Tag Archives: Divorce

Commentary

How secularism and socialism killed marriage and family in Canada

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Marriage and family
Marriage and family

This is actually a news article from National Post, the more prestigious and less progressive of Canada’s two national newspapers.

Excerpt:

Couples without kids are outpacing their procreating counterparts, same-sex relationships are blossoming, multiple generations are living under the same roof and more people than ever are living alone, Statistics Canada revealed Wednesday as the 2016 census showcased more seismic changes in the way Canadians are living their lives.

[…]Canada is skewing older, with fewer children and less affinity for marriage — forcing legislators to adjust and adapt their policies and programs to fit a rapidly evolving reality.

[…]Higher rates of separation and divorce also mean more people living alone or as lone parents, as does an increasing number of women in the workforce, which fosters a greater sense of economic independence.

Childless couples grew in number at a faster rate over the last five years than couples with at least one child, leaving the latter group at 51.1 per cent of the population, the lowest level ever recorded.

The baby boomers who fuelled such population growth in the 20th century are empty nesters in the 21st. The census found younger Canadians who do have kids are living in places like Alberta, long a magnet for job-seeking families, or Nunavut, where fertility rates are high.

They also important large numbers of unskilled immigrants who paid less in taxes than they used in social programs:

Canada’s 35.15 million people are getting older; there are now more seniors than children under the age of 14. Immigration contributed two-thirds of the country’s population growth between 2011 and 2016, and that diversity has also added complexity to the Canadian family portrait.

At the time, the Liberal Party thought that importing a lot of non-Christians who would vote for bigger government dependency was a good idea. And it was a good idea to keep them getting elected, but now they are facing the long-term consequences of importing a lot of unskilled have-not socialists.

Canada legalized same-sex marriage, and same-sex marriages don’t produce children naturally:

And a decade after census-takers first collected numbers on same-sex marriage, such couples now make up one per cent of all households, with their overall numbers having increased by 60.7 per cent since 2006. Opposite-sex couples grew by just 9.6 per cent during the same period.

Today, about 12 per cent of all same-sex couples are living with children, be they biological offspring, adopted or members of a stepfamily. In raw numbers, there were 10,020 children aged 14 and under living with 8,770 same-sex couple parents on census day last year.

Canada legalized same-sex “marriage” a decade before America did.

Basically, the problem here is that men don’t get married in a big government socialist country, because they are taxed to pay for the big government, but they aren’t allowed to lead the family. The money men earn that would be used to make decisions about their households is eaten up by secular socialist government programs. Instead of gun ownership, Canada has a politically correct and ineffective police force. Instead of home-schooling or a network or private schools, there are failing public schools that indoctrinate rather than educate. Instead of a choice of medical providers, there is a single-payer system that makes you take a number and wait your turn. Instead of stay at home mothers, they have expensive, ineffective government-run daycare. Instead of deciding what kind of car to drive, car money is confiscated for public transportation. Canada has some of the worst anti-male divorce and custody laws. And so on and so on. Big government makes men opt out of marriage. The whole society is set up to undermine the male aspiration to be the provider, and to let government make all the important decisions.

In Canada, it’s now a criminal offense to disagree with transgenderism, and in the province of Ontario, if parents disagree with transgenderism, the government will seize your children. Speaking as a Christian man with a high income, and a high net worth, I find it unappealing to think that I would be paying the salaries of secular socialists so that they could then interfere in my life and rule over me. I would be forced to give social engineers my money, and they would be continuously overruling my leadership in the home.

Canada, as a nation, decided a while back to embrace non-judgmentalism and redistribution of wealth to make sinful lifestyles produce the same outcomes as traditional lifestyles. Everybody gets free health care. What this means is that only working people pay for health care, but only the immoral people used it. They thought that this was “compassion”, but it just meant that fewer people would work, and more people who go off down immoral rabbit trails in their personal lives. They have free abortions and free drug injection clinics and free sex change surgery. But they don’t have free homeschooling, free stay at home moms, or tax breaks for chastity and sobriety. Everything wrong was subsidized, and everything right was taxed. The state became an unofficial arbiter of disputes between husbands and wives, always siding with the unhappy, emotional wife against the husbands who attempted to lead their families to be moral and spiritual.

What we are seeing now is similar to what has been observed in European countries for decades. An aging population that is depending on government to provide health care and pensions for them in their old age. When government grows large, human beings become more and more irresponsible. The population of Canada has been trained to think that their future needs are government’s problem. They don’t have to marry and make children to care for them in their old age – that’s government’s problem. They don’t have to save their own money for old age – that’s  government’s problem. When the government taxes all your money and takes over everything in the private sector, including the traditional roles of churches and charities, people become passive and irresponsible. Canada proudly embraced abortion and the redefinition of marriage, and now they don’t have a new generation of taxpayers to pay for their bloated government.

