Ruth Institute Blog

Occasionally on this blog, same-sex ‘marriage’ proponents have challenged those of us who would seek to protect the institution of marriage to explain why, if we truly believe that (part of) the public purpose of marriage is to attach parents to their children, we nevertheless maintain that even a man and woman who are (for whatever reason) incapable of procreating together, or who simply have no desire or intention of doing so, should still be allowed – and even encouraged – to enjoy the benefits of married life. Read more…

Kind of a fun, funny article. I’m with the author on this one.

by Mariette Ulrich

One hates to be cynical, but I often cringe when I see an article that begins with the words: “Psychologists have found…” Usually, they have found something that wasn’t lost. Or else they find something that works for some people, but not for others, or for some people some of the time, but not at other times. That’s not a discovery; that’s the breadth and scope of human experience.

“Men should concentrate on playing with their children and leave the care to women” the London Telegraph heading announces. Read more…

This article is heartbreaking.

Keith Macdonald is called Britain’s Most Feckless Father. Admittedly, competition for that title is fierce, but Keith established a comfortable lead on Monday night when BBC1’s Panorama asked him to name his children. Tall, wan and sepulchral as a Dickensian undertaker, Keith was hesitant at first, trying to recall the eight children by eight different women that his 25-year-old loins had spawned. He managed the first six names, but then, with two children still to go, he got stuck, shrugged, took a stab at the seventh before finally admitting defeat. Read more…

There are those who doubt that our society has come to the point where it has come to the absurd conclusion that men and women are exactly the same, but that women are better.

It has.

But that’s not the only absurd conclusion that it has come to.  It has also concluded that men are, unless proven otherwise, unspeakably evil.

Lenore Skenazy, who spends a great deal of time documenting the stupidity of the modern, paranoid style of parenting has an excellent article in today’s Wall Street Journal.

Last week, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Timothy Murray, noticed smoke coming out of a minivan in his hometown of Worcester. He raced over and pulled out two small children, moments before the van’s tire exploded into flames. At which point, according to the AP account, the kids’ grandmother, who had been driving, nearly punched our hero in the face.

Why?

Mr. Murray said she told him she thought he might be a kidnapper.

And so it goes these days, when almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep. I call it “Worst-First” thinking: Gripped by pedophile panic, we jump to the very worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate ourselves for being so vigilant. Read more…

Some of our commenters seem to be surprised that the Ruth Institute is “transitioning away from its anti-gay advocacy…. Why is there an article about abortion here?” Actually, if you look over the life of this blog, you will see a lot of discussion about abortion, contraception and artificial reproductive technology. You will also see discussions of divorce, cohabitation, out of wedlock childbearing, abstinence education, adultery, the demographic winter, what makes for a happy marriage, welfare policy and much else. The common thread is marriage: the significance of marriage to society and to children, and all the social, legal and cultural practices that affect marriage. You will see very little about homosexuality per se.

No offense to you all, but we’re just not all that interested in you all.

I wrote two books, one in 2001 (Love and Economics) and one is 2005 (Smart Sex: Finding Lifelong Love in a Hookup World) (both available at the Ruth Store.) Neither of those books say a single word about same sex marriage or homosexuality. I wrote a chapter for a book called The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, And Morals. My chapter was called, “Why unilateral divorce has no place in a free society.” I personally have been concerned about divorce, out of wedlock childbearing, cohabitation and abortion for a long time. Maggie Gallagher has written several books on similar topics. David Blankenhorn’s book Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, had a huge impact on the public discussion about the family in America.

We (Maggie, David, and others more so than me) just about had people convinced that kids needed their dads, Read more…

Clever title, no?

by Carolyn Moynihan

Some places might be tiring of it but in Spain the gender revolution rolls on. The socialist government’s latest move is to legislate against the priority traditionally given to the father’s surname in birth registers. 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…

The more we know about fatherhood, the less we are able to say that fathers are unimportant.  In this post, Stuart Schneiderman discusses a recent study that shows the importance of fathers in the lives of their daughters.  (Emphasis added).

The culture strongly encourages girls to discuss intimate matters only with other women. Who but a woman would understand a woman’s experience?

Of course, this deprives girls of a good relationship with the most important man in their lives. And it also tells them that the only people they should listen to are people who are just like them. So much for empathy. Narcissism, anyone? Read more…

The End of Men recently published in the Atlantic, can’t decide whether the marginalization of men from the family, the economy and the academy, is a nightmare or a dream come true. Steve Baskerville takes on the questions no one else will and says what no one else will say. The End of Men is not a naturally occuring result of natural forces, but something aggressively constructed by committed ideologues:

While elite feminists did assume previously male occupations, many more women have entered the workforce in professionalized versions of traditional homemaker roles. This has transformed childrearing and other domestic tasks from private family matters into public, communal, and taxable activities, necessarily expanding the size and power of the state and leading to the creation of vast bureaucracies to oversee public education and social services. Read more…

