Ruth Institute Blog

In a previous post, I discussed a Life-Style Leftist blogman’s outraged response to a perfectly reasonable statement about a very sound study, and analyzed the rhetorical strategy of accusing your opponent of saying  something he didn’t say. In this post, I want to talk about the substance of the study, what it shows and what it doesn’t.

It is always dangerous to speculate about people’s motives of course. I’ve never met Zach Ford, the blogman over at Think Progress, so I don’t know exactly what he is thinking. But I can say this: the logic of the marriage redefinition movement requires its advocates to deny that gender matters.

If gender is to become legally irrelevant to marriage, the logic of their position drives them to claim that gender is irrelevant to parenthood. The gender of parents doesn’t matter.  The gender of children doesn’t matter.  There is no difference between “mothers” and “fathers:” those are just empty, social constructs. There are only generic parents. In fact, everyone is a generic person. There are no sons and daughters either, only generic children.  So, the impact of an absent father on a girl should be exactly the same as an absent mother on a girl, or an absent father on a boy, or as an absent mother on a boy.

But now, take a look at the study that Mr. Ford claims that Mr. Stanton has mischaracterized.  The title of the study reveals that it is profoundly about gender, “The
Trouble with Boys: Social Influences and the Gender Gap in Disruptive Behavior.”  Mr. Ford characterizes the paper thus: “If anything, the Booth study supports arguments Read more…

This is one of our continuing series of posts on identifying the rhetorical tactics of the opponents of marriage. This strategy of mischaracterizing your opponents’ statements is extremely common, and takes several different forms.  Today we are going to deal with just one: being outraged over a statement you attribute to your opponent, but which he did not in fact make!

An example of this from Think Progress crossed my desk yesterday. Here is the breathless statement from left-wing LGBT blogman, Zach Ford, attacking Focus on the Family (FOTF):

But though FOTF is clearly trying to use this as evidence against same-sex marriage, the study did not prove anything “against” same-sex parents. The study in question (PDF here) did not, in fact, address same-sex parenting whatsoever, but instead compared children raised by married heterosexual parents to children raised by a single mother. It is one of many “fatherless” studies that conservative groups use to conflate not having a father/having one mother with having two mothers.

Mercy! Those nefarious right-wingers! Transforming a study that has nothing to do with same sex parents into an attack on gay parents! Read more…

Some of my Friends With Wrong Ideas (FrieWIs) keep a very close watch on me.  I don’t feel a need to respond to every post.  Every once in a while, however, they do me a favor.  Take this audio clip posted over at Equality Matters, for instance.   Posted with a breathless headline, “NOM’s Morse: Hate Crimes Laws are Anti-American, Limit Free Speech.”  This headline is designed to brand me, before you, the reader/listener, even hear what I have to say. This is from an hour long interview I did with a blog radio host called Stacy Swimp. Equality Matters went to the trouble of pulling out this 5 minutes and making it into its own little post. Read more…

The Family Research Council has caught up with the Ruth Institute. I shouldn’t gloat, but the big DC-Beltway Think Tank has just discovered the Presumption of Paternity. Out here in San Diego, as far from the Beltway as you can get and still be in the Continental US, we have been saying this stuff, literally, for years:

Same-sex “marriage” is not just an attack on a traditional social institution–it’s an attack on the order of nature itself. That was made clear again this week when an Iowa court ruled that a child whose mother was a lesbian “married” to a woman and whose father was an anonymous sperm donor should have both female “spouses” listed on the child’s birth certificate. The ruling was based on a legal principle called “the presumption of paternity,” which historically has stated that when a child is born to a married woman, her husband is presumed to be the father of that child. In other words, the law “presumed” what was almost always true. But in the wake of the Iowa Supreme Court’s legalization of same-sex “marriage” in 2009, Judge Eliza Ovrom has twisted the “presumption of paternity” into a “presumption of parentage.” So what was once a presumption of something that was nearly always biologically Read more…

I just saw this headline in the Des Moines Register:

“Judge: Put both moms’ names on
the birth certificate.”