Next stop, Greece. Well done, Canada. If you want to have secularism, socialism and feminism, then you can’t have liberty, marriage and family. They made their choice, and we ought to be learning from their mistakes.

News

New study: children of divorced parents are less likely to be religious

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A family praying and reading the Bible
A family praying and reading the Bible

This is from the leftist Washington Post, of all places.

Excerpt:

Two widely recognized trends in American society might have something to do with each other.

Divorce rates climbed to the highest levels ever in the 1980s, when about half of all marriages ended in divorce.

And in the present day, Americans are rapidly becoming less religious. Since 1972, the share of Americans who say they do not adhere to any particular religion has increased from 5 percent of the population to 25 percent.

Could those two trends be related? A new study from the Public Religion Research Institute says yes. The children of divorced parents have grown up to be adults of no religion.

People whose parents divorced when they were children are significantly more likely to grow up not to be religious as adults, the study found. Thirty-five percent of the children of divorced parents told pollsters they are now nonreligious, compared with 23 percent of people whose parents were married when they were children.

[…]Cox said his team found that even children of divorced parents who are religious are less religious than their peers. Thirty-one percent of them go to services every week, compared with 43 percent of religious people whose parents were married when they were growing up.

This part about Protestant pastors wimping out of thorny issues is very interesting:

Andrew Root, a professor at Luther Seminary who has written a book about the spiritual consequences of divorce for children, was not surprised to hear about the study’s findings.

“Everything in a divorce gets divided. Literally everything. Parents’ friends get divided. Relatives get divided. Everyone takes sides,” Root said. “Even religion takes sides. The church gets divided. Dad leaves Mom’s faith, or vice versa. Negotiating those worlds becomes difficult.”

Root said churches are not doing enough to speak directly to the concerns of children in those situations, so the kids lose faith in the ability of the church to help them. He said that when the divorce rate climbed in the 1980s, many members of the clergy, especially mainline Protestant pastors, stopped speaking out against divorce so as not to alienate struggling congregants. But by going silent on the subject, they didn’t offer any comfort to the kids.

As adults, Root said, those same people do not believe the church will respond to their adult problems. “They’re now thinking, ‘I’m dealing with depression.’ Or, ‘I’m dealing with my own marital troubles.’ The church must not have anything to say to me, because when I was 8 and dealing with divorce, my Sunday-school teacher didn’t even say, ‘Man, Amanda, that must be really complicated for you’,” Root said.

I get e-mails all the time from people who are suffering from the effects of the Sexual Revolution, which was put in place by selfish adults so they could do whatever they wanted. Children suffered a lot from this. Obviously, the painful of experience of their parents divorcing hurt their view of God. But divorce also hurts a child’s ability to know what a man loving a woman in a stable commitment looks like, and what a woman loving a man in a stable commitment looks like. I mean – what does love between sexes look like when the “in love” feeling has worn off, and all that remains is the commitment to build something together? I think that a lot is riding on the stability of the relationship between the child’s mother and father.

News

Radical feminism changes men’s perceptions of women in the workplace

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Radical feminists complain a lot about sexism, but damage is self-inflicted
Radical feminists complain a lot about sexism, but damage is self-inflicted

Lately, we’ve seen an outburst of radical feminism as more women have been equating actual rape and sexual assault with sexist comments or clumsy passes. How does this change how women are perceived in the workplace?

Here’s an article from Medium (H/T Tracy) by an anonymous male feminist.

The first point is about how women handle disagreement, compared to men:

When James Damore was asked for feedback from his supervisor and internally circulated his google memo, it got leaked, he got fired and women stayed at home the next Day because “for emotional reasons”

A ten page summary of data and analysis from Damore was enough to “emotional distress” the women at the company.

This lack of resilience and self-control disrupts the workplace, and results in lost productivity. If it turns into a lawsuit, the costs are even higher. This is in addition to women having fewer STEM degrees than men, working fewer hours than men, and taking months leave for pregnancy. Not to mention preferential hiring and promoting of women to meet government-mandated quotes.

Second point, is increased hostility to men.

Look at this tweet from a writer at Teen Vogue:

Emily Lindin, a mainstreatm writer with a degree in music history, tweets her hatred of men
Emily Lindin, a mainstream writer with a degree in music history, tweets her misandry

She has 23,000 followers on Twitter – this woman is mainstream. I looked into her background a bit. No mention of a father at home, and a self-confessed “slutty” lifestyle from her early teens onward. Her entire writing career seems to be to attack everyone who disagrees with her promiscuity.

