Tag Archives: Father

News

Some women think that fathers should not protect their children with force

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Women often ask me why I am cautious about getting married. I have a number of reasons for being cautious. I have general concerns about the anti-chastity, anti-marriage, anti-parenting culture. I am concerned about the financial situation that the country is in, which my future children would inherit.

But there is a quirky reason that I almost never tell anyone, and that has to do with the aversion that many women have of men using force to punish evil. The kind of woman I am thinking about is comfortable with banning self-defense, banning guns, coddling criminals, opposing just wars, blaming Israel for Middle East tensions, etc. Even non-feminist women tend to want to regulate and seize firearms, even though though they know nothing about them, except that they go “boom” and loud noises are scary, and therefore bad. These women oppose wars, even they don’t want to know anything about how military history shows that weakness provokes aggression – not strength. They don’t like martial arts, they won’t play wargames, they don’t know anyone in the military, they think that contact sports are evil.

Now how widespread is this attitude, do you think? Sure there are some Harriet Harman and Lynne Featherstone types in the UK, and some Bertha Wilson and Beverley McLachlin types in Canada, and some Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Betty Friedan types in the United States. But how widespread is this? How many women want to use laws, courts, schools and government to prevent men fulfilling their traditional roles as protectors, providers and moral/spiritual leaders? How many women want to control the judgmental things that men say, and the use of force by men to protect the weak and punish evildoers?

First, consider this news story sent to me by Wes:

According to the Lavaca County Sheriff’s Office, the 23-year-old father and his family were enjoying a barbecue last Saturday at their ranch on Shiner’s outskirts where they keep horses and chickens.

His young daughter had gone off toward the barn, to feed the chickens, the child’s grandfather — who isn’t being named, to protect the identity of his granddaughter — told CNN affiliates KSAT and KPRC.

Then her father heard screaming and ran. He found a 47-year-old man in the act of sexually abusing his [4-year old] daughter, according to Sheriff Micah Harmon.

The father stopped the alleged abuser, then pounded him repeatedly in the head.

[…]The father himself called 911, saying his daughter’s alleged abuser was lying, beaten, on the ground. Afterward, the sheriff said that the admitted killer appeared “very remorseful” and didn’t know the other man would die at the scene.

Now here are some reactions from women to this story.

Here’s Jezebel:

Like, okay, instead of a trial, let’s just put a dad and a child molester in a room, and give the dad a sword and give the child molester a mild sedative and call it justice! And Judge Judy can referee! Nope. I’m not a legal wizard, but I’m going to stick with my gut here, which says that WE DO NOT JUST GO ABOUT MURDERING PEOPLE.

Now, for the record, I also don’t believe that the government should be allowed to murder people who murder people, so take my opinion with however much salt you want. Is it less upsetting when someone murders a child molester? I guess so. (Although, and I know I’m opening a can of worms here, even child molesters are officially human beings and entitled to the same legal recourse as any other citizen. Also, a lot of them get murdered in prison anyway, so…you guys will get your wish.) Is accidental deadly force excusable if someone walks in on a person actively molesting their child? I think yes. But that doesn’t mean we should legalize murder and normalize vengeance. If that was even a real question.

Got that? Defending your family is murder, and executing a serial murderer is also murder. This is from a web site that is radical on abortion – somewhere to the left of Obama, which is loony territory.

And here’s CafeMom:

I’m a parent, for cripes sakes. I never want to see a child being hurt in any fashion. Just last night I sat in my house with my heart beating fast against my chest because I’d heard a rumor that a local teen had to be airlifted out of an accident scene (good news: it was one of those exaggerations that spreads on Facebook — she’s fine). In that sense, if the allegation of abuse is true, then I would have been shaking with anger and horror both. If I were that father, I would have wanted to kill that man.

But wanted to does not equal would have.

Consider this: when you take justice into your own hands, what happens? You get in trouble. You, the person who, up until that very moment, was in the right.

You may say it’s “worth it” because the other person got what you thought was “coming,” but you are forever marred by having sunk to the criminal level. You are what you profess to despise.

Got that? Defending your family is sinking down to the level of a criminal.

This is actually quite common, and I do ask about it when I am evaluating women for friendships and courtships. I once was courting a Christian woman who told me that soldiers should not use violence to stop terrorists, and policemen should not use firearms to stop criminals, even as a last resort. She imagined that there was always some other feasible alternative to violence, and that war and use of deadly force was never justified. She even said that capital punishment was always wrong. (This is in spite of what the Bible says).

What some women really want is to feminize men and to dominate them – stopping them from getting into debates, from defending themselves with force, from telling the truth if it offends others, from judging immorality, from excluding others whose beliefs are false, from disciplining their children, and so on. I was once called a “bully” by a woman for saying that I would discourage my daughter from studying ballet instead of a STEM field in college, even though my motive was to make sure that she could be financially independent, so that she would be able to pick a husband for the right reasons, instead of being desperate.

