Ruth Institute Blog

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…

Dr Ken Howell has been reinstated to his adjunct positiion at the University of Illinois. I have not been posting on this story, but I think it is significant because it shows that people’s protests can be effective. The facebook group supporting Dr Ken had 2,600 members. That is not a huge number in this day and age. I dont’ know how many calls and e-mails the university received on this case. But it does show that making your reasoned voice heard can be effective.

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.

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…

Ralph Reed declares our Supreme Court Confirmation process to be broken and he is certainly correct. The question is why?
The answer is one word: abortion. Actually, it is abortion and all its ill-begotten progeny, the entire sexual revolution. This is because the abortion rights fanatics are attempting to create something that simply cannot be: an entire society based on the premise that sex is a sterile activity, as I explain in my article at the National Catholic Register. Read more…

Carol Iannone speculates on the connection between the truly gross college movies, and the rise of co-ed dorms:

In the earlier film, (Revenge of the Nerds) when the sexes were still separate, there was perhaps a tinge of sweetness around the idea of the nerds’ longing to have their place on campus, and to have some access to girls who don’t notice them. The girls were objects to be spied on to be sure, but there is a hint of adoration in the spying. In the later films, the girls have become simple whores, ever ready to offer themselves for anything, as if trained in a French brothel. Read more…

It is one thing for people to try to reduce the probability of pregnancy. It is entirely another to attempt to create a whole society around the premise that sex should be a sterile activity, with reproduction thrown in as an afterthought if you happen to like that sort of thing.
This fundamental incoherence is why the state has to continually ratchet up its efforts to sustain the New Contraceptive World Order.

The New Contraceptive World Order is an artificial creation of the state. It requires continual support and coddling from the state, including ever-increasing efforts to suppress dissent and enforce conformity.

Cheerleaders for this new heaven on earth insist that all doctors be trained in abortions, that all pharmacists prescribe all forms of birth control, that all employers provide contraception and abortion in their health plans. Suppressing the choices of doctors, pharmacists, insurers and employers makes no sense — unless the real goal is to create the new and unnatural society of sterile sex.

Public-interest law firms defending First Amendment rights report that student pro-life groups are subjected to more restrictions on their free-speech rights than virtually any other student groups.

Obviously, restricting free speech in the name of reproductive “freedom” is incoherent. None of this would be necessary if the only purpose of the pill were merely to give everyone more choices.

My whole article is here.

Princeton University professor Robby George tells it like is today on NRO.

It has become a matter of orthodoxy among progressives that those who believe that marriage is properly defined as the union of one man and one woman are guilty of bigotry.

There is a problem, however: Barack Obama has assured voters that he believes marriage to be the union of one man and one woman — not two men, two women, or some combination of more than two people…. Read more…

The case of Christian Legal Society and the Hastings Law School tested whether Christian groups can exclude non-Christians from membership or leadership. Prof Hadley Arkes summarizes the case:

after all of the quick moves, the fact remained that the CLS was deprived of its standing on the campus because it ran afoul of the non-discrimination policy. It was deprived of official standing, not because of the all-comers policy, but because it could not accept a policy that barred all discriminations based on “sexual orientation.”

For Justice Ginsburg that was the point that finally carried. After all the grand distractions, the simple point was that a Christian group could not accept a policy that barred them from insisting that the only rightful form of sex was the coupling of a man and woman within the frame and commitments of marriage. Read more…

Wisdom is about making distinctions.

The great medieval Jewish commentator on the Bible, Rashi wrote (in his comments to Leviticus 11:47) that it is not sufficient to have great knowledge of our moral precepts.  Instead, the Torah requires us to be able to make distinctions between the pure and the impure.   Between right and wrong.  Rashi continues that it is not sufficient to be able to be able to make these distinctions only in the obvious cases.  Instead, one must also be able to distinguish in those cases in which the difference between purity and impurity is as fine as a hairsbreadth.

That is the nature of wisdom.

The Left is at war with wisdom. Read more…

My last post dealt with the sampling and reporting problems associated with the latest study purporting to show that the children of lesbians are doing just fine. The fact is, that the study claims that the children of lesbians are doing better in every dimension than the children in the general population. The underlying message of this story is not simply, “leave us alone to have kids the way we want.”

Herewith, are the 3 Really Pernicious Messages behind the “Lesbians Make Better Parents” Story line:

1. Women are better parents than men. Therefore, Read more…

You’ve all seen the headlines by now: “Children of lesbian parents do well.” These headlines are based on a new study published in the journal Pediatrics. I actually read the study, which is my custom before commenting. I also read the letters to the editor on this study.

