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Rejecting Men, Embracing Children

July 6th, 2009 admin No comments

alvare

By by Helen Alvaré, J.D.
Senior Fellow in Law and Ruth Institute Advisory Board Member
The recent news of the nearly 40% out of wedlock birth rate in the United States should pretty much rock our world as citizens and as Catholics. According to the Centers for Disease Control report, this means 1.7 million children were born to unmarried mothers in 2007, a figure 250% greater than the number reported in 1980. The implications for our society loom large. Read more…

Categories: Children, Parenting Tags:

What About Those Octuplets?

June 28th, 2009 admin No comments

by Jennifer Roback Morse

Government indifference to responsible fatherhood is what made the tragedy of OctoMom possible.  What are we to make of the case of Nadya Suleman, the California woman who gave birth to octuplets through IVF? The case has inspired lots of internet chatter and water cooler talk. Read more…

How Marriage Lost in Iowa

June 28th, 2009 admin No comments

By Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D.

From an upcoming issue of the National Catholic Register.

By now, everyone knows that the Supreme Court of Iowa has imposed same-sex “marriage” on the heartland of America, a mere 10 years after the people of that state had expressly voted against it. What very few people know is exactly how unfair this fight really was. Not only was the lineup within the courtroom imbalanced, but the trial court refused to hear relevant evidence. When the case made its way to the Iowa Supreme Court, they didn’t behave much better. Read more…

WHY NOT TAKE HER FOR A TEST DRIVE ?

June 18th, 2009 admin No comments

morse2

Cohabitation Fast Facts

by Jennifer Roback Morse

Research shows that cohabitation is correlated with unhappiness and domestic violence. Cohabiting couples report lower levels of satisfaction in the relationship than married couples. Women are more likely to be abused by a cohabiting boyfriend than a husband. Children are more likely to abused by their mothers’ boyfriends than by her husband, even if the boyfriend is their biological father. If a cohabiting couple ultimately marries, they have a higher propensity to divorce. Read more…

Categories: Co habitation, Marriage Tags:

Putting the Bible on Trial

June 8th, 2009 admin No comments

by Jennifer Roback Morse

Is the Bible hate speech? Or is Bradley Lashawn Fowler a troubled man with a nuisance law suit? Here’s a look at the trends behind this disturbing case. Bradley Lashawn Fowler, a gay man, claims that Christian publishing powerhouses, Zondervan Publishing and Thomas Nelson Publishing infringed his constitutional rights. Read more…

New Improved Disposable Father

June 6th, 2009 admin No comments

by Dr Jennifer Roback Morsemorse2

Britain and Canada are well ahead in the race to make fatherhood completely redundant.

Last fall, I debated same-sex marriage at a university in Florida. I argued that treating same-sex unions identically with marriage would lead to marginalizing fathers from the family even more than they already are. At the time, I viewed that as a long-term prediction. I did not realize I would be proven correct in less than a year. Read more…

Nancy Pelosi’s New Ideology: Condom-ism

May 18th, 2009 admin No comments

by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

Barack Obama promised us “change we can believe in.” He promised to move beyond all the tired ideologies and culture wars of the past. How strange then, that on his watch, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi should propose the implementation of one of the most outdated and laughable ideologies of all. I call that ideology “condom-ism.” Read more…

Categories: Birth Control, Children, Demography Tags:

The Empty European Village

May 6th, 2009 admin No comments

Do countries with sub-replacement fertility need
more government support, or less?
morse
First Published June 6, 2008 at MercatorNet.com.

“It Takes a Village to Raise a Child,” was Hillary Clinton’s Big Idea in the 1990s. Hillary’s supporters and detractors alike regard that slogan as a thinly-veiled code for increasing the government’s responsibility for the care of children. The demographic decline of Europe illustrates what would happen if we took this Village-Raising-Children image seriously.

Read more…

Categories: family Tags: , ,

“What God Has Joined, Let Not Man Put Asunder” … Unless ….

May 5th, 2009 admin No comments

by Helen Alvaré, J.D., Senior Fellow in Law
and Ruth Institute Academic Advisory Board Member

One of the most respected American sociologists, Andrew Cherlin, has recently published The Marriage-Go-Round: the State of Marriage and the Family in America. True to his role at Johns Hopkins University, he proposes in his new work, not only a sociologically based characterization of the American family, but also a public policy response The book is as important and revealing as it is overwhelming and discouraging to supporters of children’s welfare and the overall strength of marriage and families.  Read more…

Categories: Demography, Marriage, Parenting Tags:

Love Isn’t Enough

April 5th, 2009 admin No comments

By L. Hansen Ph.D
hansen
Tuesday, 2 June 2009

Mothers and fathers are not interchangeable. Children need the love of both.