 “Both moms?!?!?!”  Yes, you read it right: “both moms.”

Judges created same sex “marriage” in Iowa in a case called Varnum v Brien. So, now another judge rules that the spouse in a same sex marriage should be listed as the child’s other parent. Listen:

“Pursuant to Varnum v. Brien, where a married woman gives birth to a baby conceived through use of an anonymous sperm donor, the Department of Public Health should place her same-sex spouse’s name on the child’s birth certificate without requiring the spouse to go through an adoption proceeding,”

The State Attorney tried to argue that the state law’s wording in regards to parentage is gender-specific, and not open to interpretation. (Hold it right there: do you mean to tell me that a State Attorney was actually defending the state’s family law?!?!  We aren’t used to that here in CA.  Out here, the Attorney General and the Governor just flatout refused to defend Prop 8.   But I digress!) The State Attorney quite sensibly stated:

“It is a biological impossibility for a woman to ever legally establish paternity of a child.” Read more…

And here is another article, this one from 2009, on why “privatizing marriage” will not live up to its promise.

One proposed solution to the divisiveness of the same-sex marriage debate is to have the government get out of the marriage business altogether. This proposal is appealing because it seems to remove marriage from the realm of political contentiousness. We could mimic a market-type solution, in which individuals can make their own decisions about the meaning of marriage, and we need not make any collective decision. But these appearances are deceiving. We need to think through what it actually means to say that the government should “get out of the marriage business.”

Read it all here.

I have been writing an open letter to Ron Paul on why “privatizing marriage” or “getting the government out of the marriage business” is a really bad idea.  In the process, I went back to some of my old writings on this topic. I have been trying to get people to pay attention to the problems with this so-called ”libertarian” position since 2005!  Here is a link to that first foray on this topic, originally published in Policy Review, the flagship publication of the Hoover Institution, back in 2005.

Marriage is a naturally occurring, pre-political institution that emerges spontaneously from society. Western society is drifting toward a redefinition of marriage as a bundle of legally defined benefits bestowed by the state. As a libertarian, I find this trend regrettable. The organic view of marriage is more consistent with the libertarian vision of a society of free and responsible individuals, governed by a constitutionally limited state. The drive toward a legalistic view of marriage is part of the relentless march toward politicizing every aspect of society.

Although gay marriage is the current hot-button topic, it is a parenthetical issue. The more basic question is the meaning of love, marriage, sexuality, and family in a free society. I define marriage as a society’s normative institution for both sexual activity and the rearing of children. The modern alternative idea is that society does not need such an institution: No particular arrangement should be legally or culturally privileged as the ideal context for sex or childbearing.

The current drive for creating gay unions that are the legal equivalent of marriage is part of this ongoing process of dethroning marriage from its pride of place. Only a few self-styled conservative advocates of gay marriage, such as Andrew Sullivan and Jonathan Rauch, seem to understand and respect the social function of marriage. Marriage as an institution necessarily excludes some kinds of behavior and endorses other kinds of behavior. This is why the conservative case for gay marriage is so remarkable: It flies in the face of the cultural stampede toward social acceptance of any and all sexual and childbearing arrangements, the very stampede that has fueled so much of the movement for gay marriage.

This article is not primarily about gay marriage. It isn’t even about why some forms of straight marriage are superior to others. Rather, the purpose of this article is to explain why a society, especially a free society, needs the social institution of marriage in the first place. I want to argue that society can and must discriminate among various arrangements for childbearing and sexual activity.

Read it all here.

I just came from Mass in honor of the feast of the Immaculate Conception. I will soon head off to the airport to go to SF, for the Prop 8 trial.  It is fitting that this trial take place on this feast day.  I realize that many of my readers are not Catholic, and think such a feast is a lot of mumbo jumbo.  But let me explain the vision behind the Immaculate Conception, and suggest why it offers a hopeful alternative to our current cultural morass.

