Tag Archives: Marriage

News

Law professor uses same-sex marriage law to argue for legalizing polygamy

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From the Los Angeles Times.

Excerpt:

Jonathan Turley is probably not the most popular man right now with supporters of same-sex marriage. The George Washington University law professor has filed a suit challenging the constitutionality of Utah’s anti-polygamy laws — and his argument is based on a landmark 2003 Supreme Court gay rights decision. That’s not good news in the view of most gay rights supporters, who don’t want their cause linked to that of polygamists any more than they want to see parallels drawn with people who engage in incest, bestiality and other taboo sexual practices.

The Utah case involves Kody Brown, his legal wife, Meri Brown, and three other “sister wives.” It’s not actually about marriage, and it doesn’t challenge the right of the state to refuse to issue wedding licenses to polygamous families. The Browns are in court because they fear they will be prosecuted.

The 2003 gay rights case, Lawrence vs. Texas, was also a criminal matter unrelated to same-sex marriage. The court overturned the conviction of two men found to have violated a state law against same-sex sodomy. But in reaching that conclusion, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy offered a paean to intimate relationships defined by sexuality that easily can be transferred to the context of same-sex marriage, and potentially to polygamous marriages as well:

“The case does involve two adults who, with full and mutual consent from each other, engaged in sexual practices common to a homosexual lifestyle. The petitioners are entitled to respect for their private lives. The state cannot demean their existence or control their destiny by making their private sexual conduct a crime. Their right to liberty under the [Constitution’s] due process clause gives them the full right to engage in their conduct without intervention of the government.”

Kennedy emphasized in Lawrence that same-sex marriage wasn’t before the court. Similarly, in an interview with the New York Times, Turley suggested that decriminalizing polygamy will not inevitably lead to a movement for polygamous marriage.

This is what happens every time with liberal social policies like no-fault divorce, etc. First, offended victims of the mean, judgmental Christians are trotted out and sobbed over. Second, we are assured that de-criminalizing behaviors that the mean, judgmental Christians oppose will not hurt anyone. Third, Christians themselves abandon morality and support decriminalizing the behaviors because they they are more concerned about the sob stories of the “victims” than assessing the consequences of policy/law changes. Fourth, the predictable consequences of normalizing the behaviors are labeled as “unexpected” and require higher taxes and social programs to “fix”. It all starts with people who just don’t want to be told “no” – they just don’t like moral boundaries. And they don’t care who is harmed.

Commentary

Is redistribution of wealth a substitute for marriage and family?

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From MercatorNet. (H/T Mary)

Excerpt:

The circumstances of the half-million indigenous people of Australia are quite varied, from integration in capital cities to isolated outback townships where people barely speak English. But they are united in being disadvantaged. Life expectancy for Aboriginal men and women is about 10 years less than non-indigenous Australians. Other indices of social welfare – employment, education, housing, infant mortality – are appalling. It would paint a rosy picture to describe some Aboriginal settlements as Third World. They are Fourth World camps with unimaginable levels of squalor, domestic violence, child sex abuse, drunkenness, and drug abuse.

[…]…over the past 40 years, the conditions of indigenous people, relative to the rest of Australia, have hardly changed. Not that the government has been sitting on its hands. In fact, as a scathing review of the effectiveness of its programmes showed this week, it has been busy spending money hand over fist — A$3.5 billion a year for many years. And, says the report, these billions have “yielded dismally poor returns to date”.

“The history of Commonwealth policy for Indigenous Australians over the past 40 years is largely a story of good intentions, flawed policies, unrealistic assumptions, poor implementation, unintended consequences and dashed hopes. Strong policy commitments and large investments of government funding have too often produced outcomes which have been disappointing at best and appalling at worst.”

How to raise the standard of living of indigenous people is bitterly disputed. This vast and intractable morass has defeated generations of government bureaucrats, both white and indigenous. Unhappily, as the report acknowledges, “good intentions in Indigenous affairs do not translate easily into good policy, and … the risk of unintended consequences in this domain is often extremely high.”

There is one promising approach on the table – to abandon the welfare mentality to which so many Aborigines are addicted. Some Aboriginal leaders, like Noel Pearson and Galarrwuy Yunupingu are trying to convince their people and the Federal and state governments that less sit-down money is needed, not more. They argue forcefully that welfare is a poison which is killing their people.

[…]But both governments and these impressive leaders have failed to address a central issue– the state of the Aboriginal family. For decades, the government has tried to give its indigenous citizens everything they needed to access the benefits of a developed economy: education, housing, health care and so on. But it withholds the pincode, which is the traditional Western family.

All the indices for Aboriginal families are dire. About 70 percent of indigenous mothers have never been married. The vast majority of children are born out of wedlock. If Aboriginal families are dysfunctional, is it any wonder that literacy levels are in the basement and drug and alcohol abuse is sky-high?

For the bureaucrats, the figures for indigenous marriage are far less important than those for literacy or health. There are probably two reasons for this. For one, they are loath to criticise customary marriage — even though it includes polygamy and child brides – lest they appear paternalistic and patronising. But the main reason must surely be that marriage is not important for them either. The high rates of divorce, co-habitation, and single-motherhood in white Australia do not trouble them.

[…]If Aborigines had strong families, their child mortality rates and maternal mortality rates would not be the same as East Timor or the Solomon Islands.

What is happening, effectively, is we are shutting Aboriginals out of Australian society by refusing to promote the most powerful social technology of all: the traditional nuclear family. Families teach orderliness, self-restraint, industriousness, ambition, respect for others’ rights – all the virtues that children need to be healthy, to take advantage of their education and to succeed in working life.

