Ruth Institute Blog

by Carolyn Moynihan

Despite the ease with which divorce is contemplated and achieved today, research confirms that it is not good for the mental and physical health of children. A Canadian study suggests that children who experience a parental divorce are over twice as likely to suffer a stroke at some point in their lives. Read more…

Peep.

One of our critics suggested that NOM criticizes marriage abolition via redefinition but makes “not a peep” about divorce.  This is, obviously, not true.  It’s about to get still more laughably untrue with this post about the effects of divorce on happiness.  Peep. Read more…

One consequence that is sure to follow from marriage redefinition is that courts will be yet more empowered to assign parental rights and responsibilities.

How wonderful that would be!

If we just allow biology to determine parental rights, what a disaster!  In disputed cases, we would send wet, messy biological samples to labs!  There, those samples will be analyzed by scientists.  Scientists who probably never took a humanities course in their lives!  How can we let people who don’t know the first thing about postmodern critical theory make decisions like that?  How would social justice be served?

And that’s not just in same sex cases, either.

Andrew Stuttaford discusses an article in which this frightening idea is aired: Read more…

Often good comes from the bad. Case in point:

By Mary Pilon

Sure, divorcing in tough economic times might involve the use of a Taser, but according to  fresh data released on Friday from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, the divorce rate is at its lowest point since the early 1970s. And infidelity has continued to decline. Read more…

By James Tillman

September 21, 2010 (LifeSiteNews.com) — According to Dr. Stephen Baskerville, professor of political science at Patrick Henry College and author of “Taken Into Custody: The War Against Fathers, Marriage, and the Family,” the government “is engaged in a direct assault on the family” that is causing its breakdown – which in turn allows government to reach into yet more areas of civil society under the pretext of solving the problems that the breakdown of the family creates. Read more…

From the web page of our friend, Wintery Knight:

Please click this link and read this post by an Australian medical doctor. (H/T Craig)

Here’s the graph which is based on data from the National Survey of Family Growth, 2002:

Marriage stability vs. number of lifetime sexual partners Read more…

What happens when the girlfriend of a recently divorced father of two gets pregnant—and she wants the baby, he doesn’t? Should men, too, have the right to choose?

By Stephanie Fairyington, Elle Magazine

Greg Bruell and his girlfriend of a year and a half, Sandra Hedrick, had a pact. “We agreed that if we got pregnant, we’d terminate because we were not in a stable family unit,” Hedrick says. Or as Bruell more starkly puts it, “I resumed sexual relations with her on the condition that were birth control to fail, she’d abort without waffling.” Read more…

A reader posted my AOL New article on her facebookpage and got this response from a friend:

I see multiple problems with her argument,
1. She does not mention divorce, which has already ‘redefined marriage.’ Divorce rates in our nation have been hovering around 50% for quite some time, and divorce can be very detrimental to children involved.
2. There are some heterosexual couples who are physically unable to bear children. As far as reproduction is concerned, they are in the same category as homosexual couples. Both of theses couples can adopt children, yet no one questions the ‘parental status’ of heterosexual parents who adopt.
3. There are many married couples who choose not to have children, so saying that the ‘essential purpose of marriage is to attach mothers and fathers to their children’ is an exaggeration that remains unsupported by empirical evidence.
4. In some cultures and ethnic groups, marriage rates are decreasing and couples choose to cohabit instead. These groups have already ‘gotten rid of marriage’ and they are not seeing an adverse effects.
I’m more inclined to agree with the comment on the article from Ken, and I’m very glad prop 8 was overruled; however, I do appreciate this woman’s attempt to provide non-religious argument against gay marriage…

I had a limit of 650 words for that column, so obviously I cannot deal with every possible objection. So let me briefly amplify my remarks, mostly to say that I have dealt with many of these issues multiple times.
1. On divorce. I write about divorce regularly. In fact, divorce was one of the first issues that got me into the study of marriage and family. I have a couple of recent podcasts, here and here. My books, Love and Economics, and Smart Sex, both deal with the whole range of marital breakdowns, without ever once refering to same sex marriage. Read more…

I will be doing today’s broadcast on Issues Etc. on this revolting story from the NYT. It is revolting because:
1. it is about upper middle class New Yorkers, which seems to be the only kind of people that enters the collective mind of the NYT.
2. it takes divorce and separation for granted, and never asks why people end up in this place of separation and retreat from relationship.
having said that, I never really know what I’m going to say in these broadcasts until Todd Wilken starts asking me questions! Tune in!

