Ruth Institute Blog

An urban high school teacher in Connecticut talks about unwed motherhood, fatherlessness, and how it affects the kids in his classroom.

by Gerry Garibaldi

…Here’s my prediction: the money, the reforms, the gleaming porcelain, the hopeful rhetoric about saving our children—all of it will have a limited impact, at best, on most city schoolchildren. Urban teachers face an intractable problem, one that we cannot spend or even teach our way out of: teen pregnancy. This year, all of my favorite girls are pregnant, four in all, future unwed mothers every one. There will be no innovation in this quarter, no race to the top. Personal moral accountability is the electrified rail that no politician wants to touch… Read more…

By Mona Charen

If only lower income heterosexuals were as keen to marry as some homosexuals, the United States would be a much stronger country.

Supporters of gay marriage (most prominently The New York Times, which reported New York’s legalization of such unions last week with about as much hoopla as it did the Japanese surrender in 1945) are ecstatic. Read more…

Proposition 8′s sponsors will be in court Monday morning to argue whether Judge Walker’s decision to overturn Prop 8 should be vacated on the basis that the long term same-sex relationship he is involved in (and was involved in at the time of the Prop 8 trial, but failed to disclose) constitutes a conflict of interest.

If you want to follow the hearing, and don’t mind going to the website of one of Prop 8′s opponents to do so, then you can find live updates at http://www.afer.org/june13 starting at 9:00am.

For those of our readers in the Kansas/Missouri area:

MARRIAGE AND CATHOLIC HEALTHCARE. This summer’s “Catholic Healthcare Identity: Medical and Pastoral Strategies” conference at Benedictine College is the NFP Outreach National Summer Institute. The conference, lasting from July 11-16, offers college credit for educators and/or continuing medical education credits for doctors and continuing education units for nurses. Keynote speakers include:

Read more…

Some of our commenters seem to be surprised that the Ruth Institute is “transitioning away from its anti-gay advocacy…. Why is there an article about abortion here?” Actually, if you look over the life of this blog, you will see a lot of discussion about abortion, contraception and artificial reproductive technology. You will also see discussions of divorce, cohabitation, out of wedlock childbearing, abstinence education, adultery, the demographic winter, what makes for a happy marriage, welfare policy and much else. The common thread is marriage: the significance of marriage to society and to children, and all the social, legal and cultural practices that affect marriage. You will see very little about homosexuality per se.

No offense to you all, but we’re just not all that interested in you all.

I wrote two books, one in 2001 (Love and Economics) and one is 2005 (Smart Sex: Finding Lifelong Love in a Hookup World) (both available at the Ruth Store.) Neither of those books say a single word about same sex marriage or homosexuality. I wrote a chapter for a book called The Meaning of Marriage: Family, State, Market, And Morals. My chapter was called, “Why unilateral divorce has no place in a free society.” I personally have been concerned about divorce, out of wedlock childbearing, cohabitation and abortion for a long time. Maggie Gallagher has written several books on similar topics. David Blankenhorn’s book Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, had a huge impact on the public discussion about the family in America.

We (Maggie, David, and others more so than me) just about had people convinced that kids needed their dads, Read more…

Dr J was up in San Francisco earlier this week for the Prop 8 trial in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.  In addition to the interviews we’ve already posted, she also spoke with Austin Nimocks and Jordan Lorence (both of these are available on our podcast page under Prop 8).  There’s also a pre-trial interview with Todd Wilken of Issues, Etc; more are on the way.

Dr J was up in San Francisco earlier this week for the Prop 8 trial in the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.  While she was there, she interviewed Bill May, Bruce Hausknecht, and Ron Prentice (all of these are available on our podcast page under Prop 8).  She was also interviewed by KTVU; that video is currently up on their website.

by Sheila Liaugminas

Again and again, California voters have had their voice and their vote on Proposition 8 rejected. Mostly by powerful homosexual marriage activists, judges and sympathizers. But the people who want their constitutionally expressed will to be legally established have tolerated the repeated necessity of fighting for it in court. The appeal is court again, and sympathizers of the voters have joined in. Read more…

There are a few more podcasts up for your listening pleasure–one from our recent “It Takes a Family” conference, and the other two are interviews of Dr J on Issues, Etc.

Dr J gave the opening talk at ITAF 2010; entitled Marriage and Freedom in Society, it discusses what marriage does for society and some of the consequences (especially those relating to children) if we choose to dissolve or weaken it.  Some of the areas she covers include divorce law, state intervention, and parenthood.

The two Issues, Etc interviews discuss the response to Judge Walker’s attitude about the Prop 8 case (Shot in the Arm…or the Foot?) and another group of Mama Grizzlies, this one opposed to Sarah Palin (Sarah Palin vs. Mama Grizzlies).  Dr J’s exposition on the arrogance of both subjects is excellent.

by Sheila Liaugminas

After declaring a California voter initiative wrongly passed because he disagreed with the citizens’ conclusion, Judge Vaughn Walker took it upon himself to declare anyone who disagreed with him ineligible to appeal to a higher court. Case closed, he thought. He was wrong. Read more…

Gotta love the first paragraph.

by Stephen J. Heaney

Re-examining the essential characteristics of marriage.

Abraham Lincoln once asked how many legs a dog has if we call a tail a leg. The answer, he said, is four: calling a tail a leg does not make it so. We chuckle and move on.

But what if people began to argue that a tail really is a leg? They might say that what defines the leg is that it is an appendage of the dog’s body, that it contains bone and muscle covered with skin and fur—just like a tail. Tails just happen to come out of the body at a different angle than other legs. When a tail hangs down low, who can tell the difference? Read more…

Oh boy. Here we go.

by Walter R. Schumm

The evidence shows that gay marriage is equal to or better than traditional marriage, according to a Federal Court judge. But what sort of evidence?