The reason why left-wing bureaucrats are opposed to strengthening marriage is because they don’t like the differing gender roles that are inherent in marriage, they don’t like chastity and sexual restraint, and they don’t like people having the ability to make a living independent of the state. If there was no “crisis” to solve, then how could the compassionate left get elected? How could they feel good about themselves by redistributing other people’s wealth and imposing their enlightened values on the poor? They need to create the crisis – they don’t want to solve it. Subsidizing risky and reckless behavior just throws gasoline on the fire – which is exactly what the left wants. They don’t like religion. They don’t like morality. They don’t think that people should feel bad about being immoral. They don’t care about encouraging people to be careful about conceiving and raising children. They care about getting elected and being perceived as generous. And they will only be stopped when people see that redistributing wealth is not as good as helping the poor to make their own way in the world – to earn their own success, independent of the state’s social programs.

We need to realize that the secular left elites are not wise, and they are not good. They do not have a plan to do good, they do what makes them feel good. They are not helping the poor, they are helping themselves. Undermining religion and morality while favoring dependence on government does not help the poor.

News

New study: feminism pressures women into unwanted sex

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This Yahoo News article explains, citing the research of Mark Regnerus. Notice that they use the phrase “gender equality” as a euphemism for feminism. The idea that men and women have no innate differences and no differing roles is the core feminist belief.

Excerpt:

In his presentation, “Sexual Economics: A Research-Based Theory of Sexual Interactions, or Why the Man Buys Dinner,” Baumeister, a psychologist, explained how applying economic principles helps understand people’s sexual decision-making, especially when they’re just beginning a relationship.

“Women’s sexuality has a kind of value that men’s sexuality does not,” he says. “Men will basically exchange other resources with women to have sex, but the reverse doesn’t work. Women … can trade sex for attention, for grades, for a promotion, for money, as in prostitution or sex with a celebrity.”

The idea, he says, is that men want sex more than women do (on average) and that sex in a relationship begins when women decide it’s time. Supply and demand rule, so whichever sex is more scarce has more power. The theory focuses on heterosexual interactions only.

When women outnumber men (as on many college campuses today) there’s more competition among women for those guys, says Mark Regnerus, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas-Austin. He addressed that in the book he co-wrote, Premarital Sex in America, out earlier this year.

Regnerus says Baumeister’s theory of sexual economics was a key element. “It’s a perspective through which to understand sexual relationships and sexual behavior,” he says.

Regnerus’ research attributes the rise of the “hookup” culture on campus to the fact that there are so many more women in college. He says Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs “wrote the key work on the subject” in 2004. Because a woman’s sexuality has a value to men, a man who wanted sex typically had to give her something of value, such as a marriage proposal.

Notice that marriage proposals don’t just come out of the blue. They need supporting evidence and accomplishments, or they look ridiculous.

Traditionally, a man would have to show a woman his suitability for the traditional roles of husband and father. He would have to demonstrate that to the woman, and to her father. He would have to declare his intentions, produce his “prospects”, including his degree transcripts, work history and financial holdings. That was before feminism. After feminism, women decided that men don’t have any special roles to fill, so there was no need for men to “apply for the job”, so to speak.

After feminism, we also had no-fault divorce made into law. This was done to accommodate women who had made poor choices when they married. No-fault divorce led to a massive exodus of fathers from the home. So now many women are growing up without fathers. We have also witnessed the rise of single motherhood by choice. With sex education, and the free availability of contraception and abortion, men have been taught to assume that sex is no big deal, and they are able to avoid committing and just get sex from the women who are giving it away for free. The remaining women who want a commitment quickly lower their expectations in order to avoid being passed up entirely. Consequently, many women have decided to get pregnant without a man, just so that they can have a relationship with someone who will not leave them. And this fatherless procreation is all taxpayer subsidized, often including free IVF for childless single women who put recreational sex and careers above marriage and child-bearing for the first 40 years of their lives.

Fatherlessness causes women to have sex at earlier and earlier ages, without any guarantee that the man can fulfill traditional roles or hold to a commitment. Feminism denies that men have distinct male roles, so women are giving up sex to men based solely on the man’s appearance and based on the approval of their peers, which is determined by a pop culture that denigrates chastity, courtship and marriage.

Fathers matter to daughters. In order to make a good choice of a man, a woman needs to see her father’s husband/father behavior to use as a measure. She needs to have a father to help her to moderate her emotions and to make romantic decisions based on practical demands of marriage and parenting. She needs to employ means/ends reasoning to evaluate a man for those roles. But feminism ejected fathers from the home, reducing the male role to sperm donor and taxpayer for welfare programs. Today, we have a generation of women who are basically giving away sex for free, with no romance or commitment in sight.

The feminist idea that “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” sounded good to a generation of feminists who had been mistreated by the “bad boys” whom they freely chose, but now we can see the result of that policy for their daughters. Oral sex on the first date is not uncommon for many teens, with no expectation of a follow-up phone call. That’s what feminism got women. All this raving about rape epidemics… and it turns out that feminism is itself largely responsible for the epidemic of forced/coerced sex. Surprise!

It looks like all those bossy, controlling, judgmental, logical, exclusive, intolerant, Christian fundamentalism men were actually more concerned with women’s happiness than feminists were all along. Maybe those boundaries were there for a reason? Maybe the Bible knows what it is talking about when it speaks about marriage, courting, family and chastity? Maybe.