Ruth Institute Blog

By Rachel Pepa [Please note the other resources at the bottom of the article when you click "Keep reading."]

A review of Precious Babies: Pregnancy, Birth and Parenting after Infertility By Kate Brian

As an informal guide to having children after fertility problems, Precious Babies has much to recommend it. There is, however, an omission which, as a donor conceived (DC) person, I found particularly troublesome – the book is entirely devoid of DC voices. Read more…

Note: This is a longer version, with citations, of the article posted just previous to this on the Ruth blog.

by Stanton L. Jones is Provost and Professor of Psychology at Wheaton College (IL).  PDF version of this paper and the Resources available for download at our Print Resources Page.

Homosexuality in particular, and sexual orientation, sexual identity and sexuality in general, are enormously complex topics, about which religious and social conservatives are prone to believe a number of falsehoods. This reality exposes us to derision in the public arena and weakens our capacity to engage this issue effectively. These false assertions include that: Read more…

by Stanton L Jones

Dr. Evelyn Hooker is arguably history’s most revered gay-affirming activist scientist, and so it is that, at a time when social science is frequently abused in public discussions of same-sex issues, Hooker should be remembered and praised for her clearheaded allegiance to proper scientific standards. Read more…

My two-year-old son was singing, or rather, belting out, the Alleluia in his best voice. The only problem was that he replaced the word “Alleluia” with…

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by Rob Schwarzwalder

A judge’s decision to order the abortion of “a mentally ill woman’s unborn baby and sterilize her — if it meant she had to be ‘coaxed, bribed, or even enticed … by ruse’ into the procedure” has drawn appropriate fire from officials in the Bay State. Read more…

Meet at the Stand with Children Info Booth
8th Annual Walk for Life West Coast on Saturday

Join us to promote marriage and family while walking for life at the 8th Annual Walk for Life West Coast in San Francisco this Saturday, January 21, 2012. Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

It’s difficult today to say anything in favour of the intact, married family without putting somebody’s nose out of joint. Last week it was a blogger at the LBGT site ThinkProgress who took umbrage at a comment by Focus on the Family’s Glenn Stanton. I’ll let Mr Stanton tell you how from his post on NRO’s Home Front blog: Read more…

First of all this week, there was a big (about 5,000 observations) sophisticated (University of Chicago Business School) study of bad behavior in little boys. Conclusion: little boys benefit substantially from living with both their biological parents. The second study was a little (78 observations) simplistic (unrepresentative sample, ideologically motivated researchers) of the Quality of Life of the children of lesbian couples. Conclusion: the children of lesbian couples are just as happy and well-adjusted as their peers.  Read more…

by Charlie Butts

Council members in Baltimore are introducing a “Peeping Tom” ordinance that reportedly creates “serious safety issues for women.” Read more…

By Michael Worley, First year law student at J. Reuben Clark Law School at Brigham Young University, and a 2011 graduate of the Ruth Institute It Takes a Family to Raise a Village program.

It is common knowledge that TV reports don’t tell the whole story.  Frequently a group of 75 undecided voters gather to share their responses immediately after a debate.  Such people provide instant commentary that the theorists of network TV may not be able to perceive.  However, these groups tend not to be predictive of overall election results. Random polling via phone calls shows us much clearer results.  Read more…

by Jennifer Roback Morse

This article was first published at familyinamerica.org on January 10, 2012.

Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men
Mara Hvistendahl
Public Affairs, 2011; 314 pages, $26.99

This brave and timely book has many strengths and one glaring, but understandable, weakness. The strength of this book is the reporting. Mara Hvistendahl, a liberal, pro-choice feminist, painstakingly documents the catastrophic consequences of the worldwide “choice” for male babies: gender imbalance leading to prostitution, sex slavery, and male frustration and aggression. The weakness of this book is the political analysis. She doesn’t understand how deeply Roe v. Wade changed American political culture, particularly within the conservative movement broadly conceived. But both these strengths and weaknesses work together to yield an honest and courageous book that should be read by anyone who considers himself (or herself) well informed. Read more…

by Katie Hinderer

I often get asked why I like social media so much. Parents are concerned at the amount of time their children spend online and the relationships that are suffering as a result. They see the constant need to be in the know and the increasingly short attention spans as something detrimental. And while I agree, there are serious downsides to social media, there are also amazing upsides that if tapped properly can make a huge difference. Read more…

by Shannon Roberts

Past Eugenics and sterilisation programs in the United States are coming back to bite them, with North Carolina currently the first State to address compensation for victims.