Recently, I posted about Professor John Gottman.  He has a list of four things that predict divorce:  criticism, defensiveness, contempt and stonewalling.   He calls them the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Here’s a different sort of list.  It compiles various research studies and makes predictions about the likelihood of divorce given some more exotic variables such as occupation, the status of the children, hormonal levels and even facial expression in old photographs. Read more…

This is interesting. Yet another reason having kids is a good thing.

by Carolyn Moynihan

A study showing the contagious nature of divorce among social networks has been receiving a good bit of attention this week. Not only friends, siblings and people you work with, but also friends of friends are more likely to divorce if you do. Children can protect you from this contagion (although not, apparently, from more direct causes of divorce) — the more children the better. Read more…

Dr J’s latest podcast features her latest interview with Todd Wilken over at Issues, Etc, where they discuss cluster divorce.  The study they cite (spearheaded by Brown University’s Dr. Rose McDermott and available in entirety here) finds that when your friends divorce, you’re more likely to split from your spouse–75% more likely, to be specific (though children mitigate the effect somewhat).  Even friends of friends have an impact.  Check it out.

“Breaking Up is Hard to Do, Unless Everyone Else is Doing it Too”

In my previous post, I discussed Fred Reed’s writings.  I quoted a heartbreaking scene which he wrote about the consequences of divorce and the pain of fathers being separated from their children.  Divorce is awful.

In the comments Wintery Knight appreciated our take on this subject.  His comments seem to show that he appreciates the dangers that our unfair divorce court system imposes upon men who want to get married. Read more…

Fred Reed writes some provocative stuff.  I often disagree with him, but he’s smart as a whip and always interesting.  In this article, he takes on hooking up.

I see where women, or college girls anyway, are honking and blowing most fierce about how they don’t like the way sex works nowadays. Yeah. It seems that the hook-up is in flower. Read more…

As part of its Newly Wed In America series, National Public Radio today aired a segment titled Kids First, Marriage Later — If Ever.

A couple of quotes:

“Many of these parents are children of divorce… Today, these parents say they’d rather raise a child alone or with multiple partners than risk putting that child through a divorce.”

“As to what kind of consequences this new concept of marriage will have for the next generation… Experts say it’s too soon to say what the effects will be. We’ll have to ask these children in 20 years.”

Many of the discussions in the comments section of this site fall into a very familiar pattern.  Take, for instance, one issue that we here at the Ruth Institute support: lifelong marriage.  Lifelong marriage means that we are not particularly fond of divorce.  (I’m sure my opinion as a Jew differs from that of Dr. J who is Catholic, but I think we can agree that divorce is, generally speaking, a bad thing).

And these discussions are usually not very productive because they are addled with illusion.

So, we don’t like divorce.  How does this play out so predictably in the comments?  And how are the comments beset by illusion?

Read more…

by Pat Fagan of the Family Research Council

Women in always-intact marriages who worship at least weekly are more likely to have had fewer lifetime sexual partners than those in other family structures who never worship. According to the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG), women in always-intact marriages who attend religious services at least weekly have had, on average, 2.42 lifetime sexual partners, followed by women in always-intact marriages who never worship (4.71), those in other family structures who worship at least weekly (5.51), and those in other family structures who never worship (9.07). Read more…

Life Coach Dr. Stuart Schneiderman offers some thoughts as to why the forty year marriage of Al and Tipper Gore might have ended.

I will speculate that the Gore marriage fell apart because Al Gore fell in love with something else. Not with another woman, not with another person, but with a cause. The Gore marriage failed because Al Gore was seduced by the cause of global warming.

Al Gore did not simply come to believe in its truth; he became its most prominent Read more…

An interesting study. More insight into factors that can break up marriages. Ruth Instute friend Brad Wilcox is quoted.

by Carolyn Moynihan

Happiness studies — you can’t get away from them, and marital happiness studies seem to be the flavour of the month. The latest shows that a certain kind of happiness gap between spouses increases the likelihood of divorce. Read more…