So, in response to yesterday’s post, I have been asked what are some of the other reasons that cause men to become disinterested in dating and marriage. I have a list as long as my arm. But here’s another one for today. Today’s reason is that the legal is system is biased against men. There many examples of the bias, but I’ll focus on sentencing.

The study I want to talk about today is called “Estimating Gender Disparities in Federal Criminal Cases“, and it’s published in the peer-reviewed journal “American Law and Economics Review”.

The abstract says this:

This paper assesses and decomposes gender disparities in federal criminal cases. It finds large unexplained gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution, conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables. Decompositions show that most of the unexplained disparity appears to emerge during charging, plea-bargaining, and sentencing fact-finding. The approach provides an important complement to prior disparity studies, which have focused on sentencing and have not incorporated disparities arising from those earlier stages. I also consider various plausible causal theories that could explain the estimated gender gap, using the rich dataset to test their implications.

The key sentence there is “It finds large unexplained gaps favoring women throughout the sentence length distribution, conditional on arrest offense, criminal history, and other pre-charge observables.”

I also found this paragraph interesting:

The estimated gender disparities are strikingly large, conditional on observables. Most notably, treatment as male is associated with a 63% average increase in sentence length, with substantial unexplained gaps throughout the sentence distribution.

This anti-male discrimination becomes apparent to men when they are going through the divorce process.

About 70% of divorces are initiated by women, and most of them for frivolous reasons (reasons that were not recognized as valid in the law prior to “no-fault-divorce” being enacted). The reasons are also not recognized in the Bible. Throughout the divorce process, men encounter anti-male bias. This begins with the common use of false accusations against the man, in order to get sole custody, which provides the woman with greater child support payments from the man. These false accusations are usually not based on any evidence, such as police reports. They just emerge during the divorce proceedings and are used to eject the man from the home, and get the woman sole custody of the kids. In 90% of cases, the woman gets sole custody of the kids. And this is despite the fact that single-father homes have similar outcomes for children as married two-parents homes. The results of single-mother homes are disastrous for children in many areas, including poverty, crime, mental health,  sexual activity, etc. But the court system insists on doing what is worse for children by separating the father from the child. Even the meager visitation rights that fathers get are not enforced.

Failure to pay alimony and child support can land men in prison. And the laws are enforced very unfairly there, as well. Consider this case from Canada:

A wealthy businessman will have to pay more than $50,000 a month in spousal support for 10 years to a woman with whom he had a long-term romantic relationship even though they kept separate homes and had no children together, Ontario’s top court has ruled.

Seeing this, many men today have declined to participate in dating and marriage. And I could come up with dozens more reasons like this one. Based in peer-reviewed studies. It’s not one reason deterring men from marrying, it’s dozens of reasons. In every case, society has decided that men are expendable. And sadly, the church has largely ignored the root causes of men’s retreat from dating and marriage. The church simply has nothing at all to say to men who are faced with these risks, costs and disincentives.

When I explain these problems to pro-marriage conservatives, they confess to never having heard about any of these issues. They say “I just like the idea of people falling in love and having lots of cute babies”. They haven’t really bothered to think about the calculations that men run before deciding what to do with women. Maybe it’s time for Christian leaders to do a little more homework about these issues. Maybe there is something Christian churches can do to make marriage a bit more appealing to men.

We are already seeing this happening in conservative states like Florida and Tennessee. In Florida, there are new laws requiring that child custody be 50-50 in most circumstances. This acts as a deterrent against women who want to file frivolous divorces just to get child support from wealthy men. Florida also banned permanent alimony, which is another positive step to make marriage more fair for men. (Although many women in Florida were furious about it). In Tennessee, it is now a misdemeanor to claim child support payments from a man who is not the biological father of the child.

These are the kinds of policy solutions that will bring marriage back. But I’ve never heard Christians talking about these issues. All I ever hear from pious Christian leaders is that men need to “man up”, as if manning up makes the threats from feminist laws and courts disappear. It doesn’t work, but it does signal virtue, which seems to be the goal of many pious Christian leaders. We’re going to have to do better than virtue-signaling if we want to reverse the decline of marriage. It’s not going to be solved by shaming and blaming men.

A friend sent me a draft e-mail, that he wrote to a family member, who has rejected historic Christianity for progressive Christianity. He was asked to give the basics of salvation, and his attempt to explain the gospel to her is below. My advice included taking out the Christianese terms. Do you think he did a good job? I think his emphasis on what is not the gospel (what needs to be rejected) makes this a first-class explanation of the gospel.

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So, you’ve asked the 10,000 talent question (alluding to Matthew 18:23-35).  You are basically asking me what I think the Gospel is.  I’ll try to answer that in a minimalistic way, using my own characterization of it rather than just making doctrinal statements.

One must accept that there is a God, who is a higher authority than themselves.  How much one must first believe about that God is debatable, but candidate beliefs would be that He is personal (having a mind like, but greater than, ours), powerful, and the creator of this cosmos and everything in it — He owns it all.  Our natural intuition is to see beauty, order, complexity, and “design” in nature.  There is a difference in belief vs unbelief in that some think it is just the appearance of design and some acknowledge their intuition that it actually is designed.

One must acknowledge their moral intuitions, and recognize that there are actually right and wrong things in this world.  It’s not just whatever you want to do, or whatever society decides in a given time or culture.

Given that morality is then understood to be a transcendent thing (universal and independent of time and culture), the connection is made to God as the author of this moral law.

One must then recognize that he/she regularly fails to live up to this law, even according to just their meager understanding of it, and even by the standards of morality that they make up for other people.

