Tag Archives: Family

Commentary

On women leaving marriages that don’t make them happy enough

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Don’t blame me! I didn’t write it. Alisha wrote it. She’s the meany, not me!

Excerpt:

I have a certain friend, a great guy I’ve known since I was a gawky teen, and who continues to be my friend in  my fully grown yet still gawky state. He has always been strong- fights hard, works hard, but loves the hardest.

When he married a few years ago, I was a little worried. Now that he’s divorced, I’m very hurt. And taken aback that he is not the only guy I know in this situation. In fact, I know about 4.

Now, these men are far from perfect. No one except God is. Yet in all these collapsed marriages, the women openly and willingly admitted the men they promised to be with until death had never hit, pushed, sexually or emotionally accosted them. They quite simply, no longer wanted to be married.

Of course, there is nothing really simple about dissolving one’s marriage, except for my simple-minded incomprehension as I sat at a showing of “The Devil Wears Prada” with one of these ladies a few years back. We had gone to the mall to do a little window shopping, and for what seemed to be the entire trip, this young lady- I’ll call her Amber- complained non-stop about what her husband wasn’t doing. He wasn’t buying her new clothes or shoes or taking her on vacations. She worked hard, many days 10 hours. And well, he worked, too, but it wasn’t fair he didn’t buy her more.

“Can he afford to buy you all that stuff?” I asked. She looked at me as if I were stupid. “MY FATHER works two even three jobs to make sure Mama gets everything she wants and deserves! Sometimes, he is away for weeks, working at construction sites to ensure it!”

[…]Another girl I know got hitched- only to ditch her groom before a tan line started to develop on her ring finger. The very same things she loved about him while they were dating- his commitment to God, desire to go into the ministry, his “good guy” sweetness- were instantly repulsive in marriage. Their marriage annulled, she jumped into a long term dating relationship which turned into cohabitation and a child together. But fortunate for her, no wedding.

I actually blame the men for choosing these women. Men have to test women during the courtship to see if what they are interested in is making a commitment and then acting self-sacrificially to honor their obligations. I could tell you nightmare stories about Christian women I know who can do the most amazing acts of selfishness and then totally refuse to make amends or accept any responsibility. But then, I’m not married to those women – because that all came out before I ever got serious about them. Many women are judging men today based on how amusing they are and whether their girlfriends will be envious and approving based on secular criteria supplied by TV shows and music videos. This all has to be detected during the courtship by the man. Courting is when the man has to detect if the woman is thinking anything other than “if I don’t like this – if it doesn’t make me feel happy all the time and impose no obligations on me – then I can get out of it”. Is she ready for a commitment? That’s the man’s job to find out.

What courtship is really about for men is communicating your plan and the challenges you’re facing and then standing back to see if she wants to help. I once met a Christian woman who would not so much as sit down with me to see what I did for a living. She wanted to have fun! And understanding my job so that she could help was not fun. (Presumably, spending my money that I earned from that job would have been more fun). So if a man marries a woman like that, then it is the man’s fault. If men are too stupid to know how to detect lemons then they deserve to suffer. Learning how to court is more important than playing video games. Knowing what laws strengthen men in their roles as husbands and fathers is more important than watching X-treme sports. Men are responsible to understand marriage, understand what women do in a marriage, and understand policies that strengthen or weaken marriage. Many men who are divorced today voted for the party of no-fault divorce (with the custody battles and fake charges of child abuse) and domestic violence laws (which criminalize criticizing your wife’s spending or weight) yesterday. And those men are fools. And they must be punished.

Men are terrible at knowing what they want from women. What matters to the stupid men about women today is not whether they are chaste and self-sacrificial and organized and goal-oriented, but only their physical appearance, how much they are willing to drink, and how far they are willing to go physically. Even Christian men have no idea what Christian women are supposed to DO in a marriage. Many men think that marriage will be 50% playing video games, and 50% sex or something. It’s just totally unrealistic. Not to mention that women are not inanimate objects. They are more like employees. If you bring a woman into your home and do not know how to motivate them, then they will not fill the role that they are assigned. Surely a wife is as entitled to as much “management” as an employee. Having sex with someone is not effective management. One-on-one eye-to-eye communication about current concerns and future goals is effective management.

I think that men and women really need to sit down and think about marriage and parenting as an engineering problem. What are the use cases? What are the requirements? What is the design plan? What are the possible solutions? What are the tradeoffs? What is the schedule? How much of this can we build ourselves, and how much of it can we purchase or outsource? If the woman is not on board with the seriousness of marriage, because she resents obligations, saving money and structure, then drop her like a hot potato. If she does not want a man to fulfill his roles in the marriage – protecting, providing and leading on moral/spiritual issues – then kick her to the curb. Spontaneity is good for a Sunday afternoon or a Friday night. It is not the way to run a a marriage, especially when there are kids. Spontaneity is not the way to produce quality software – with garbage in, you get garbage out. Can you imagine hiring an engineer based solely on their physical appearance and amusement value? Yet this is what men are doing. Christian men are doing this.

Commentary

What is the conservative plan for taking care of the poor?

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Here’s is the Heritage Foundation explaining what conservatives would do to solve the problem of poverty.