Feminism – the denial of and disrespect for distinct male roles – has influenced everything in society. Feminism has influenced the tax rates, the size of government, the laws, the courts, the schools… everything. If I were to get married, I would be getting married in a world dominated by feminism – where the majority of single/younger women are fully supportive of regulating and controlling men, as evidenced by their voting patterns.

Many women just seem to have this enormous confidence about regulating and dominating other peoples lives, and these convictions are often not based on any evidence, but merely on intuitions and feelings – or even the desire to be perceived by others as “nice”. I am frequently encourtering women on the right and the left who boast to me about how they do not judge others – as if having no informed, evidence-based moral convictions was a qualification for being a wife and mother. Who wants to marry a hedonistic sociopath? Not me.

I think it is very important for me to be careful about getting into a relationship where the state can intrude and regulate my entire life, in the event of a divorce or because I have children and they want to be a “co-parent” with me, as a Canadian educrat recently said. I can take care of myself, but when you have to face divorce courts, or let your children face government agencies and public schools forcing their secular left viewpoint on tiny little kids, it’s a lot to ask of a man.

I am already being forced to give a third of my salary to fund a secular leftist bureaucracy which opposes my plans and my values. For me to consider marriage, I would have to be convinced that the woman would support me. And the precondition for support is having an informed view of what men care about and what we are trying to achieve. Women need to show that they are willing to recognize the differences of a man, and his distinct roles, and to give him space to make his contributions.

This understanding of the contributions of men has to be done at the micro level of defending the family, but also at the macro level of defending the nation. Women ought to make an effort to understand and affirm the use of force by Western nations against tyranny and oppression. Counter-terrorism, national security and a robust peace through strength foreign policy are not things that come easily to women, and that’s exactly why they should be open to studying those things, so that their minds are naturally changed as they grow in knowledge.

UPDATE: Grand jury says there will be no charges laid against the father.

News

Are gay relationships typically stable and monogamous?

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ECM sent me this post from The Public Discourse which explains a bit more about the two studies on gay parenting that were in the news last week. Some people are complaining that the study did not use enough long-term gay relationships. This quote explains why that was not feasible.

Excerpt:

The [NFSS] study found that the children who were raised by a gay or lesbian parent as little as 15 years ago were usually conceived within a heterosexual marriage, which then underwent divorce or separation, leaving the child with a single parent. That parent then had at least one same-sex romantic relationship, sometimes outside of the child’s home, sometimes within it. To be more specific, among the respondents who said their mother had a same-sex romantic relationship, a minority, 23%, said they had spent at least three years living in the same household with both their mother and her romantic partner. Only 2 out of the 15,000 screened spent a span of 18 years with the same two mothers. Among those who said their father had had a same-sex relationship, 1.1% of children reported spending at least three years together with both men.

This strongly suggests that the parents’ same-sex relationships were often short-lived, a finding consistent with the broader research on elevated levels of instability among same-sex romantic partners. For example, a recent 2012 study of same-sex couples in Great Britain finds that gay and lesbian cohabiting couples are more likely to separate than heterosexual couples.[3] A 2006 study of same sex marriages in Norway and Sweden found that “divorce risk levels are considerably higher in same-sex marriages”[4] such that Swedish lesbian couples are more than three times as likely to divorce as heterosexual couples, and Swedish gay couples are 1.35 times more likely to divorce (net of controls). Timothy Biblarz and Judith Stacey, two of the most outspoken advocates for same-sex marriage in the U.S. academy, acknowledge that there is more instability among lesbian parents.[5]

Therefore, while critics of the NFSS have faulted it for lacking comparisons between children of IBFs and the children of committed and intact gay or lesbian couples, this was attempted, but was not feasible. Despite drawing from a large, representative sample of the U.S. population, and despite using screening tactics designed to boost the number of respondents who reported having had a parent in a same-sex relationship, a very small segment reported having been parented by the same two women or two men for a minimum of three years. Although there is much speculation that today there are large numbers of same-sex couples in the U.S. who are providing a stable, long-term parenting relationship for their children, no studies based upon large, random samples of the U.S. population have been published that show this to be true, and the above-cited studies of different nations show that on average, same-sex couple relationships are more short-lived than those of opposite-sex couples.

Despite the lack of empirical evidence for the claim that today there are large numbers of stable, two-parent gay households, for the last ten years, contemporary gay parenting research has nevertheless claimed that there are “no significant differences” (and some benefits) to being raised by same-sex parents. Therefore, Regnerus analyzed the new NFSS data to verify this claim. In the end, he found the claim to be more plausible when comparing the grown children of parents who had a same-sex relationship to the grown children of divorced, adopted, single-parented, or step-parented arrangements. The claim is false if one compares the grown children of a parent who had a same-sex relationship to those from IBFs. While the study has been criticized for “comparing apples to oranges,” Regnerus’s work studies the reality of the population of children who were raised by parents who had same-sex relationships.