One must not try to suppress this, or therapize it away.  One must recognize there is a problem and real moral culpability.  One must recognize that they feel guilty and have self-esteem issues because they actually do have guilt and issues.

One must make the connection between guilt and their standing before God.  Being good sometimes and in some ways does not erase the bad you do, past, present, or future.  One must be willing to bend the knee to God’s will regarding morality.

One must also come to see the moral failure (sin) in their lives as a bad thing that they’d like to be rid of, rather than excusing it as the fault of others, or revelling in it as part of the pleasure of life, or shrugging it off as just “who I am.”

One must appeal to God in these matters for both forgiveness and help in living as they should.

Given that God has provided a champion for the problem that humanity faces (the backstory of which not all will fully know), one whose heart is truly yielded to all these things will naturally and eagerly receive Word of this as Good News.  God has solved the seemingly irreconcilable demands of both justice and forgiveness in that champion.

Those with ears to hear will receive this solution — Jesus — and believe what He has done in life and on the cross for their sake — the resurrection being both confirmation of His divine authority and also the sign of the defeat of death which awaits us all, and is the only barrier between us and facing this God whom we fail at every turn.  They will believe on (or upon) Jesus as Lord and their means of salvation, surrendering dependence upon their own ideas of self-righteousness and earning the favor of God.

The outward expression that we have understood and accepted these things is that we have made Jesus Lord and committed ourselves to following Him, conform our character to His, resist our sinful inclinations, and are interested in learning all about Who God is and what has been done for us in Christ.

This commitment to the Lordship of Christ naturally leads to the acceptance of subsequent beliefs.  If Jesus is indeed Lord, then He holds all authority, and what He said and taught to His followers is our guide — the New Testament.  And if this is the divine story, as intended by God for men, then we have reason to believe that it is comprehensible to us, and He will insure (in spite of the fallibility of men and demonic plots) that its essential message will not be lost or corrupted until all things are completed.  Given that Jesus affirmed every categorical section of the Old Testament, and claimed to be its promised Messiah, then that, too, is a source of truth and understanding.

Those doctrines that are sometimes characterized as “essential” for salvation, are merely the highlights of this redemption narrative, which are those things being clear and consistent, and which indicate that someone has yielded themselves to the authority of Christ and the scriptures, and understands these things.  It is not that believing them is what saves, but they are what the saved naturally come to believe.  Confessing them is the tangible, verbal act of affirming the Gospel, but is not necessarily identical to a life committed to putting it into practice, which is saving faith.

Previously, I blogged about the murder of Iryna Zarutska, the 23-year-old woman who was murdered by a criminal who was a 14-time repeat offender, in Democrat-dominated Charlotte, NC. What struck most people about the story is how Democrats didn’t want to accept any responsibility for their soft-on-crime policies. And now we have a similar case in South Carolina.

Daily Caller has an exclusive story about it:

Stephen Federico, the father of 22-year-old Logan Federico, told the Daily Caller no Democratic lawmakers have contacted him since her murder.

Logan was shot and killed during a May 3 suspected home invasion while visiting friends in Columbia, South Carolina. Democrat South Carolina Rep. James Clyburn represents the district where Logan Federico was killed.

When the Caller asked Federico if any Democratic lawmaker, including Clyburn, had reached out since his daughter’s death, he said no.

Referring to Democrat North Carolina Rep. Deborah Ross, he added, “One called my daughter the wrong name yesterday.”

I do think that it is infuriating when someone takes a course of action for social reasons – virtue signaling – and then refuses to accept responsibility for the results of their actions. In this case, Democrats took an action – being soft on criminals, and deterring self-defense – and then when the result occurred – repeat offenders committing serious crimes after being released – the Democrats don’t want to even accept that it happened. And they certainly don’t accept that they are responsible. After all, they think, how could bad results come from actions taken by someone as morally superior as myself? The moral superiority means that they should never be held accountable for any results of their actions.

Just like the Iryna case, the accused in this case had been caught and released many times:

Authorities charged Dickey with two counts of first-degree burglary in 2014, then served warrants for a third first-degree burglary charge in October, according to WIS10. The man pleaded guilty on a second-degree non-violent burglary charge and was sentenced to 10 years suspended amid probation.

Dickey faced the other two burglary counts the following year, though one was dropped. He pleaded guilty to burglary to the third-degree. Dickey pleaded guilty for the third time to third-degree burglary in 2023 after originally facing a count of violent second-degree burglary. Eleventh Circuit Court Solicitor Rick Hubbard claimed his office did not know of Dickey’s previous burglary charges and guilty pleas amid the 2023 case.

[…][Stephen Federico] noted that prison is meant to rehabilitate people but argued that Dickey never spent enough time behind bars to know if rehabilitation could have worked — noting he only served about 600 days over a decade. “I would say the odds are against career criminals ever being rehabilitated.”

There’s some must-see video of the father that has been making the rounds – a rare look at what crime is like for the victims:

In this case, the accused criminal was arrested 39 times, and had 25 felonies in his criminal record. What was he doing out on the streets? Well, you just have to consider that big problem that secular leftists have with accountability. They don’t like the idea of anyone being “punished” for their actions. That’s why they hate Christianity and the idea of a final judgment so much. And this hatred comes out in their coddling of criminals.

Dennis Prager had a memorable line that he used to say often on his radio show. He would say “If you are kind to the cruel, you will be cruel to the kind“. But that’s what the secular left believes, which is why people have to learn never to put them into power. You think you are electing people to protect you from evil, but the secular left sees it as an opportunity to deal with their own guilt by showing their great capacity for forgiveness and non-judgment. “I don’t judge” they say, and they mean that as a boast. Well, they are making that boast while risking your life. Their boast, your life.