There are a couple of reasons why I advise my sons and my fellow men to marry hard-core believers. First, is has been my consistent observation that in today’s world, with women armed as they are with so many choices, choices that include whether a man’s child escapes the uterus intact and whether a man gets to participate in the rearing of his own seed, indeed whether he remains free or is sold into a state of semi-slavery, a woman’s locus of control becomes paramount. If she is internally controlled, as I’ve observed most women are, then her actions will be primarily driven by whim. Or biochemistry. Or modern chemistry. Or even a dartboard. Whatever heuristic a woman uses to govern her actions, if she peers inside herself to determine what to do and where to go, run, don’t walk away. Such women is but a leaf in the autumn wind. Who knows where the air currents will take her, and by extension, where the man tied to such a woman finds himself.
Hard core Believers, on the other hand, are externally governed. Their locus of control tends to be directed outside themselves, toward a fixed point that doesn’t move. In the case of Believers, that fixed point is Scripture and the Holy Spirit, and women whose decision tree starts and ends there are a whole lot less likely to follow their Game-manipulable lizard hind brain into situations which their hamster must then rationalize away.
[…]This brings me to the second reason why I advise men to marry zealots: they take their faith seriously. A seriousness that is reflected in their church/synagogue attendance rates. And it turns out that said attendance rates are highly correlated with marital success. Read on:
“Christians divorce at roughly the same rate as the world!”
It’s one of the most quoted stats by Christian leaders today. And it’s perhaps one of the most inaccurate.
The factor making the most difference is religious commitment and practice. Couples who regularly practice any combination of serious religious behaviors and attitudes – attend church nearly every week, read their bibles and spiritual materials regularly; pray privately and together; generally take their faith seriously, living not as perfect disciples, but serious disciples – enjoy significantly lower divorce rates than mere church members, the general public and unbelievers.
[…]Looking at the data, one thing is very clear. Those that are serious about their faiths stand a significantly lower risk of marital disruption than those that are not. Fine. This is great news, but not the end of the story, for what I also find very interesting about this table is that those who dabble in their faiths, those who are neither hot nor cold, are the ones setting themselves up for failure the most…+20 for Protestants, -5 for Catholics, and a whopping +53 for Jews.My advice for my sons and my fellow brothers is this: find and marry a woman who is zealous about her faith, a zealotry that is demonstrated by her actions.
I keep telling Christian women that men really do think about these things. We really are doing our homework first. And we really do have big plans that we are trying to fit you to. That’s why we ask you so many questions, so you should be ready to answer.
Professor Mike S. Adams is pro-life, but he posted something on Facebook that I must disagree with.
He posted this:
Over 80% of post-abortive women said they would have had the baby if the guy had been supportive. Five guys find out their girl is pregnant: The first two pressure abortion, the third walks away or was never present, the fourth sticks around for 80 to 120 days, and the fifth steps up totally. This not a woman’s problem. It is a lack-of-manhood problem.
Mike has about 5000 friends, and 44 of them liked it. I would think that most of these people would call themselves pro-life conservatives. But I don’t think what he posted promotes the pro-life cause.
I replied to him with this:
Mike I could not disagree more. It’s a woman’s problem unless it is rape, since the woman consents to sex with a man she is not married to. In fact, the cause of abortion is YOUR opinion – namely, the opinion that women should not be obligated to be chaste or to think rationally about who they are having sex with. There is a path to marriage that goes through courtship, and that path has a name: self-control. Stop enabling the poor choices of women, because we have to stop the murder of unborn children.
Many of Mike’s friends supported him. So I wrote this:
Wow. I had no idea that so many of Mike’s friends think that the Bible is a pack of lies when it says that fornication is morally wrong. I guess you guys aren’t Christians then, since you feel so free and easy about revising the Bible when you feel like it.
If fornication is wrong, it’s wrong for women AND men. And you don’t fornicate and then expect happy outcomes from it. There is a word for a person who sins and then expects a good outcome. A FOOL.
Then Mike replied to me:
Sorry Wintery. Where I come from the man leads and is, therefore, responsible.
I replied to that with this:
Mike, I agree with male leading – IF the man is a Christian. But the men that these women chose are not Christians. And you can’t expect men to act morally unless they have a theistic framework that grounds morality.
Women should not be told, by you and others, that they can choose to have sex with immoral men and then expect the immoral men to act morally. That is just enabling abortion by justifying a lack of prudence and wisdom. Instead, we should be holding women accountable to choose men who WILL control themselves.
