Ruth Institute Blog

by Jennifer LeClaire

There’s plenty of talk about the attack on marriages and family. Now, the Ruth Institute, a project of the National Organization for Marriage Education Fund, is encouraging creative young adults to become part of the solution with a video contest.

The Ruth Institute just launched its first annual Reel Love Challenge, a video contest for young adults aged 18 to 30. The contest is open to all young adults, married or single, male or female, in college, out of college, or never been anywhere near a college. This contest offers a platform for a generation to offer ideas about what sustains love over a lifetime.

“Marriage will be what your generation makes it,” says Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, founder and president of The Ruth Institute. “Divorce, adultery, even incest are all over the news. I urge all emerging adults to take matters into their own hands and begin to create a culture of fidelity and love.”

Roback says the Reel Love Challenge gives young adults a forum to start asking and answering, the right questions, such as “What makes lifelong love possible?” and “Why is it worth the effort?” She says the videos can be professional looking, or just done with a cell phone camera. The Ruth Institute is more interested in content, thoughts, and ideas, than Hollywood production quality.

Here’s the skinny on entering the contest: Read more…

Have to download to watch:

http://rcpt.yousendit.com/1009399653/bb047d31da1224fc2ffcbfa504a6ace2

For 18-24 year olds. Tell the Ruth Institute what you believe Real Love is in a video, 30 seconds or less.

http://www.ruthinstitute.org/reellovechallenge/index.html

$2,000,  $1,500,  $1,000 prizes!!

This pamphlet offers 77 incontrovertible statements in support of Natural Marriage,

all of which defend the premise without delving into ‘religious’ themes. If there is someone in your life whom you hope to influence without being accused of ‘preaching’, this pamphlet will be of immense value to you.
The pamphlet was written by Ruth Institute president and founder, Jennifer Roback Morse, Ph.D., who was also the spokeswoman for California’s Prop 8 campaign. Dr. Morse has also been an ironclad defender of Natural Marriage as well as an informed observer of the political and sociological implications of Same Sex Marriage. Dr. Morse offers a complete argument, strategic and trenchant. You may order these pamphlets for distribution to your group or organization by clicking here.

By Emily Knapp | Special to the Kalamazoo Gazette

KALAMAZOO — The keynote speaker at Saturday’s Catholic Women’s Conference espoused her view that marriage should be between a man and a woman, but she did so with little reference to her Catholic faith.

Jennifer Roback Morse — founder of the nonprofit Ruth Institute, part of the National Organization for Marriage Education Fund — told her audience at Hackett Catholic Central High School that she would present an anthropological and sociological perspective on marriage and child rearing. Read more…

Charlie Butts – OneNewsNow -

Ruth Institute, a division of the National Organization for Marriage, is spreading its message of the value of marriage to young people at U.S. college campuses.

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse saw a need for such an organization two years ago while speaking on college campuses, but an associate says Morse wanted the initiative to go beyond herself. Read more…

HEADLINE:  Catholic Women’s Conference speaker at center of controversy: Gay-rights groups accuse Jennifer Roback Morse of illegal political activities

from the Kalamazoo Gazette

KALAMAZOO — A woman who is known for her opposition to same-sex marriage and accused of illegal political activities by national gay-rights groups is the keynote speaker for Saturday’s Catholic Women’s Conference at Hackett Catholic Central High School. Read more…

RUTH INSTITUTE ANNOUNCES POSTER CONTEST AS PART OF

“REEL LOVE CHALLENGE”

Photo Contest Invites Creative Slogans

SAN MARCOS, CA – The Ruth Institute, a project of the National Organization for Marriage Education Fund, announced a one month poster contest as part of its first annual Reel Love Challenge, a video contest targeting college students around the country, and aimed at promoting a positive view of marriage and lasting love.

The poster contest, which runs through the month of October and will award a flip camera to the winner, invites contestants to submit a photo holding a sign that completes the phrase “Reel Love Is ­­____.”

The poster is available for download at the contest’s website, http://www.ruthinstitute.org/reellovechallenge/posterContest.

Submissions will be received until October 31, and a winner will be announced November 1.

The one month poster challenge is part of the Ruth Institute’s Reel Love Challenge, which invites college students around the country to submit 30 second videos to the contest website answering the question “How is lifelong love possible?” Video submissions will be accepted from September 20, 2010 until February 1, 2011, followed by an awards ceremony in San Diego where finalists’ videos will be viewed and winners will be determined by a panel of notable judges.

To schedule an interview with Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, founder of the Ruth Institute, contact Mary Beth Hutchins by e-mail at mhutchins@crcpublicrelations.com

Book outlines stark divisions

By Cheryl Wetzstein, The Washington Times

Young parents Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston may have gotten engaged again recently, but they are still a quintessential “red” family trying to swim against the tide of family change, say two family law professors who have launched a debate about “red” and “blue” American families.

