Ruth Institute Blog

Can we judge the status of a woman by her pay check? Have women arrived when they have half the seats in the legislature and their husbands do half the chores at home? This is Part I of a symposium by Mercatornet.com on improving the status of women by 2020.

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse’s take on the situation:

I have a radical idea for promoting the dignity of women: the idea that giving birth to children inside marriage is good and worthy use of one’s time and talent. This idea has come under assault from many directions. Read more…

OK, it’s not that I’m Australian mates (born and raised right here in the good old USA, as a matter of fact) but for some reason the first two times I’ve felt motivated to post on Ruth Institute blog it’s been because of something that was happening ‘down under’ (and both times specifically in Queensland, no less).

Before, I was concerned about the vote on an initiative to liberalize the law concerning surrogate births. And now there’s a lobby group in Queensland that wants to make facebook let their members have the option of identifying themselves as ‘transgender’.

It seems the gay lobby and their supporters are determined to force us all to conform -  in terms of our language, thoughts, and behavior – with their world view. Remember how eHarmony was forced to facilitate same-sex dating on their own website?

I’ll bet nobody is taking any gay dating websites to court to make them facilitate Christian evangelism… or the efforts of organizations like Exodus International.

That’s the question Colleen Carroll Campbell asks. in reference to the recent story about a Catholic school in Colorado that denied readmission to the child of a lesbian couple. As she put it:

Boulder’s vociferous gay-rights activists mobilized to protest the priest, the parish and the Archdiocese of Denver, brandishing signs outside the church that plaintively asked: “What would Jesus do?”

For the reporters breathlessly covering the story and many Catholics, the answer was obvious. Jesus would allow the children to stay in the school. He would tell the teachers not to worry about the conflict between their duty to teach Catholic doctrine on marriage and their desire to protect the feelings of students being raised by a couple that flouted that doctrine in a particularly obvious way.

But Colleen noted a detail that seems to have been overlooked in all the breathless hoopla:

A lesbian couple in the liberal bastion of Boulder, Colo., had enrolled their children in a Catholic parish school, only to see those children denied re-enrollment once the parish priest learned of their home situation.

In other words, the children had been in the school, placed there by their legal parents, who evidently didn’t think it worth mentioning that they were living a lifestyle contrary to the very public teaching of the church. Why did they enroll their children in the school operated by a religion that very publically disapproves of homosexual practice? Have they been living in a cave? Do they really believe it is in their children’s best interests to send them to this particular school, all things considered? Here is what Archbishop Chaput has to say:

The policies of our Catholic school system exist to protect all parties involved, including the children of homosexual couples and the couples themselves. Our schools are meant to be “partners in faith” with parents. If parents don’t respect the beliefs of the Church, or live in a manner that openly rejects those beliefs, then partnering with those parents becomes very difficult, if not impossible. It also places unfair stress on the children, who find themselves caught in the middle, and on their teachers, who have an obligation to teach the authentic faith of the Church.

Most parents who send their children to Catholic schools want an environment where the Catholic faith is fully taught and practiced. That simply can’t be done if teachers need to worry about wounding the feelings of their students or about alienating students from their parents. That isn’t fair to anyone—including the wider school community. Persons who have an understanding of marriage and family life sharply different from Catholic belief are often people of sincerity and good will. They have other, excellent options for education and should see in them the better course for their children.

He is assuming goodwill on the part of these two women. I hope he is correct. It is entirely possible, however, that they fully intended to create this kind of controversy. If so, they are in effect, using their children to advance a political point of view, by placing their children in a compromised situation, and daring somebody to do something about it.

The California Human Rights Amendment would define personhood to include everyone, “no matter how small.” The spiritual dynamo behind this amendment is pro-life hero, Rev. Walter Hoye. An African American pastor in Oakland, Rev. Hoye spent time in jail, because he violated the Oakland City Council’s draconian “clinic bubble law.” Rev. Hoye makes the connection between personhood, abortion and slavery better than anyone I know. Read it here.

My formal endorsement is on this page.

Go here to download your petitions.

San Diego County residents will have the chance to vote in better judges, meaning judges who will interpret the Constitution, rather than make up law as they go along. Visit Better Courts Now to find out how you can be involved. If you don’t live in San Diego County, forward this to someone who does! (You can find my video testimony on this page!)

Race and Abortion: a series of billboards in the Atlanta area call attention to the connection between abortion and race. I talk about those billboards in this interview on Issues Etc, on Lutheran Public Radio.

Sean Hannity reports that #100 on his list of wasted stimulus money” $219,000 on an academic study of female hook-up patterns at Syracuse University. Note that the professor/principle investigator explains that hooking up is a public health problem, or at the very least, correlated with public health problems. Why, then, do we not discourage hooking up, the way we discourage smoking and driving without seat belts? Instead of spending “stimulus money” to study a preventable public health problem, why not do something to actually prevent the preventable public health problem?

Remember yesterday’s post about Sex Week at Yale? Why aren’t the administrators at Yale taxed for their share of the public health costs they are creating? (This calls to mind a bigger problem: no one makes any money from people living chaste monogamous life-styles, whereas somebody makes money from each and every problem that flows from non-monogamous sex….)

My colleague Jamie Gruber found this and posted it over at the Ruth Youth blog.