We should not be supporting the fantasy view of love that says that recreational sex magically leads men to commit to protect, provide and lead women for life. That view is neither wise nor Biblical. On the contrary, recreational sex leads men to NOT commit. Women have to learn how to select men, to evaluate them for marriage, and to make them prove themselves. We need to tell men AND women that sex before marriage is morally wrong. And we need to be convincing by showing them how recreational sex does not lead to stable marriages, and puts children, unborn and born, in harm’s way. Telling the truth about the danger of premarital sex is the best way to stop the killing of unborn children.
Here’s an example to make the point. We do not blame bears for mauling campers. Bears are bears, and they were bears before the campers showed up in their cave. We ought to blame the camper for choosing to wander off the trail and into the bear’s den in order to PET THE BEAR. Wild bears may eat free food that is offered to them, but they are not going to let you pet them and hug them. Women, like campers, need to be responsible. They need to choose the right man for marriage. They need to exercise self control. They need to make the man prove his ability to commit and support a family BEFORE they have sex with him. No one hires an employee without understanding what job they need done and then making sure that the candidate they choose can do the job. And that’s what we need to tell women.
Obviously, I was a little upset when I wrote that, but I hope it wasn’t too bad.
So what’s the point I was trying to make by being critical of Mike? I think the problem we have today is that men who are pro-life are unwilling to hold women accountable for their own poor decisions about sex and marriage. Basically, conservative and/or Christian men think that women don’t need to think through what choices are most likely to avoid abortion and most likely to achieve marriage. These men give tacit approval to the popular trend of trying to achieve marriage through premarital sex (or cohabitation), when the research shows that these behaviors do not result in long-lasting stable marriages. In fact, sex out of wedlock is a good way to get into a situation where an abortion will occur.
In my view, Mike is ainadvertently encouraging women to get into the situations where they will be pressured to abort by reinforcing the idea that there is nothing wrong with their plan to achieve marriage by having premarital sex (or cohabitating), and then expecting men to respond to their pregnancy by MARRYING them. Mike seems to be telling women that it is normal for them to expect that marriage will follow from premarital sex with men who have not been vetted for the roles of provider, protector and leader As if marriage is natural for men who don’t even have jobs and who are surrounded by women willing to have sex with them on the first date. Any man who will have recreational premarital sex with a woman is exactly the kind of person who will not commit to lifelong providing and fidelity – he is having sex before marriage because he wants recreation, without the commitment and self-sacrifice that marriage requires. Rationally speaking, it makes no sense for men to buy the cow, and to keep buying the cow with 40 years of labor, when they can get the milk for free. And that’s what we need to tell women – think with your minds, not with your emotions.
[A] recent study reveals that 88 percent of unmarried young adults (ages 18-29) are having sex. The same study, conducted by The National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, reveals the number doesnʼt drop much among Christians. Of those surveyed who self-identify as “evangelical,” 80 percent say they have had sex.
[…]In addition to having premarital sex, an alarming number of unmarried Christians are getting pregnant. Among unmarried evangelical women between the ages of 18 and 29, 30 percent have experienced a pregnancy (a number thatʼs actually 1 percent higher than among those who donʼt claim to be evangelical).
According to the Guttmacher Institute, nearly half of all pregnancies in America are unintended. And of those, 40 percent end in abortion. More than 1 million abortions occur in the United States each year. But perhaps the most disturbing statistic for the Church: 65 percent of the women obtaining abortions identify themselves as either Protestant or Catholic (37 percent Protestant and 28 percent Catholic). Thatʼs 650,000 abortions obtained by Christians every year.
Christian women are not told that premarital sex is wrong by many Christians and conservatives – and out of that refusal by “Christians” and “conservatives” to take a stand, we get 650,000 abortions per year. We need to have more courage to tell women to be more self-controlled and responsible when they choose who to have sex with, and when to have sex. We need to tell women to make good decisions that lead to stable marriages. We need to tell women to study these issues and to support policies that produce strong, moral men who are willing to marry – for example, by reforming education so that our schools produce men who can find jobs, perhaps by having more male teachers in the classroom. We need to tell women to support policies that make marriage more friendly for men, like abolishing no-fault divorce, and promoting shared parenting. Christians in particular need to counteract the views of love and romance that are prevalent in popular culture with a view of relationships built around chastity and love. Although many people today are uncomfortable with moral absolutes and moral judgments, it would be a good be a good idea for women to promote these things, so that the men they are choosing from are more moral.
