and increase LGBTQ activism infiltration, under the guise of anti-bullying and anti-suicide programs, in public schools throughout the United States.

The order is specifically aimed at states that have banned transgender medical interventions for minors, promoted parental rights, and that have blocked public schools from teaching concepts related to gender identity and sexuality to young children.

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Study: Greater Likelihood of Youth Suicide in ‘Gender-Affirming’ States Allowing Minors Transgender Drugs Without Parental Consent

Susan Berry, PhD

A study by the Heritage Foundation reveals a higher likelihood of youth suicide in states that allow minors to receive puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones without parental consent – an outcome that contradicts what the “gender-affirming” crowd is fear-mongering to parents.

Research has shown the vast majority of children who express signs of gender dysphoria experience a resolution of the problem without medical intervention, but Heritage Senior Research Fellow Jay Greene, Ph.D. notes in his study, released Tuesday, that data indicating adolescents with gender confusion suffer from a high rate of suicide have been “invoked” by LGBTQ activist organizations, media, and even the White House, “to assert that cross-sex medical interventions reduce the risk of suicide.”

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Commentary: Chief Justice of the Court of Natural Law

Pennsylvania Daily Star Staff
Justice Clarence Thomas

Recently, the Heritage Foundation and the Scalia School of Law at George Mason University honored Justice Clarence Thomas on the 30th anniversary of his joining the Supreme Court. A day of panels featuring former Thomas clerks and prominent legal scholars commented on his legacy and future. The justice responded that evening. 

Yet even a full day of often enlightening panels and speeches, doubtless to be supplemented in the years to come by law review issues, articles, and books, misses the crucial fact about Thomas’ jurisprudence that has made him the indispensable justice: his overarching focus on natural law. 

In America natural law comes to sight in the principle of equality, which continues to confuse both conservatives and liberals. With the Democrats’ embrace of “equity,” they have cast aside equality as a principle. Conservatives have never been comfortable with equality to begin with, as Harry Jaffa consistently pointed out in his work. Equality does not mean socialism but rather government by consent, and all the institutions that follow from the preservation of this fundamental element of justice. The clearest expositor of this principle, as Thomas explains, has been Abraham Lincoln, when he attacked the evil of slavery. 

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