The 2004 and 2008 elections showed a divided America — and that division extends even to families, Naomi Cahn and June Carbone write in their book, “Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture.” Read more…

We are getting excited about our Gala August 12 near LAX. Southern CA supporters of the Ruth Institute should be getting an invitation in the mail shortly after the July 4th weekend. If you don’t get one, let us know! Or, just go here to sign yourself up!

by Chris Ross

Americans are confused about the true nature of marriage “because we live in an era of big government,” said Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse, an economist who studies love and marriage and the founder of The Ruth Institute.

“Big government did not create marriage,” said Morse, who recently spoke to students at The King’s College in New York City, as part of the school’s Distinguished Visitors Series. “Government does not create marriage. Marriage is a natural reality that preexists the state.” Read more…

This story appeared about the Ruth Institute in the National Catholic Register on their Culture of Life page, March 28-April 10, 2010 Issue. Thanks again to writer Joseph Pronechen for the interview.

When it comes to curing the ills of society’s misconceptions and attacks on traditional marriage, Jennifer Roback Morse has the antidote: the Ruth Institute.

Begun less than two years ago by Morse, from its base in San Marcos, Calif., the Ruth Institute provides a dose of what real marriage is. Morse, the institute’s president, says a main mission of the institute, a project of the National Organization for Marriage, is to promote lifelong married love, especially to college students, by creating an intellectual and social atmosphere favorable to marriage. Read more…

Make a simple request for information, “I don’t quite see how to do this myself. Do you have any ideas?”

This tip comes from the section, Asking for Help without Whining, Complaining, or Being Demanding. Sometimes people have the opposite problem and have a hard time asking for help even when they really need it. In either case, the above formula with do nicely.

Want more marriage-saving tips? Find all 101 here.

Sean Hannity reports that #100 on his list of wasted stimulus money” $219,000 on an academic study of female hook-up patterns at Syracuse University. Note that the professor/principle investigator explains that hooking up is a public health problem, or at the very least, correlated with public health problems. Why, then, do we not discourage hooking up, the way we discourage smoking and driving without seat belts? Instead of spending “stimulus money” to study a preventable public health problem, why not do something to actually prevent the preventable public health problem?

Remember yesterday’s post about Sex Week at Yale? Why aren’t the administrators at Yale taxed for their share of the public health costs they are creating? (This calls to mind a bigger problem: no one makes any money from people living chaste monogamous life-styles, whereas somebody makes money from each and every problem that flows from non-monogamous sex….)

My colleague Jamie Gruber found this and posted it over at the Ruth Youth blog.

People sometimes ask me why I founded the Ruth Institute. I always reply that young people who want lifelong married love need and deserve accurate information and adult support. People sometimes have a hard time believing me when I try to convey just how crazy campus life can be. But now, I don’t need to say anything. Yale University is proving my point for me. Yale (where I taught economics from 1980-85) sets aside the week surrounding Valentines Day to be Sex Week at Yale. Minneapolis Star Tribune Columnist Kathy Kersten tells us about it:

This being Yale, the week started with a veneer of academic respectability: Read more…

The winning essays from the Stand for the Family Symposium are already posted! Great job to Jamie and Betsy for getting those 18 essays up so quickly! There were three categories, with separate judging and prizes: Undergraduate essays, Graduate student essays, and Law student essays. They are all posted at the Marriage Library. Students, you can show your parents and friends your essay!

The BYU symposium generated a bit of local publicity. Here is an article about my opening talk that kicked off the conference. The author did a reasonable job of identifying the important points of my talk.

Americans are being taught to believe they’re generic humans, that “we’re not men and woman, we’re generic parents, we’re not moms and dads,” she said. “Ladies and gentlemen, there are no generic people!” Read more…

I have been in the student presentation sessions at the BYU Stand for the Family conference. The Ruth Institute sponsored the Call for Papers. We arranged for the judging and awarding of prizes. We had over 150 papers entered in our essay contest. The first place winner for undergraduate papers was Alyssa Brown. Her paper was a critique of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. She won first place from a field of over 100 entries in the undergraduate category.
Steve Francis won first place for the graduate papers with a paper on the New Natural Law and the definition of marriage. Sterling Olander won the first prize for a paper he wrote for a Law and Logic class, “Logical Fallacies Used by the Courts to Justify Same Sex Marriage Validate a Slippery Slope.” All these papers are works in progress, and may be substantially revised before they get published. We will be posting them on the Ruth Institute Marriage Library site, in the meantime.
Thanks to all students for their efforts!

Why just read when you can watch? 

Check out Dr. Morse on the Ruth Institute Youtube page.