Tag Archives: Marriage

News

John Hawkins of Right Wing News interviews Dr. Helen Smith about Men On Strike

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I thought this interview posted on Right Wing News was a very appropriate thing to post on Fathers Day. The whole thing is worth reading, because it’s stuff that is never discussed much by the people who complain that men aren’t marrying as they used to, under the new changed standard of what marriage is. Well, marriage has changed, and it’s not as attractive to men as it used to be.

Here’s a snip from the interview:

If a man came to you and he said, “Listen, I think marriage is great. There’s no downside to it.” What would you say to him? Not telling him not to do it, but maybe saying, “Have you thought about the other side of this?” What are some of the negatives for men in marriage that are making men less likely to marry?

Well, the first negatives are the legal ones. If man does get divorced, he’s much more likely to pay alimony. For example, about 97 percent of alimony is paid by men, only about 3 percent by women. Men tend to lose with their children more often. Only about 10 percent of men get custody of their children if there’s a divorce. In marriage, …if a man finds out a couple of years down the line that the child isn’t his, the state, in certain states — not most states — a man can be forced to pay for that child even though that child is not his. At the same time, if he wants a vasectomy — now this one is hard because it’s actually not on the books — but if a married man goes to a doctor and wants a vasectomy, most doctors in this country will not perform a vasectomy unless that man gets his wife to sign off.

…If he wants to leave the marriage, a woman can just point her finger and tell her lawyer that a man committed child abuse, domestic abuse — and a lot of times it’s just taken as a given. If a woman wants a restraining order against a man in a marriage, men most often are taken to jail when, you know, the woman calls the police. However, studies actually show that violence in domestic relations is almost 50% from men and 50% from women. If a woman gets angry for any reason, she can simply accuse a man and men are just assumed guilty in our society.

The other thing is psychological reasons. Men’s self-esteem suffers more than women when they don’t see their friends as often and that’s because women tend to congregate a little more. When men lose contact with those friends, their mental and, you know, their psychological health can suffer from that. Men are also generally given the worst part of the house once kids come along. The man is kind of put downstairs to the basement, whether he wants to be there or not. Now sure, a lot of men might enjoy the basement, but they shouldn’t be forced down there.

In my work over the years, I’ve actually seen men who hang around outside or they’ll say, “I don’t mind being outside in the garage,” but the minute they get a divorce they’re right back in that house and wanting the full use of it.

So, I do think that there are a lot of issues that men want to consider when they think about marriage because in our society if you make a mistake and if you’re a man, there’s a lot more at stake. If you’re a woman and you make a mistake, yes, it can be bad, but the state is with you. You probably are going to get your children; you probably are going to get some child support; it’s more than likely you’re not going to be kicked out of your house. There’s even more support for you. There are a lot of organizations to help women; there are almost none to help men.

You know, one way to tell if a woman you like is interested in marriage is to read her an interview like this and then ask her for her feelings. If she is dismissive of the feelings of men, and the changing incentives that men face in this world, then you should really reconsider marriage to her.

By the way, if you’d like a quick re-cap about how feminism has changed marriage, here are a few of the main bullet points that describe what marriage used to mean:

  1. Being the legally and socially recognized head of the household
  2. An expectation of regular sex except in rare cases
  3. Legal rights to children
  4. Lifetime commitment
  5. The presumption of premarital chastity from the wife
  6. Spritual leadership role that is not undermined by forces outside the home
  7. Moral leadership role that is not undermined by forces outside the home
  8. The right to work to earn money and spend it as you see fit

There are more, but those are a few. And you can see, with a little reflection, how different laws and policies have degraded the old definition of marriage and put in place a new feminized definition that takes away the woman’s responsibility to choose a man wisely, to be responsible and self-controlled, to do her part to be accountable to her husband’s leadership, and to avoid choices that destroy the marriage.

Here are some specific things that undermined the 8 points above:

  1. Governmental meddling in the household and imposing values on children in public schools
  2. The normalization of sex-withholding as a way of undermining male leadership
  3. Uneven custody laws and false accusations during custody hearings
  4. No-fault divorce, which encourages women to initiate divorces in order to get the marital home, alimony and child support
  5. Sex education, taxpayer-funded contraceptives, taxpayer-funded abortion, single mother welfare
  6. Public schools teaching things that dogmatically that undermine religion, like Darwinian evolution
  7. Public schools teaching things that dogmatically that undermine morality, like sex education
  8. High tax rates, massive welfare spending which has resulted in inflationary monetary policy

Note: I am chaste and most of this stuff hasn’t really impacted me personally as much as it affects men who have married and had children. I am just being analytical about the way the world is for men.

