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…
Ed Feser has a provocative article about scientism, which he defines this way: Scientism is the view that all real knowledge is scientific knowledge—that there is no rational, objective form of inquiry that is not a branch of science. His critique is that Despite its adherents’ pose of rationality, scientism has a serious problem: it is either self-refuting or trivial.
Take the first horn of this dilemma. The claim that scientism is true is not itself a scientific claim, Read more…
Social critic Lee Harris scores great points in his analysis of the Tea Party movement. Though his analysis is indirect: he is critiquing David Brooks’ analysis. But, Harris leaves no doubt where he stands.
Here we come to the most puzzling aspect of David Brooks’s column. Why did he feel the need to make his derisive and gratuitous reference to Wal-Mart shoppers? The answer appears to be that Brooks is engaged in a sly argumentum ad hominem. He is attacking the Tea Party movement by pointing out that those who sympathize with it are likely to shop at Wal-Mart. Now, as a sociological observation, there may be an element of truth in this contention. But it is also possible to take the remark as a not terribly subtle appeal to his reader’s latent (or not so latent) snobbery. After all, what could be more déclassé than shopping at Wal-Mart? It is a bit as if David Brooks had winked at his sophisticated Read more…
I recently asked a black pastor friend of mine to consider this hypothetical question: Where do you think the black community would be today, if the Sexual Revolution had not happened at the same time as the Civil Rights movement of the 1960’s? Think about it: a functioning African American family, black men inside the family, collaborating with their wives to raise their children together, as they had done for generations, but doing all that in the post-segregation era.
Now the CDC offers this report on another facet of the sexual revolution that hits blacks disporportionately: Read more…
Low birth rate a problem? Making abortion illegal seems like a good idea to me. I’m skeptical that Korea (or any abortion nation) would actually pull it off, though.
Anna Choi
Unless Koreans have more kids, their nation could disappear. A dynamic gynaecologist has a plan to reverse the trend by applying the existing laws on abortion.
Korea has the second-lowest birth rate in the world – so low that the government has reversed years of pressure on couples to have just one or two children. It now desperately wants to raise the birth rate. But why not reduce the abortion rate, asks obstetrician and gynaecologist Anna Choi. Her lobby group, Gynob, has created quite a stir with its demand that abortion be criminalised and abortion doctors prosecuted. We interviewed Dr Choi via email. Read more…
Sex ed programs aren’t working. The solution: keep having them!
By Professor Brenda Almond
After 13 years in power, a sense of chronic disappointment hangs over the Labour administration.
Yesterday, another of the Government’s shameful failures was exposed: the bankruptcy of its policy to tackle Britain’s awful record as western Europe’s teenage pregnancy capital. Read more…
Not to mention the A.D.H.D., the obesity, the lack of creative thought factors.
by Carolyn Moynihan
Art imitates life and research imitates common sense, it seems. A new study has found that the more young people watch television, the poorer their relationships with both their friends and parents. Read more…
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