Category Archives: Commentary

Comparing male and female support for abortion, divorce and gay marriage

Disclaimer: This post doesn’t apply to married women. When I refer to women below, I mean young, unmarried women. But I’m just going to say “women” for brevity’s sake.

Are women really more moral than men? Let’s take a look at the attitudes of men and women on five of the most prominent moral issues of our time: gay marriage, divorce, abortion, war, and crime.

Gay marriage, divorce and abortion

Here is Pew Research on gay marriage as of 2016:

Women far more likely to support gay marriage than men
Women are more immoral on gay marriage than men

Women favor gay marriage by a margin of 58% compared to only 52% for men.

Here is the Austin Institute on divorce in 2014:

Women are more immoral on divorce than men
Women are more immoral on divorce than men

Women initiate about 70% of divorces, even though they freely chose the man they married, and vowed to stick by him through all circumstances.

Here is Gallup on abortion as of 2015:

Women are more immoral on abortion than men
Women are more immoral on abortion than men

About 75% of young, unmarried women vote for the Democrat party – the party of unrestricted, taxpayer-funded abortion.

Abortion ignores the needs of unborn children. Same-sex marriage ignores the need of children for a mother and a father. Divorce devastates children, causing all sorts of negative effects. Men are more willing to judge all three of these bad behaviors than women. Men are more concerned about protecting the weak than they are about feeling compassionate and being perceived as “tolerant”.

What about war and self-defense against criminals?

Women are also more liberal than men on war and self-defense. You can just look at what happened in the Middle East to the Yazidi girls who are being raped and sex-trafficked to understand the consequences of this anti-war viewpoint. To be anti-war when the war is just is to be pro-evil. Just ask the Christians being tortured and murdered in Syria whether they are happy that American troops were withdrawn from Iraq. Just ask the victims of crimes like rape whether they wish they had been armed when they were attacked. Men are tougher on terrorists and criminals than women are.

Blaming men for what women choose to do

This data shows that men should be challenging women to improve their views on these important issues. But Christian pastors and scholars often discourage men from challenging women on moral issues, preferring to blame men when women take the wrong side of moral issues.

For example, here’s Mark Driscoll explaining how men are to blame for single motherhood:

Part of it is the unintended consequences of divorce. Forty percent of kids go to bed at night without a father. Not to be disparaging toward single moms, but if you’re a single mom and you’re working 60 hours a week, and you’ve got a boy, and he’s home all by himself with no parents and no dad, he’s just going to be hanging out with his buddies, feeding himself pizza rolls.

The number one consumer of online pornography is 12- to 17-year-old boys. What that means is he’s home eating junk food, drinking Monster energy drinks, downloading porn, masturbating and screwing around with his friends. That really doesn’t prepare you for responsible adulthood. That’s a really sad picture, especially if you’re a single gal hoping to get married someday. You’re like: “Seriously, that’s the candidate pool? You’ve got to be kidding me.” That’s why 41 percent of births right now are to unmarried women. A lot of women have decided: “I’m never going to find a guy who is actually dependable and responsible to have a life with. So I’ll just get a career and have a baby and just intentionally be a single mother because there are no guys worth spending life with.”

This practice among Christian leaders of blaming men for the actions of women is one of the major reasons why women have the views that they do on abortion, divorce, gay marriage, just war and self-defense. Men have been cowed into silence by man-blamers like Mark Driscoll and James Dobson. This message actually weakens the moral leadership of men, and creates a worse world.

This lack of moral leadership by men is particularly problematic with “pro-life” men who try to blame men for abortion. Abortions occur (in non-rape cases) because a woman makes two choices: 1) choosing a man who only wants recreational sex, and 2) choosing to have recreational sex with a man who has shown no interest in commitment or parenting. Speaking as an unmarried virgin somewhat advanced in years, there are plenty of good men out there who don’t believe in sex before marriage, and who have prepared very well for the traditional male roles of protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. If women insist on choosing the wrong men, and choosing to do the wrong things with those men, it makes sense to hold them accountable. The bad men were bad before the women chose them, and so they should have been recognized and avoided by the women before any need for abortion occurred. A woman cannot expect a bad man to suddenly turn into a good man after he is given recreational sex. Recreational sex does not make a man who is not interested in marriage and children somehow become interested in marriage and children. And women need to be told this by pro-life men who are not cowards.