Very often, women are blissfully unaware of how their own voting undermines men’s willingness and ability to get married and to stay married. Instead of recognizing the motivations and needs and goals of men and changing themselves, they often just resort to insults and blaming. And of course there is a non-stop chorus of male voices who affirm this – even conservatives and Christian leaders do it. The man-up crowd often tells men flat out to lower their standards and let the woman rule regardless of her ability to listen to men, care about men’s goals or care about men’s feelings.

Commentary

Why do we celebrate Fathers Day? Why is fatherhood important?

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Father’s Day is the day that children and wives are supposed to honor fathers by giving them respect for being providers, protectors and moral/spiritual leaders. One of the best ways to motivate this duty is by studying research to find out the difference that fathers make.

Some statistics on the importance of biological fathers from Fathers.com.

Excerpt:

Some fathering advocates would say that almost every social ill faced by America’s children is related to fatherlessness. Six are noted here. As supported by the data below, children from fatherless homes are more likely to be poor, become involved in drug and alcohol abuse, drop out of school, and suffer from health and emotional problems. Boys are more likely to become involved in crime, and girls are more likely to become pregnant as teens.

For a summary, I’ll just list one fact from each of the six categories they listed.

1. Poverty

Fact:

– Children in father-absent homes are five times more likely to be poor. In 2002, 7.8% of children in married-couple families were living in poverty, compared to 38.4% of children in female-householder families.

Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Children’s Living Arrangements and Characteristics: March 2002, P20-547, Table C8. Washington, D.C.: GPO 2003.

2. Drug and Alcohol Abuse

Fact:

– The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services states, “Fatherless children are at a dramatically greater risk of drug and alcohol abuse.”

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. National Center for Health Statistics. Survey on Child Health. Washington, DC, 1993.

3. Physical and Emotional Health

Fact:

– Unmarried mothers are less likely to obtain prenatal care and more likely to have a low birthweight baby. Researchers find that these negative effects persist even when they take into account factors, such as parental education, that often distinguish single-parent from two-parent families.

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Public Health Service. Center for Disease Control and Prevention. National Center for Health Statistics. Report to Congress on Out-of-Wedlock Childbearing. Hyattsville, MD (Sept. 1995): 12.

– Children in single-parent families are two to three times as likely as children in two-parent families to have emotional and behavioral problems.Source: Stanton, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. National Center for Health Statistics.”National Health Interview Survey.” Hyattsville, MD, 1988.

4. Educational Achievement

Fact:

– After taking into account race, socioeconomic status, sex, age, and ability, high school students from single-parent households were 1.7 times more likely to drop out than were their corresponding counterparts living with both biological parents.Source: McNeal, Ralph B. Jr.”Extracurricular Activities and High School Dropouts.” Sociology of Education 68(1995): 62-81.

5. Crime

Fact:

– Children in single parent families are more likely to be in trouble with the law than their peers who grow up with two parents.

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. National Center for Health Statistics. National Health Interview Survey. Hyattsville, MD, 1988.

6. Sexual Activity and Teen Pregnancy

Fact:

– A white teenage girl from an advantaged background is five times more likely to become a teen mother if she grows up in a single-mother household than if she grows up in a household with both biological parents.Source: Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe. “Facing the Challenges of Fragmented Families.” The Philanthropy Roundtable 9.1 (1995): 21.

Now take a look at this Wall Street Journal article that explains some of the ways that fathers have beneficial effects on children.

Excerpt:

As an estimated 70.1 million fathers prepare to celebrate Father’s Day in the U.S., recent research shows that their distinct style of parenting is particularly worth recognition: The way dads tend to interact has long-term benefits for kids, independent of those linked to good mothering.

[…]The benefits of involved fathering are known: improved cognitive skills, fewer behavioral problems among school-age children, less delinquency among teenage boys and fewer psychological problems in young women, based on an analysis of 16 long-term studies of father involvement, published in 2008 in the scholarly journal Acta Paediatrica.

Some of dads’ behavior may spring from their roles as family breadwinners. Although mothers play a significant role in the workforce, men are still the primary breadwinners in more than three-fourths of married-couple households.

And 48% of working fathers spend less than six hours a day with their children, compared with 31% of working mothers, according to a recent poll of 459 working adults by Workplace Options, a provider of employee-assistance and work-life programs in Raleigh, N.C.

As a result, fathers may be less familiar with their children’s nonverbal cues. Such dads tend to challenge children more to express themselves in words, helping foster the better cognitive skills researchers have found in 2-year-olds with involved fathers.

Parenting patterns may be rooted in neurological differences. Under stress, research shows, men’s brains are wired to respond to challenges physically, leaping into action. Women are more likely to withdraw or shut down.

