Ruth Institute Blog

We’re going to try again to get a parental notification act on the ballot.

If we want to hold parents accountable, then we have to accord them authority commensurate with their responsibility. It is completely beyond me anyway why we ever made young girls vulnerable to sexual predators in the first place by making it legal for some supposedly ‘concerned’ adult to take them to an abortionist in secret.

You can view the text of the initiative at this PDF.

Here we go. More info on the schools issue.

by Bill Bumpas

Organizers for the first-ever “National School Choice Week” are hoping to spotlight the need for effective educational options for every child in America.

National School Choice Week is set for January 23-29, and executive director Kyle Olson tells OneNewsNow that more than 150 state and national organizations will host major events across the country. Citing extensive documentation, he points out education spending has increased by more than 200 percent over 25 years — but student academic achievement has remained stagnant and unacceptable. Read more…

This is the kind of stuff that concerns me. It’s the stuff that will be pushed more and more if SSM is legalized everywhere. I think this goes beyond merely pushing equality and anti-bullying (somewhat understandable there) but gives unspoken encouragement to the gay lifestyle. Is that really necessary? I think the idea is to cause less confusion, not more.

Bill Bumpas – OneNewsNow

Brian Camenker, president of MassResistance!, tells OneNewsNow a concerned mother first alerted his group of the panel discussion that took place at Concord-Carlisle High School in late October during which seven teachers shared their “coming out” stories and encouraged the reported standing-only audience to do the same. Read more…

Kind of weird, right?

by Mariette Ulrich

A former Canadian Prime Minister, Pierre Trudeau, once famously quipped: “The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation.”

Unless, it would seem, the “nation” means schoolchildren ages 12-17, and the “state” is local school board bureaucrats and/or the provincial Ministry of Education. The Ottawa-Carleton District School Board (Ontario, Canada) plans to issue a survey which asks, among other things, for children to disclose their gender (four choices) and sexual orientation (nine choices). Proponents claim the survey is voluntary, but rather than requiring parental permission for the survey to be administered, the onus is on parents to opt out in writing (by Nov. 19), if they do not wish their child to participate. Read more…

When this was brought to my attention (look on the third page) all I could think is “You have got to be kidding…”

But because we are by now such a thoroughly (indeed absurdly) non-judgmental, morally neutral, nonsensically ‘tolerant’, hyper-inclusive, politically correct society there are bound to be those who insist that the National ‘Education’ Association simply must allow the Drag Queens among them to have their own caucus if they are also willing to countenance the NEA Christian Prayer Service Caucus, the Catholic Caucus, the Creation Science Educators Caucus, the Jewish Caucus, or the People of Faith Caucus; as they in fact do.

And because our culture has to a significant extent succumbed to nihilism, some will also dismissively declare, “So what? How much more cynical is that than the Bourbon Caucus or the (apparently) competing No Cocktail Left Behind caucus? Or does it sound any sillier than the Princess Caucus?” And the NEA does also consent to those as well, after all…

Some will even assert (mindlessly, if you ask me) that the NEA Drag Queen Caucus is adequately counterbalanced by their Ex-Gay Educators Caucus.

And even I can understand how the Lesbian & Gay, Bisexual and Transgender Caucus could be relevant to advocating the ‘rights’ of it’s members in the workplace.

But be honest with your self. Are any of those others in any way morally comparable to a Drag Queen Caucus? So now we are to be compelled to provide our children to cross-dressers so they can act out their ‘sexuality’ in front of a captive (and compliantly impressionable) audience?

For an organization that purports to be attending to the education and care of all of our young to indulge such a bent is beyond cynical. It’s just plain malicious.

Finally, some good news from a family court:

A Wisconsin court has told a lesbian that legal adoption, not merely nurturing a child, determines parental rights.

A lesbian identified as Liz K. and her former partner Wendy M. adopted two children from Guatamala. The couple decided that since Liz was a practicing attorney and could add the children to her health insurance, she should be the legal adoptive parent.

But after the couple’s relationship ended, Liz’z former partner sued for parental rights, saying she had a relationship with the children also. Mat Staver of Liberty Counsel believes the court made the right decision in refusing to grant guardianship status to Wendy. 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…

Two more disputed lesbian custody cases are coming in Ohio. both these cases have the following features:
1. a biological mother does not want her former lesbian partner to have parental rights over her child.
2. the former partner and the mother dispute many details of their relationship to each other and their agreement regarding the child.
3. no second party adoption was done, although in one case, “But before the child was born, Mullen (the biological mother) signed legal documents naming Hobbs (her lesbian partner) as Lucy’s co-parent. After the couple broke up, Mullen voided that agreement.”

Without knowing what this agreement actually said, it is hard to know what is going on here. But what is clear, is that adoption is the traditional way the law has attached parental rights to people who are not biologically related to the child. With that in mind, listen to this chilling statement:

Camilla Taylor, a senior staff attorney for Lambda Legal, an advocacy group for gays, said Ohio law recognizes the parental rights of people who have no biological relationship with a child. Read more…

This part cracks me up: The woman in charge of the sex ed program was upset saying that they had to “kow-tow to parents.” Oh, please forgive parents for caring what their children learn on the topic! She acts as though parents are idiots and know nothing. Well, they ARE parents.

by Brian Lilley

A government plan for explicit sex-ed gets shut down by parents.