Proponents of same-sex marriage believe the only thing children really need is love. Based on that supposition, they conclude it’s just as good for children to be raised by loving parents of the same sex, as it is to be raised by loving parents of the opposite sex. Unfortunately, that basic assumption—and all that flows from it—is false. Because love isn’t enough! Read more…

Categories: Children, Parenting, family Tags:

The End of Secularism

April 1st, 2009 admin No comments

by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

Secularism was to be the wave of the future. Leading secular theorists such as Peter Berger taught that secularism would be the inevitable result of the inexorable march of progress and that its many advantages would simply drive out religion in all of its forms. No serious discussion was possible or necessary. Religion would be deposited unceremoniously on the dustbin of history. Read more…

Honoring Thy Fathers

February 19th, 2009 admin No comments

wilcoxby BRADFORD WILCOX

For millions of children across the U.S., this Sunday will not be a cause for celebration. Because of dramatic increases in divorce and nonmarital childbearing, about 28% of our nation’s children — more than 20 million kids — now live in a household without their father, up from 10 million kids (14%) in 1970, according to a recent Census Bureau report. Moreover, because most of these boys and girls see their dads infrequently (once a month or less), Father’s Day will offer cold comfort to many of these children. Read more…

Fathers: In or Out?

February 19th, 2009 admin No comments

Helen Alvaré, J.D., Senior Fellow in Law

Occasionally, there is a flurry of media attention to the issue of “responsible fatherhood.”  Promise Keepers will gather thousands of men at a rally or Bill Cosby will call on Black men to get more involved. But there’s much more to the modern “fatherhood” issue than these discrete news items.  Read more…

Categories: Parenting, Single Parents, family Tags:

Are Children Worth It?

January 29th, 2009 admin No comments

January 28,009

by Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

Let us state it at once: Revolutionary Road is a bad movie, despite the awards it garnered from its Hollywood peers. The story is Hollywood’s fantasy of the stultifying life in the 1950’s suburbs. Unbelievable storyline, unsympathetic characters, and a socially irresponsible message: evidently these are the requirements for Hollywood awards. Read more…

Categories: Children, Demography, family Tags:

Walking in a Demographic Winter Wonderland

January 5th, 2009 admin No comments

By Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

Why are people averting their eyes from the coming collapse of population growth?
Demographic Winter is an independently produced film describing the consequences of the population collapse of industrialized countries. I have been amazed at the response, or I should say, lack of response to this film. Read more…

Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage Will Increase Prevalence of Homosexuality: Research Provides Significant Evidence

January 1st, 2009 admin No comments

by Trayce Hansen, Ph.D.

An accumulation of research from around the world finds that societies which endorse homosexual behavior increase the prevalence of homosexuality in those societies. The legalization of same-sex marriage-which is being considered by voters in several U.S. states-is the ultimate in societal endorsement and will result in more individuals living a homosexual lifestyle.

Extensive research from Sweden, Finland, Denmark, and the United States reveals that homosexuality is primarily environmentally induced. Specifically, social and/or family factors, as well as permissive environments which affirm homosexuality, play major environmental roles in the development of homosexual behavior…

A Danish research investigation studied two million adults living in Denmark, a country where same-sex marriage has been legal since 1989. This study uncovered a number of specific environmental factors that increase the probability an individual will seek a same-sex rather than an opposite-sex partner for marriage.

For Danish men, the environmental factors associated with higher rates of homosexual marriage include an urban birthplace and an absent or unknown father. Significantly, there was a linear relationship between the degree of urbanization of birthplace and whether a man chose homosexual or heterosexual marriage as an adult. In other words, the more urban a man’s birthplace, the more likely he was to marry a man, while the more rural a man’s birthplace, the more likely he was to marry a woman.

For Danish women, the environmental factors related to increased likelihood of homosexual marriage include an urban birthplace, maternal death during adolescence, and mother-absence…

For American men, the environmental factor most related to homosexual behavior was the degree of urbanization during the teenage years. Specifically, boys who lived in large urban centers between the ages of 14 and 16 were three to six times more likely to engage in homosexual behavior than were boys who lived in rural communities during those same ages. The authors offer the following possibility: “an environment that provides increased opportunities for and fewer negative sanctions against same-gender sexuality may both allow and even elicit expression of same-gender interest and sexual behavior.” …

For American women, the environmental factor most associated with a homosexual or bisexual identity was a higher level of education. And though that was also true for men, the pattern for women was more dramatic. For instance, a woman with a college degree was nine times more likely to identify herself as non-heterosexual than a woman with only a high school diploma…

[Researchers] believe one explanation is the fact that with more acceptance, even encouragement, of homosexuality at universities, more university women embrace a non-heterosexual lifestyle. For an example of how that might develop, see Dennis Prager’s article entitled, “College Taught Her Not To Be a Heterosexual.”

Based on the findings of the American research study, environments that sanction and/or promote homosexuality induce more individuals to engage in homosexual behavior…

Social and cultural norms, as well as legal regulations, influence human behavior including sexual behavior. So not surprisingly, as the United States and other Western Countries have become increasingly pro-homosexual-socially, politically, and legally-they have experienced an upward trend in the number of individuals engaging in homosexual behavior. That trend will continue if we move beyond mere tolerance of homosexual behavior (which is appropriate) to formally honoring it by legalizing same-sex marriage.

Excuse me, Madam Speaker

July 30th, 2010 admin No comments

with Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

Nancy Pelosi made Stupid History by her claim that “family planning” funds will stimulate the economy. Her argument, if you can dignify it with that term, is that reducing unwanted pregnancies will reduce the burden on the taxpayers. But she doesn’t ask herself whether more contraception is really the answer to “unwanted” pregnancies. Read more…

Categories: Birth Control, Single Parents, family Tags: