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News

If we seriously want men to marry and become fathers, let’s repeal no-fault divorce

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I saw a very good article at the Heritage Foundation web site about the importance of fathers for children. The author Virginia Allen listed out some of the benefits that fathers provide to children:

Studies have found that children raised without a father are:

  • At a higher risk of having behavioral problems.
  • Four times more likely to live in poverty.
  • More likely to be incarcerated in their lifetime.
  • Twice as likely to never graduate high school.
  • At a seven times higher risk of teen pregnancy.
  • More vulnerable to abuse and neglect.
  • More likely to abuse drugs and alcohol.
  • Twice as likely to be obese.

From education to personal health to career success, children who lack a father find themselves at a disadvantage to their peers raised in a two-parent household.

I was looking for a good analysis of why there’s been a decline of marriage and fatherhood, and I found an article by Joe Carter on The Gospel Coalition, of all places. By looking at marriage rates and historical events that changed the marriage rate, he was able to identify the cause of the decline of marriage – and fatherhood.

Marriage and divorce rates per capita
Marriage and divorce rates per capita

I’ll spare you the statistical analysis, which is excellent, and give you the conclusion – although you can guess it from the graph above:

Now that we’ve explored the data, what year should we use as the marker for the beginning of the decline of marriage in the United States? I would argue for 1985, the last year that the marriage rate topped 10 percent.

[…]What changed in 1985 that could have led to the decline in marriage? There are likely numerous factors—which we’ll examine in future articles—but one stands out in particular: By 1985, all states (except for New York) had enacted no-fault divorce legislation.

The most helpful book I know of about no-fault divorce is “Taken Into Custody”, by Dr. Stephen Baskerville. He wrote a column  for Crisis magazine that summarizes some of his ideas.

Excerpt:

Feminists were drafting no-fault divorce laws in the 1940s, which the National Association of Women Lawyers now describes as “the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken.”

The result effectively abolished marriage as a legal contract. Today it is not possible to form a binding agreement to create a family.

The new laws did not stop at removing the requirement of citing grounds for a divorce, to allow divorce by mutual consent, as deceptively advertised at the time. Instead they created unilateral and involuntary divorce, so that one spouse may dissolve a marriage without any agreement or fault by the other.

Here’s what divorce does to the spouse who is the victim of the unilateral “no-fault” divorce:

Though marriage is a civil matter, the logic quickly extended into the criminal, including a presumption of guilt against the involuntarily divorced spouse (“defendant”). Yet formal due process protections of criminal proceedings did not apply, so forcibly divorced spouses became quasi-criminals not for recognized criminal acts but for failing or refusing to cooperate with the divorce by continuing to claim the protections and prerogatives of family life: living in the common home, possessing the common property, or—most vexing of all—parenting the common children.

Following from this are the horrendous civil liberties violations and flagrant invasions of family and individual privacy that are now routine in family courts. A personalized criminal code is legislated by the judge around the forcibly divorced spouse, controlling their association with their children, movements, and finances. Unauthorized contact with their children can be punished with arrest. Involuntarily divorced parents are arrested for running into their children in public, making unauthorized telephone calls, and sending unauthorized birthday cards.

In my conversations with men, no-fault divorce laws, and anti-male divorce courts are the main reasons given for why they do not pursue marriage and fatherhood. Men do not want to be coerced in a marriage with the threat of divorce by an unhappy wife. Men do not want to be subject to the government in so many areas of their lives if the wife does carry out the threat. They especially don’t want to be separated from their children. One my secular male friends told me that he would not marry unless the woman had evidence in her past of hating radical feminism and no-fault divorce. This was the main criteria. He actually was able to find a woman who was a men’s rights activist who hated divorce. But that was the only way he would marry.

Statistically speaking, the wife is more likely to initiate divorce than the husband. Women initiate 70% of divorces, the majority of those just because she is “unhappy”. I think this is because women get into marriage based on their feelings, and they think that it is the husband’s job to make them feel good. They see their happiness as the primary goal of the marriage, and see a marriage that does not make them happy as a marriage that needs to be ended. Their view of commitment really means “I’ll commit so long as it makes me feel good”. None of this is particularly appealing to men, who take marriage vows to mean what they say, and think that the commitment isn’t conditional on being happy. (Note: if you’re husband doesn’t have this view of marriage, then why did you choose him out of all the other men in the world?)

Are we going to repeal no-fault divorce, then?

My experiences speaking with divorced Christian women is that they married primarily based on first impressions and emotional responses. No-fault divorce was seen as a boon to women who had married the wrong men by following their hearts. It’s an interesting question to ask whether women really would want no-fault repealed. It would mean that they would have to get serious about who they marry. They would have to think about what a man does in a marriage. They would have to think about what men want out of a marriage. And they would have to say no to their feelings, both in choosing a man, and in keeping the man after the wedding.

I’ve been told by women that the rapid giving of sex is a way to get attention from a man without having to be respectful of him. Are women willing to stop using sex as a tool to attract the wrong men, and start developing their skills as wives and mothers in order to attract the right men? Are women willing to stop seeing relationships as “fun and thrills”, and get serious about pursuing men who have marriage and children as the goal? Are wives willing to give a man what he needs in the marriage: sex, respect and obedience? Are they willing to give up the threat of divorce in the home and learn to argue rationally and compromise?

If women aren’t willing to demand the repeal of no-fault divorce laws and get serious about men and marriage, then what’s the point of complaining that men don’t want to marry and become fathers? If you’re not willing to fix the root cause of the problem, then don’t complain about the problem.

News

Canada’s Supreme Court bans Christians from practicing law in Canada

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Canada election results 2015
Canada election results 2015

The headline is a bit broad, but give me a minute, and I’ll explain what the judges decided. For one thing, it’s only in Ontario and British Columbia where the ban is in effect. Also, the basis of the ban is that Christians cannot be lawyers if they believe that sex before marriage  or outside of marriage is morally wrong. Let’s take a look at an article from the less leftist of Canada’s National newspapers, the National Post.

Excerpt:

Trinity Western University suffered a stinging loss in the Supreme Court of Canada on Friday, which found that law societies in B.C. and Ontario were justified in not accrediting the university’s prospective law school because of its policy on premarital sex. But no one should harbour any illusions that the pain will be limited to the small Christian school in B.C.’s Fraser Valley.

The impact of the court’s decision against TWU will seriously afflict the engagement of religious communities with public life across this country, regardless of whether it’s the Catholic Church, the Salvation Army or Muslim and Jewish charitable organizations.

The Supreme Court was asked to decide whether TWU’s Christian “community covenant,” in which students and staff agree to the understanding that sexual relations must be limited to heterosexual marriage — which, by definition, excludes homosexual relations — was a legitimate prerogative for an accredited law school. In layman’s terms, the court had to discern the balance between Charter-protected religious freedoms and emerging rights of sexual minorities to live their identities freely and fully.

The court ruled that the refusal of the two law societies to accredit TWU’s law school was a “reasonable” balancing of rights. Its logic was that LGBTQ students would be unlikely to apply to TWU given the community-covenant requirement, so they effectively would have 60 fewer spaces available to them. Other students have access to the 16 current law schools, plus TWU’s 60 spots, and that therefore constitutes an inequality. By compiling that perceived inequality with the fact that students at TWU commit to reserving sexual intimacy for within traditional Christian marriage, the court concluded that the TWU covenant created a “public interest” harm to the reputation of and public confidence in the legal profession. These outweighed, in the court’s assessment, the “minor” consequences of denying religious freedom to the TWU community.

The effect of this ruling is that Bible-believing Christians who study law at the only Bible-believing law school in Canada cannot practice law in two of the most populated provinces. But Ontario is the province that contains the large city of Toronto, as well as the capital city of Ottawa. This basically means that Trinity Evangelical Law School graduates would be unable to be lawyers or judges at the Supreme Court.

The Supreme Court is fine with LGBT people practicing law in Ontario and British Columbia, including at the Supreme Court, just not Christians who believe in the Bible. But those Bible-believing Christians should definitely have to pay taxes, including the taxes that go to pay for the salaries of their overlords on the Supreme Court. Basically, if you’re an evangelical Christian in Canada, then you’re good enough to be a slave, but not much else. You can work to pay for your secular slave masters, but you can’t have the same rights as people who don’t believe the Bible.

I think it goes without saying that the Supreme Court judges weren’t able to get this ruling from the text of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. They just made it up from their own secular leftist values. This is actually normal for judges in Canada. There are no judges on the Canadian Supreme Court who accept that the Charter overrules the will of the judges.

Here’s a reaction to the ruling that I thought was interesting:

“Perhaps most disappointing from our perspective, the majority failed to account for or even address the equality rights of prospective TWU students or TWU’s freedom of association. These were issues we raised in our oral and written arguments to the court,” says Schutten. “The majority says it need not address those rights claims, because it is sufficient to ask whether the violation of freedom of religion is justified.” ARPA Canada believes that these other rights should play an important part in the “proportionality” analysis of the law societies’ decisions.

There is no freedom of religion in Canada. And there is no freedom of association in Canada. From previous rulings by Canadian Human Rights Commissions, we know that there is no freedom of speech in Canada. There is no right to self-defense from criminals in Canada. And there are no parental rights to educate your own children according to your Christian worldview in Canada. In Ontario, the man who wrote the education curriculum is now behind bars for child pornography, and the Supreme Court had nothing to say about whether that was morally wrong. For a long time, there has been covert discrimination against Bible-believing Christians in Canada, and now the Supreme Court has just shown what has been going on for decades and decades in universities and in government, in order to keep serious Christians out of positions of influence. From classroom teachers, to business owners to Supreme Court judges, Christians have been banned from the public square. Just like what happened to Jews in 1930s Germany.

Any Bible-believing Christian born in Canada has one mission: to get educated in a STEM skill that America needs, and then get out of that godless country. Kudos to those wise Christians who saw what was coming and got out early. It’s not the place for Christians to have a full and meaningful Christian life.

News

Obama administration FBI on the possibility of a Trump election win: “We’ll Stop It”

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Barack Obama and his corrupt ally in the FBI
Barack Obama and his allies in the FBI

So, the Department of Justice Inspector General’s report on the FBI’s political bias came out yesterday, and I’ve rounded up some of the most interesting findings from a variety of sources. It’s important that everyone finds out just what kind of administration we had under the Democrat Barack Obama.

Here’s an article from Fox News, which listed out 7 of the most important findings.

Let’s start with #1:

New texts between FBI lovers Strzok and Page were ‘disappointing’ and cast a shadow over the integrity of the entire Clinton email probe

A slew of anti-Trump text messages between special counsel Lisa Page and FBI Deputy Assistant Director Peter Strzok damaged the integrity of the entire Clinton email probe, Horowitz writes.

The report unearths striking new messages between the pair that were sent and received on government devices, including one in which Strzok vows to  “stop” Trump from being elected just months before the presidential election.

On August 8, 2016, the IG found, Page asked Strzok “[Trump’s] not ever going to become president, right? Right?!” and Strzok replied “No. No he won’t. We’ll stop it.”

Trump won’t win, because the FBI will stop it (in their spare time, between adulterous affairs).

More:

Five unnamed FBI employees — including one lawyer who later worked on the Mueller probe — are under scrutiny for anti-Trump bias

Strzok and Page are not the only FBI officials who evidenced anti-Trump bias during the Clinton email probe, Horowitz noted in the report.

The watchdog identified five other unnamed individuals, including two agents and one FBI attorney who worked on the Muller Russia probe until earlier this year, who made “statements of hostility toward then-candidate Trump and statements of support for candidate Clinton,” and improperly mixed “political opinions” with case-related discussions.

The FBI fumbled the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s storage and transmission of classified data on an unsecured home-brew server, which allowed her to escape government record-keeping requirements.

The Daily Caller noted that the FBI slow-walked the investigation of Hillary Clinton:

When further Clinton emails were discovered on a laptop belonging to former congressman Anthony Weiner, who is married to longtime Clinton aide Huma Abedin, the FBI agents overseeing her case took just under a month to take meaningful action, Horowitz’s report found.

No later than Sept. 29, 2016, FBI executives and the agents who oversaw the Clinton email investigation were informed that “that Weiner investigation agents had discovered 141,000 emails on Weiner’s laptop that were potentially relevant to the [Clinton email] investigation.” Comey didn’t authorize a search warrant until Oct. 27, after he was briefed on them that day, the IG report found.

But do you know what was a priority? The investigation of the Trump campaign because of the Democrat-funded Russia dossier.

The Daily Caller continues:

The FBI prioritized investigating the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia over the discovered emails on Weiner’s laptop, possibly due to political bias, according to the report. Anti-Trump agent Peter Strzok was intimately involved with that decision.

So, who decided that the FBI should exonerate Clinton?

Investors Business Daily explains:

The report also, whether intentionally or not, makes it clear why the FBI had concluded early on that there wasn’t a case against Clinton: President Obama had already cleared Hillary of any wrongdoing.

The IG report recalls how, during a 60 Minutes interview on October 11, 2015, Obama “characterized former Secretary Clinton’s use of a private email server as a ‘mistake,’ but stated that it did not ‘pose a national security problem’ and was ‘not a situation in which America’s national security was endangered.’ Obama also stated that the issue had been ‘ginned up’ because of the presidential race.”

It goes on to say that “Obama’s comments caused concern among FBI officials about the potential impact on the investigation.”

Former EAD John Giacalone told the IG, “We open up criminal investigations. And you have the President of the United States saying this is just a mistake … That’s a problem, right?”

Obama repeated his absolution in April 2016 — right around the time Comey was starting to draft his statement dropping the case against Clinton.

“Obama stated that while former Secretary Clinton had been ‘careless’ in managing her emails while she was Secretary of State, she would never intentionally do anything to endanger the security of the United States with her emails.”

[…]From Obama on down, no one ever wanted or intended to do what should have been done: Prosecute Clinton for gross negligence in her handling of highly classified material. The entire investigation was just for show.

Should we be surprised at any of this? Not at all. We already knew that the Obama administration used the IRS to persecute conservatives. These are not people who make a it a priority to do the right thing. Being secularists, they lack an objective foundation for morality. For them, morality is just customs and conventions, not an objective design for how we ought to live. Whenever morality interferes with their desire to serve their own interests, the question they ask is “will I get caught?”. Instead of listening to their consciences, they think of their own feelings and how they will be perceived.

It turns out that you can’t expect a man who votes in favor of infanticide multiple times (as a state senator) to take morality seriously. It doesn’t matter if a man’s skin color is the color you like. If he has no capacity for put moral duties above self-interest, then you should expect corruption and abuse of power. He ruined everything he touched, from religious liberty to Iran to Syria to Libya to the cost of health care to the $20 trillion national debt, and beyond. An absolute disaster of incompetence and immorality.