The first point is the meaning of the feast itself.  We celebrate Mary’s conception without the stain of original sin.  We hold that original sin causes weakness of the will, darkness of the intellect and forgetfulness in the memory. Have you ever experienced any of those things, dear reader of any religion or no religion? Then you know what I’m talking about. The effects of original sin are part of the universal human condition.  Read more…

I am going up to San Francisco this morning for the Prop 8 hearings this afternoon. I will be live-blogging on the NOM site and here on the Ruth Institute blog.

Passports in the UK will no longer list Mother and Father on a child’s passport.  Only Parent 1 and Parent 2 will be listed.

Documents seen by the Daily Mail suggest the change was made as a result of lobbying by the gay rights group Stonewall. The Home Office Diversity Strategy’ states: ‘IPS [the Identity and Passport Service] is working with Stonewall in response to an issue about having to name a “mother” and “father” on the passport  application form.’

Stonewall has gotten the government to impose Parent 1 and Parent 2 on the passports, in the oh-so-reasonable attempt to spare people embarrassment at the border.  I want you to think about changing the birth certificates to have Parent 1 and Parent 2.  This would mean that the government would take no notice at all of which person has a biological connection with the child. Not mother and second parent. Nor mother or co-parent.  Just Parent 1 and Parent 2. Biology is out of the equation. We couldn’t have the biological mother being “privileged” over her “partner,” now could we?

This is where the decoupling of sex and reproduction from marriage has led us. No more natural parents, only legal parents. Years ago, the idea was, “every child a wanted child.”  Now we’ve come to the point where “Every child an adopted child,” whether you gave birth to the baby or not.

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2044491/PC-passport-Goodbye-mother-father-Now-Parent-1-2-appear-form.html#ixzz1fiCgXrPV

We at the Ruth blog have decided to no longer allow Ari to have posting privileges over here.  His sarcasm has gone over the line and we don’t care to be associated with it.  Those who are interested in hearing what Ari has to say can find him at his own blog.  We will stick to reporting on all aspects of the marriage issue in a civil way.

Sincerely,

Jenny and Betsy

P.S. Ari is not an employee of either NOM or the Ruth Institute. He was merely a volunteer contributor here who used to be helpful and engaging. I apologize for not policing the material on his blog more closely, as it was linked to us. That was entirely my fault, and mine alone. ~Betsy

Alana Stewart, Elizabeth Marquardt, Jennifer Lahl, call your offices! Check out this NPR interview with a representative of the IVF industry and Wendy Kramer, founder of one of the sibling donor registries. Listen to Sean Tipton, director of public affairs for the American Society for Reproductive Medicine, an organization of reproductive medicine practitioners.

We think everyone is entitled to whatever they want and whatever they agree to, so we think the informed consent process is essential. So everyone needs to understand what the restrictions and rules are or are not, agree to it only if all the parties agree, and don’t have any changes to that agreement unless all the parties agree.

When asked about the fact that children haven’t given their consent to these arrangements, here is his flippant answer:

Well, as far as I know, no one has ever consented to the circumstances of their own conception. I happen to have teenage boys who I suspect currently probably would not consent to me being their father. I don’t know too many teenage boys who would consent to whoever their father is. Read more…

According to a  recent study of ovarian cancer ”After 15 years of follow-up, they found that women who had undergone IVF were more than four times as likely those who had not to develop borderline ovarian cancer, a malignancy that is treatable and survivable.”

Now, I would normally think that a four times greater risk of cancer would be cause for concern. Not so.

“This shouldn’t be a cause of concern to women undergoing IVF,” said Flora E. van Leeuwen, the lead author and head of epidemiology at the Netherlands Cancer Institute. “We’re talking about in an increased risk of a very rare tumor that is highly treatable.”

That’s assuming that this particular risk is the only risk associated with IVF.  Is that how all known carcinogens are treated?

