Tag Archives: Family

Polemics

Dennis Prager: Why a good person can vote against same-sex marriage

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Dennis Prager mentioned this article on his show today, and I thought I would link to it, since it is somewhat complementary to my own secular case against gay marriage.

Excerpt:

So, the question is whether redefining marriage in the most radical way ever conceived — indeed completely changing its intended meaning — is good for society.

It isn’t.

The major reason is this: Gender increasingly no longer matters. There is a fierce battle taking place to render meaningless the man-woman distinction, the most important distinction regarding human beings’ personal identity. Nothing would accomplish this as much as same-sex marriage.

The whole premise of same-sex marriage is that gender is insignificant: It doesn’t matter whether you marry a man or a woman. Love, not gender, matters.

Some examples of this war on gender:

  • This year Harvard University appointed its first permanent director of bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer student life. The individual, Vanidy Bailey, has asked that he/she never be referred to as he or she, male or female. Harvard has agreed.
  • In 2010 eHarmony, for years the country’s largest online dating service, was sued for only matching men and women. Its lack of same-sex matchmaking meant that it violated anti-discrimination laws in some states. As a result, eHarmony was forced to begin a same-sex online service.
  • Each year more and more American high schools elect girls as homecoming kings and boys as homecoming queens. Students have been taught to regard restricting kings to males or queens to females as (gender-based) discrimination.
  • When you sign up for the new social-networking site, Google Plus, you are asked to identify your gender. Three choices are offered: Male, Female, Other.
  • Catholic Charities, which operates the oldest ongoing adoption services in America, has had to end its adoption work in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., because the governments there regard placing children with married man-woman couples before same-sex couples as discriminatory.

Increasingly, even the mother-father ideal is being shattered in this battle to render the male-female distinction insignificant.

  • The socialist French government has just announced that in the future no government-issued document will be allowed to use the words “mother” or “father.” Only the gender-neutral term “parent” will be acceptable in France.
  • And in Rhode Island this year, one school district cancelled its father-daughter dance after the ACLU threatened to sue the district for gender discrimination. Only parent-child events, not father-daughter dances or mother-son ballgames, will be allowed.

And all this is happening before same-sex marriage is allowed. Imagine what will happen should same-sex marriage become the law of the land.

It will hasten the end of the male-female distinction and of any significance to mothers or fathers as distinctive entities.

It will mean that those who, for religious or other reasons, wish to retain the man-woman definition of marriage will be legally and morally as isolated as racists are today.

And it will mean that teachers and other adults who ask little boys and girls who they would like to marry, will, in order to be in sync with the morality of our times, have to make it clear that it might be someone of the same sex. “Will you marry a boy or a girl?” will be the only non-bigoted way to ask young people about their marital plans.

Dennis Prager is a Jewish scholar – he’s not coming from a Christian perspective. And in this article, he doesn’t mention God or the Bible at all.

When it comes to any issue, my approach is to look at what the Bible says to get my basic position, to clarify it with good history and good theology, and then to find evidence from outside the Bible to confirm it and to make it practical and effective. The evidence from outside the Bible is also useful to speak about what the Bible says with people who don’t accept the Bible – and even the existence of God. If you want to influence the culture, you have to ready to speak to anyone – even people outside of church!

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New study: brain of child neglected by mother is smaller and underdeveloped

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Dina sent me this article from the UK Daily Mail.

Here is the scan:

Brain scans of 3-year old children: normal vs neglected
Brain scans of 3-year old children: normal vs neglected

Excerpt:

Both of these images are brain scans of a two three-year-old children, but the brain on the left is considerably larger, has fewer spots and less dark areas, compared to the one on the right.

According to neurologists this sizeable difference has one primary cause – the way each child was treated by their mothers.

The child with the larger and more fully developed brain was looked after by its mother – she was constantly responsive to her baby, reported The Sunday Telegraph.

But the child with the shrunken brain was the victim of severe neglect and abuse.

According to research reported by the newspaper, the brain on the right worryingly lacks some of the most fundamental areas present in the image on the left.

The consequences of these deficits are pronounced – the child on the left with the larger brain will be more intelligent and more likely to develop the social ability to empathise with others.

But in contrast, the child with the shrunken brain will be more likely to become addicted to drugs and involved in violent crimes, much more likely to be unemployed and to be dependent on state benefits.

The child is also more likely to develop mental and other serious health problems.

Professor Allan Schore, of UCLA, told The Sunday Telegraph that if a baby is not treated properly in the first two years of life, it can have a fundamental impact on development.

