When my two-year-old daughter was throwing a fit, I took hold of her and looked her in the eyes, saying, “You WILL talk to Mommy nicely.”
With no hesitation, she got three inches from my face, tilted her head to the side and said
by Bill Bumpas
She’s not the first one to challenge teens to remain pure before marriage. But author Elsa Kok Colopy tells OneNewsNow what she’s talking about in her book is real purity — not just about a bunch of” do’s and don’ts.” Read more…
US Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich was accused by ex-wife number two last week of wanting, at one stage, an “open marriage” in order to accommodate an affair he was having with present wife (number three). The New York Times has rounded up some experts to discuss the merits of such arangements. Brad Wilcox of the National Marriage Project, who can be relied on for common sense and objectivity, says: Read more…
My two-year-old son was singing, or rather, belting out, the Alleluia in his best voice. The only problem was that he replaced the word “Alleluia” with…
It’s difficult today to say anything in favour of the intact, married family without putting somebody’s nose out of joint. Last week it was a blogger at the LBGT site ThinkProgress who took umbrage at a comment by Focus on the Family’s Glenn Stanton. I’ll let Mr Stanton tell you how from his post on NRO’s Home Front blog: Read more…
First of all this week, there was a big (about 5,000 observations) sophisticated (University of Chicago Business School) study of bad behavior in little boys. Conclusion: little boys benefit substantially from living with both their biological parents. The second study was a little (78 observations) simplistic (unrepresentative sample, ideologically motivated researchers) of the Quality of Life of the children of lesbian couples. Conclusion: the children of lesbian couples are just as happy and well-adjusted as their peers. Read more…
By Michael Worley, First year law student at J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, and a 2011 graduate of the Ruth Institute It Takes a Family to Raise a Village program.
It is common knowledge that TV reports don’t tell the whole story. Frequently a group of 75 undecided voters gather to share their responses immediately after a debate. Such people provide instant commentary that the theorists of network TV may not be able to perceive. However, these groups tend not to be predictive of overall election results. Random polling via phone calls shows us much clearer results. Read more…
by Jennifer Roback Morse
This article was first published at familyinamerica.org on January 10, 2012.
Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men
Mara Hvistendahl
Public Affairs, 2011; 314 pages, $26.99
This brave and timely book has many strengths and one glaring, but understandable, weakness. The strength of this book is the reporting. Mara Hvistendahl, a liberal, pro-choice feminist, painstakingly documents the catastrophic consequences of the worldwide “choice” for male babies: gender imbalance leading to prostitution, sex slavery, and male frustration and aggression. The weakness of this book is the political analysis. She doesn’t understand how deeply Roe v. Wade changed American political culture, particularly within the conservative movement broadly conceived. But both these strengths and weaknesses work together to yield an honest and courageous book that should be read by anyone who considers himself (or herself) well informed. Read more…
I often get asked why I like social media so much. Parents are concerned at the amount of time their children spend online and the relationships that are suffering as a result. They see the constant need to be in the know and the increasingly short attention spans as something detrimental. And while I agree, there are serious downsides to social media, there are also amazing upsides that if tapped properly can make a huge difference. Read more…
Past Eugenics and sterilisation programs in the United States are coming back to bite them, with North Carolina currently the first State to address compensation for victims.
According to the North Carolina Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation, at one time 31 states in the United States had government-run eugenics programs. In North Carolina alone, close to 8,000 men, women, and children, largely poor, black, disabled or uneducated, were forcibly sterilized from 1929 to 1974. The programs were aimed at creating a better society by eliminating those considered undesirable. Read more…
by William West
Film censors are allowing teens to access much more explicit content and few parents seem to careA time traveller from the 20th Century would very likely be shocked by how standards have plummeted in the film industry in a little over a decade – particularly with movies aimed at the teen market. Even parents from the swinging ’60s and ’70s would have thought twice about the explicit films now routinely sanctioned by censors for viewing by teenagers. Read more…
Random chance? Prank of the fitness gods? Yes, I know I’m getting big, but seeing this on my fridge is just spooky.
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…
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…
When my daughter was about four, I was telling her that while we were in church everyone needs to be extra quiet. When we are, Jesus can talk to us in our hearts. And if we are quiet, we can hear Him. She said, “Okay, Mommy,” and about a minute later she said, “Oh Mommy, I hear him.” I said, “Really? What is He saying?”
Now Available as an E-Book!
Scholarly evidence continues to point to the enormous benefits of marriage to couples, children, and the society. Released by a group of eighteen family scholars, the latest edition of Why Marriage Matters offers important new findings from the social sciences on the state of marriage in the United States, including why recent increases in cohabitation and family instability pose a risk to children. Read more…
In the last post on the new State of Our Unions (SOU) report from the National Marriage Project we read that “the benefits of generosity were particularly pronounced among couples with children”. Parents who were very generous with each other were more likely to be very happy as well. But there’s more. Generosity in having children is also part of the happiness equation. Read more…
In a Melbourne maternity hospital last month a very shocking event occurred. A healthy, 32-week-old, wanted, unborn child was killed by a lethal injection when the sonographer performing the procedure mistook the child for its unhealthy twin. When the mistake was realised, the mother had an emergency caesarean section and the sick child was also terminated, according to news reports. The whole tragic episode left the mother traumatised and everybody involved distraught. Read more…
So horrible.
by Peter Saunders
Children with special needs can be a great challenge to care for but a tragic story from Australia this week demonstrates that the search for the perfect child can have devastating consequences. Read more…
Dr. Michael L. Brown
Caution: Contains descriptions that some may find offensive.
As outrageous as it is to hear about the new sex-ed curriculum for New York City schools, beginning with middle schools, there are some school districts for which the program does not start early enough. And so, in June 2010, the Provincetown, Massachusetts, school board voted unanimously to begin distributing condoms to elementary school children upon the student’s request, beginning in first grade and without parental knowledge or consent. (What possible use could a 6-year-old have for a condom?) Read more…
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