Ruth Institute Blog

It’s a great way to keep your head clear. But does anybody care, I wonder?

by Carolyn Moynihan

It is always gratifying when research coincides with common sense and everyday experience, as in the case of a new study showing that a relationship in which sexual intimacy is delayed is more likely to endure. Read more…

Great post today over at the First Things blog.

It is odd that simply because of its “sexual freedom” our time should be considered extraordinarily physical. In fact, our “sexual revolution” is mostly an industrial phenomenon, in which the body is used as a idea of pleasure or a pleasure machine with the aim of “freeing” natural pleasure from natural consequence.

Like any other industrial enterprise, industrial sexuality seeks to conquer nature by exploiting it and ignoring the consequences, by denying any connection between nature and spirit or body and soul, and by evading social responsibility. The spiritual, physical, and economic costs of this “freedom” are immense, and are characteristically belittled or ignored. The diseases of sexual irresponsibility are regarded as a technological problem and an affront to liberty.

Industrial sex, characteristically, establishes its freeness and goodness by an industrial accounting, dutifully toting up numbers of sexual partners, orgasms, and so on, with the inevitable industrial implication Read more…

by Bill Bumpas and Jody Brown

he full results of a national study that favors abstinence education is being withheld from researchers and the public.

The taxpayer-supported survey from 2008 found that around 70 percent of parents and their teenagers believed that teens should wait until marriage to have sex. Despite release of the study’s summary and its highlight at two major public health conferences last year, the Department of Health and Human Services is withholding the full results according to Valerie Huber, executive director of the National Abstinence Education Foundation. Read more…

Washington Times Columnist Cheryl Wetzstein interviewed me for this article on the new book Red Families v. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. Cheryl ably summarizes the basic premise of the book:

In blue states, families tend to be well-educated, have high-paying jobs, be tolerant of diversity and be politically liberal. They marry later in life, have children in wedlock and are dedicated co-parents….

Red-state families, however, seem to be stuck in a time warp — Read more…

I’m pretty sure a couple of movies have been made with topics similar to this. The difference here, of course, is this woman’s plan was not for the sake of comedic effect.

by Carolyn Moynihan

Maybe something is changing for the better out there among Generation Y. A British journalist in her early 30s has written a book about renouncing sex for a year in order to get control of her emotional life. It’s called Chastened. Read more…

The thought of kids having kids is really disturbing to me. I had my first child when I was 25, and I can say, it’s serious business. I can’t imagine doing it while trying to go to high school or even college. And who is really going to be raising these children anyhow? My guess is, the grandmothers. Let’s do a survey of how mothers of pregnant teens feel about teen pregnancy.

The picture a 13-year-old boy sitting next to his baby, which accompanied an article on this topic a while back, still burns in my memory. It was such a heart-wrenching sight. The thirteen-year-old  looked so tiny. Plus his face spoke volumes of “What have I gotten myself into?” This dad is still asking to have his pb and j cut into triangles and for rides to the library. I wouldn’t let a 13-year-old boy babysit my toddlers. Babies deserve more. Read more…

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…

Next up in our series on the Pill: how exaggerating the effectiveness of contraception causes serious problems. Read the statistics I quote in this column. If you don’t believe the stats I quote, you can go directly to the Alan Guttmacher articles where I first got them. Bottom line: contraception is least effective among women who are poor, young and unmarried. Yet these are the very groups to whom contraception is the most heavily marketed.

Over 70% of poor, cohabiting teenagers using condoms, will be pregnant within a year. By contrast, the middle-aged, middle-class married woman has a 6% chance of pregnancy after a year of condom use. Read more…

Right on! This is right up te same alley as what the Ruth Institute is doing with its It Takes a Family conferences and with Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse’s Smart Sex book.

by Carolyn Moynihan

CNN has run a story on the movement among college students to shun the hook-up culture prevalent on campuses and encourage dating and abstinence. Read more…

Evidently, the article Michael New was responding to originally appearred on the Law, Religion and Ethics blog. The discussion there is quite good, at a surprisingly high level of sophistication. The Leftys are still wrong however, as this deeply flawed analysis in the comments by June Carbone illustrates: Read more…

This article from CNN quotes favorably our friends at the Love and Fidelity Network, based at Princeton. Evidently, students from a number of schools are trying to start nonreligious pro-abstinence clubs. This is a favorable report, because they are describing the students in their own terms, rather than putting scare quotes around them, or implicitly arguing with them. (To see why such groups are needed, check out this discussion I had on Fox News with someone who ought to be old enough to know better. Notice how she interrupts my every sentence….) Read more…

I recommend the book, The War on Intimacy. The subtitle tells the story, “How Comprehensive Sex Ed Sabotages Committed Relationships and Our Nation’s Health.” I met the author, Richard Panzer, Ph.D. at a meeting of the Abstinence Clearing House last year. He pressed this book into my hands, and I read it on the plane. He and coauthor Mary Anne Mosack have compiled a wealth of information, from academic studies on the psychological impact of early teen sexual activity, the spread of STD’s and much more. They have a wealth of information about how you can be involved on their site. They also have some You-Tube clips. Check it out.