In the end, I agree with Mike S. Adams in one respect. Abortion may be caused by a lack of manhood problem. Only the lack of manhood doesn’t come from the men that women choose to have premarital sex with. The lack of manhood comes from men who refuse to hold women accountable for their own free foolish decisions that put unborn children in harm’s way. In addition to the abortion problem that results from those foolish decisions, there is also the explosion in out-of-wedlock births to weigh in the balance. Again, the more people tell women that they should expect men who engage in recreational sex to commit to marriage after premarital sex (or cohabitation), the more fatherlessness we get.
This article is from the liberal New York Times. (H/T Mary)
Excerpt:
It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.
Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.
[…]The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage.
Actually, conservatives do argue that shrinking pay checks have discouraged marriage – shrinking paychecks caused by higher taxes, which are supported by single women and their overwhelming propensity to vote Democrat.
More:
The recent rise in single motherhood has set off few alarms, unlike in past eras. When Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then a top Labor Department official and later a United States senator from New York, reported in 1965 that a quarter of black children were born outside marriage — and warned of a “tangle of pathology” — he set off a bitter debate.
By the mid-1990s, such figures looked quaint: a third of Americans were born outside marriage. Congress, largely blaming welfare, imposed tough restrictions. Now the figure is 41 percent — and 53 percent for children born to women under 30, according to Child Trends, which analyzed 2009 data from the National Center for Health Statistics.
[…]Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.
In Lorain as elsewhere, explanations for marital decline start with home economics: men are worth less than they used to be. Among men with some college but no degrees, earnings have fallen 8 percent in the past 30 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the earnings of their female counterparts have risen by 8 percent.
“Women used to rely on men, but we don’t need to anymore,” said Teresa Fragoso, 25, a single mother in Lorain.
Indeed. Ever since feminism produced such cultural advancements as coed classrooms, sex education and no-fault divorce, men have been so surrounded by freely available sex. Thanks to feminism, men don’t have to lift a finger to prove to women that they are capable of performing their traditional roles before sex is offered to them. When women decided to agree with feminists that men are identical to women, they refused to set expectations on men to act like men. When women decide that it’s not men’s jobs to perform their traditional male roles in a marriage, then they choose other men based on other criteria, e.g. – broad shoulders, a deep voice, athletic ability, nice shoes – and other concerns that have nothing whatsoever to do with marital success. Feminism is not good for men – it turns them into boys, who don’t have to prove themselves ready for marriage before they get sex. When men have sex handed to them on a silver platter, they stop caring about doing well in school, getting jobs and sacrificing to honor their commitments.
More:
Others noted that if they married, their official household income would rise, which could cost them government benefits like food stamps and child care. W. Bradford Wilcox, a sociologist at the University of Virginia, said other government policies, like no-fault divorce, signaled that “marriage is not as fundamental to society” as it once was.
Even as many Americans withdraw from marriage, researchers say, they expect more from it: emotional fulfillment as opposed merely to practical support. “Family life is no longer about playing the social role of father or husband or wife, it’s more about individual satisfaction and self-development,” said Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University.
[…]Reviewing the academic literature, Susan L. Brown of Bowling Green State University recently found that children born to married couples, on average, “experience better education, social, cognitive and behavioral outcomes.”
Times have changed. Before, men and women looked to each other for support – that’s why they married. Now the government gives single mothers support, so that they don’t need protectors and providers. Legions of social workers, public schools and day care are provided to teach children morality and religion – while women go to work to pay taxes for their salaries. Single mothers like this arrangement because government checks and government programs are much less demanding than husbands and fathers. It makes more sense to single women to choose exciting men to have sex with – men who are spontaneous, handsome, fun and dangerous – and then toss them aside if they try to hold her accountable to behave morally, or ask her to do anything that she doesn’t make her feel happy.
Finally, you might think that the church is aggressive about telling women how wrong it is for them to have premarital sex, but you’d be wrong. Pastors are terrified of offending women in their churches by talking about moral obligations and success factors for marriage. Women don’t want to believe that there are guidelines from morality and from social science research that could override their emotions and intuitions. They want to be happy, and whatever they decide while trying to be happy must be right. Pastors would never dream of telling women in their churches that there was anything from with the view of relationships they get from Bridget Jones’ Diary, Pretty Woman, Kate and Leopold, Eat, Pray, Love, etc.
Men: never ever marry a woman who cannot denounce feminism, socialism, premarital sex, abortion, divorce, adultery, and especially single motherhood – in the strongest terms. That is a pre-condition for marriage. And don’t accept her opinion on these questions. Expect her to convince you using evidence from research – books and research papers. Don’t marry someone who knows nothing about marriage. Don’t make a woman a parent when she knows nothing about parenting. Your future children are depending on your judgment. Fatherlessness puts children at risk for higher rates of poverty, neglect and abuse, and a host of behavioral problems.
WINTERY KNIGHT 