Because fathers have had to learn to manage their own impulses to strike out or react physically to frustration, they may be better equipped than mothers to help children manage their own urges to behave badly, Dr. Pruett says.

Indeed, fathers typically aren’t as upset as mothers by kids’ tantrums or bad behavior, based on a 2009 survey of 1,615 parents by Zero to Three, a nonprofit child-development research and policy organization. Only half as many fathers as mothers say their children’s temper tantrums are one of their biggest challenges.

Fathers matter, so women need to choose men who will be good fathers. And that means having an idea of what fathers do, and knowing how to evaluate a man to see if he can do what fathers do. There’s more to fathers than handsomeness and fun!

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News

If we redefine marriage, then what will the schools teach our children about it?

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Here’s a good article in the Public Discourse.

Excerpt:

We need to be careful not to project our adult understandings onto children. They will develop identities based on the culture around them, not on the culture we grew up in. In the past, boys knew that if they married when they grew up, they would marry a woman; and girls knew that if they married when they grew up, they would marry a man. Children understood that marriage brought men and women together to form families because every aspect of our culture conveyed that message. There was nothing automatic about it. Change the culture, and you change the outcome.

What will our culture teach children now? How will parents answer children’s questions? If Billy says, “Do you think I might marry Timmy when I grow up?” what is the answer? “We’ll have to wait and see what your sexual orientation is and what Timmy’s sexual orientation is”? Or “If you get married, it will probably be to a girl”? Instead of a clear foundation for building their self-understanding, the children will receive nebulous answers.

The educational system will be an authoritative source of insecurity for children. Planned Parenthood, the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), Advocates for Youth, Answer, and Future of Sex Education (FoSE) are powerful national organizations bonded together to promote not just sex education but also “gender education” to our young. These groups have produced the National Sexuality Education Standards “to address the inconsistent implementation of sexuality education nationwide.”

Under these standards, children ages eight to ten will be taught to “define sexual orientation as romantic attraction to an individual of the same gender or of a different gender.”

Children ages ten to twelve will be taught, among other things, to

  1. Differentiate between gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.
  2. Analyze external influences that have an impact on one’s attitudes about gender, sexual orientation, and gender identity.
  3. Access accurate information about gender identity, gender expression, and sexual orientation.
  4. Communicate respectfully with and about people of all gender identities, gender expressions, and sexual orientations.

Throughout these and other guidelines published by national sex and gender education groups, there is an emphasis on teaching young children three identities, underscoring a distinction between each person’s biological sex, gender identity, and sexual orientation. This “three identity” approach may help some students, but it will damage the vast majority of them.

In fact, the “three identities” approach will confuse us all. For example, Massachusetts has a new transgender directive about the use of bathrooms and locker rooms. Suppose someone has a male body, a female gender, and a lesbian sexual orientation. Does that person use the girl’s locker room or the boy’s? This is not said in jest or with a trace of sarcasm. The issues are too important and the people involved are too important. Helping children who have gender questions navigate the world is laudable, but we need to do it in a way that demonstrates a caring and a love for all of the children.

These gender standards or a version thereof are coming to a community near you. The goal of the “gender education” groups is to wrest control of education from local communities and parents and move the curriculum to a more centralized authority.

How will this work out in the future? Well, it’s already being pushed by left-wing activists, legislators and lawyers:

Last month, a bill was filed in Congress (H.R. 1652) entitled the Student Non-Discrimination Act (SNDA). It has the backing of the American Association of University Women; the American Federation of Teachers; the American Civil Liberties Union; the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network; the NAACP; the National Association of School Psychologists; the National Association of Secondary School Principals; the National Council of La Raza; the National Education Association; and the National Women’s Law Center.

SNDA would bring the Massachusetts gender model to all public schools across the country, prohibiting discrimination against any student on the basis of actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity. The bill authorizes lawsuits and permits federal authorities to intercede if necessary.

The same effort is underway in many states that still allow local communities and parents a voice in sex and gender education. Even Massachusetts allows for a certain amount of local control but a bill is pending to eliminate local community influence and impose statewide standards.

If local control cannot be taken by legislation or administrative directives, litigation will be employed. For example, the ACLU recently sued an elementary school in Utah because it removed a book about a lesbian couple from the school’s library shelves and made the book available by request only. The school settled the lawsuit and put the book back on display.

The drive to control sex and gender education in local school systems is and will continue to be relentless. The forces behind this movement are smart, powerful, and well-funded, often with millions of taxpayer dollars.

I wonder if people who support redefining marriage really have thought through the consequences of their position. They may think “this isn’t going to affect me at all”, and then one day wake up to find a big surprise, courtesy of the public school system.