Tag Archives: Marriage

News

New study finds that children do best in traditional mother-father families

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

From the Washington Times. (H/T Jonathan)

Excerpt: (links removed)

Two studies released Sunday may act like brakes on popular social-science assertions that gay parents are the same as — or maybe better than — married, mother-father parents.

“The empirical claim that no notable differences exist must go,” Mark Regnerus, a sociology professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said in his study in Social Science Research.

Using a new, “gold standard” data set of nearly 3,000 randomly selected American young adults, Mr. Regnerus looked at their lives on 40 measures of social, emotional and relationship outcomes.

He found that, when compared with adults raised in married, mother-father families, adults raised by lesbian mothers had negative outcomes in 24 of 40 categories, while adults raised by gay fathers had negative outcomes in 19 categories.

Findings such as these do not support claims that there are “no differences” between gay parenting and heterosexual, married parents, said Mr. Regnerus, who helped develop the New Family Structures Study at the university.

Instead, “children appear most apt to succeed well as adults when they spend their entire childhood with their married mother and father, and especially when the parents remain married to the present day,” he wrote.

Mr. Regnerus‘ study of 2,988 persons ages 18 to 39 — including 175 adults raised by lesbian mothers and 73 adults raised by gay fathers — marks the first research from the new dataset, which initially included some 15,000 persons.

The second study, also in Social Science Research, takes a critical look at the basis of an oft-cited American Psychological Association (APA) report on gay parenting.

The APA brief says, “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,” said Loren Marks, associate professor at the School of Human Ecology at Louisiana State University.

However, after looking at the 59 studies that undergird this assertion, “the jury is still out,” Mr. Marks said. “The lack of high-quality data leaves the most significant questions [about gay parenting] unaddressed and unanswered.”

Problems with the APA-cited studies were their tiny size; dependence on wealthy, white, well-educated lesbian mothers; and a failure to examine common outcomes for children, such as their education, employment and risks for poverty, criminality, early childbearing, substance abuse and suicide. Instead, the APA studies often looked at children’s gender-role behaviors, emotional functioning and sexual identity.

This story was also reported on Science Daily, with the predictable liberal spin.

Here is my previous post on the data that shows why same-sex unions are not good for raising children.

News

Marcia Segelstein’s article on chastity in the newest issue of Salvo magazine

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Here’s the article that is available online on the Salvo Magazine web site.

Here’s a bit about the author, Marcia Segelstein:

Marcia Segelstein, a senior editor of Salvo, is a part-time writer and a full-time mother. A former senior producer for CBS News, she has also written for First Things, Touchstone, and OneNewsNow.

And here’s a snippet from the article:

Dr. Jenell Williams Paris is the author of The End of Sexual Identity: Why Sex Is Too Important to Define Who We Are. She told Relevant that Christians need more than rules to live chastely. What’s often missing, Paris believes, is a compelling story and an understanding of the “whys” behind the rules. To explain what she means, she uses the example of parents teaching their little girl to look both ways before crossing a street:

A young child may follow this rule solely because of the power of her parents’ authority, which is appropriate. As she grows, the child [continues to look both ways,] but for a deeper reason that she owns for herself. She sees the broader context of traffic, understands the benefits and dangers, and makes choices accordingly. Rules are external and authority-bound: Maturity requires knowledge of why to do the right thing, not just what the right thing is.

Chris Jessee is the Youth and Family Pastor at First Baptist Church in Waynesville, Ohio. Last year, he organized an event in conjunction with True Love Waits, an organization that promotes abstinence till marriage, and several area churches. Unlike other such events he’s been involved with, he included parents in this one. “Every year we did True Love Waits without the parents, we were missing out on a critical aspect of it,” he explained in an interview. “I believe parents are the key element when it comes to discussions of purity with teens.”

In his view, the church’s role should be to encourage and train parents to address abstinence issues with their children. Echoing Dr. Paris’s approach, Jessee believes a critical aspect of that training is providing both parents and their teens with the “whys” they need to defend their faith and its practices. Merely laying out the rules isn’t enough.

