Tag Archives: Divorce

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Men on strike: the social changes that caused men to opt out of marriage

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Painting: "Courtship", by Edmund Blair Leighton (1888)
Painting: “Courtship”, by Edmund Blair Leighton (1888)

I read and enjoyed Dr. Helen Smith’s book “Men on Strike” a few years back. The book explains a few of the developments that have led to men underperforming in school and in the workplace, and opting out of marriage and fatherhood.

Dr. Helen comes to this problem as a secular libertarian, not as a Christian conservative.

A review of Dr. Helen’s book appeared in Salvo magazine. The review is written by Terrell Clemmons, who has the best Christian worldview of any woman I know – I frequently rely on her advice.

Terrell writes:

While the feminist movement may originally have been about equal respect for both sexes, what it has morphed into, she argues, is female privilege. From rape laws that empower women but not the men they may falsely accuse, to divorce laws tilted in favor of the wife, to the feminization of the U.S. education system, men have become the sex under the gun, while women enjoy the status of a protected class.

But unlike their mothers or grandmothers, men today are not taking to the streets burning their undergarments and shrieking demands (thank God). They’re doing just the opposite, which is far worse. They’re going on strike. The strike zones are manifold:

Higher Education.In addition to the enrollment imbalance, which is approaching a 60/40 ratio of women to men, college has become, in the words of one professor, “a hostile working environment [in which] males increasingly feel emasculated.” Smith quotes a student named John, who had this to say about his college experience: “I had already been cautious around women, having grown up with Tawana Brawley in my backyard and daily stories of sexual harassment; I played it safe and passive every time. But it doesn’t matter. The only way not to lose is to not play. So I’m out.”

Work,including community involvement. With higher female graduation rates and salaries, men today are falling behind their fathers economically and professionally. Consequently, their efforts to prove themselves worthy mates through hard work and higher earnings don’t win female attention the way they used to. Discouraged, too many retreat to a man cave, and inertia sets in from there.

Marriage.Marriage rates are down, and honest men opting out will tell you why. Smith cites a Rutgers University study of single heterosexual men which turned up the top reasons they hadn’t married. They can get sex and the companionship of cohabitation without marriage more easily than in times past, and they don’t want to open themselves up to the risk of divorce and financial loss. It really isn’t that complicated a decision. In fact, it’s often not an actual decision at all. It just happens.

The simplest explanation for the difficulties that boys face in an education system that is dominated by women (teachers and administrators) is discrimination. And in the workplace, the government requires employers to report on male and female head counts, and promote women who are not qualified. I have seen receptionists with tattoos and no college degrees promoted to six-figure manager jobs in companies where I worked.

There is one more which to me was the most surprising one in the book – paternity fraud, and the laws that support paternity fraud:

Take the following cases of nonconsensual insemination: Nathaniel from California, age 15, had sex with 34-year-old Ricci, which, due to his age, was legally considered nonconsensual. Emile from Louisiana was visiting his parents in the hospital when a nurse offered him oral sex, if he wore a condom, which she conveniently offered to dispose of for him afterward. S. F. from Alabama passed out drunk at the home of a female friend and awoke undressed the following morning. In all three cases, including the one involving the minor, a woman got sperm and, nine months later, a child, and the man got ordered by a court of law to pay support for eighteen years.

Less devious, but similarly amiss, are those cases in which a man, having been betrayed by his wife or girlfriend, was nevertheless held financially responsible for a child genetically proven to be another man’s offspring. While not as sensational as sperm-jacking, it is another form of paternity extortion.

In each of those cases, the man was found liable to pay child support – including the case of the 15-year-old boy, who was forced to pay child support to his statutory rapist when he turned 18. This is how the court system works, and more and more men are understanding the risks.

I often encounter “pro-marriage” people while gathering stories for the blog. These pro-marriage people come in two varieties.

On the one end of the spectrum are people like Terrell Clemmons and Jennifer Roback Morse, who understand marriage, but who also understand the social changes that have made marriage unattractive for men. Both Clemmons and Morse have a background in STEM fields, so they are able to understand incentives and tradeoffs. They understand that society has to rollback the changes to education, divorce laws, etc. if they expect men to be interested in marriage again. They understand that men are not just accessories of women, but instead have their own desires, feelings and reasons for marrying.

On the other end of the spectrum are feminist men, who are not able to understand the changing incentives that face men in a world that has evolved under the influence of radical feminism. It is just simpler (less thinking) for these men to accept the radical feminism as a given, and then urge men to “man up”. I think a much better idea would be for the “man up” crowd to realize how marriage has changed, and how the schools and the workplace have changed, then make all of these things more attractive to men. It doesn’t do any good to try to “dare” men into jumping off a cliff. Men aren’t stupid, and they do what is in their own best interests. If the man-up crowd wants younger men to marry, then they need to change the incentives offered to men. And that means changing women first.