I think this is an important point to make – and it’s consistent with the research from previous studies. People have been getting their opinions about what the gay lifestyle is really like for children from biased sources and popular culture. But we need to look at research to really know what is true. Any leftist Hollywood producer with money can make a TV show in which all the religious/conservative people look like devils, and all the gay couples are faithful, committed, monogamous and non-violent. But that’s not research – that’s television.To really make policies that protect children, we have to look at the facts.

The right way to think about gay marriage is to think about it as an extension of no-fault divorce. The same feminists and leftists who pushed for the legalization of no-fault divorce told us back then that the children would be fine, that children are resilient. No-fault divorce was a change in the definition of marriage. The leftists said that divorce would never become widespread, and that it would not harm children in any way. It was all a pack of lies. If the practices of the gay lifestyle become conflated with marriage, then marriage will come to denote relationships engaged in for “love” not children, such that unchastity, infidelity, increased domestic violence and frequent break-ups are incorporated back into the definition of marriage.

News

The American Psychological Association (APA) on lesbian and gay parenting

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Here’s the abstract from a study published in the peer-reviewed journal “Social Science Research“.

Abstract:

In 2005, the American Psychological Association (APA) issued an official brief on lesbian and gay parenting. This brief included the assertion: “Not a single study has found children of lesbian or gay parents to be disadvantaged in any significant respect relative to children of heterosexual parents” (p. 15). The present article closely examines this assertion and the 59 published studies cited by the APA to support it. Seven central questions address: (1) homogeneous sampling, (2) absence of comparison groups, (3) comparison group characteristics, (4) contradictory data, (5) the limited scope of children’s outcomes studied, (6) paucity of long-term outcome data, and (7) lack of APA-urged statistical power. The conclusion is that strong assertions, including those made by the APA, were not empirically warranted. Recommendations for future research are offered.

And some the findings:

  • 26 of 59 APA studies on same-sex parenting had no heterosexual comparison groups.
  • In comparison studies, single mothers were often used as the hetero comparison group.
  • No comparison study had the statistical power required to detect a small effect size.
  • Definitive claims were not substantiated by the 59 published studies.

In fact, the assertions of the APA are contradicted by a recently released large-scale study of gay and lesbian parenting.

Here are the facts from a study released last Sunday:

Straight vs. lesbian parenting (click for larger image)
Heterosexual vs. gay parenting (click for larger image)

This data is not surprising – we know that fatherless children do far worse than children who have a father present, even when all the factors like income and wealth and education are corrected for. Children need a mother and a father.

Is the APA unbiased?

Why would the APA make pronouncements that go against the scientific facts? Well, consider what a former President of the APA says about the APA:

A former president of the American Psychological Association (APA), who also introduced the motion to declassify homosexuality as a mental illness in 1975, says that the APA has been taken over by “ultraliberals” beholden to the “gay rights movement,” who refuse to allow an open debate on reparative therapy for homosexuality.

Dr. Nicholas Cummings was President of the APA from 1979 to 1980, and also served as a member of the organization’s Council of Representatives. He served for years as Chief of Mental Health with the Kaiser-Permanente Health Maintenance Organization, and is the author of the book “Destructive Trends in Mental Health: The Well-Intentioned Path to Harm.”

In an interview with representatives of the National Association for Research and Therapy of Homosexuality (NARTH) in late April, Cummings said that the organization’s problems began with the rejection of the Leona Tyler Principle, which required that all public positions of the APA be supported by scientific evidence.

The APA “started changing pretty drastically by the late 1980s,” said Cummings.  “By the mid 1990s, the Leona Tyler principle was absolutely forgotten, that political stances seemed to override any scientific results. Cherry-picking results became the mode. The gay rights movement sort of captured the APA.”

Cummings says that the movement for “diversity” in the APA, which he endorsed, had resulted in a lack of diversity regarding heterosexuals.

“If I had to choose now, I would see a need to form an organization that would recruit straight white males, which are underrepresented today in the APA,” he said.

Cummings says that he personally is not in opposition to the homosexual movement, including gay “marriage,” pointing out that he was the author of the motion to strike homosexuality from the APA’s list of mental illnesses. However, he is distressed at the loss of scientific objectivity at the organization.

More evidence against same-sex marriage is available in this research paper from the Family Research Council think tank, compiled from mainstream statistics like the Census Bureau and the Department of Justice.

Here is my comprehensive case against gay marriage.