Men really need to shed this perception that there is something wrong with them, and challenge women on areas where they have immoral views. Men: don’t let yourselves be manipulated into silence in order to get affection, approval or sex. If you must have affection, approval and sex, then choose a woman who puts moral standards above feeling happy and being perceived as compassionate.

Ryan T. Anderson lectures on marriage and why it matters

Marriage and family
Marriage and family

Here’s the lecture:

About the speaker:

Ryan T. Anderson researches and writes about marriage and religious liberty as the William E. Simon Fellow at The Heritage Foundation. He also focuses on justice and moral principles in economic thought, health care and education, and has expertise in bioethics and natural law theory.

Anderson, who joined the leading Washington think tank’s DeVos Center for Religion and Civil Society in 2012, also is the editor of Public Discourse, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, N.J.

Anderson’s recent work at Heritage focuses on the constitutional questions surrounding same-sex “marriage.” He is the co-author with Princeton’s Robert P. George and Sherif Girgis of the acclaimed book “What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense” (Encounter Books, December 2012).

The lecture starts at 7:20 in. The lecture ends at 49:35. There are 32 minutes of Q&A.

Introduction:

  • When talking about marriage in public, we should talk about philosophy, sociology and public policy
  • Gay marriage proponents need to be pressed to define what marriage is, on their view
  • Every definition of marriage is going to include some relationships, and exclude others
  • It’s meaningless to portray one side as nice and the other mean
  • Typically, marriage redefiners view marriage as a more intense emotional relationship
  • Marriage redefiners should be challenged in three ways:
  • 1) Does the redefined version of marriage have a public policy reason to prefer only two people?
  • 2) Does the redefined version of marriage have a reason to prefer permanence?
  • 3) Does the redefined version of marriage have a reason to prefer sexual exclusivity?
  • Also, if marriage is just about romance, then why is the state getting involved in recognizing it?
  • The talk: 1) What marriage is, 2) Why marriage matters, 3) What are the consequences of redefining marriage?

What marriage is:

  • Marriage unites spouses – hearts, minds and bodies
  • Marriage unites spouses to perform a good: creating a human being and raising that human being
  • Marriage is a commitment: permanent and exclusive
  • Male and female natures are distinct and complementary

The public purpose of marriage:

  • to attach men and women to each other
  • to attach mothers and fathers to their children
  • there is no such thing as parenting, there is only mothering and fathering
  • the evidence shows that children benefit from mothering and fathering
  • boys who grow up without fathers are more likely to commit crimes
  • girls who grow up without fathers are more likely to have sex earlier
  • Children benefit from having a mother and a father
  • can’t say that fathers are essential for children if we support gay marriage, which makes fathers optional
  • without marriage: child poverty increases, crime increases, social mobility decreases, welfare spending increases
  • when government encourages marriage, then government has less do to – stays smaller, spends less
  • if we promote marriage as an idea, we are not excluding gay relationships or even partner benefits
  • finally, gay marriage has shown itself to be hostile to religious liberty

Consequences redefining marriage:

  • it undermines the norm in public like that kids deserve a mom and a dad – moms and dads are interchangeable
  • it changes the institution of marriage away from the needs of children, and towards the needs of adults
  • it undermines the norm of permanence
  • we learned what happens when marriage is redefined before: with no-fault divorce
  • no-fault divorce: after this became law, divorce rates doubled – the law changed society
  • gay marriage would teach society that mothers and fathers are optional when raising children
  • if marriage is what people with intense feelings do, then how can you rationally limit marriage to only two people?
  • if marriage is what people with intense feelings do, then if other people cause intense feelings, there’s no fidelity
  • if marriage is what people with intense feelings do, then if the feelings go away, there is no permanence
  • the public policy consequences to undermining the norms of exclusivity and permanence = fatherless children and fragmented families
  • a final consequences is the decline and elimination of religious liberty – e.g. – adoption agencies closing, businesses being sued

We’re doing very well on abortion, but we need to get better at knowing how to discuss marriage. If you’re looking for something short to read, click here. If you want to read a long paper that his book is based on.

Related posts

What caused “a rising tide of personality disorders among millenials”?

Rioters smash windows at a T-Mobile store during a protest against campus speaker
Rioters smash windows at a T-Mobile store during a protest against campus speaker

That quote about millenials in the title of this post comes from the American Counseling Association.

PJ Media reports: (H/T Curby)

If you were to come across someone who cried in the streets, who saw the world in terms of black and white and made death threats against strangers, who cowered in a special room and made public displays of naked self-harm and blood letting, you might conclude that they were suffering from a personality disorder.

