Tag Archives: Judgment

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What happens when the government pays people to have babies out-of-wedlock?

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Take a look at this article from the UK Daily Mail. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

Britain’s most feckless father is having another five children  – and is apparently ‘engaged’ for the third time in three months.

Unemployed father-of-10 Keith Macdonald – who pays just £5 a week to support his offspring – will cost taxpayers more than £2 million by the time all his youngsters reach 18.

He has got two new girlfriends pregnant, is having another baby with an ex and a fourth woman who was already known to be having his child has discovered that she is actually having twins.

But it remains unclear whether the latest pregnancies will make Macdonald, from Washington, Tyne and Wear, a father-of-15. The 25-year-old has admitted he has only eight youngsters, while one of his former lovers has claimed he already has 11 children – so when the next five are born he would have 16 in total.

[…]By the time each of his 15 children are 18, they will have cost the state £50,000 in child tax credits, £20,000 in child benefit while each mother could receive £30,000 in income support and £50,000 in housing benefit.

He’s also spent time in prison and is currently unemployed. So where exactly is this guy getting the money to convince all these women of his ability to provide for them?

The father, who has met most of his conquests at bus stops, claims £68.95 per week in disability benefits because he has a bad back and £44 per week in income support.

He has previously said it was ‘not his fault’ he had fathered so many children.

[…]He fathered his first child when he was just 14.

What can these women possibly be thinking, having sex before marriage with such a beastly man?

He is now engaged to marry 32-year-old unemployed Amy Ward, from Chester-le-Street, Tyne and Wear, and she is expecting his child.

Unemployed Emma Kelly, 18, and 21-year-old ex-girlfriend Clare Bryant – have also both recently been made pregnant by the feckless father, it emerged today.

And another one of his expectant partners – 24-year-old Danielle Little – has just found out that she is expecting his twins.

It remained unclear when Macdonald, who has been in and out of prison, will tie the knot with his expectant fiancee Miss Ward.

[…]But Macdonald was also engaged to unemployed Danielle Little, from Sunderland, in September.

He had promised to marry 19-year-old beautician Sarah Armstrong from Chester-le-Street in the same month when he discovered she was pregnant.

Miss Little warned Miss Ward about the feckless father on Facebook – but she reacted with fury in a post on the site.

She wrote: ‘Some people just don’t get on with their own lives and just like to cause s*** for other people.’

I think everyone can see that this man is not the sort of man that would pass any father’s pre-dating interrogation. This man is scum. There was a time when a man like this would not have been able to afford bus fare if he didn’t have a job. But now the government is paying him so that he can carry on with women as if he actually had a job. They are enabling him to act like a child well past the time where he should have grown up.

The author of the post on RuthBlog asks this:

Questions for Your Consideration

  1. What is the womens’ role here? Are they victims? Why is the article centered around the man?
  2. Imagine what these kids’ reactions might be when they grow up and learn their dad is the father of many other children, most by different mothers. Do you think the parents considered the kids’ reactions before having sex? Generally speaking, are a child’s future (and unknown) reactions something parents ought to consider?
  3. In your opinion, is this the sort of future most women dream about when they’re young? What is the government’s role, if any, in supporting the dreams of its youth?

Those are good questions, but I have one of my own.

Husbands or government

When women think about marriage, do they think about where the money is going to come from to buy all of the things they dream about? I know that they dream about babies, weddings, clothes, shoes, jewelry, a home, home decorations, a garden, furniture, drapes, vacations, and so on. But my question is – are they dreaming about who is going to pay for all of that? And if they know about these costs, then why are young, unmarried women voting to increase government spending on welfare? The only way to pay for all these benefits is by raising taxes and confiscating their future husband’s earnings and investments. It may feel good to “soak the rich”, but does it result in more marriage-minded men? (Obama has greatly increased welfare benefits, thus undermining marriage and the need to choose a man who can earn money). How does heaping taxes and regulations on businesses make a man more likely to be employed? How does raising capital gains and dividends taxes make a man more able to earn a return on his investments?

A man cannot pay for all of these social programs, (which just incentivize more and more costly behaviors), at the same time as he is supporting a family of his own. If the government is handing out money to single mothers, then women do not need men to prove that they are good earners before having sex with them. So men stop trying to do well in school and get good jobs, and instead focus on being popular, exciting and entertaining.