In one sense, Judge Walker can’t be blamed for his decision since he was provided a great deal of inaccurate and incomplete information through the trial process. I hope that future amicus briefs will be able to correct those deficiencies. Read more…

by Mary Rice Hasson

What gays can teach straights about marriage, according to some people.

Of all the things that Tom and Tina Average might want for their marriage, one they have quite likely never thought of is innovation. It is the kind of word they might look for in the home improvement pages of the weekend paper or on their favourite consumer website, but not in a marriage guidance brochure. Read more…

by Sheila Liaugminas

As if there were only a couple…

Besides every other issue dividing politicians and the culture, which seem to abound right now, the battle for the legalization of same-sex marriage is throwing more heat than light on the larger issue of human rights.

In the past two weeks, Hawaii’s governor had to pronounce on state legislation that would have permitted gay marriage. She said no. Read more…

By Patrick McIlheran of the Journal Sentinel

Let’s look at how the gay-marriage thing in California has unfolded so far:

The state’s Supreme Court in 2008, on a one-vote margin, decides to redefine marriage to dump one key parameter that had always and everywhere in human history been part of marriage: that it be between complementary sexes, not identical ones.

Within months, the voters of the state overrule the court, amending their constitution to say that, no, you can’t redefine basic social institutions against the will of the people. The losers sue the state.

And Wednesday, a federal judge – a judge, as in one – overrules the people, ruling, among other things, that “gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage.” It doesn’t? Read more…

Radio Derb this week discussed marriage redefinition:

Just as the Brits would much rather have been left alone with their familiar Britishness, without having two million people of utterly alien faith and folkways dumped on them, so Californians would rather be left alone with the familiar institution of marriage as a union of one man with one woman, as a well-tried social unit for the generation and nurturing of children. Read more…

Kathleen McKinley proposes a compromise on the issue of marriage redefinition in her article “The Gay Marriage Compromise.”

I can promise you that if Prop 8 were voted on tomorrow, and the exact same language was used, but instead the word “marriage” was replaced with the words “civil unions,” it would pass. And most everyone would be fine with it. As some other guy, not as well known as Kinky once said, “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose by any other name would smell as sweet.” Read more…

From RealClearPolitics:

But for Judge Walker there is an odor of illegitimacy about merely “moral” views expressed in legislation, especially when morality finds support in religion. Thus he declares that Proposition 8 expresses only a “private moral choice,” not a considered public morality. And thus in his tendentious “findings of fact,” he makes the astonishing claim-purporting to be a fact found at trial, not a judgment of his own-that “religious beliefs that gay and lesbian relationships are sinful . . . harm gays and lesbians.”

Perhaps here, in this nadir of absurdity, we have found the real fundament of the judge’s thinking. Citizens who wish to defend the institution of marriage as they and their families have known it all their lives, and for countless generations, are irrational bigots. Worse still, if they are moved to act because of the union of their faith with their moral opinions, they are crazy religious folk, bent only on harming others whom they merely “dislike” on grounds that cannot possibly be defended before a tribunal of right-thinking people. And those others, the same-sex-couple plaintiffs? They must be rescued from the “harm” to their feelings that results from their exclusion from a historic civil and moral institution that has never hitherto been thought to have been built for them.

The bludgeoning going on here in the name of “tolerance” and “equality” is amazing.  Read the whole thing here.

Michael Medved has an opinion piece worth reading over at AOLnews.com on the recent Prop 8 ruling.  I think the 7 points he makes are very well-stated and cogent to the discussion.

1. “Proposition 8 was a mean-spirited ban on gay marriage.”
Proposition 8 banned nothing. The ubiquitous headlines describing this voter-mandated change in the California Constitution as a “gay marriage ban” amount to an egregious example of journalistic malpractice. The entire proposition consisted of only 14 words: “Only marriage between a man and a woman is valid or recognized in California.” This simple statement imposes no restrictions and issues no commands regarding the behavior of private citizens; it merely demands a change in the actions of government. Proposition 8 did nothing to interfere with gay couples in registering for state-recognized civil unions, participating in church ceremonies consecrating their love, forming lifetime commitments, raising children or concluding comprehensive contractual arrangement to share all aspects of life and property. The proposition simply says that government will not get involved in any of these private or public processes by calling such relationships a marriage.

2. “Proposition 8 singled out gays and lesbians for discriminatory treatment.”
The proposition never mentioned gays, lesbians or any other individuals, whatever their sexual orientation. It didn’t discriminate among individuals; it drew distinctions among relationships. Under the proposition, a gay male and a straight male would face exactly the same options in marriage; there is no relationship open to the straight citizen that’s denied to his gay neighbor. The fact that gay people want government sanction for a different sort of relationship, creating radically new forms of marriage, reflects their desire to transform institution, not a demand for equal, long-established rights.

Read more…

(July 21, 2010) We’ve already podcasted Dr J’s talk from this rally, “It Takes a lot of Faith to Believe in Same-Sex Marriage.”  She also recorded two of the other speakers.  Bishop Harry Jackson and Pastor Derek McCoy both discussed the importance of the vote in the defense of traditional marriage.

To date, 31 states have voted to define marriage as occurring between one man and one woman.  Maine overturned same-sex marriage by People’s Veto, and all the states that have enacted same-sex marriage have done so through the courts (Vermont used its legislature as well).

Bishop Harry Jackson

Pastor Derek McCoy