Monthly Archives: October 2010

Polemics

MUST-READ: Only personally opposed to abortion?

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Unborn baby scheming about International Life Chain Sunday
Unborn baby scheming about International Life Chain Sunday

The following is a guest post from commenter Mary to commemorate International Life Chain Sunday. Mary urges all of my readers to take this opportunity to stand up for the pre-born.

In my discussions with people on the topic of abortion, I frequently come across people (including many Christians) who claim to be “personally opposed” to abortion (or words to that effect), but who don’t think that it should be illegal. They believe in “a woman’s right to choose”. This all sounds very fine and magnanimous, couched as it is in the language of generosity, but an analysis of the reasoning behind it shows it to be seriously flawed.

Abortion should be illegal for the following reasons:

  1. Taking of innocent human life without morally sufficient reason should be illegal. Where the rationale comes from for believing this basic premise is another topic, but it is agreed on by all reasonable people – theists and atheists alike. (A morally sufficient reason would be something that saves another innocent human life.)
  2. The pre-born child is human. This is a scientific fact.
  3. The pre-born child is alive. This is a scientific fact.
  4. The pre-born child has committed no crime and can therefore be considered legally innocent.
  5. Taking the life of the pre-born child is to take an innocent, human life.
  6. Taking the life of a pre-born child should be illegal.

Abortion should be illegal for the same reason that murdering a newborn or a 2 year old is illegal. We don’t give women the “right to choose” to kill their newborns and for the same reason we should not give them the “right to choose” to kill their pre-born children either. The only case where we would consider it acceptable to take the life of a newborn would be where it was absolutely necessary to save the life of another innocent human being. The same should be true in the case of a pre-born child. We should give equal value to human lives and value life above the right to comfort and convenience.

Our entire legal system is based on the fact that there are certain limits to choice. If the right to choose were applied across the board we’d have to scrap every law in the books. Laws exist to limit choices that are damaging to others.

Legalized abortion is unfair discrimination of the worst kind on the basis of age and location. The right to life of the pre-born is a human right that should be fought for with passion and integrity. If we do not fight for this right we will be remembered in the same way as those who have failed to stand up for the rights of the oppressed in other areas.

Will we be like German citizens during the Nazi regime who failed to stand up for the rights of Jews, despite being “personally opposed” to Nazism? Will we be like those who failed to stand up for the right to freedom of those oppressed by slavery and Apartheid, despite being “personally opposed” to the same? Or will we be like Dietrich Bonheoffer and William Wilberforce who went beyond personal aversion, even though they weren’t members of the oppressed group, who spoke against oppression and who stood up for what was right, in the face of opposition.

I would like to end with two very apt quotes from Dr. Martin Luther King:

It may be true that the law cannot make a man love me, but it can stop him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important.

Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter

Commentary

Why do some women tolerate jerks as boyfriends?

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What causes Christian women to pass on strong, capable Christian men and to choose weaker non-Christian men instead?

Fears of rejection

On the one hand, most women want men to provide them with good things, to love them, to treat them honorably and to lead them. But on the other hand, they fear abandonment and rejection. Sometimes this fear of abandonment and rejection is so strong that it causes them to pass on men who they think are “too good for them”. A good man may seem unattainable to a woman who has not put in the same amount of effort to prepare for him.

Fear of moral obligations

Sometimes a really good man places moral and spiritual obligations on a Christian woman that require her to improve and grow, in order to help him with his life plan. Also, men flourish when a woman encourages him, recognizes him, supports him in his male roles. A good man who has definite ideas on what counts as good behavior may expect more from a woman, and those moral obligations can get in the way of her selfish pursuit of happiness.

Strong, good men are avoided

So it turns out that the fear of rejection or abandonment can be STRONGER when the man is good at his Biblical roles, because she feels like she doesn’t measure up and will have to work hard to keep him. And the expectation to fulfill moral obligations can be STRONGER when the man has a well-developed sense of morality, because he actually knows how women are supposed to act and he may hold the woman accountable.

Weak men are easier to blame and control

Let me explain some other reasons why a Christian woman might prefer to have a weaker, non-Christian man:

  1. A woman may prefer to blame a man in order to rationalize her selfish actions, and an immoral man is easier to blame.
  2. A woman may prefer to blame a man in order to punish him for some real or imagined crime, and an immoral man is easier to blame.
  3. A woman may want to avoid moral obligations to a man, and a weaker man is easier for her to control. (e.g. – using pre-marital sex in order to avoid having to love a man self-sacrificially)
  4. A woman may need to avoid being judged or led morally by a man, so she prefers a man who is weak at morality and moral reasoning.
  5. A woman may need to avoid being judged or led spiritually by a man, so she prefers a man who is weak at theology and apologetics.

