Tag Archives: Children

News

Nebraska legislature introduces bill to ban abortion after 20 weeks

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Article from the American Thinker. (H/T ECM)

Excerpt:

Nebraska has a nonpartisan, unicameral legislature, so many of the shenanigans which can cause legislative bills to fall into a maelstrom of confusion are absent there. This is not a “partisan” issue, and no conference committee reports can swallow the bill and then regurgitate it as unrecognizable vomit.

Moreover, Legislative Bill 1103 will get a hearing: Its sponsor is Mike Flood, Speaker of Nebraska’s legislature.

Note that Mike Flood is a Republican. Republicans are pro-life.

More:

The Nebraska bill carefully accounts for those sorts of concerns that all decent people have always had about abortion: Might the mother die if the child is born? Could a live birth cause permanent damage to the mother’s health? (Legislative Bill 1103, though, makes a point of requiring physical and not “psychic” harm to the mother.) Amendments may include those other tricky areas — children born of rape or incest.

[…]The Nebraska bill will put fans of unrestricted abortion right where they belong — supporting all sorts of evil, as long as it is committed out of sight.

It’s a brilliant move. It’s a wonder that the pro-life movement hasn’t adopted a more incremental approach before, because it works. Make the Democrats publicly defend infanticide as a woman’s right to choose.

I hope you’ve all practiced your pro-life arguments. If not, then just read this, and you’re good to go.

If you know about pro-life arguments already, then why not try guessing who is more pro-life: men or women? Those links go to charts from the latest Gallup poll. Isn’t it surprising? I’m surprised.

Podcasts

Brian Auten interviews Sean McDowell on apologetics and youth

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Brian did another interview, this time with Sean McDowell. He’s pretty fun to listen to.

The MP3 file is here.

Topics:

  • with respect to faith, do young people care about more about truth or emotional happiness?
  • what projects is Sean working on lately?
  • what was it like being the son of famous apologist Josh McDowell?
  • how did Sean become a Christian?
  • what did Sean’s father say when Sean expressed doubts in Christianity?
  • how did Sean build up his convictions about the truth of Christianity?
  • what effect does the father’s relationship to the child have on the child’s Christian faith?
  • how did Sean get interested in apologetics?
  • what resources had the biggest effect on Sean’s apologetics training?
  • should you be concerned when someone you care about starts to doubt?
  • what should you say to someone who has doubts?
  • how should you respond to tough questions from young people?
  • how can a person encourage their church to adopt apologetics?
  • what’s a good book on intelligent design theory for young people?

This is fun because I spend a lot of time thinking about how to pass my faith along to my children in a way that will still allow them to question and rebel. It’s a really challenging problem, but Sean seems to know how to do it.

Don’t miss the MP3 from Sean’s first debate on whether morality is possible without God.

Podcasts

Jennifer Roback Morse answers the best argument for same-sex marriage

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Cloning her would solve the marriage problem
She'll show you how to defend marriage

Jennifer Roback Morse likes to debate, and she’s very good at it. So good, that you can learn how to debate about marriage too, just by listening to her debates.

The audio of her recent debate in Manhattan just came out.

The MP3 file is here. (46 minutes lecture, 27 minutes of Q&A)

The main case that she makes is similar to the case she made in the debate she had at Columbia University, which I blogged about before. But the Q&A is new, and very interesting. It starts at 46:00 and goes until the end. But one of the difficult questions she was asked really stood out.

The argument

Opposition to same-sex marriage is the same as opposition to inter-racial marriage.

The answer

There are two ways to respond:

1) Race has nothing to do with the central purpose of marriage as being the natural way of binding children to parents, and parents to each other. Race doesn’t affect those goals. But gender is relevant to the the purpose of marriage, because if a baby is formed from opposite sex parents then both parents have a biological link to the child, which is a stronger bond than a non-biological link. This improves the chances that the child will be raised in a stable environment.

2) A better historical analogy to opposing same-sex marriage is opposition to no-fault divorce (unilateral divorce). No-fault marriage started in California. They also argued that only a few people would be affected, that the children would not be harmed, studies show that it will be OK, etc. But in hindsight, we now know that it was a disaster for the family, and especially for children.

You can visit Dr. J’s blog here.

Those of you who are into Christian apologetics need to understand that atheism is embraced for a whole host of non-rational causes. One of them is growing up in a fatherless household. It has a profound impact on a child’s worldview when the child’s father is defective or absent. That means that every Christian apologist who knows the standard arguments also needs to know how to defend marriage. Insofar as socialism attacks marriage, the Christian apologist needs to be able to defend marriage on fiscal grounds, as well.

I’ve written before about no-fault divorce, pre/extra-marital sex, single-mother parenting and same-sex marriage. Here is my post that cites research in order to explain why people oppose same-sex marriage.