Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Dawn Stefanowicz explains her experience being raised by a gay parent

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*** WARNING: This post is definitely for grown-ups only! ***

I was listening to a Dr. J podcast on “Why Marriage Matters”, and I heard about a woman named Dawn Stefanowicz, who was raised by her gay father in Toronto.

So, I looked around and found this interview with Dawn posted on MercatorNet. This is mature subject matter.

Intro:

Gay marriage and gay adoption are being fiercely debated in a number of countries. Usually these issues are framed as a human rights issue. But whose rights? Patrick Meagher, MercatorNet’s contributing editor in Canada, recently interviewed a woman who was raised by a homosexual father. She feels that her rights as a child were completely ignored.

Dawn Stefanowicz (www.DawnStefanowicz.com) grew up in Toronto. Now in her 40s, she has written a book, Out From Under: Getting Clear of the Wreckage of a Sexually Disordered Home, to be released later this year. Stefanowicz has now been married for 22 years, is raising a family, and also works as an accountant. She has also testified about same-sex marriage in Washington and Ottawa.

Sample:

MercatorNet: How did you feel about what was going on around you?

Stefanowicz: You become used to it and desensitised. I was told at eight years old not to talk about this but I knew that something was wrong. I was not thinking “this is right or wrong” but I was disturbed by what I was experiencing. I was unhappy, fearful, anxious and confused. I was not allowed to tell my father that his lifestyle upset me. You can be four-years-old and questioning, “Where is Daddy?” You sense women are not valued. You think Daddy doesn’t have time for you or Daddy is too busy to play a game with you. All this is hard because as a child this is the only experience you have.

MercatorNet: How did this affect your relationship with others?

Stefanowicz: I had a hard time concentrating in school on day-to-day subjects and with peers. I felt insecure. I was already stressed out by an early age. I’m now in my 40s. You’re looking at life-long issues. There is a lot of prolonged and unresolved grief in this kind of home environment and with what you witness in the subcultures.

It took me until I was into my 20s and 30s, after making major life choices, to begin to realise how being raised in this environment had affected me. Unfortunately, it was not until my father, his sexual partners and my mother had died, that I was free to speak publicly about my experiences.

And:

MercatorNet: Why do so few children speak out?

Stefanowicz: You’re terrified. Absolutely terrified. Children who open up these family secrets are dependent on parents for everything. You carry the burden that you have to keep secrets. You learn to put on an image publicly of the happy family that is not reality. With same-sex legislation, children are further silenced. They believe there is no safe adult they can go to.

Have you ever considered what effect it has on a child that they have to grow up without their mother or their father? Is that good for them? Is that something that we should be promoting so that there is more of it? It’s a sad thing to tell adults that they cannot do whatever they want, but it’s a sadder thing to harm children just so that adults can do whatever they want. We need to choose to be careful not to harm children by making poor decisions.

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Commentary

Oxford University Press book asks: does religion cause violence?

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J.W. Wartick posted a review of a book called “The Myth of Religious Violence”, and written by Dr. William T. Cavanaugh.

Let’s take a look at some of the review.

Here, J.W. quotes from the book:

The story goes that, after the Protestant Reformation divided Christendom along religious lines, Catholics and Protestants began killing each other for holding to different doctrines. The wars of religion… demonstrated to the West the inherent danger of public religion. The solution to the problem lay in the rise of the modern state, in which religious loyalties were marginalized and the state secured a monopoly on the means of violence…

This story is more than just a prominent example of the myth of religious violence. It has a foundational importance for the secular West, because it explains the origin of its way of life and its system of governance. It is a creation myth for modernity (123).

Then writes this:

Following the lines of thinking of Voltaire, John Locke, and others, Cavanaugh argues that the myth of religious violence is perpetuated in order to marginalize that which is considered religious and give rise to the nation-state. According to this myth, “All theological religions are to be tolerated, provided they do not interfere with the obligations of citizens to the state…” (129). The myth is that religion is divisive and that they “fight over doctrines or ‘religious creeds’” so that “the state steps in to make peace” (130).

Cavanaugh shows that this myth is indeed false. The “wars of religion” had any number of motivating factors. The use of this story is not so much to tell a truth as it is a means by which to legitimize the nation-state. He argues towards these conclusions by showing that many “wars of religion” were in fact wars of economy, wars of power structures, and the like. He notes four primary factors for this myth to work: that combatants were motivated by religious difference, that the primary cause of war was religion, that religious causes are analytically separable from political, economic, and social causes at the time of the wars, and that the rise of the modern state was not a cause of the wars (141-142). He then analyzes each of these in turn based upon the historical record and shows that these all fail to account for the actual history of the “wars of religion.” In fact, the opposite is true in each case (142-177).

“We must conclude that the myth of the wars of religion is finally incredible, which is to say, false” (177).

[…]Perhaps the most challenging and paradigm-shifting portion of the book is that which focuses upon the uses of the myth of religious violence. Cavanaugh argues that the myth is so perpetuated because of its usefulness.

Cavanaugh has his BA from the University of Notre Dame, his MA from Cambridge University, and his PhD from Duke University. Do the secularists have anything to stack up against someone with his credentials?

Commentary

Christian homeschooling mom recommends teaching kids to think through policies

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Here is a neat post from Lydia McGrew, Ph.D, a homeschooling mom.

Excerpt:

As we Protestant conservatives view with great dismay what seems to us the hair-tearing foolishness of a new generation of young, “emergent” evangelicals spouting the platitudes of the left and getting their priorities all messed up, either abandoning or downplaying the pro-life movement, voting Democrat, and embracing left-wing economics, we need to think of something that cannot be said too often: What the left wants is not what is best for the poor, the weak, the little guy. In fact, we can sometimes even go farther: The left does not want what is best for the poor and the weak. Viz. the Obama administration’s willingness to shut down Catholic hospitals, Catholic charities, and anyone else who won’t toe the line on his HHS mandate. Viz. the Obama administration’s cutting off the Catholic bishops’ funding for anti-trafficking, because they wouldn’t refer for abortions. Viz. the left’s shut-down of adoption agencies that won’t place children with homosexual couples. The list goes on and on.

And there is more: The actual economic policies advocated by the left mean fewer jobs, higher prices, and small businesses pushed out by high regulatory costs, all of which is very bad for the people who need jobs the most. We’re seeing this right now with the economic burden of Obamacare, but that’s only one example. The actual environmental policies advocated by the left are radically anti-human and will result in grave economic harm both to our own country and, even more, to developing countries. I have just been reading a book I hope to write more about later, Merchants of Despair by Robert Zubrin. In it he chronicles case after case after case of leftist policies that have harmed the poorest of the poor in Third-World countries, from coercive population control to crackdowns forcing Third-World countries to eschew the advantages of more nutritious modified grains.

When our young people are growing up we Christians and conservatives often teach them biblical principles, and that is very good. But we also need to teach them economic principles. We need to teach them that there is no free lunch. We need to have them read books like Zubrin’s and like Thomas Sowell’s The Vision of the Anointed. We need to talk through with them the ways that policies that sound oh-so-kind to “make things free” or “force employers to pay more” or “give health insurance to everyone” actually harm the people they are meant to help. We need to expose to them the viciously anti-human underside of the environmental movement, as well as its empirical fecklessness.

This one is a must-read! Please click through and read the whole thing, especially if you have Christian children.

Lydia’s group blog “What’s Wrong With the World?” is also good reading.