MSNBC had this article on the lowering age of sexual maturity among girls. This article tracks an overall decline in the age of breast development. It reminded me of a series of papers I’ve read about the declining age of first menstruation. This MSNBC article doesn’t report on this, and the factors may be somewhat different. However, I have been following the decline in age at first menses because one of its strong correlates is the presence of an unrelated male in the household. By contrast, girls living with their biological fathers tend to have their first periods at a later age. There is a lively debate over the reasons for this correlation. But the correlation seems to be well-documented. Read more…

Monday (July 5th) I listened to a broadcast on the Diane Rehm Show of an interview with James T. Patterson, author of Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle over Black Family Life from LBJ to Obama. That title was already on my long (long…) wish-list of books I’d like to buy if I had a few thousand bucks to spare (and a few years of leisure time I could spend to read them) so of course I listened with interest. But if what I heard was any indication of the kind of self contradictory ‘logic’ to be found in his book, then it’s probably no longer one of the must-have titles on my list. (So don’t take this as a review of Professor Patterson’s book, which I haven’t read. This is just my reactions to some of the assertions he made in his interview.) 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…

Yesterday my husband and I took our three children, ages 5, 2.5, and 3 months, with us to Macy’s to find a wedding gift for my husband’s sister. A helpful clerk, an older woman named Marjorie, spotted me looking around for a place to print a registry and immediately jumped to my aid. She walked me to the computer, gave me a helpful tip for pulling out the pages correctly, and took the time to explain a few things on the printed sheets before setting me loose to first relocate my family. I had walked off leaving my husband holding the bag–the diaper bag that is, as well as keeping tabs on our two free birds and the baby safely trapped in her car seat he had set on the floor. Not surprisingly, he had everything under control, so I simply stood near him as I perused his sister’s registry. Read more…

Family law Judges are famous for their truly disgusting rulings.  But no matter how low they sink into the muck, they continuously find a way to achieve new lows of tyranny and immorality.

Witness this case: Read more…

Part 1. in a series of responses to a question posed by a student.

No one contract can treat same sex couples and opposite sex couples identically.

(Warning: this post is long! But Worth the effort if I do say so myself!)

1. If you believed that it is not possible for the government to be neutral in the definition of marriage, would that change your view of the desirability of your proposal? Read more…

Just this past weekend, I told the National Association of Catholic Family Life Ministers that the use of Artificial Reproductive Technology is the newest threat to marriage as the lifelong fruitful union of a man and a woman. I argued that the very existence of the ART option is distorting women’s marriage decisions. They believe that they can postpone marriage indefinitely, and if Mr. Right never shows up, they can still become a mother on their own, artificially.
As if on cue, Time magazine steps up to the plate with corroborating evidence:

New research from Belgium and the U.K. suggests that women may increasingly be considering freezing their eggs as a way to prolong fertility as they pursue a career — or find the right romantic partner. A survey of nearly 200 female students found Read more…

is the name of the Knights of Columbus pro-fatherhood initiative. I met their editor, Brian Caulfield, last week at the National Association of Catholic Family Life Ministers in Cincinnati. He says nice things about me in this post!

They may be a small and non-representative minority of Catholics, but they are people in possession of an idea, and know they have the truth to share. Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, who runs the cutting-edge Ruth Institute in defense of marriage, insisted repeatedly in her talk that Catholics have the benefit of knowing the truth, and they should be anxious to share it out of love and compassion for their neighbors.

This whole Fathers for Good site is a pretty cool source of encouragement for fathers.

There is a lot to be said for cultivating stoic virtues.  The best people in the world, as far as I’m concerned are those that are determined to bestow upon others what they need.  And they will make their own wants secondary.

The pursuit of happiness is fine.  But assigning too high a priority to happiness and pleasure makes a person into a narcissistic jerk.

This article discusses how getting married and having children can make somebody into that kind of person.

And here’s where I wonder if we ought to re-examine our commitment to happiness. It seems to me that there’s possibly some merit — if we persevere and have the sense to learn from it — in the other-orientation that is (good) parenting. It’s fine to go through life happy, in other words, but I suspect we also want to go through life without becoming big fat self-absorbed jackasses. Children really help in that regard. Read more…

I just discovered Dr. Gordon Finley over at Men’s News Daily. Here he is on the challenges to fatherhood:

fatherhood itself is under fire on multiple fronts and with multiple losses, not only for children and fathers, but also for society. Consider three: male unemployment, divorce, and non-marital childbearing.

Male unemployment today is higher than female unemployment while not coincidentally female educational attainment is higher Read more…

We here at the Ruth Institute have been saying for quite some time that Artificial Insemination technology can and will be used to push men out of families, and in so doing increase fatherlessness.

It almost boggles the mind that there is any dispute about this proposition.  Witness the strange and unexpected changes in the law that Kay Hymowitz documents in this article:

Unfortunately, in the absence of any other authority, answering these questions has fallen to family court judges, who are—and I mean no disrespect—not always the sort you’d expect to be on the short list for the Louis Brandeis Award for Cautious Jurisprudence. Read more…