News

Schools ask 12-year-old children whether they have had gay, oral and anal sex

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This is from Breitbart News. (H/T Ari)

Full text:

A public hearing is taking place Wednesday morning in the Massachusetts State House to look into a controversial sex survey given to middle school and high school students.
Developed by the Centers for Disease Control and called the “Youth Risk Behavior Survey,” the survey asks students as young as 12 a series of very personal and highly ideological questions.

The survey asks students if they are homosexual and if they are transgender. It also asks if they have had oral or anal sex and if they have performed such acts with up to six people.

Whether or not they have carried a gun, smoked cigarettes, consumed alcohol and how much also appear on the questionnaire, as well as whether they have taken drugs, such as OxyContin, Percocet, and Vicodin. It asks how often their guardian uses a seat belt, if the youngster has a sexually transmitted disease, and where they sleep.

The group MassResistance says the survey is “psychologically distorting” and will lead the child to think he is “abnormal if he is not doing it all.” The group stated that “having children reveal personal issues about themselves and their family can have emotional consequences.” They also complain that “the survey results are used by radical groups from Planned Parenthood to LGBT groups to persuade politicians to give more taxpayer money [to] these groups.”

Though students fill out the survey anonymously, MassResistance warns that “they are administered by the teacher in the classroom and there is often pressure for all kids to participate.”

The test is given nationally and not without controversy. The Chicago Tribune reported two years ago that a Chicago teacher was reprimanded for telling students they had a “constitutional right” not to fill out the survey.

This post is a lead-in for my 2 PM post, which tries to explain what people on the secular left are hoping to achieve by trying to break down the natural resistance that children have to sexual exploitation.

Polemics

William Lane Craig answers: should Christians accept intelligent design?

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Here is the question he is answer on his Reasonable Faith web site:

Dr. Craig,

First of all, I appreciate all you have done for the Kingdom of God. I pray you keep up the good work. You are someone I look up to.

I’m taking a philosophy of religion course right now, and it is very fascinating to me. I’m taking the course because I am interested in Christian Apologetics. One aspect of Christian Apologetics is to argue for intelligent design. To my surprise, my professor, who is a Christian, does not believe in intelligent design (ID). I also wanted to point out the fact that in an astronomy class my girlfriend is taking, the professor lectured on how most Christians do not believe in ID.

As I’m pondering on why my Christian professor doesn’t believe in ID and how an astronomy professor lectures on how most Christians don’t believe in ID, I start to question if I even know what ID really is.

I thought that God was the intelligent designer that we are arguing for in Christian Apologetics.

So my questions for you are:

1) What is your definition of intelligent design?

2) Is intelligent design something that Christians should believe in?

3) If Christians should believe in intelligent design, then why do some people not believe in it? Are they just confused on the meaning of intelligent design?

I appreciate your time.

Drew

Here is part of Dr. Craig’s answer:

I think it advisable to capitalize “Intelligent Design” (ID) in order to signal that we are using the words in a technical sense, rather than in the sense accepted by every Christian. Broadly speaking, we may say that ID is a theory of justifiable design inferences. That is to say, it’s a theory which seeks to answer the question: what justifies us in inferring that design is the best explanation of some phenomenon? It is obvious that we make such design inferences all the time. A teacher who finds that a student’s term paper reproduces sections from Wikipedia realizes that this is not the result of chance but of deliberate plagiarism. Archaeologists excavating a site readily discern the difference between the products of sedimentation and metamorphosis and human artifacts. A beachcomber who comes upon a sandcastle recognizes that it’s not the result of the action of the waves and the wind but of intelligent design.

Some of these inferences are so obvious that it never even occurs to us to ask why we are justified in making such inferences to design. But philosophically, it’s no trivial matter to provide a theory of what makes a design inference justified. The theory of Intelligent Design seeks to provide just such an account. As an account of justified design inferences, Intelligent Design theory is of interest to a wide variety of fields: for example, to cryptographers who are trying to discern whether a sequence of letters is just meaningless jibberish or an encoded message; to crime scene investigators who want to determine whether the fire was a result of natural causes or of arson; to searchers for extra-terrestrial intelligence who are trying to make out whether the signal they’re receiving is just random noise or a message from an extra-terrestrial intelligence, and so on and so forth.

ID theorists have offered a number of accounts of what justifies a design inference. Undoubtedly one of the most sophisticated which has been offered comes from the mathematician William Dembski in his book The Design Inference, which appeared in Cambridge University Press’s monograph series on Probability, Induction, and Decision Theory. Dembski argues that a design inference is justified when two conditions are met: first, the event to be explained is extraordinarily improbable and, second, the event corresponds to an independently given pattern.

In its most fundamental sense, then, Intelligent Design is a theory of design inferences which is applicable to a number of diverse fields. While disagreement may exist over which theory of design inference is correct, this is hardly the point at which Intelligent Design encounters heated opposition. Rather controversy arises when the theory of Intelligent Design is applied to the field of biology. For Dembski and other ID theorists have made the controversial claim that biological organisms exhibit just that combination of high improbability and conformity to an independently given pattern that justifies an inference to intelligent design. Accordingly, they maintain that we are justified scientifically in inferring that biological complexity is best explained by Intelligent Design.

We infer design in biology (e.g. – protein sequencing) the same way we infer design in blog posts, computer programs, etc.

This video featuring Stephen Meyer explains ID in 5 minutes: (H/T Evolution News)

If you want to understand intelligent design better, I recommend this lecture by Stephen C. Meyer on the origin of life.

