CNS News reports on a very disturbing story. (H/T ECM)
Excerpt:
The birth rate in the United States hit an all-time low in 2011, according to a report released this month by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
“The 2011 preliminary number of U.S. births was 3,953,593, 1 percent less (or 45,793 fewer) births than in 2010; the general fertility rate (63.3 per 1,000 women age 15-44 years) declined to the lowest rate ever reported for the United States,” said the report.
More than 40 percent of all babies born in the country last year, the report said, were born to unmarried women.
[…]Although the percentage of babies born to unmarried women was highest among teens, the percentage of babies delivered by unmarried women of older ages increased from 2010 to 2011.
This is disturbing for many reasons, but one of those reasons is surely that Social Security will go bankrupt faster if there are not enough replacement workers paying into the system. People like me who are paying for Social Security today will never get back what we paid into it. There just aren’t enough people being born to pay out those benefits. I don’t think that fatherless children will do as well at earning income, either, which is just going to make the system go bankrupt faster.
Part of the problem, I think, is that when the economy goes south, fewer men will marry and take on the burden of having and raising children. In order to enter into the roles of husband and father, a man has to be earning a decent income and keeping what he earns. When the deficits are over a trillion dollars a year, and the job market stinks, men look at the responsibilities of marriage and parenting and they say no. This is another reason why women should not be voting for Obama.
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!
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.
WINTERY KNIGHT 