Here are 8 reasons why this study does not prove anything about the functioning of the children of lesbians.
1. The sample is extremely small: 78 children of lesbian mothers and 93 children in the control group.
2. The sample of lesbian mothers is unlikely to be representative of the general population of lesbians. This is a sample of people who volunteered for the study, not a random sample. The most motivated and high-functioning people are the most likely to volunteer for a politically charged study.
3. The “results” are intrinsically unreliable. The results are nothing but the mothers’ reports of their childrens’ behavior and functioning. There is no cross-checking with objective outcomes, Read more…

Dennis Prager has a motto he uses when he discusses scientific studies.  As a rule of thumb, he says, studies either confirm common sense or they are hogwash.  I couldn’t have said it better myself.

Recently, in the comments, somebody disputed the self-evident proposition that married biological parents are the best way to raise a child.  She quoted a recent study saying that two women raising a child are just as good as married parents.  This goes against the massive amount of data collected by David Popenoe in his book Life Without Father.  More significantly, it goes against common sense.  It is, after all, perfectly obvious that, generally speaking men and women bring different things to the table when raising children.  For instance, they interact differently with children.  It also goes against common observation.  In the years I spent defending criminals, it was rare to find one that was raised by both of her or his biological parents.

When I indicated my skepticism of the study, my disputant brought out the big guns.  Read more…

I want to thank Ari Mendelson for finding and posting this very important 22 minute video on the history of political correctness. And I want to thanks the Free Congress Foundation for making this.

This video is important to the Ruth Institute because it shows the connection between Marxism and the Sexual Revolution. Marxism has failed as an economic ideology, but it’s adherents have not given up. In fact, this video shows that some Marxists realized as early as the 1920’s that capitalism was a successful economic system. Therefore, the working class was not likely to rise up against the capitalist class. (Listen especially around the 6 minute mark.) These Marxist theorists began looking for another class to play the revolutionary role that traditional Marxism had assigned to the working class.

They found the answer to that dilemma in what we would now call the Sexual Revolution. Read more…

A monumental amount of nonsense has been written and distributed on college campuses on the subject of rape.  I am going to link below a site containing the best advice I have ever seen on crime prevention.  If you’re a young woman in college, or you know a young woman who is in college, this advice is well worth taking seriously.

Before I continue, I must add that one of the most unpleasant aspects of writing about topics such as this one is that the knee jerk reaction of some people upon hearing this type of advice is that it constitutes “blaming the victim.”  Such accusations miss the point.  One has to admit Read more…

Some of our opponents accuse us of wanting to establish a theocracy.  Specifically, we’ve been accused of wanting to usher in a future reminiscent of Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale.

This is absurd.

The list of people who want to establish a theocracy as much as I do or more than I do includes Richard Dawkins, Vladimir Lenin and Chairman Mao.

In contrast to the atheists named above, I am passionately religious.  I also think that others should be religious as well.

So, why do I oppose theocracy as much as (or more than) your typical militant atheist? Read more…

It’s not a tinfoil hat conspiracy if the conspirators wrote down their conspiracy, published those writings and spent a hundred years in pursuit of the goals of that conspiracy.

Witness this video on the history of Political Correctness.

So, when we say that some elements of the Left are obsessed with their goal of abolishing the family in favor of total state control of citizen’s lives, you need not take our word for it.  You need not take the word of the speakers in this video.  You need only read the writings of Marcuse, Gramsci, and their ilk.

From One News Now comes this article about a high school student who dared to wear a T-shirt to school that promoted….(gasp)…..abstinence!

A middle-school student in Minnesota has regained his right to wear at school a T-shirt bearing an abstinence message.

Officials at Hastings Middle School had initially prohibited seventh-grader Johnathon Kinney from wearing the T-shirt with the message “Virginity Rocks!” On April 26, two school teachers confronted Kinney about the shirt, informing him that it was offensive and should be covered up. School officials also warned Kinney against wearing the shirt again.

After contacting the principal about the incident — and finding he supported the teachers’ decision — Kinney’s parents contacted The Rutherford Institute. John Whitehead, Read more…

Michelle Obama has lectured the nation on childhood obesity.  It probably won’t shock you that her proposed solutions involve government action.

However, I would suggest a different solution– marriage and active child rearing by biological parents.  This article discusses some of the causes of childhood obesity.  The causes it discusses are less politically correct than blaming McDonalds and the Coca Cola Corporation.

Today, large numbers of elementary school kids are getting themselves ready for school without a parent. When my wife substituted at our son’s elementary school in California, kids were showing up at school with donuts for breakfast—because both parents had left the house hours earlier, expecting their kids to make their own way. After school, too many elementary school kids are returning to empty homes, and eating for comfort. I recall when my wife and I were out looking at houses Read more…

This article from the Georgetown Hoya could be considered appalling. (I think that is approximately the view of my friend Tony Listi, who called it to my attention.) I think it is highly instructive. (Listen to me shift into Professor mode: sorry, I can’t help it.) This author who frets about “recycling” an old hook-up, is actually illustrating that the “organic” approach to human sexuality is truer to the facts than is the “consumer” approach.
First, some definition of terms: “recycling” means having sex with a hook-up partner a second time. Read more…