The man in the Daily Mail article is an ex-con and unemployed. He is the worst sort of man for a woman to choose – and yet women are falling all over him. Because the government is making it unnecessary for them to care about whether he can earn a living and act responsibly. The government is saying “we pay the bills, so you can choose men on the basis of sex, drama and to impress your girlfriends with the drama”. Women have decided that there is no way that men ought to be – they certainly should not be respected as the protector and provider and moral/spiritual leader.

Ends and means

I have been struggling lately to understand why women spend so much time thinking about what they want, and complaining about their friends who are getting married, and yet spend so little time acquiring funding, skills and knowledge to achieve what they want. One woman I know who wants to get married recently gave a one-word review of “Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands”, which I made her read. Her review was “Barf!”. She has no idea what demands marriage will place on her, and resents the needs of men (and probably resents the needs of children too). However, she is very interested in Mark Driscoll and loves to load up obligations on men. Obligations on men = GOOD! Obligations on women = BARF! That’s how she thinks. It’s the feminist double-standard that Dr. Laura writes about in PCF Husbands. And, of course, if anything thing goes wrong with the intentions of women, they can just blame the man and claim that the failure was unpredictable and not their fault.

I once had a conversation with an unemployed Christian woman who was explaining to me how she had a right to collect welfare from the government in order to have a child out-of-wedlock by choice. She had NO IDEA what fatherlessness would do to a child, and NO IDEA how increased welfare spending caused higher taxes and reduced the number of men who could afford to marry. She was left-wing on most fiscal policies. (But she was also not a feminist and she was chaste, so not totally awful)

Contrast that woman with another Christian woman I know who did a B.S. and M.S. in engineering, worked 10 years, saved all her money, and helped her husband pay off their house, before becoming a stay-at-home mother. She wanted a husband and a home, so she went out and did two degrees in engineering so that she could help her husband pay for the things she wanted – before becoming a stay at home wife and mom. The engineer is vehemently opposed to big government, higher taxes and welfare because her husband’s salary is what is allowing her to be a good wife and mother, away from the stress of work.

Socialism and feminism

Why are women pursuing men like the unemployed ex-con? I actually wrote a post on why women prefer bad men, and why they would prefer not to have to deal with traditional men acting in traditional male roles. It’s less work for them if they just get a check in the mail – they don’t have to be respectful of a husband if a check just comes in the mail. Some women really resent the authority that a man has in the home as the primary earner, and they also resent having to respect men and deal with their other needs for sex, verbal encouragement, etc. They want government to replace men, because men, especially good men, are authoritarian and demanding and judgmental. And the result is skyrocketing rates of single motherhood. The out-of-wedlock birth rate is 40% in the United States, costing us 112 BILLION dollars a year.

Here is another post discussing research on the attitudes of college women to hooking up done by the University of Virginia. Women really are choosing this. No one is making them do it. They are doing it because they want to. The bounds of traditional sexual morality, traditional sex roles and traditional courtship  are not fun. Read the research and see for yourself what they say.

Socialism and Polygamy

This post on Haemet talks about the social costs of polygamy, which is another arrangement that can’t easily be sustained without government support.

Related posts

Commentary

If things go wrong in a relationship, who is to blame?

53 Comments

I was having a discussion with a Christian woman last night (who can comment, if she likes) about who is to blame in relationships when things go wrong.

My basic contention is that whenever something goes wrong in a relationship, then the person whose expectations are dashed is to blame.

The reason why I think this is because you have to take people as you find them and then vet them as if they were job applicants applying for the job of marriage. The job of marriage has very specific requirements, and these requirements are objective. Someone is going to have to raise the kids, someone is going to have to cook the meals, someone is going to have to earn the bulk of the money, someone is going to have to deal with the beasties that invade the home. The goal of the relationship is not to test the person to see if they are “fun” or whether your friends are envious. The goal of the relationship is to test the person for the role they will play in the marriage.

So consider the case where a man has sex with and then dumps a woman, who expected him to marry her and have children. Who is to blame? On my view, it’s the woman who is to blame. The man was bad before she got there, and you cannot expect a bad man to act good, just because you imagine that he will. Imagination is not the equivalent of passing an interview with the woman’s father, and getting the father’s approval. Imagination is not a 12-year resume with no gaps. Imagination is not a $500,000 investment portfolio. Imagination is not a paid-off home. Imagination is not a handful of reference letters from his former girlfriends. If the woman relied on her imagination, then the woman is to blame for the man’s bad conduct.