News

If we seriously want men to marry and become fathers, let’s repeal no-fault divorce

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I saw a very good article at the Heritage Foundation web site about the importance of fathers for children. The author Virginia Allen listed out some of the benefits that fathers provide to children:

Studies have found that children raised without a father are:

  • At a higher risk of having behavioral problems.
  • Four times more likely to live in poverty.
  • More likely to be incarcerated in their lifetime.
  • Twice as likely to never graduate high school.
  • At a seven times higher risk of teen pregnancy.
  • More vulnerable to abuse and neglect.
  • More likely to abuse drugs and alcohol.
  • Twice as likely to be obese.

From education to personal health to career success, children who lack a father find themselves at a disadvantage to their peers raised in a two-parent household.

I was looking for a good analysis of why there’s been a decline of marriage and fatherhood, and I found an article by Joe Carter on far-left The Gospel Coalition, of all places. By looking at marriage rates and historical events that changed the marriage rate, he was able to identify the cause of the decline of marriage – and fatherhood.

Marriage and divorce rates per capita
Marriage and divorce rates per capita

I’ll spare you the statistical analysis, which is excellent, and give you the conclusion – although you can guess it from the graph above:

Now that we’ve explored the data, what year should we use as the marker for the beginning of the decline of marriage in the United States? I would argue for 1985, the last year that the marriage rate topped 10 percent.

[…]What changed in 1985 that could have led to the decline in marriage? There are likely numerous factors—which we’ll examine in future articles—but one stands out in particular: By 1985, all states (except for New York) had enacted no-fault divorce legislation.

The most helpful book I know of about no-fault divorce is “Taken Into Custody”, by Dr. Stephen Baskerville. He wrote a column  for Crisis magazine that summarizes some of his ideas.

Excerpt:

Feminists were drafting no-fault divorce laws in the 1940s, which the National Association of Women Lawyers now describes as “the greatest project NAWL has ever undertaken.”

The result effectively abolished marriage as a legal contract. Today it is not possible to form a binding agreement to create a family.

The new laws did not stop at removing the requirement of citing grounds for a divorce, to allow divorce by mutual consent, as deceptively advertised at the time. Instead they created unilateral and involuntary divorce, so that one spouse may dissolve a marriage without any agreement or fault by the other.

Here’s what divorce does to the spouse who is the victim of the unilateral “no-fault” divorce:

Though marriage is a civil matter, the logic quickly extended into the criminal, including a presumption of guilt against the involuntarily divorced spouse (“defendant”). Yet formal due process protections of criminal proceedings did not apply, so forcibly divorced spouses became quasi-criminals not for recognized criminal acts but for failing or refusing to cooperate with the divorce by continuing to claim the protections and prerogatives of family life: living in the common home, possessing the common property, or—most vexing of all—parenting the common children.

Following from this are the horrendous civil liberties violations and flagrant invasions of family and individual privacy that are now routine in family courts. A personalized criminal code is legislated by the judge around the forcibly divorced spouse, controlling their association with their children, movements, and finances. Unauthorized contact with their children can be punished with arrest. Involuntarily divorced parents are arrested for running into their children in public, making unauthorized telephone calls, and sending unauthorized birthday cards.

In my conversations with men, no-fault divorce laws, and anti-male divorce courts are the main reasons given for why they do not pursue marriage and fatherhood. Men do not want to be coerced in a marriage with the threat of divorce by an unhappy wife. Men do not want to be subject to the government in so many areas of their lives if the wife does carry out the threat. They especially don’t want to be separated from their children. One my secular male friends told me that he would not marry unless the woman had evidence in her past of hating radical feminism and no-fault divorce. This was the main criteria. He actually was able to find a woman who was a men’s rights activist who hated divorce. But that was the only way he would marry.

Statistically speaking, the wife is more likely to initiate divorce than the husband. Women initiate 70% of divorces, the majority of those just because she is “unhappy”. I think this is because women get into marriage based on their feelings, and they think that it is the husband’s job to make them feel good. They see their happiness as the primary goal of the marriage, and see a marriage that does not make them happy as a marriage that needs to be ended.

Are we going to repeal no-fault divorce, then?

No-fault divorce was seen as a boon to women who had married the wrong men by following their hearts. It’s an interesting question to ask whether women really would want no-fault repealed. It would mean that they would have to get serious about who they marry, instead of just getting into marriage based on feelings. They would have to evaluate men according to expectations of what a man does in a marriage, instead of on feelings. They would have to think about what men want out of a marriage, and prepare themselves to provide for his needs. They would have to say no to their feelings, when choosing a man, and in keeping a man after the wedding.

If women aren’t willing to demand the repeal of no-fault divorce laws and get serious about men and marriage, then what’s the point of complaining that men don’t want to marry and become fathers? If you’re not willing to fix the root cause of the problem, then don’t complain about the problem.

News

Does the “legacy of slavery” explain black women’s 72% out-of-wedlock birth rate?

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James White asks: does the Bible apply to black women?
James White asks: does the Bible apply to black women?

I don’t like Calvinist theologian James White very much, but at least he’s willing to defend the moral teachings of the Bible against the woke identity politics that is taking over Christian churches. A few months ago he tweeted something very controversial (see above), and got into a lot of hot water with fake Christians. In this post, I’ll explain why he is right.

So, as you can see above, James is concerned that black women are having so many abortions, and he thinks that the solution to this is to encourage black women to take the Bible’s advice on sexual morality. Shocking, I know.

