Tag Archives: Crime

Commentary

Twenty-one reasons why marriage matters

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From the National Marriage Coalition in New Zealand. (H/T Jennifer Roback Morse)

Summary:

FAMILY

1. Marriage increases the likelihood that fathers have good relationships with their children
2. Cohabitation is not the functional equivalent of marriage
3. Growing up outside an intact marriage increases the likelihood that children themselves divorce or become unwed parents
4. Marriage is a virtually universal human institution.

ECONOMICS

5. Divorce and unmarried childbearing increase poverty for both children and mothers
6. Married couples seem to build more wealth on average than singles or cohabiting couples
7. Married men earn more money than do single men with similar education and job histories
8. Parental divorce (or failure to marry) appears to increase children’s risk of school failure
9. Parental divorce reduces the likelihood that children will graduate from college and achieve high-status jobs

PHYSICAL HEALTH AND LONGEVITY

10.Children who live with their own two married parents enjoy better physical health, on average, than do children in other family forms
11.Parental marriage is associated with a sharply lower risk of infant mortality
12.Marriage is associated with reduced rates of alcohol and substance abuse for both adults and teens
13.Married people, especially married men, have longer life expectancies than do otherwise similar singles
14.Marriage is associated with better health and lower rates of injury, illness, and disability for both men and women

MENTAL HEALTH AND EMOTIONAL WELL-BEING

15.Children whose parents divorce have higher rates of psychological distress and mental illness
16.Divorce appears significantly to increase the risk of suicide
17.Married mothers have lower rates of depression than do single or cohabiting mothers

CRIME AND DOMESTIC VIOLENCE

18.Boys raised in single-parent families are more likely to engage in delinquent and criminal behaviour
19.Marriage appear to reduce the risk that adults will be either perpetrators or victims of crime
20.Married women appear to have a lower risk of experiencing domestic violence than do cohabiting or dating women
21.A child who is not living with his or her own two married parents is at greater risk of child abuse

This is fun to read! You can learn to defend marriage, even if you favor lifelong chastity over marriage like I do.

The full PDF is here.

News

Good news for the right to free speech in Canada!

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Life Site News has the best post I’ve seen so far.

Excerpt:

The Canadian Human Rights Tribunal ruled today that section 13 of the Canadian Human Rights Act, Canada’s human rights legislation against hate messages, unreasonably limits the Charter right to freedom of expression.

[…]Popular conservative pundit and human rights commission critic Mark Steyn today said that the end of the hate speech legislation is near, calling today’s decision a “landmark decision.”  “This is the beginning of the end for Section 13 and its provincial equivalents, and a major defeat for Canada’s thought police,” he said. “It’s not just a personal triumph for Marc Lemire, but a critical victory in the campaign by Ezra Levant, Maclean’s, yours truly and others to rid the Canadian state of this hideous affront to justice.”

[…]The hate message section of the Canadian Human Rights Act (CHRA) has been the subject of growing criticism, having been accused of placing limits on the Charter right to freedom of expression.  High profile cases have been brought against conservative publisher Ezra Levant and columnist Mark Steyn, as well as numerous cases against Christians who have expressed their convictions against the homosexualist agenda.

The CHRC has admitted to using unethical methods within their investigations.  Notably, in a hearing during Lemire’s case, CHRC employee Dean Steacy testified that he and a number of colleagues regularly used an alias to post racist messages…  The CHRC was also investigated by the RCMP regarding allegations that they had hacked into a private citizen’s internet connection, though that case was dropped when it led the police to the American jurisdiction.

Until today, no respondent had won a human rights case brought to the Tribunal under section 13.  Further, about half of the section 13 cases have been brought by Richard Warman, and almost all of them in recent years.

Blazing Cat Fur has a huge round-up of blog reactions from the best Canadian blogs.

Here are some of the blogs from his round-up:

I took a look at the comments on BCF, and they are still pretty cautious, but excited.

This news was big enough to get picked up over at Hot Air by Ed Morrissey, who explains:

When government tells you what you can and cannot say in the political context, then free speech is essentially dead.  Section 13 created an enormously intimidating device for anyone who wants to argue their beliefs in the public square in Canada.  Even in just a “remedial” mode, it creates an atmosphere where people have to worry whether their speech will create a necessity to seek government approval, and the costs of defending speech become so onerous as to silence people.

The conservatives need to make this an issue in the next election, which is coming soon since the Liberals have announced that they are no longer going to back the Conservatives. Now is the time for bold action, Stephen Harper.

Further study

Commentary

Why are sentences for domestic violence committed by women so lenient?

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ECM sent me this article by Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute.

I feel terrible about how unfairly men are treated when they are victims of domestic violence. I think that a lot of men are going to be put off of marriage  when stories like the ones in the article become widely known.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

Mothers who kill their children often serve little jail time. Gender stereotypes lead people to believe that any woman who kills her kid must have done so as a result of duress or insanity. Andrea Yates ultimately escaped punishment after methodically drowning her five children one by one in a bathtub. A Prince William County woman guilty of stabbing her five daughters received less than three years in jail (after her lawyer ridiculously claimed the children should not be deprived of their mother!).

A woman who used poison to paralyze her daughter, enabling her husband to then kick her conscious-but-immobilized daughter to death, escaped penalty by pleading “battered woman syndrome.”

[…]Battered woman syndrome has become an excuse to kill not only children, but also innocent non-relatives. A California woman got her lover to kill an innocent man by falsely telling him that the man was her paramour. She then had her murder conviction overturned by the California Court of Appeal. How? She claimed that “battered women’s syndrome” made her do it.

[…]According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics’ study of large urban counties, wives who kill their husbands without provocation get only seven years in prison, on average, compared to a more reasonable 17 years in prison for husbands who kill their wives without provocation.

[…]For a glaring example of gender bias in the courts (and the media), you need look no further than The Washington Post story by Tamara Jones, in which she commiserates with convicted felon Teressa Turner-Schaefer, who spent a mere 11 months in jail for killing her husband after an argument.

Now Turner-Schaefer gets to collect $400,000 in life insurance for killing her husband. In a plea bargain, she pleaded guilty to the crime of involuntary manslaughter, which, amazingly enough, doesn’t bar you from collecting life insurance taken out on the person you killed.

There are many more horrible stories in the article about children and men being assaulted and murdered by women. The crimes are not being punished fairly. It discourages me greatly that most women don’t seem to be up in arms defending men when injustices like this happen. Actually, the man is usually blamed for the violence committed against him by the woman.

I think it is particularly shocking how Christians have nothing to say about this.