Sometimes, what I’ve noticed is that women tend to focus on the bad thing that the men do that is counter to their expectations, because they project a standard of morality onto the man that the man expressly repudiates. In fact, I have actually met atheistic women who think that atheistic men should act based on some standard of morality. But the problem is that neither the atheist woman nor the atheist man accepts any objective standard of morality. If there is no designer to the universe, then the universe is an accident, and there is no way that we OUGHT to be. If there is no way we OUGHT to be, then there is no point in expecting anyone to be any way – it’s just your opinion against their opinion. So you have a woman expecting a man to act according to some standard that she doesn’t think is real by her own worldview!And meanwhile, the good men are passed by because we are “too strict”, “too religious”, “too moral”, “too chaste”, “too sober”, “too predictable” and “there is no chemistry”. (Chemistry = emotional craziness)

What this means is that women end up feeling free to drink as much as they want, have sex with whoever they want on the basis of appearance and popularity, and then expect that sex will cause the man to immediately propose with a diamond ring, a massive expensive wedding in Hawaii, a huge palatial home, and so on. The moral laws that might block a woman from doing bad things are “too strict” for her to follow, but they expect men to follow moral rules that they don’t follow themselves! Women actually believe that drunken hook-up sex will cause really immoral men to drop their hedonistic, atheistic lifestyles and act completely differently than they were before. What causes women to think this? It isn’t reason and evidence, that’s for sure. I think they think that men who are good looking and popular have some store of hidden virtue that is unlocked by having sex with the woman who is their “soul mate”. Somehow, a magical spell will come over a self-centered, muscle-bound lout and he will be filled with thoughts of marriage and babies. Women actually think that! And what happens is that after choosing the wrong man and getting pregnant, etc. with him, they blame the man for the subsequent abortions, affairs, domestic violence, etc. In short, the problem is this: women go to the pet store, pass by all the dogs and cats and bird, and bring home a trendy and attractive alligator, who then promptly bites each of their limbs off. And then the women complain that the alligator is very unfair and immoral. Who is really to blame here? The alligator, who is just doing what comes naturally for alligators, or the woman who passed the good pets by and brought home a monster?

It sounds like I am blaming women, but I’m not – but she wasn’t convinced. So I invented a new example to show how men could be to blame, unlikely though that may be, since men are perfect in every way. This time, I imagined what would happen if a stripper-gram woman showed up at my door. I actually told the woman I was chatting with that I had to go because a stripper-gram HAD shown up. I told the woman how attractive the stripper was, and how I was in love with her, and wanted to marry her. How she undoubtedly was very wealthy, and well educated, and how she would help me to raise little Michele Bachmanns and William Lane Craigs. I waxed eloquently on her B.A. in integrated science with a minor in philosophy of religion, M.A. in economics and her J.D. in defamation law. All of which I had no evidence for, except for the feelings of love aroused by the site of her naked cleavage. Besides, I explained, it would be easier for me to change her to match my boobie-induced delusions of her after we were married. At this point, my debating partner began to see the point. She could see that this imaginary stripper was going to dash my expectations, and probably cheat on me, and spend all my savings on shoes and breast implants. And who would be to blame? ME! Because I am the one who was refusing to court her properly, and instead inventing an entire future life together that the imaginary stripper and I had never discussed, nor was she capable of meeting those requirements.

I actually know a Christian-raised atheist woman who co-habitated with a left-wing, global-warming atheist and then got pregnant and had an abortion, and she blamed the man for this. As if an atheist should be expected to believe in objective moral values and marriage! As if the man had been able to get her to co-habitate and get pregnant without her consent! She accepted no responsibility for her choice of this man whatsoever. And when I told her about the dangers of pre-marital sex and the importance of courting rules, she dismissed them as being too strict, claiming that a good job, chastity, virginity, apologetics, a firmly-grounded Christian faith, a rational basis for morality, sobriety, and so on, were all totally unnecessary for a sensible successful marriage. Still! After all that! Her sole criteria for a man? CHEMISTRY! And the approval of her female peers, who were all penniless, up to their eyeballs in student loans and credit card debt, and had degrees in squishy-headed non-engineering/non-science fields, like English, Women’s Studies, Journalism and Peace Studies. Phooey!