All these symptoms can be found in the High Conflict Personality Disorder category known as Axis II in DSMV, including Anti-Social PD, Histrionic PD, Paranoid PD, Narcissistic PD, and Borderline PD.

[…]In 2014, a survey of 100,000 college students at 53 U.S. campuses by the American College Health Association found that 84% of U.S. students feel unable to cope, while more than half experience overwhelming anxiety.

The problems begin with how the children are raised. As the size and scope of government grew, taxes had to be raised to pay for the “social safety net”. When taxes go up, women can no longer afford to stay home with their young children during the first five years, which are critical to child development. Instead, the moms go out to work to pay for the new social welfare programs. And their children end up in day cares.

Look:

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development has found:

Children in full-time day care were close to three times more likely to show behavior problems than those cared for by their mothers at home.

[…]The more time in child care of any kind or quality, the more aggressive the child.

The result is young people who, a decade and a half after daycare, scream at the parent/State for not protecting them sufficiently. It is no coincidence that “safe spaces” resemble daycare centers.

Day cares cause children to have increased anxiety and aggression. It used to be that this would be mitigated as the child grew up and encountered real life. Their narcissism would die because they would have to accept that they were not the center of the universe. They learned that hard work was not fun, and that they had to do things that they didn’t feel like doing in order to survive. But today, things are different – something else is happening to children in public schools and university classrooms.

More:

Faced with histrionic students, university staff end up behaving like “Helicopter Parents”: those largely absent, full-time working parents who overcompensated by flying in to fuss over their child. Attempting to assuage parental guilt, one of the tools they used was “positive parenting” — a philosophy created by social Progressives.

Parents were taught to not scold or punish, and instead to use “positive reinforcement” in an attempt to raise their children with “high self-esteem.” This ideology also became fashionable within an increasingly progressive school system that awarded children prizes for “non-competitive sports” and for merely taking part in school activities.

As they passed from day care to through high school, these children with artificially enforced high self-esteem were also told that they were morally superior to generations that came before. They were inducted into politically correct language and were even taught to lecture their own parents on racism, equality, and ecology. From the ages of six to eighteen, they took part in yearly multiculturalist “save the planet” projects. They were told they had a heroic destiny as “agents of change.”

A false picture of the world and a vastly inflated sense of self-importance did not compensate for the foundational trauma of parental neglect. Instead, as Dr. Jean Twenge has explained, Positive Parenting created young people with a “narcissistic wound” for whom the real world would be perceived as a threat to self-worth.

And this explains why college students today resort to violence when presented with ideas that they disagree with – even if the people are vastly more intelligent and experienced than they are themselves. They don’t care about free speech, because they already know everything. They claim to care about diversity, but they shout down or assault anyone who disagrees with them.

And that’s not the only contradiction:

SJW protests are awash with contradictions. SJWs claim to fight for freedom, but are opposed to freedom of speech, support banning videos and books, and support the violent disruption of public talks, as was seen with the riots at UC Berkeley, Middlebury College, and elsewhere.

SJWs believe in a world with “no boundaries” where “everyone is equal” — free immigration, open access to healthcare and education, etc. — but at the same time are obsessed with creating segregated spaces.

While they protest against the “fascist patriarchal state” they are, at the same time, fundamentally Statist, demanding that the government police language for them and punish their enemies. While SJWs claim to fight for human rights, they parade the symbol of the largest genocides in history — the Communist flag. They are pro-feminist, and at the same time defend Sharia law.

It’s a mess. People like to joke about the zombie apocalypse, but it’s a joke because there is no such thing as a zombie. Except that when I see what the secular left has produced on college campuses, it really does make me think of zombies. Do you think that people with no marketable skills could resist the urge to steal and kill when they find themselves in debt and unable to earn a living with their degree in Marxist-Feminist Studies? Where would a psychotic millennial draw the line? They don’t understand how successful mature people became successful – they only understand that their own failure is not their fault. It’s all the fault of white males, the patriarchy, straights, capitalists, etc. Where does a deluded secular leftist draw the line on violence? Can you expect moral behavior from someone who doesn’t believe in God, and doesn’t believe in personal responsibility?

I think we are going to see a lot more violence from these young leftist psychopaths – especially from the ones being raised without a married mother and father. I think we’re going to see something to rival the most horrifying of zombie apocalypse movies. There isn’t any foundation of empathy or morality inside them – it was never put into them by their own families or the godless schools.