Statistics back up Jessee’s views on the crucial role of parents. A study conducted by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, titled “With One Voice 2010,” asked teens aged 12 to 19 who is most influential when it comes to decisions about sex. Almost half, 46 percent, said their parents were most influential, with friends coming in second at 20 percent.

That’s exactly right – we need to have reasons and evidence when talking about chastity – and call young people up to a higher standard of romance, intimacy and commitment. They need to know what they are getting by embracing chastity, and not just what they are giving up. On my blog, I often post about the research that shows the benefits of chastity, as in this previous post. I love chastity and I highly recommend it – especially to Christian men.

And yes – I really did write the sidebar for this article, and you can see it online. The sidebar is about practical tips for chastity. It’s based on some of my previous posts on how to be chaste. The older I get, the more I thank God that I still have my wits about me when it comes to women. Chastity allows you to be very circumspect about women and to make sure that they really are as good as you think they are and that they really can do the things that you need them to do in a marriage.

Polemics

How the presence and quality of fathers affects belief in God

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Here’s an article by Paul Copan which points out how father presence/absence and father quality affects belief and disbelief in God.

Excerpt:

Seventh, the attempt to psychologize believers applies more readily to the hardened atheist.It is interesting that while atheists and skeptics often psychoanalyze the religious believer, they regularly fail to psychoanalyze their ownrejection of God. Why are believers subject to such scrutiny and not atheists? Remember another feature of Freud’s psychoanalysis — namely, an underlying resentment that desires to kill the father figure.

Why presume atheism is the rational, psychologically sound, and default position while theism is somehow psychologically deficient? New York University psychology professor Paul Vitz turns the tables on such thinking. He essentially says, “Let’s look into the lives of leading atheists and skeptics in the past. What do they have in common?” The result is interesting: virtually all of these leading figures lacked a positive fatherly role model — or had no father at all.11

Let’s look at some of them.

  • Voltaire(1694–1778): This biting critic of religion, though not an atheist, strongly rejected his father and rejected his birth name of François-Marie Arouet.
  • David Hume(1711–76): The father of this Scottish skeptic died when Hume was only 2 years old. Hume’s biographers mention no relatives or family friends who could have served as father figures.
  • Baron d’Holbach(1723–89): This French atheist became an orphan at age 13 and lived with his uncle.
  • Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–72): At age 13, his father left his family and took up living with another woman in a different town.
  • Karl Marx(1818–83): Marx’s father, a Jew, converted to being a Lutheran under pressure — not out of any religious conviction. Marx, therefore, did not respect his father.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche(1844–1900): He was 4 when he lost his father.
  • Sigmund Freud(1856–1939): His father, Jacob, was a great disappointment to him; his father was passive and weak. Freud also mentioned that his father was a sexual pervert and that his children suffered for it.
  • Bertrand Russell(1872–1970): His father died when he was 4.
  • Albert Camus(1913–60): His father died when he was 1 year old, and in his autobiographical novel The First Man, his father is the central figure preoccupation of his work.
  • Jean-Paul Sartre(1905–80): The famous existentialist’s father died before he was born.12
  • Madeleine Murray-O’Hair (1919–95): She hated her father and even tried to kill him with a butcher knife.
  • We could throw in a few more prominent contemporary atheists not mentioned by Vitz with similar childhood challenges:
  • Daniel Dennett (1942–): His father died when he was 5 years of age and had little influence on Dennett.13
  • Christopher Hitchens (1949–): His father (“the Commander”) was a good man, according to Hitchens, but he and Hitchens “didn’t hold much converse.” Once having “a respectful distance,” their relationship took on a “definite coolness” with an “occasional thaw.” Hitchens adds: “I am rather barren of paternal recollections.”14
  • Richard Dawkins (1941–): Though encouraged by his parents to study science, he mentions being molested as a child — no insignificant event, though Dawkins dismisses it as merely embarrassing.15

Moreover, Vitz’s study notes how many prominent theists in the past — such as Blaise Pascal, G.K. Chesterton, Karl Barth, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer — have had in common a loving, caring father in their lives.16

Not only is there that anecdotal evidence, but there is also statistical evidence.