Parents are the primary educators of their children. While this may seem to be a rather mundane statement, it is becoming radical in many parts of the world. Yet last week parents rose up to tell the politicians, experts and bureaucrats that run Ontario’s education system that they had had enough and a strange thing happened; the parents won the day. Read more…

I am often told that we must redefine marriage to be the union of any two persons, in order to protect the interests of the children of same sex couples. Putting aside the important question of how a same sex couple acquires a child in the first place, my answer has always been that domestic partnership law accomplishes the goal. Here is a case that proves the point:

In a case that reached the U.S. Supreme Court, a Bay Area woman has won the right to parental status and visits with the daughter of her former lesbian partner, who moved out when the girl was 3 months old….
The women had lived together for nearly five years and were registered domestic partners when Kristina gave birth to Amalia by artificial insemination Read more…

I appreciate the author’s attitude on how ridiculous this is. Since when is it okay to usurp parental authority over a ten-year-old and teach them the “pleasures of sex”? When was sex ever a good thing for any child? Please, let’s teach children NOT to have any self-control. Let’s tell them to sneak around their parents so they can “do it,” get STDs to share with others, get pregnant, and have more abortions all for the sake of sexual pleasure. Fantastic idea, Planned Parenthood. Way to help them become responsible, healthy, well-adjusted adults. And I’m sure all parents would love their kids to start having sex as soon as possible. Get real!

Idiots.

Marcia Segelstein – OneNewsNow Columnist -

The International Planned Parenthood Federation is the umbrella organization for 180 Planned Parenthood organizations around the world. It recently released a report called “Stand and Deliver: Sex, health and young people in the 21st century.” The term “young people” refers to anyone over the age of 10.

The IPPF report includes a list of “Young People’s Human Rights.” Among them are the following: Read more…

Readers interested in how accomodating lesbian parents will impact the definition of parenthood should take a careful look at this post, by Julie Shapiro and the discussion in the comments.   She is referring to the Santa Cruz case, in which a woman who conceived twins with a known sperm donor, left the lesbian relationship Read more…

A US judge granted political asylum to a German homeschooling family that is in danger of losing their children to the state.

Immigration Judge Lawrence O. Burman, of Memphis, Tennessee, said: “We can’t expect every country to follow our constitution. The world might be a better place if it did. However, the rights being violated here are basic human rights that no country has a right to violate.” He observed: “Homeschoolers are a particular social group that the German government is trying to suppress. This family has a well-founded fear of persecution… therefore, they are eligible for asylum…” Read more…

The judge in the Miller Jenkins custody case has given Lisa Miller 30 days to appear in court.

A judge gave a Virginia woman at the center of a long-running lesbian custody dispute 30 days to appear in court with her 7-year-old daughter or face possible arrest. Judge William Cohen of Vermont Family Court made the ruling in response to a request by Janet Jenkins to hold her former partner, Lisa Miller, in contempt after Ms. Miller failed to turn over the child, Isabella, to Ms. Jenkins on Jan. 1. The couple broke up in 2003, and Ms. Miller, the girl’s biological mother, moved to Virginia, renounced homosexuality and became an evangelical Christian. Her lawyer said she did not know her client’s whereabouts.

That is what the AP calls it. But actually this dispute between two women will become more and more common, unfortunately.

A Santa Cruz court is slated to hear a custody dispute between former lesbian partners in which the biological mother has become romantically involved with the sperm donor father of her 10-month-old twins. Ah yes, the father: the forgotten figure in the demands that Presumption of Paternity be replaced by Presumption of Parenthood. Read more…

More from Douglas Farrow’s Touchstone article. BTW, the book he references, A Nation of Bastards is available from the Ruth Institute Reading List, along with a bunch of other good books.  I have been making this point for some time: the immediate impact of same sex marriage is very far from its full long-run impact, very much as “reducing the cost of divorce for people in bad marriages,” was a long way from being the main impact or final impact of eliminating the fault basis for divorce. Read more…

Douglas Farrow makes the argument that far from having “separation of church and state,” the modern world has acheived precisely the opposite. By melding the functions of civil society into the state, the state has become de facto, the religion of the society, and one that brooks no opposition. The two major area where this has occurred are the natural family and the religious community.

The natural family unit confronts the state as an entity that claims rights not granted by the state but brought to it—rights the lawful state is obliged to recognize and respect. The religious community likewise claims rights and liberties that derive from a source other than the state, a source that transcends and relativizes the state…. Read more…

I got involved in a discussion over at the Econ Lib blog on the question of baby-selling. The question arose when Bryan Caplan opined that it would be best for all concerned if women considering placing their children for adoption could recieve explicit payments for their babies, not just compensation for their hospital expenses and the like. As part of his argument, he claimed: Read more…

The latest on the disputed custody of Isabella. Miller has apparently disappeared with her child, rather than comply with the court order to surrender her daughter to a woman she used to have sex with. Read more…

An Irish court ruled that the biological dad who donated sperm to a lesbian couple still has some rights.

the five judges of the Supreme Court today found that, while man was not entitled to guardianship of the three-year-old boy at this time, it would be in the child’s best interest for his father to have access to him.

This case illustrates the coming conflict between lesbian couples and the father of their children. Read more…