A friend sent me photos of street light posters he saw lining the streets of Hollywood. These posters were recruiting foster and adoptive parents in honor of National Adoption Month. What could be better than trying to recruit more foster and adoptive parents? 

But my friend noticed something odd: there were absolutely no mothers in any of these posters. All posters featured pairs of men, smiling with their adoptive African American children. 

Posters, recruiting gay foster parents on Highland near the Hollywood Bowl

So I went and took a look at the website for the campaign called www.RaiseaChild.us  It is a campaign specifically to recruit gay men and lesbians to become foster and adoptive parents. 

One of the partners in this campaign is called, “Southern California Foster Family and Adoption Agency.”  They state in their press release supporting this campaign, “nearly 50% of the families our agency works with are headed by single or partnered gays and lesbians.”

Why isn’t 50% gay families “inclusive” enough? Let’s say this particular private agency chooses to specialize completely in placing children with same sex couples and same sex attracted individuals.  Yet I doubt that religious agencies are allowed to specialize in adoptions with heterosexual married couples.

And there is disinformation associated with this campaign.  One of the partners in the campaign states, “Throughout the United States, there are an estimated 1 million gay households raising 2 million children.” But according to the very gay-friendly Williams Institute’s analysis, there are less than 650,000 same sex couples in the United States.  Of those, about 111,000 are raising their “own” children, which the Williams Institute defines as, “never-married children under 18 who are sons or daughters of one partner or spouse (Person 1) by birth, marriage (stepchild), or adoption.” 

How the Raise A Child campaign and its partners come up with a number of “1 million gay households raising 2 million children,” is a mystery to me. 

The campaign for gay foster parents, on Universal Studio Blvd

And look at the children in these posters.  I wonder what the African-American community thinks about recruiting gay men to become foster parents for the children of their community who have been taken from their parents.  Do the African-American pastors have any thoughts and opinions about this? I imagine they do. But I will let them speak for themselves. 

What I want to know is this: Why aren’t we recruiting stable heterosexual married couples to be foster parents? After all, we know for sure that children do best in married couple low-conflict households.  Same sex parenting is an untried social experiment. Parenting by male couples is especially unstudied, since it is exceedingly uncommon.  Even the very pro-gay researchers Judith Stacey, could find only one study comparing gay male parenting with heterosexual couples that qualified for  inclusion in her comprehensive survey of gay parenting studies.[1]

 Now I realize that stable heterosexual married couples might not be so easy to find in Hollywood.  But hey, LA is a big town. There are lots of nice neighborhoods you could go to recruit stable heterosexual married couples, assuming, of course, that helping children really is the main point of the campaign.  

From the beginning of the sexual revolution, from no fault divorce to widespread cohabitation to out of wedlock childbearing, society has been surrendering the interests of children to the interests of adults, far too often and far too lightly. Many of the children in foster care, landed there precisely because of the failures of earlier episodes in the sexual revolution. Some are the children of unmarried mothers, or teen mothers.  Some have been abused by their mothers’ live-in boyfriends, who are statistically by far the most dangerous people for children to live with.

Children in foster care are the most vulnerable children in society.  These kids deserve better than to be human guinea pigs, in yet another round of social experimentation.  We should be pulling out all the stops to recruit stable heterosexual married couples to care for these children, not using their plight as an opportunity to “celebrate diversity.”  End of story. 

Based on what I saw and heard at this convention, I would have to conclude that the CA GOP doesn’t want to talk about social issues. Their general session featured report after report on everything but social issues. The workshops and panels: jobs, jobs, jobs. 

Now, my free market credentials are certainly in order: I taught in the George Mason University economics department for 10 years. My admiration for the free market is second to none. But, I certainly recall people accusing us of caring about property rights, not human rights, and accusing us of caring only about money, not people. I always tried to argue that property rights, properly understood, are human rights, and that money matters to real people.  