Feminism, as an ideology, does not allow women to prefer men who exhibit traditional masculine characteristics: providing, protecting, moral and spiritual leadership, chastity, fidelity. That’s “sexist”. So what’s left? Get drunk and have sex with the hot bad boys, since evaluating a man’s character is “sexist”. Then promote false accusations and misandry to get revenge against the hot bad boys you freely chose. This will only get worse as more radical feminists waste their 20s on hot bad boys, and raise more fatherless girls when they become single mothers by choice, in their 30s.

Do men want to work with women who hate men and make false accusations against people they disagree with? I’m a conservative, Christian, pro-life virgin. I disagree with all premarital sex. If this woman worked with me and found out my views, she would almost certainly get me fired. As more and more women come under the influence of angry radical feminists, men will have the perception that women hate them. That’s bad for the minority of non-progressive women, but it’s just safer to avoid any woman once the radical feminist views become the majority.

Another article from Medium (H/T Wes) makes a third point about how conservatives are treated by liberal women in the workplace. The article is written by a female senior software engineer, who promotes STEM to women and the elderly. She is a self-described “moderate conservative”.

Excerpt:

On September 27, 2017, I decided to attend the Atlanta Google Women Techmakers’ event “Idea Jam Session,” which was hosted at TechSquare Labs in Atlanta. At that time, I was still an active member of Women Who Code, the Atlanta GDG, and Google Women Techmakers and, perhaps naively, I just assumed that I had every right to attend the event like any other member of the group because I had not been banned.

Upon arriving at the event, Maggie immediately asked me to leave the room. At the door, she informed me that she would be extremely uncomfortable if I remained a member of the community because some of the views that I had expressed on Twitter are “very harmful to gender equality”. She then asked Daniel Sabeo, the event coordinator at TechSquare Labs, to escort me from the facility. I was deeply upset at being publicly humiliated, but left willingly without causing any disruption.

Two days later, I got an email from TechSquare Labs. Daniel had discussed the incident with Allen Nance, Paul Judge, and Rodney Sampson, the owners of the facility, and he informed me that they had collectively decided to ban me and my company from using their venue or attending any of their events because they were concerned about the “safety” of their members. I later learned from a fellow developer that Maggie had, in fact, told various people that I’d been stalking her.

[…]The following week, Martin Omander, GDG program manager for North America, formally banned me from the Google Developer Group and Google Women Techmakers and, again, declined to provide me with any details of the complaints against me or the rules that I’d allegedly violated.

How many women are likely to attack conservatives in the workplace?

Young, unmarried women voted 78% to 22% for Obama in 2008, according to exit polls.

Exit polls from the 2008 Obama vs McCain election
Exit polls from the 2008 Obama vs McCain election: unmarried women voters only

Obama voted against banning infanticide multiple times as a state senator in Illinois. 78% of young, unmarried women voted for him anyway. Women who graduate from college in non-STEM fields are especially progressive. In my experience, most young, unmarried women form their views by adapting to the dominant views of their community. On campus, their community is usually progressive. In my experience, men are more likely to construct a worldview through reasoning and evaluating evidence.

In my experience, young, unmarried progressive women are progressive because they want taxpayer-funded abortions, taxpayer-funded contraception, no-fault divorce, single mother welfare, student-loan forgiveness, etc. Taxpayer-funded bailouts for problems caused by their own free choices. They feel that if society is paying for something, then it’s “normal” and they don’t have feel guilty about making poor choices. Their primary concern about politics is being able to do what they feel like without anyone disapproving. Everything bad that happens is “unexpected”, and so society should have to pay for it.

Most men rightly disagree with leftist policies, because men believe in personal responsibility. But if men think that they will be falsely charged or otherwise sanctioned for being conservative, then it makes sense for them to not speak to women at all. Again, that’s bad for the minority of young, unmarried conservative women, but it’s safer to just avoid the risk. Especially as radical feminism becomes the dominant view among young, unmarried women. The point is that men are going to have to hide their political views from MOST young, unmarried women in the office, because progressive ones seem to be very intolerant of the conservative views that most men hold.

I don’t even speak to young, unmarried women about religion and politics in the workplace. It doesn’t matter if we have the same views or not. Feeling offended and going full totalitarian is just too widespread. The rational choice for men is to disengage. I can have conversations safely about religion and politics with men, even if they disagree with me. I realize that this isn’t fair to the minority of young, unmarried conservative women who are safe to talk to, but it’s just too dangerous to risk it.