So this kind of thing really happens, and many of the people who should bear the responsibility are oblivious to the fact that they have any duty at all to actually evaluate romantic partners rationally and objectively to see if they are able to meet the demands of marriage and parenting. People act as if drunkenness, partying, promiscuity and selfishness are pre-requisites to a good marriage. And that fathers have no role to play in setting out boundaries for their daughters and making them accountable for their decisions.

For all the men out there, if this sort of crazy irrational avoidance of responsibility strikes a chord with you, I urge you to go out and watch the 2008 movie “Taken” with Liam Neeson. For a more gritty dramatic movie, I recommend the movie “Thirteen”from 2003. Fathers matter. Husbands matter.

I was having a discussion with a Christian woman last night (who can comment, if she likes) about who is to blame in relationships when things go wrong.

My basic contention is that whenever something goes wrong in a relationship, then the person whose expectations are dashed is to blame.

The reason why I think this is because you have to take people as you find them and then vet them as if they were job applicants applying for the job of marriage. The job of marriage has very specific requirements, and these requirements are objective. Someone is going to have to raise the kids, someone is going to have to cook the meals, someone is going to have to earn the bulk of the money, someone is going to have to deal with the beasties that invade the home. The goal of the relationship is not to test the person to see if they are “fun” or whether your friends are envious. The goal of the relationship is to test the person for the role they will play in the marriage.

So consider the case where a man has sex with and then dumps a woman, who expected him to marry her and have children. Who is to blame? On my view, it’s the woman who is to blame. The man was bad before she got there, and you cannot expect a bad man to act good, just because you imagine that he will. Imagination is not the equivalent of passing an interview with the woman’s father, and getting the father’s approval. Imagination is not a 12-year resume with no gaps. Imagination is not a $500,000 investment portfolio. Imagination is not a paid-off home. Imagination is not a handful of reference letters from his former girlfriends. If the woman relied on her imagination, then the woman is to blame for the man’s bad conduct.

At this point, the woman in question started to disagree with me. She thought that all people (especially those evil men) should be expected to act like Christian theists, and that if they didn’t then they were to blame. In other words, people should feel feel free to drink as much as they want, have sex with whoever they want on the basis of appearance and popularity, and then expect that sex will cause the man to immediately propose with a diamond ring, a massive expensive wedding in Hawaii, a huge palatial home, and so on. Women actually belief that drunken hook-up sex will cause really immoral men to drop their hedonistic, atheistic lifestyles and cause men to act completely differently than they were before. What causes women to think this? It isn’t reason and evidence, that’s for sure. I think they think that men who are good looking and popular have some store of hidden virtue that is unlocked by having sex with the woman who is their “soul mate”. Somehow, a magical spell will come over a self-centered, muscle-bound lout and he will be filled with thoughts of marriage and babies. Women actually think that!

Well, she thought I was just blaming women again, which I love to do. So I invented a new example to show how men could be to blame, unlikely though that may be, since men are perfect in every way. This time, I imagined what would happen if a stripper-gram woman showed up at my door. I actually told the woman I was chatting with that I had to go because a stripper-gram HAD shown up. I told the woman who lovely the stripper was, and how I was in love with her, and wanted to marry her. How she undoubtedly was very wealthy, and would help me to raise little Michele Bachmanns and William Lane Craigs. I waxed eloquently on her B.A. in integrated science with a minor in philosophy of religion, M.A. in economics and her J.D. in defamation law. All of which I had no evidence for, except for the feelings of love aroused by the site of her naked cleavage. Besides, I explained, it would be easier for me to change her to match my boobie-induced delusions after we were married. At this point, my debating partner began to see the point. She could see that this imaginary stripper was going to dash my expectations, and probably cheat on me, and spend all my savings on shoes and breast implants. And who would be to blame? ME! Because I am the one who was refusing to court her properly, and instead inventing an entire future life together that the imaginary stripper and I had never discussed, nor was she capable of meeting those requirements.

So now I would like to hear from my commenters what they think about this way of assigning blame so that it is not based on the degree of bad thing that is done. Instead I assign blame to the person who chooses the wrong person for a relationship, for the wrong reasons, and then hopes to change that person later.

