Tag Archives: Marriage

News

New study: higher risk of divorce when men do housework

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Atheist commenter Jerry sent me this story about a Norwegian study that affirms traditional roles within the marriage.

Excerpt:

Couples who share housework duties run a higher risk of divorce than couples where the woman does most of the chores, a Norwegian study sure to get tongues wagging has shown.

The divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 per cent higher than among those where the woman did most of the work.

“The more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,” Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled Equality in the Home, said.

Researchers found no, or very little, cause-and-effect. Rather, they saw in the correlation a sign of “modern” attitudes.

“Modern couples are just that, both in the way they divide up the chores and in their perception of marriage” as being less sacred, Mr Hansen said, stressing it was all about values.

“In these modern couples, women also have a high level of education and a well-paid job, which makes them less dependent on their spouse financially. They can manage much easier if they divorce,” he said.

There were only some marginal aspects where researchers said there may be cause-and-effect.

“Maybe it’s sometimes seen as a good thing to have very clear roles with lots of clarity … where one person is not stepping on the other’s toes,” Mr Hansen suggested.

“There could be less quarrels, since you can easily get into squabbles if both have the same roles and one has the feeling that the other is not pulling his or her own weight,” he added.

I think that this article is basically correct – men like having clearly defined roles. A man has the traditional roles of protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader. He has the responsibility to lead in those areas. He doesn’t want to have the woman’s role, he doesn’t want to be forced to perform it. Men don’t like to be nagged. He doesn’t want to be micromanaged. He doesn’t want the government telling him how to do his roles, either. I think that one of the reasons why men are so unwilling to marry is because they sense that they could be dominated by their wives and by the state – a state that is not very interested in promoting the interests of men.

In my case, I am a bachelor, so I have to do all my own cleaning, cooking and nurturing. I like learning more about cooking and cleaning and anything else practical. But I hope that if I did get married, then my wife would take the lead in those areas, and push me to be better at my special male roles. I would also hope that she would vote to protect my ability to perform my roles. For example, lower taxes and less regulation, so that I can easily find a job to provide for the family. And concealed carry, so that I can always protect my family. And school choice, so that the schools do not undermine our values and teaching. I think that women should be focused on supporting their husbands, and raising effective, influential children. Once the children are old enough, she can focus having an influence outside the home through engagement in the church, the university and in the political sphere. I think someone like Michele Bachmann has done everything right at the right times, for example.

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Commentary

We must make the moral argument against dependence on government

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Consider this article by Jackie Gingrich Cushman.

Full text:

The Obama administration’s policies are bad. Bad in the sense that the policies are morally corrupting. They take money and control away from people and give them to government bureaucrats, who then decide what should be done. The policies encourage people to be less responsible personally and to rely more on the government.

Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher argued that “socialism itself — in all its incarnations, wherever and however it was applied — was morally corrupting,” Claire Berlinski wrote in “There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters” (Basic Books, 2008). “Socialism turned good citizens into bad ones; it turned strong nations into weak ones; it promoted vice and discouraged virtue … transformed formerly hardworking and self-reliant men and women into whining, weak and flabby loafers.”

Sound familiar?

Republicans are currently debating the surface arguments about the Obama administration’s programs — they cost too much, they are not paid for and there is too much government intervention.

The core of the matter is the same today as it was in Great Britain in the 1970s.

The system President Obama is championing is morally wrong.

In order to win in November, Republican nominee Mitt Romney must win the argument, and thereby win the vote.

The argument is that the system Obama is promoting is bad and that it creates a weak society. Romney needs to articulate what it is to be an American; why we must defend America’s core values; why they are good values.

Romney’s speech this week at the Clinton Global Initiative reverberated with these themes.

He talked about “the incomparable dignity of work.”

“Free enterprise,” he said, “has done more to bless humanity than any other economic system not only because it is the only system that creates a prosperous middle class, but also because it is the only system where the individual enjoys the freedom to guide and build his or her own life. Free enterprise cannot only make us better off financially, it can make us better people.”

Romney recounted the story of Muhammed Bouazizi of Tunisia. “He was just 26 years old. He had provided for his family since he was a young boy. He worked a small fruit stand, selling to passers-by. The regular harassment by corrupt bureaucrats was elevated one day when they took crates of his fruit and his weighing scales away from him.

“On the day of his protest, witnesses say that an officer slapped Bouazizi and he cried out: ‘Why are you doing this to me? I’m a simple person, and I just want to work.'”

“I just want to work,” Romney repeated.

“Work. That must be at the heart of our effort to help people build economies that can create jobs for people, young and old alike. Work builds self-esteem,” he continued. “It transforms minds from fantasy and fanaticism to reality and grounding. Work will not long tolerate corruption nor quietly endure the brazen theft by government of the product of hardworking men and women.”

He linked free enterprise to freedom. “The most successful countries shared something in common,” he said. “They were the freest. They protected the rights of the individual. They enforced the rule of law. And they encouraged free enterprise. They understood that economic freedom is the only force in history that has consistently lifted people out of poverty — and kept people out of poverty.”