According to the North Carolina Justice for Sterilization Victims Foundation, at one time 31 states in the United States had government-run eugenics programs. In North Carolina alone, close to 8,000 men, women, and children, largely poor, black, disabled or uneducated, were forcibly sterilized from 1929 to 1974.  The programs were aimed at creating a better society by eliminating those considered undesirable.  Read more…

by William West

A time traveller from the 20th Century would very likely be shocked by how standards have plummeted in the film industry in a little over a decade – particularly with movies aimed at the teen market. Even parents from the swinging ’60s and ’70s would have thought twice about the explicit films now routinely sanctioned by censors for viewing by teenagers. Read more…

Random chance? Prank of the fitness gods? Yes, I know I’m getting big, but seeing this on my fridge is just spooky.

See it to believe it.

by Carolyn Moynihan

Here’s a question of special relevance to regions where there is a high incidence of HIV/AIDS — in particular, sub-Saharan Africa: Does marriage protect a person against the disease? An editorial published in the official Zimbabwean newspaper, The Herald, this week scoffs at the idea, saying, “Nothing could be further from the truth.” Read more…

In a previous post, I discussed a Life-Style Leftist blogman’s outraged response to a perfectly reasonable statement about a very sound study, and analyzed the rhetorical strategy of accusing your opponent of saying  something he didn’t say. In this post, I want to talk about the substance of the study, what it shows and what it doesn’t.

It is always dangerous to speculate about people’s motives of course. I’ve never met Zach Ford, the blogman over at Think Progress, so I don’t know exactly what he is thinking. But I can say this: the logic of the marriage redefinition movement requires its advocates to deny that gender matters.

If gender is to become legally irrelevant to marriage, the logic of their position drives them to claim that gender is irrelevant to parenthood. The gender of parents doesn’t matter.  The gender of children doesn’t matter.  There is no difference between “mothers” and “fathers:” those are just empty, social constructs. There are only generic parents. In fact, everyone is a generic person. There are no sons and daughters either, only generic children.  So, the impact of an absent father on a girl should be exactly the same as an absent mother on a girl, or an absent father on a boy, or as an absent mother on a boy.

But now, take a look at the study that Mr. Ford claims that Mr. Stanton has mischaracterized.  The title of the study reveals that it is profoundly about gender, “The
Trouble with Boys: Social Influences and the Gender Gap in Disruptive Behavior.”  Mr. Ford characterizes the paper thus: “If anything, the Booth study supports arguments Read more…

By Peter Johnson Jr.

Wednesday the United States Supreme Court delivered a knockout blow to the White House in the cause of religious liberty.

Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for a unanimous court swatted away the government’s claim that the Lutheran Church did not have the right to fire a “minister of religion” who, after six years of Lutheran religious training had been commissioned as a minister, upon election by her congregation.  Read more…

This is one of our continuing series of posts on identifying the rhetorical tactics of the opponents of marriage. This strategy of mischaracterizing your opponents’ statements is extremely common, and takes several different forms.  Today we are going to deal with just one: being outraged over a statement you attribute to your opponent, but which he did not in fact make!

An example of this from Think Progress crossed my desk yesterday. Here is the breathless statement from left-wing LGBT blogman, Zach Ford, attacking Focus on the Family (FOTF):

But though FOTF is clearly trying to use this as evidence against same-sex marriage, the study did not prove anything “against” same-sex parents. The study in question (PDF here) did not, in fact, address same-sex parenting whatsoever, but instead compared children raised by married heterosexual parents to children raised by a single mother. It is one of many “fatherless” studies that conservative groups use to conflate not having a father/having one mother with having two mothers.

Mercy! Those nefarious right-wingers! Transforming a study that has nothing to do with same sex parents into an attack on gay parents! Read more…

Comments on the blogosphere are a total joke. And by joke, I don’t mean funny. I mean “something not to be taken seriously.”

Case in point: When Santorum did well in Iowa on Jan. 3, 2012, many news sites wrote about the Duggers supporting him. The articles I saw were pretty evenhanded, but it was the comments I found most interesting.

You see, for many years I suspected that there was a covert strategy involved in blog comments, and this suspicion grew even stronger as I observed and participated on the Ruth Institute blog. It was clear that there was no debate among those commenters who disagreed with us; there was none of the give and take one might expect in a debate. They were uniformly one sided, as if they had a single intention behind them.

Unfortunately, I could never confirm my suspicions, except once, Read more…