Excerpt:

Since 1964, the U.S. has spent $15.9 trillion on means-tested welfare programs. After adjusting for inflation, welfare spending is 13 times higher today than it was in 1965. Welfare spending has grown more rapidly than Social Security, Medicare, education, and defense. And what do we have to show for these efforts? According to the Census Bureau, a record high 3.7 million Americans fell into poverty in 2009. The out-of-wedlock birthrate is now 40% and the African American out-of-wedlock birthrate is 72%. When the War on Poverty began the out-of-wedlock birthrate was just 7%.

The collapse of marriage is the root cause of child poverty in the U.S. today. It is far past time to reboot our poverty programs to promote work and encourage marriage in order to control costs and promote greater self-reliance. Among Rector’s recommendations:

  • Slowing the growth of the welfare state: Congress needs to establish reasonable fiscal constraints within the welfare system. Once the current recession ends, aggregate welfare spending should be rolled back to pre-recession levels. After this rollback has been completed, the growth of welfare spending should be capped at the rate of inflation.
  • Promoting personal responsibility and work: Able-bodied welfare recipients should be required to work or to prepare for work as a condition of receiving aid. Food stamps and housing assistance, two of the largest programs for the needy, should be aligned with the TANF program to require able-bodied adults to work or to prepare for work for a minimum of 30 hours per week.
  • Ending the welfare marriage penalty and encouraging marriage in low-income communities: Current means-tested welfare programs penalize low-income recipients who get married; these anti-marriage penalties should be reduced or eliminated.

During the administration of President Bill Clinton, conservatives successfully reformed one welfare program in the 1990s: replacing the old Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) with the new Temporary Assistance to Needy Families (TANF). But President Barack Obama’s failed economic stimulus gutted those reforms. And his budget proposal would spend $10.3 trillion on means-tested welfare over the next decade. Before the current rise in poverty, that was enough to give $250,000 to each person currently living in poverty in the U.S., or $1 million for a poor family of four. Our nation can’t afford another 10 years of failed War on Poverty thinking.

You can read more about this issue in this Townhall.com column by Walter Williams, which explains everything you need to do to avoid being poor, and to avoid making your kids poor.

Excerpt:

Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And, finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior. If you graduate from high school today with a B or C average, in most places in our country there’s a low-cost or financially assisted post-high-school education program available to increase your skills.

Most jobs start with wages higher than the minimum wage, which is currently $5.15. A man and his wife, even earning the minimum wage, would earn $21,000 annually. According to the Bureau of Census, in 2003, the poverty threshold for one person was $9,393, for a two-person household it was $12,015, and for a family of four it was $18,810. Taking a minimum-wage job is no great shakes, but it produces an income higher than the Bureau of Census’ poverty threshold. Plus, having a job in the first place increases one’s prospects for a better job.

The Children’s Defense Fund and civil rights organizations frequently whine about the number of black children living in poverty. In 1999, the Bureau of the Census reported that 33.1 percent of black children lived in poverty compared with 13.5 percent of white children. It turns out that race per se has little to do with the difference. Instead, it’s welfare and single parenthood. When black children are compared to white children living in identical circumstances, mainly in a two-parent household, both children will have the same probability of being poor.

Here’s more Walter Williams: (2 minutes)

And some Thomas Sowell: (4.5 minutes)

Walter Williams and Thomas Sowell are my two favorite economists.

Podcasts

New version of Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse’s Love and Economics talk

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Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse
Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

If you’ve heard it before, it might be worth listening again – this version is clear and new, and there is Q&A. This is my favorite lecture on marriage because she makes marriage seem like the Lord of the Rings or some similar epic. There’s good and evil, and it’s very dangerous and adventurous and important.

The MP3 file is here.

Her goal in this lecture is to explain what families do to help to raise children who can participate in society and the free market. Her audience is fiscal conservatives and libertarians who think that marriage and family are not as important from fiscal issues. She is making a connection between marriage and civil society, and civil society to limited government, and limited government to liberty. Family should be very important to fiscal conservatives and libertarians.

My favorite part is about 26 minutes in, when she is discussing government-run day care, government-provided meals for children and being very aggressive about how she doesn’t want government taking over the roles of mothers and fathers. The push to make government take over the parental roles flows from the idea that women need to be more like men, and that means they need to be separated from their children so they can work like men do. Also, government programs attempt to communicate to women that men are unecessary as protectors and providers and moral leaders, since the government can protect, provide and educate.

What she does not mention is that socialists also love the idea of taking money from the hard-working, frugal parents and redistributing it to single mothers so that all the children will be equally screwed with loveless day care and lousy public-school educations, which are really more indoctrinations than preparation for a profession. They like the idea that everyone will be equal and the only way to do that is to yank children away from their parents.

Consider the words of this radical feminist:

“We really don’t know how to raise children. If we want to talk about equality of opportunity for children, then the fact that children are raised in families means there’s no equality. […]In order to raise children with equality, we must take them away from families and communally raise them.”

(Mary Jo Bane:  Former Assistant Secretary of Administration for Children and Families in the Department of Health and Human Services of the Clinton administration)

This is what they think about the traditional family. The left thinks that the man’s job is to work, and the woman’s job is to work, and the government’s job is to steal their money so that everyone’s children are raised “communally”. This is what the left believes about marriage and family. That’s why they enact policies to break up marriages and push women out of the home to make them work like men. Leftists also don’t want parents teaching their children conservative views and values.

This lecture is highly-recommended. Christians really need to think about marriage and family the way she does. There are two things a woman needs to do to convince a good man to marry. 1) Treat marriage and family as a war against tyranny and socialism. 2) Understand and assist men with their needs and plans.