Excerpt:

In 1994 the Swiss carried out an extra survey that the researchers for our masters in Europe (I write from England) were happy to record. The question was asked to determine whether a person’s religion carried through to the next generation, and if so, why, or if not, why not. The result is dynamite. There is one critical factor. It is overwhelming, and it is this: It is the religious practice of the father of the family that, above all, determines the future attendance at or absence from church of the children.

If both father and mother attend regularly, 33 percent of their children will end up as regular churchgoers, and 41 percent will end up attending irregularly. Only a quarter of their children will end up not practicing at all. If the father is irregular and mother regular, only 3 percent of the children will subsequently become regulars themselves, while a further 59 percent will become irregulars. Thirty-eight percent will be lost.

If the father is non-practicing and mother regular, only 2 percent of children will become regular worshippers, and 37 percent will attend irregularly. Over 60 percent of their children will be lost completely to the church.

Let us look at the figures the other way round. What happens if the father is regular but the mother irregular or non-practicing? Extraordinarily, the percentage of children becoming regular goesupfrom 33 percent to 38 percent with the irregular mother and to 44 percent with the non-practicing, as if loyalty to father’s commitment grows in proportion to mother’s laxity, indifference, or hostility.

[…]In short, if a father does not go to church, no matter how faithful his wife’s devotions, only one child in 50 will become a regular worshipper. If a father does go regularly, regardless of the practice of the mother, between two-thirds and three-quarters of their children will become churchgoers (regular and irregular). If a father goes but irregularly to church, regardless of his wife’s devotion, between a half and two-thirds of their offspring will find themselves coming to church regularly or occasionally.

A non-practicing mother with a regular father will see a minimum of two-thirds of her children ending up at church. In contrast, a non-practicing father with a regular mother will see two-thirds of his children never darken the church door. If his wife is similarly negligent that figure rises to 80 percent!

The results are shocking, but they should not be surprising. They are about as politically incorrect as it is possible to be; but they simply confirm what psychologists, criminologists, educationalists, and traditional Christians know. You cannot buck the biology of the created order. Father’s influence, from the determination of a child’s sex by the implantation of his seed to the funerary rites surrounding his passing, is out of all proportion to his allotted, and severely diminished role, in Western liberal society.

Basically, anyone who doesn’t have a benevolent, involved father is going to have an enormously difficult time believing that moral boundaries set by an authority are for the benefit of the person who is being bounded. The best way to make moral boundaries stick is to see that they apply to the person making the boundaries as well – and that these moral boundaries are rational, evidentially-grounded and not arbitrary. It is therefore very important to children to be shepherded by a man who has integrity and who has studied moral issues like chastity, abortion and same-sex marriage in order to know how to be persuasive to others, using real-world evidence and non-religious arguments.

I think from a practical point of view, it’s also important for women to think carefully about men they choose to have sex with and to marry. The relationship with the child with the man who raises them is vital to belief in God. Judging from the evidence above, one can make a case that any woman who participates in men who are not capable of life-long commitment, providing and protecting, etc. and who are not capable of leading on moral spiritual issues is basically risking her ability to present her child to God as a Christian.

A child’s relationship with God begins with his/her mother’s ability to control herself and choose the right man for the job of being a father. Note that superficial qualities like “deep voice”, “broad shoulders”, “expensive shoes”, “likes dogs” and “makes me laugh” have no bearing on a man’s ability to commit and lead on moral/spiritual issues. We don’t really do a good job of showing evidence of choices and outcomes to women in the church, which is why there are so many fatherless children being conceived by women who go to church. Christian women are following their feelings to premarital sex, missionary cohabitation, and abortions under the supervision of ignorant, man-blaming pastors who don’t want to judge the delicate women by offering them facts.