If you read the replies to his tweet on Twitter, you’ll see millions and millions of comments calling him a racist, and telling him that slavery is to blame for EVERYTHING that black women do wrong. Basically, the James haters say that black women can do anything they want, and should never be told that it’s wrong according to the Bible, because their bad choices are all the fault of slavery. So the Bible doesn’t even apply to them, or something.

Here is an example from a radical feminist progressive named Karen Swallow Prior:

Karen Swallow Prior says that black people have no moral agency
Karen Swallow Prior says that unlike whites, blacks have no moral agency

According to the fake Christians, it’s not that black women make poor choices with sex, it’s that the ghosts of white slavers who raped their great-great-great grandmothers reach through time with magic and force them to have sex with hunky bad boys who won’t commit to them before sex. It’s not rap music calling black women hoes! It’s the ghosts of slavery past. And even if this ghost theory isn’t true, we shouldn’t tell black women not to sin, because… it would hurt their feelings. After all, the Bible isn’t a book that’s designed to set boundaries to prevent self-destructive behaviors. It encourages us to listen to our hearts, be reckless, and sin as much as we can.

So when did black community problems with sex and abortion start? Did it start with slavery times? Actually, blacks were doing GREAT at marriage and sexual matters just 50 years ago.

This reply to James White explained:

Blacks married at rates comparable to whites before welfare
Blacks married at rates comparable to whites before welfare

That’s true. Black children weren’t fatherless, so they weren’t having early sex outside of marriage, and so they weren’t getting abortions.

As the header graphic shows, black women were just as likely to be married as white women in the 1960s,  FAR AFTER the days of slavery.

The reason that the graph is going upward is because daughters raised in fatherless homes tend to engage in sexual activity at younger ages, because they are seeking approval from a man which their (single) mother cannot give them. It’s a tragic downwards spiral, and it affects all races. The only way to stop it is to tell women to choose marriage-minded men (not hot bad boys) and marry before having sex, like the Bible says. But woke fake Christians think the Bible is too mean, and better to allow sin by saying that sin is inevitable because slavery ghosts or something.

What’s neat is that black men who take Christianity seriously are totally on board with the facts:

Black man here. Can confirm that the Bible applies to black women.
Black man here. Can confirm that the Bible applies to black women.

On this blog, I don’t talk about my ethnicity myself, for confidentiality reasons, but I have said that my skin is darker than Barack Obama. I’m not white or Asian. And the reason that I don’t fall into this trap of causing babies to be born out of wedlock is because I think that when the Bible says that sex outside of marriage is a sin, that this is true. I don’t make excuses or shift blame. It’s incumbent on me to obey, since I claim to be a follower of Jesus.I’m not interested in identity politics. I’m not interested in racial divisions. I’m not interested in blame-shifting. The rules are the rules. And my following of the rules caused me to not cause abortions, according to Christian specifications. Period.

When it comes to sex outside of marriage, the answer of every Bible believing Christian is simple: I’m against it. That is the correct answer, and anything more or less than this answer is demonic. If you are a Christian, sex outside of marriage is always morally wrong. And if you try to justify it, or blame someone else, in order to excuse it, then you’re not a Christian at all. If you try to make excuses for why someone did it, you’re not a Christian. Whether you have had it and been forgiven, or never had it, the answer is always the same: it’s morally wrong. Don’t do it. Never do it.

What I am seeing from people who are critical of James White’s tweet is that they are basically trying to attack those who make moral judgments based on what the Bible says. They want to make room for sinners to sin. The root of abortion sin is sexual sin. Real  Christians discourage sexual sin, and therefore protect unborn children. Fake Christians want to be liked by appearing compassionate, so they make excuses for sexual sin. If you take the Bible seriously on morality, you won’t be liked. Those who try to excuse sin do so because their need to be liked is more important than their need to promote what the Bible teaches.

Some fake Christians will say “oh, but I do think the Bible is right about sex and marriage, but we have to care about slavery reparations and global warming and refugees and illegal immigrants and trasnsgender rights, too”. Baloney. An authentic Christian is concerned about the things that the Bible teaches are “major” things. Drunkenness is a major thing. Sexual immorality is a major thing. Divorce is a major thing. Homosexuality is a major thing. If you meet a Christian who treats those issues as minor issues, and instead majors in what the secular left tells them are major issues, then you’re talking to a fake Christian.

Christianity isn’t a brain-dead faith. You get your priorities from the Bible, and you argue those priorities using facts. The facts about marriage rates are clear and they show that the problems in the black community aren’t caused by slavery. They’re caused by single mother welfare programs. Those welfare programs taught women of all races that they didn’t have to listen to their fathers when choosing men. Those welfare programs taught women that feelings were a better guide in relationships than the Bible. Those welfare programs taught women that their eyes were a better judge of character than performance of traditional marriage roles. Those welfare programs taught women that recreational sex was a way to get a man to commit and stop being a bad boy. We need to go back to the root cause of the problem. The root cause of the problem was making excuses for disobedience to the Bible, and transferring money from married homes to out-of-control women. Of all races.