Tag Archives: Cohabitation

Commentary

Robert P. George explains why same-sex marriage is morally wrong

1 Comment

Famous Princeton University professor writing in the Wall Street Journal. (H/T ECM)

This is the best single article I’ve read on same-sex marriage.

Excerpt:

If marriage is redefined, its connection to organic bodily union—and thus to procreation—will be undermined. It will increasingly be understood as an emotional union for the sake of adult satisfaction that is served by mutually agreeable sexual play. But there is no reason that primarily emotional unions like friendships should be permanent, exclusive, limited to two, or legally regulated at all. Thus, there will remain no principled basis for upholding marital norms like monogamy.

A veneer of sentiment may prevent these norms from collapsing—but only temporarily. The marriage culture, already wounded by widespread divorce, nonmarital cohabitation and out-of-wedlock childbearing will fare no better than it has in those European societies that were in the vanguard of sexual “enlightenment.” And the primary victims of a weakened marriage culture are always children and those in the poorest, most vulnerable sectors of society.

Candid and clear-thinking advocates of redefining marriage recognize that doing so entails abandoning norms such as monogamy. In a 2006 statement entitled “Beyond Same-Sex Marriage,” over 300 lesbian, gay, and allied activists, educators, lawyers, and community organizers—including Gloria Steinem, Barbara Ehrenreich, and prominent Yale, Columbia and Georgetown professors—call for legally recognizing multiple sex partner (“polyamorous”) relationships. Their logic is unassailable once the historic definition of marriage is overthrown.

You know, there’s no law that says that we could not strengthen marriage if we wanted to. Just saying. Children do better when conceived and raised in stable environments with a strong exclusive bond between two opposite-sex parents. Do we care about children’s welfare? If so, then we need strong marriages.

Podcasts

Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse explains the dangers of cohabitation

Leave a comment

The podcast is here.

The story she is talking about is here.

Excerpt:

DALLAS — The hotel bathroom was a de facto prison cell — a cramped, foul space where three young children were starved, beaten and sexually assaulted for at least nine months.

The toilet didn’t work. The bathtub was a place to sleep. Meals were rare, and the two oldest children — once each a healthy 90 pounds — withered to less than 60 pounds.

Each day for reasons unknown, their mother’s boyfriend would force the 10-year-old boy to stand in the corner with his arms raised above his head; his 5-year-old half brother had to kneel in another corner, arms also raised.

The disturbing details emerged in court records that tell the horrific story of the torture borne by the two boys and their 11-year-old half sister, all of whom have different fathers. The children were found July 2 after their mother called a relative to say she feared for her own life and those of her children.

A photo of the cohabiting couple are here.

Dr. J’s blog is here.

Commentary

Christina Hoff Sommers explains feminist myth-making

1 Comment
Christina Hoff Sommers
Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers

This story was sent to me by ECM, but I also saw posted at Dinocrat.com, Jennifer Roback Morse and Muddling Towards Maturity.

How reliable are the stories you read in women’s studies textbooks? Does violence against women really increase on Superbowl Sunday? Or is it just a ploy to create a made-up crisis to justify transferring wealth from taxpayers to feminists for research, social programs, etc.?

Excerpt:

One reason that feminist scholarship contains hard-to-kill falsehoods is that reasonable, evidence-backed criticism is regarded as a personal attack.

Lemon’s Domestic Violence Law is organized as a conventional law-school casebook — a collection of judicial opinions, statutes, and articles selected, edited, and commented upon by the author.

…in a selection by Joan Zorza, a domestic-violence expert, students read, “The March of Dimes found that women battered during pregnancy have more than twice the rate of miscarriages and give birth to more babies with more defects than women who may suffer from any immunizable illness or disease.” Not true. When I recently read Zorza’s assertion to Richard P. Leavitt, director of science information at the March of Dimes, he replied, “That is a total error on the part of the author. There was no such study.” The myth started in the early 1990s, he explained, and resurfaces every few years.

Zorza also informs readers that “between 20 and 35 percent of women seeking medical care in emergency rooms in America are there because of domestic violence.” Studies by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Bureau of Justice Statistics, an agency of the U.S. Department of Justice, indicate that the figure is closer to 1 percent.

Sommers is a Christian equality-feminist who writes against activist “gender” feminism. I have her first two books. She is a professional philosopher who understands men and tells the truth.

You can read more about what constitutes feminist research in this article by Rod Dreher.

Further study

My previous story on domestic violence showed that female-instigated DV is rising in Australia, and that rates of DV are similar in Canada and the UK.

Previously, I blogged about a new study that shows the importance of fathers to the development of children.

I also blogged about how government intrudes into the family and about the myth of “dead-beat Dads”. And about how the feminist state’s discrimination against male teachers is negatively impacting young men. And there is my series on how Democrat policies discourage marriage: Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.

Dr. Linda Kelly Hill
Dr. Linda Kelly Hill

Here is a related research paper by Dr. Linda Kelly, a professor of Law at Indiana University School of Law.