I actually know a Christian-raised woman who co-habitated with a left-wing, global-warming atheist and then got pregnant and had an abortion, and she blamed the man for this. As if an atheist should be expected to believe in objective moral values and marriage! As if the man had been able to get her to co-habitate and get pregnant without her consent! She accepted no responsibility for her choice of this man whatsoever. And when I told her about the dangers of pre-marital sex and the importance of courting rules, she dismissed them as being too strict, claiming that a good job, chastity, virginity, apologetics, a firmly-grounded Christian faith, a rational basis for morality, sobriety, and so on, were all totally unnecessary for a sensible successful marriage. Still! After all that! Her sole criteria for a man? CHEMISTRY! And the approval of her female peers, who were all penniless, up to their eyeballs in student loans and credit card debt, and had degrees in squishy-headed non-engineering/non-science fields, like English, Women’s Studies, Journalism and Grievance Mongering Socialist Theory. (That is a real degree at Wellesley College, I am pretty sure) Phooey!

So this kind of thing really happens, and many of the people who I think should bear the responsibility are oblivious to the fact that they have any duty at all to actually evaluate romantic partners rationally and objectively to see if they are able to meet the demands of marriage and parenting. People act as if drunkenness, partying, promiscuity and selfishness are pre-requisites to a good marriage. And that fathers have no role to play in setting out boundaries for their daughters and making them accountable for their decisions.

For all the men out there, if this sort of crazy irrational avoidance of responsibility strikes a chord with you, I urge you to go out and watch the 2008 movie “Taken” with Liam Neeson. For a more gritty dramatic movie, I recommend the movie “Thirteen”from 2003. Fathers matter. Husbands matter.

Commentary

Can a person be a Christian and yet still do bad things?

11 Comments

I sometimes write posts about atheists and say that they will have difficulty grounding the minimal requirements of morality if the universe is an accident and they are just lumps of matter. To show how this works out, I like to cite famous atheists who also managed to get political power, and then point out how they treated other people. I then say that doing bad things is not really wrong on atheism, since morality is really based on doing whatever you feel like that makes you feel good and that your peers will approve of. And if you want to do something they won’t approve of, you can still do it, as long as no one ever finds out.

Atheist readers sometimes object that Christians can behave just as badly as atheists.

But consider this post from Retha’s English-language blog. (She’s from South Africa)

Excerpt:

However you choose to define Christian, the definition most certainly is not “anyone who calls himself a Christian, is a Christian.” We don’t use that definition for anything else. We don’t believe that everyone who calls themselves “honest” are. We don’t believe that everyone who calls themselves “not overweight” are not. You cannot be a king, or a genius, or a dog, or a tall person, by calling yourself that. (If it worked that way, it would have been a very strong temptation to call myself drop-dead gorgeous.)

Simple word etymology is more useful: Christian has the root word Christ and the suffix –ian. A Christian is a Christ-following/ Christ-imitating person. Who is meant when we speak of Christ? He is the Jesus described in the New Testament, as described there.To be a Christ-ian, you need to follow/ imitate Jesus as he is painted in the Bible. That is where He is painted as the Christ.

There’s a lot of wisdom in those two paragraphs.

I think it’s possible for someone to call himself a Christian and yet to do bad things. Christians aren’t perfect. Even when they know what they ought to do, they struggle to do it. The dividing line here is that a real Christian is never going to call sin anything other than sin. They aren’t going to try to defend it. (Although I always try to explain what leads me to sin if anyone asks – which is not the same as rationalizing, it’s just explaining). Someone who claims to be a Christian and yet does things that Bible forbids without any shame or regret is not a Christian. If that person responds to being judged by denying that what they are doing is wrong, or by attacking the Bible’s authority on moral issues, then that person is not a Christian.

If the person is saying “don’t judge me”, or “the Bible doesn’t say that”, or “the Bible was written by men“, or “the Bible was written a long time ago”, or “I believe in a God of love”, or “you’re intolerant”, or “I was born as a pickpocket”, or “I have the bank-robbing gene”, or “that’s your truth”, or “that’s just your interpretation”, or “if God loved me, he would give me a Mercedez Benz”, then you are probably not dealing with a Christian, whatever they claim to be. Lots of people claim to be Christians but don’t follow Christ. An we shouldn’t believe that someone who tries to argue that abortion is consistent with the Bible is an authentic Christian, for example. The Bible forbids pre-marital sex and murder.

I sometimes struggle with going to church, because I can’t stand being around happy, singing people (unless they know apologetics, in which case I can). But you would never hear me say that going to church was wrong, or that I was morally justified in avoiding church. Instead, I would say I was wrong not to go to church regularly, but that I hadn’t found a church that made me feel comfortable yet.