So, it’s not that the poor, sweet, innocent women are helpless victims of nasty, evil, brutish man-beasts, at all. Far from it. Some of them DELIBERATELY CHOOSE to pass up the best Biblical Christian men, because they fear rejection or moral judgment or loss of control, and/or they want to avoid moral obligations to men that may interfere with their selfishness.

Disclaimer

I just want to reiterate before anyone freaks out that I know a LOT of Christian women who are heroic at letting Christianity influence their choice of romantic partners. Actually, I know women who are MORE courageous than I am in resisting bad partners. And it’s harder for a woman to do because women have concerns about the future, and so on. The choice to be faithful to God, to be chaste and to choose a godly man is nothing less than an act of incredible heroism. I wish more women did that. It is really amazing and admirable when women hold out for a good man, then answer his call to step up into the role that he needs her to play to help him with his plan to serve God effectively.

I actually know more of the good kind than the bad kind, especially since I started writing and the good ones just showed up! Pow! There you all are! Where had you all been hiding?

Commentary

Do big government tax credits break up intact families?

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Here’s a research study from the Royal Economic Society. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Labour’s tax credits have caused thousands of families to break up, an authoritative study said yesterday.

The flagship scheme is blamed for a doubling of the divorce rate among low income parents with young children.

Tax credits, introduced a decade ago to cut child poverty, were supposed to help single mothers and hard-working families.

But a so-called ‘couple penalty’ means that a mother can pick up more than £100 extra a week by splitting from her partner.

Evidence published by the Royal Economic Society said that tax credits give mothers married to men on low earnings an incentive to divorce.

The study found that the divorce rate among mothers with low-income husbands rose by 160 per cent in the three years after the benefits were brought in.

Marco Francesconi, of the University of Essex, said that tax credits had limited the
benefits of marriage, encouraged mothers to work and produced a ‘greater risk of family disruption’.

He said: ‘The result that tax credits had strong employment and divorce effects on married mothers in poor households is very important.

The findings, published in the highly-influential Economic Journal, are the first hard evidence that tax credits are working to drive couples apart.

[…]Professor Francesconi and two senior colleagues based their research on 3,235 couples tracked from 1991 by the British Household Panel Survey.

‘Women married to a partner who did not work or who worked fewer than 16 hours a week were more than 2 per cent more likely to dissolve their partnership after the reform than their childless counterparts,’ the report said.

Now take a look at this interview about unilateral (“no fault”) divorce from Life Site News, featuring Dr. Stephen Baskerville. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

LSN: Are there any other often-ignored laws or cultural issues that work against the family?

SB: The divorce regime is in fact a panoply of destructive laws, not just no-fault.  The massive federally funded machinery catering to the dishonest hysteria over “domestic violence” is almost all geared to facilitating divorce.  Knowingly false accusations of domestic violence are now out of control, and almost all of it is generated to secure custody of children in divorce cases.

The same is largely true of the hysteria over “child abuse”.  Child abuse is certainly real, but almost all of it takes place in single-parent homes, not intact families.  In other words, there is a child abuse industry that actually creates the problem it professes to be addressing.  By encouraging false accusations of child abuse to facilitate divorce and single-parent homes, the child abuse industry actually creates more child abuse.  That is a shocking statement, I realize, but I have documented it in my book.

Child support is another facilitator of divorce.  Too many people credulously accept feminist/government propaganda that child support is to provide for children who have been abandoned.  Nothing is further from the truth.  It is mostly extorted from fathers that have been evicted, again through “no fault” of their own.  It is a subsidy on divorce and single-parent homes.  If you pay people to divorce, they will do it more.  That is precisely what child support does.

Basically, these single-mother welfare policies are put in place by left-wing political parties in order to provide financial incentives to women to break up their marriages. This is called “compassion” – equalizing the life outcomes of married couples with single-mother households. Government does this by transferring wealth from marriage couples to single parents households.

But social problems are created by fatherless homes, no matter how much wealth redistribution the socialists do. Big government has to raise taxes and increase social programs to deal with the failures they themselves caused in the first place. Bigger government means more regulation of private life, and less take-home pay for working husbands. Eventually, a traditionally-minded man cannot support a family alone, and his wife has to work. That leaves government-regulated day cares and public schools in charge of the children. How convenient for the secular left – now they can impose their sex education on ever younger children. Parents can’t complain about what they don’t know about.

Remember that 77% of young, unmarried women voted for Barack Obama in the 2008 election. This is what they wanted – to replace the unreliable men they freely and unwisely chose for themselves with the security offered by big government. But big government gets its money from the reliable men. What do you suppose the reliable men will do when 50% of their paycheck is confiscated by the state? Does that give a man confidence to get married? Will he respected by his family and have moral authority in the home because of his role as sole provider? Of course not. Government will be in charge.