Regular Ruth Readers know that I have been supportive of the students of the Princeton University Anscombe Society, and their efforts to obtain a center to support abstinence and chastity on campus. Their efforts have been smacked down by the University adminstration, for a variety of extremely lame reasons.  But now, the Christian Union, housed at Princeton, reports that the University’s refusal to support the students who value sexual integrity is nothing short of hypocrisy.  They claim that they want to remain neutral and not impose or even propose values to students, so they couldn’t possibly support an abstinence center on campus, to go along with the Women’s Center and the LGBT Center. But now, the mask is off entirely: the University supported events that quite obviously promote non-abstinence, non-monogamy.  I can’t make this up. Read more…

Maggie Gallagher did her syndicated column on the new abstinence studies. (Regular Ruth readers already know something about this controversy. See our posts here, here,  and here and our podcasts here .)

The release of this new study in the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine this week is weirdly timely. …It’s just the gold standard for intervention research, a bright and shining pinnacle of research design that social science seldom ever reaches: Read more…

Way to go, PM! Way to voice your opinion even when it’s so horribly unpopular. . . and when you’re right.

Carolyn Moynihan

Horrors! The next prime minister of Australia might be a man who advocates virginity for young people.

Here is this week’s shock-horror story from Australia: the country’s next prime minister might be a man who advises his daughters not to throw their virginity away on just anyone. Fair go, that’s what he dared to say during an interview with a women’s magazine. You probably heard the resulting outcry in America, above the President’s State of the Union address, above the iPad hysteria: ‘What a chauvinist! What a pontificator! What a hypocrite!’ — to recite only the more flattering epithets. Read more…

My money is on the horrible movies and tv shows geered toward teens. Just a preview for an American Pie movie was enough to make me want to retch.

Charlie Butts – OneNewsNow -

Teen pregnancies were up three percent in 2006, which is the latest reporting period available. Proponents of comprehensive sex education are blaming abstinence programs for the increase. Read more…

I wonder why we haven’t heard anything about this study from the University of Pennsylvania Med School? Sixth and seventh grade African American students were randomly sorted into a control group, an abstinence only class, a safer-sex class and a combined abstinence plus safer sex class.

an abstinence-only intervention for pre-teens was more successful in delaying the onset of sexual activity than a health-promotion control intervention. After two years, one-third of the abstinence-only group reported having sex, compared to one-half of the control group. Read more…

Oprah was dumbfounded by Bristol Palin’s abstinence pledge.  I analyze both women in this new podcast.  You and I know that if Bristol had said, “I want to be president of the US,” Oprah would not have said, “Aren’t you setting yourself up for failure?”  But that is exactly what she said when Bristol voiced her determination to abstain from sex until she gets married.

Oprah gives Bristol a “chance to recant” her heretical belief system that marriage, sex and childbearing belong together. Don’t you just love how Oprah disses Bristol’s choice for abstinence?!?! If she were “choosing” to abort a baby, Oprah would never allow herself to say, “you know, you may regret that someday.” If Bristol were saying, “I would like to be President of teh US someday,” Oprah would say, “You go, girl.”
Only when a young woman admits that she wants marriage and sex and child-bearing to be linked in one organic package, do the adults try to talk her out of it.
Which tells you that “choice” is not really the issue. The rhetoric of “choice” is a cover, a defense for an action that cannot be defended on its own terms. (cross posted over at the RuthYouth blog. )

I note with interest that Reuters interviewed representatives of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, the research wing of Planned Parenthood. “Its all the fault of those Big Bad Social Conservatives.”  Oddly enough, Reuters did not interview anyone from the abstinence education movement. I wonder why? Perhaps they dont’ know where to find Leslee Unruh at the Abstinence Clearinghouse. I guess they have never heard of David Mahan, hip, urban African-American married father, who gives inspiring, dynamic presentations through his organization, Frontline Youth Communications. Maybe Reuters doesn’t know about Luis Galdamez, Hispanic Abstinence  Read more…