News

Do Supreme Court justices understand the reasons for traditional marriage?

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This article from the Public Discourse takes a look at the oral arguments from the same-sex marriage case in progress at the Supreme Court.

Here’s the list:

  • Error Number One: Massachusetts Marriage Rates Have Stayed the Same
  • Error Number Two: Because Some Men Leave Their Wives and Children, Marriage Does Not Help Keep Fathers Around
  • Error Number Three: The Purpose of States’ Recognizing and Regulating Marriage is to Bestow Dignity on Couples
  • Error Number Four: The Only Harm to Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage Is Making Marriage More Adult-Centered
  • Error Number Five: There Is a Parallel between Brown/Loving and Lawrence/Obergefell
  • Error Number Six: Age Restrictions on Marriage Are Equivalent to the Definitional Element of One Man and One Woman

One of Obama’s Supreme Court picks is showing herself a poor thinker:

Error Number Two: Because Some Men Leave Their Wives and Children, Marriage Does Not Help Keep Fathers Around

Justice Sotomayor also committed what is commonly referred to as an exception fallacy. This is where someone reaches an overall conclusion about a group on the basis of a few exceptional cases. Thus, when Mr. Bursch was making the argument that redefining marriage to include same-sex couples will disconnect marriage from the long-held norm that the institution binds children to their biological mother and father, Justice Sotomayor responded:

Marriage doesn’t do that on any level. How many married couples do fathers with the benefits or the requirements of marriage walk away from their children? So it’s not that the institution alone does it and that without it that father is going to stay in marriage. He made a choice . . . Some mothers do the same thing.

This is a classic example of the exception fallacy. Of course some men and women walk away from their marriage and their children. But that is the exception, not the rule, and it is certainly counter to the social norm of marriage that gently pushes parents to stay together and raise their children.

It is rather shocking that a justice of the United States Supreme Court would claim that “on any level” marriage does not have that effect and longstanding purpose. It is also disappointing that she would commit such a basic error of logic.

I often encounter the problem among people with no math background. You cite statistics about what outcomes are expected, and they reply with an exceptional outlier to refute the argument. I’m troubled that Supreme Court justices lack the ability to reason in this way, though.

Here’s another pretty obvious mistake:

Error Number Four: The Only Harm to Legalizing Same-Sex Marriage Is Making Marriage More Adult-Centered

Several justices struggled to see how redefining marriage in genderless terms would cause any harm or have any impact on the institution of marriage. As Mr. Bursch correctly but incompletely argued, legalizing same-sex marriage will alter the institution to be primarily concerned with fulfilling the desires of adults rather than the needs of children.

But that’s not all. As the 100 Scholars of Marriage made clear in their amicus brief, several other important and beneficial social norms will be eroded, if not erased, by same-sex marriage, including:

– Gender-diverse parenting: the norm that children both need and deserve to be raised by a man and a woman, not only because of what they learn from interacting with a parent of each sex, but because men and women parent and interact with their children differently, providing distinct but complementary benefits. By its very structure, same-sex marriage eliminates this norm and its attendant benefits to children.

– Biological bonding: the norm that marriage binds children to their biological mother and father in a family unit. Same-sex marriage and parenting, by definition, means that at best only one of a child’s biological parents will be in the home. While death, divorce, or parental delinquency create exceptions, elevating the exception to the norm undermines that norm and the benefits it produces.

– Postponing or channeling procreation: the norm that procreation should only responsibly occur within the stable bonds of marriage. Same-sex marriage is not, and biologically cannot be, about procreation. By redefining marriage in this way, the institution becomes less about being the socially recommended “place” and “time” where procreation is recommended.

– Placing social value on raising children: the norm that society values and needs children to be born and raised by their parents. Again, same-sex marriage is not primarily about procreation, and its acceptance attenuates this norm for the institution as a whole. Of course, same-sex couples can adopt or one member of the couple can reproduce with someone of the opposite sex, but these are secondary purposes and behaviors.

What impact will the weakening or elimination of these norms have on the institution of marriage, and thus the behavior of society? Put another way, as Justice Breyer asked, “what’s the empirical connection?”

Well, the last major alteration to the institution of marriage—no-fault divorce—did have unintended negative consequences, reducing marriage rates and increasing divorce rates more than expected, with children and women suffering the consequences. Additionally, the Netherlands, the country that has had same-sex marriage the longest, after controlling for other factors, has experienced a drop in opposite-sex marriage rates among young women after adopting same-sex marriage.

The truth is, no one knows for sure what the effect will be—but it clashes with history, common sense, and theory to assume it will be innocuous.

The norm of gender-diverse parenting is important, because fathers and mothers are both needed.

Look at this abstract from a very new study to see why:

The association between family structure instability and children’s life chances is well documented, with children reared in stable, two-parent families experiencing more favorable outcomes than children in other family arrangements. This study examines father household entrances and exits, distinguishing between the entrance of a biological father and a social father and testing for interactions between family structure instability and children’s age, gender, and genetic characteristics. Using data from the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study and focusing on changes in family structure by age (years 0–9), the authors show that father exits are associated with increases in children’s antisocial behavior, a strong predictor of health and well-being in adulthood. The pattern for father entrances is more complicated, with entrances for the biological father being associated with lower antisocial behavior among boys and social father entrances being associated with higher antisocial behavior. Child’s age does not moderate the association; however, genetic information in the models sharpens the findings substantially.

Biological fathers need to present in the home.

It doesn’t look like we will get a good legal decision on this case. The leftist judges are just not thinking clearly.