The next step is for Romney to lay out this argument not only for other countries, but for our own. It works here as well as abroad. There are 12.5 million unemployed Americans; 8 million more are working part-time when they want to work full time; 2.6 million people are so discouraged that they have given up looking for work and are no longer counted as unemployed.

More than 23 million Americans understand the statement, “I just want to work.”

These people and those around them understand that there is great dignity in work, and want to work — but cannot find a job.

In order to win the vote in November, we must first win the argument. America works best when Americans are working. The way to get more Americans to work is to promote freedom, ingenuity and free enterprise. While government programs and subsidies might provide temporary relief, the only proven way to long-term prosperity is to create more jobs, thereby allowing people to lift themselves up, providing not only their monetary needs, but also dignity of purpose.

My biggest concern about socialism is how it makes it harder for men to be providers, and easier for women to do without a man – even having children without a man. I really oppose that – fatherlessness is not good for children.

Voting for Democrats means voting for bigger government which means voting for higher taxes to pay for it all. Higher taxes means that there is less money in the pockets of job creators, and that means fewer jobs. But it also that a married man can no longer retain enough of his earnings to support a family. And that means his wife has to work and won’t be able to take care of young children or her husband. Instead of learning the values of the parents, children will learn what the government schools decide they should learn. It’s a disaster. And it’s immoral. It’s immoral to take the provider role away from men and give it to a parasitical secular government. It destroys marriage and it destroys family.

News

After legalizing gay marriage, France set to ban ‘mother’ and ‘father’ from official documents

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From the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

France is set to ban the words “mother” and “father” from all official documents under controversial plans to legalise gay marriage.

The move… means only the word “parents” would be used in identical marriage ceremonies for all heterosexual and same-sex couples.

The draft law states that “marriage is a union of two people, of different or the same gender”.

It says all references to “mothers and fathers” in the civil code – which enshrines French law – will be swapped for simply “parents”.

The law would also give equal adoption rights to homosexual and heterosexual couples.

[…]President Francois Hollande pledged in his manifesto to legalise gay marriage. The draft law will be presented to his cabinet for approval on October 31.

Hollande is a socialist, just like Barack Obama, who also favors gay marriage, and infanticide, too. Not just abortion, infanticide.

This is not surprising – the same thing has been done in other countries, like Spain:

Ironically, the Socialist government claims that although it pushed through legislation to benefit a small minority of the population – and in the process changed the definition of marriage – that this could in no way be construed as an attack on the traditional family. Indeed, the government claims that it is in truth pro-family.

So now, jump fast forward to last Friday.

That’s when the Spanish government announced a ministerial order that new births would have to be registered at the State Civil Registries in the Family Book under the headings of Parent (progenitor) A, and Parent (progenitor) B.

In other words, the terms “Father” and “Mother” were to be no longer used.

In Spain, marriages, births and deaths are all recorded at Civil Registries, with most of those actions being noted in a Family Book (Libro de Familia). While the example isn’t perfect, think of the Family Book as an extended birth certificate.

Juan Fernando López Aguilar, Spanish Minister of Justice, excused the ministerial order by claiming since the government modified “the status of civil marriages, to allow the union of same-sex couples, it was necessary for a new format for the Family Book (Libro de Familia) and one that used terms such as “Parent A” and “Parent B” instead of “Father” and “Mother.”

That’s right. To match up it’s same-sex marriage legislation to the Civil Registry, the government deemed that Spaniards could no longer qualify themselves as either “Fathers” or “Mothers” of their children.

Canada does the same thing:

In Canada, they’ve already done this. Following the passing of the Civil Marriage Act, all official documentation and legislation was amended, erasing “husbands” and “wives”. And because same-sex couples primarily use reproductive technology to procreate, some Canadian legislation has been amended to replace the term “natural parent” with “legal parent”. As one report describes it: “In short, the adoption exception – that who is a child’s parent is established by legal fiat, not biological connection – becomes the norm for all children.” Most strikingly, on birth certificates some Canadian provinces have replaced the term “father” and “mother” with “Parent 1” and “Parent 2”.

That policy was put in place by the Liberal party, which is the socialist party in Canada, and with the full support of the communist party of Canada, the New Democrat Party.

It’s important to understand what effects these leftist, anti-family, anti-marriage policies have, especially on children. This is what Barack Obama and his socialist friends in other countries want. Leftists are anti-marriage and anti-family. They don’t like mothers and fathers raising children. They want the children to be alone in the world, and shuffled around to various people, and eventually raised by the state and brainwashed to serve the state. Feminism has so poisoned people against the traditional family – and especially the traditional male roles of protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader – that no one is willing to resist the push by socialists to destroy marriage and family.

Imagine being a child and growing up with no access to your biological mother or your biological father, or both of them. This is the horror that the left unleashes on little children, assuming they don’t murder you in the womb. As if it isn’t bad enough to push feminist policies like no-fault divorce and subsidized single motherhood, now they have to go even further. Let me be clear. We should be putting into place policies that promote the nuclear family – a mother and a father being chaste, marrying once for life, and having children who grow up in a loving, stable environment. We should not be promoting recreational sex and promiscuity as equivalent to marriage. Children deserve better.

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