Well the CA GOP seemed determined to confirm this old stereotype.  Yes, the economy of CA is in bad shape and free market solutions would be a good thing. But there are plenty of other things to talk about, that would be good, unifying issues. For instance:

SB 48, the gay history textbook bill.  This bill is so bad that even the LA Times opposed it as being micromanaging of the school textbooks.  With the state in a Read more…

I spent the weekend at the CA GOP convention. I had heard that there was a move afoot by a wealthy “Republican” to strip the party platform of the pro-marriage and pro-life planks. Rumor was, that this gentleman, Charles Munger, paid people to support his watered down version of the platform.  Since I live in San Deigo, and the convention was in LA, I went to keep an eye on things. I brought with me a couple of family members and ITAF grads. I did some “real time” posting on my facebook page yesterday.  Here’s the summary.

The full platform committee voted to preserve the pro-life and pro-marriage language that has been part of the platform for some time. Interestingly enough, the argument for the new platform was not, “let’s take out the life and marriage stuff.”  The argument was, “the old platform doesn’t have enough about jobs and the economy.”  

Well, Mike Spence (see below) took care of that argument.  He pointed out that the platform has plenty of support for free markets and job creation. It also has plenty about the social issues that matter so much to so many people.  He pointed Read more…

The Presidential Straw poll here at the convention is open until 5 PM. Based on the organized presence I see here, I predict the winner will be either Rick Perry or Roon Paul.  Lots of signs, t-shirts and enthusiasm for those two. No one else has a significant, organized presence.

I’m just saying.

Please notice the Rick Perry volunteer at the CA Republican convention.  I confronted some of them, and asked, “I just have one question for you Rick Perry people: do you realize that Rick Perry has dressed you up as Aggies?”   Of course, since they are all from California, they were completely innocent of the fact that they are wearing the colors of Texas A&M!

A Rick Perry volunteer in CA

Later, I met a gentleman who was some kind of volunteer coordinator for Perry.  He admitted that yes indeed, the choice of colors was deliberate. I asked if he were intentionally dissing the Longhorns.

He added, “the Longhorns will not wear these shirts: we have to get them orange shirts.  We have photos of Rick Perry volunteers in IO, wearing orange Longhorn shirts. The Baylor students have to have green shirts; the Aggies have to have maroon. Texans take their school colors very seriously.” 

That is what I call a real political chameleon!

I am attending the CA Republican Convention at the relentlessly stylish J W Marriott Hotel at LA Live. (I’m not kidding: even the bathroom fixtures are funky!)  There is a movement afoot to change the Platform of the CA Republican Party, including removing the pro-life and pro-marriage language that has long been part of the platform. A few of us have come up from San Diego to see what is going on.  Some of my Ruth Institute students have shown up from different universities around the state.

Last night, Michele Bachmann gave the dinner speech. She was electrifying. Intelligent. Persuasive. I agreed with virtually everything she said.  And yet, and yet. …

She did not say a single word about social issues. Not a word, to a state party that is on the verge of gutting its platform of pro-life and pro-marriage language. Not a word, in the deep blue state that nonetheless won Proposition 8. Not a word about marriage, in spite of the fact that far more people voted for the marriage issue, than who voted for Republican Party candidates. The GOP has no statewide Read more…

The Republican won in NY 9, the special election to fill Anthony Wiener’s seat.  This is a complete political upset, and the marriage issue was part of the story. Yet, today, the former head of the CA Republican Party says it was all about Israel.  The Jews voted for the Republican over Israel. End of story.

Hello: It seems to me there are quite a few Democrats who are soft on Israel.  It seems to me there are quite a few Jews who vote routinely for Democratic candidates, regardless of their position on Israel.  I wonder what it could be that was different in this particular case?

Gee, there was a widely publicized vote on the definition of marriage in New York state in the past few months and these two candidates diverged sharply on the issue.  This heavily Democratic district voted against the candidate that voted against natural marriage. What will it take for the political establishment to accept the fact that marriage is a winning issue?