He pointed out that the genes for several aspects of brain function, including intelligence, cannot function.

[…]The study correlates with research released earlier this year that found that children who are given love and affection from their mothers early in life are smarter with a better ability to learn.

The study by child psychiatrists and neuroscientists at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, found school-aged children whose mothers nurtured them early in life have brains with a larger hippocampus, a key structure important to learning, memory and response to stress.

The research was the first to show that changes in this critical region of children’s brain anatomy are linked to a mother’s nurturing, Neurosciencenews.com reports.

The research is published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

Lead author Joan L. Luby, MD, professor of child psychiatry, said the study reinforces how important nurturing parents are to a child’s development.

I have a very good feminist non-Christian friend who sometimes comments here. I once asked her about marriage and she said that her skills would be wasting on raising children. I explained to her my view that a mother needs to stay at home with the children, and that is more important work. I expect my future wife to read all kinds of books on child care and to give the child attention, nutrition, exercise and play so that the child will grow up to be an effective Christian. Maybe I need to be clear. I am not going to spend hundreds of thousands per child with just any woman. I need a woman who can produce influential and effective Christians who will engage in the public square. And we do not entrust that job to just anyone – we want a Michele Bachmann or a Jennifer Roback Morse. Professional women who are willing to be stay-at-home moms when it’s necessary to do that.

I expect the woman I marry (if I marry) to have a college degree, and preferably a graduate degree, and a couple of years of employment. Then she has to stay home and invest in those children through the first five years at least. After that she can stay home or work as much as she thinks is beneficial to the family goals of impacting the university, the church and the public square – as well as continuing to raise those children. It’s not a waste of her talent to make the next William Lane Craig, the next Marsha Blackburn, the next Doug Axe, or the next Edith Jones.

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Why do about 70% of single / divorced / unmarried women vote Democrat?

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Sandra Fluke, Democrat party spokeswoman
Sandra Fluke, Democrat party spokeswoman

Note: This is one of those snarky anti-feminist posts that you should avoid if you like feminism. Lydia and Mary, I mean you. No peeking!

According to to the Women’s Voices Women’s Vote Action Fund:

Romney, for example, has the narrow backing of men, 48% to 44%, while Obama has a somewhat larger lead among women, 51% to 43%. That gender gap exists largely because Obama has overwhelming support, 71% to 19%, among single women.

Democratic strategists have said for many years that abortion, contraception and related issues have particular importance for how single women vote.

Unmarried women voted for Obama by a margin of 70-29 in the 2008 election. Now keep in mind that the Democrat party is for abortion, same-sex marriage, taxing and regulating job creators, massive deficits and spiraling debt. And the Democrats also support anti-family policies like pushing premarital sex onto young people at early ages, mandatory funding of failing public schools, no-fault divorce, and subsidizing welfare programs which make it easier for women to have fatherless children.

In fact, since women were given the right to vote, they have voted for the government to tax more, spend more and intrude more into the family. That’s not my opinion, it is based on research papers like this one. Now my question is this – why are so many single women voting for higher taxes, more government and less freedom?

Why single women vote the way they do

Single women vote the way they do, I contend, because they have been influenced by feminism on a very specific question. Before, women aspired to marriage and children and having a home of their own. But today, they seem to be more interested in making government take over the things that men used to take care of, so that men become optional. This frees up the woman to choose a man based on her feelings, rather than choosing one who is a good provider, protector and moral/spiritual leader. In fact, it is this resentment of male leadership – especially their moral judgments and exclusive truth claims – which women are rebelling against.

This explains why single women overwhelmingly vote for bigger government. The government is currently distributing tens of thousands of dollars from working men to single women to achieve this goal of releasing women from responsibility to men and the leadership of men. Single women are then left free to prefer less-demanding, less moral, less religious men based on superficial, emotional, selfish criteria. Entertainment, appearance, postmodernism, relativism, and universalism are the new male abilities in demand. Providing, protecting, chastity, fidelity and leading on moral and spiritual issues were the old male abilities, and are no longer in demand.

Here is my message to single women who vote Democrat: you can either marry the government and collect welfare or you can marry a real man. Marriage costs money for a man – and he earns that money by working. He can either work for the government and those who are dependent on the government, or he can work for you and the family and the private schools and the church and so on. You can’t have both. A dollar can either be spent by a man or spent by the government. Choose one. Bigger government means smaller men, and smaller government means bigger men.

More on this topic in my previous post, which listed 5 ways that traditional marriage has been debased by feminism.

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