Tag Archives: Marriage

Commentary

Assessing feminism’s results: the hook-up culture

Leave a comment

This must-read ABC news story should help to open some eyes. (H/T Muddling Towards Maturity)

Canadian filmmaker Sharlene Azam interviews some young people about the quality of their relationships in the brave new world of feminism.

Prostitution:

“Five minutes and I got $100,” one girl said. “If I’m going to sleep with them, anyway, because they’re good-looking, might as well get paid for it, right?”

Another girl talked about being offered $20 to take off her shirt or $100 to do a striptease on a table at a party.

The girls are almost always from good homes, but their parents are completely unaware, Azam said.

Coercion:

“I think there’s very much trading for relationship favors, almost like ‘you need to do this [to] stay in this relationship,'” one girl told “Good Morning America.”

“There’s a lot of social pressure,” said another. “Especially because of our age, a lot of girls want to be in a relationship and they’re willing to do anything.”

Self-destruction:

“I mean, we’re not looking for our future husbands,” one girl said. “We’re just looking for, maybe like … at our age, especially, I think all of us, both sexes, we have a lot of urges, I guess, that need to be taken care of. So if we resort to a casual thing, no strings attached, it’s perfectly fine.”

Azam said she thinks the “no strings attached” romances could be a defense mechanism against a greater disappointment.

“A lot of girls are disappointed in love,” she said. “And I think they believe they can hook up the way guys do and not care.

Why feminism is to blame

It was feminism that sought to replace fathers with government social programs. Feminism that raised taxes to provide social safety nets for women who could not be bothered to choose boyfriends wisely. Feminism that instituted no-fault divorce to encourage women to divorce men for money. And feminism that pushed women out of the home via high tax rates, so that children would be indoctrinated by left-wing public schools.

Let me be clear: the Democrat party is anti-family. Their policies destroy love, marriage and parenting. The secular-marxist-feminist left wants to control people. Free market capitalism, the family and robust religious beliefs are obstacles to their fascist goals. Feminism opposes the family, secularism opposes the integration of faith and public actions, and marxism opposes free market capitalism – the ground of liberty itself.

I think that young people are uninformed/unwise/un-parented enough to believe that these experiences are not scarring them emotionally. I am a man and growing up I knew intuitively that sexual intimacy with women followed by separation would be a catastrophe emotionally. The only way to properly assess the opposite sex is by keeping clear of their insecure, godless, soulless, clutching arms. Physical contact kills objectivity.

Young people are the most shallow people in the world. They judge people on appearances, and they try to use people to make themselves happy. Christian young people are not taught to view relationships as alliances made for the benefit of God’s purposes in the world. Instead, young people don’t know whether God exists, what he is like, and how to involve his goals and character in their decision making.

When I was a young man, I dreamed about romance, courtship, poetry, roses, marriage and lifting up my children in front of my face. I made decisions to prepare for that vision: chastity, investing, frugality, studying theology and apologetics, etc. I made sure that I could satisfy the demands of being a husband and father. I spent equal time on computer science, to make money, and on Christianity, to gain knowledge, wisdom and character.

I would say that the vast majority of young people today repudiate that vision of family with their actions. Their morality is moral relativism. Their epistemology is postmodernism. Their purpose in life is hedonism. This is not liberating. On the contrary: their actions removed their ability to marry, relate to a spouse and parent children. The more Christianity retreats, the more atheist “morality” steps in.

If atheism is true, then there is no real way we ought to be. Each person struggles with others to secure feelings of happiness. Other people don’t have any purpose except to be forced to make us happy. There is no morality. There is no free will. There is no moral accountability. There is no ultimate significance. There is no purpose. And children, born and unborn, are the biggest victims of all.

Commentary

Exploding the myth of “Deadbeat Dads”

Leave a comment

Dr. Stephen Baskerville e-mailed met to let me know about an important article in the Washington Times about the new show on the anti-male “Lifetime” network. If you want to understand why men don’t want to be husbands and fathers any more, read this entire piece.

Excerpt:

More than 90 percent of fathers with joint custody paid the support due, according to a Census Bureau report (Series P-23, No. 173). So deadbeats are in the minority. Also, most so-called deadbeat dads actually are dead broke. Two-thirds of men who fail to make child-support payments earn poverty-level wages, according to the Federal Office of Child Support Enforcement. Most of the others are unemployed.

Bruce Walker, executive coordinator at the District Attorneys Council in Oklahoma City, who ran the state’s child-support enforcement program for three years and jailed hundreds of fathers for nonpayment, told the Newark Star-Ledger in 2002: “These men are seldom the mythical monsters described by politicians.”

“Many times I prosecuted impoverished men,” he told the Star-Ledger. “I prosecuted one deadbeat dad who had been hospitalized for malnutrition and another who lived in the bed of a pickup truck.”

On his blog, Dr. Baskerville links to some responses to the article, including his own:

Two powerful letters in response were published Wednesday:
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/20/the-demonization-of-dads/
http://washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/20/love-and-divorce/

My own letter was published Thursday (full letter below):
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/may/21/the-agony-of-child-support/

All three are worth reading because they are full of statistics that will shock you. Here is the best bit from the third:

Ostensibly created to recover welfare costs, child support enforcement on the federal level has failed and now costs taxpayers more than $3 billion annually. More seriously, it pays mothers to divorce or forgo marriage, thus creating the very problem it is supposed to alleviate.

Mothers are not the only ones who profit from fatherless children. State governments generate revenue from child support at federal taxpayers’ expense. By paying states according to the amount of child support they collect, federal programs give states an interest in more fatherless children. The more broken homes there are, the more revenue for the state.

Don’t forget to read the facts on the lack of male teachers in the schools, which undermines men’s ability to achieve and to be responsible. And when you’re done with that, you can read about the problem of no-fault divorce and the family court system. (A shorter version is linked here)

For those of you who are pro-life or pro-traditional marriage, I want to advise you that this issue is also a very important, although under-reported, issue for social conservatives. Fathers matter, and the state has policies in place that are discouraging men from their traditional role in the family. In the case of a divorce, fathers almost never get custody, and sometimes they do not see their children for years.

Before, I wrote about the fact that 40% of new births are to unwed mothers. Generous benefits provided by the government ensure that fathers are dispensable. Over 20 million children in the United States are raised without a father in the home. And I’m sure you know the social costs to young men and women: violence, anxiety, promiscuity, unwed motherwood, teen pregnancy, abortion, suicides, depression, drug addiction, etc.

And don’t even get me started on the false allegations of rape, harassment, etc., such as the recent Duke University lacrosse scandal. Women who make these false allegations are almost never punished! Over two-thirds of divorces are initiated by women for “irreconcilable differences”. You have to understand that thoughtful men notice these things, and they will make decisions accordingly.

Surprise! Men don’t like being treated poorly by the state. Treat us poorly enough and we’ll find other things to do with our lives than get marriage and raise children. To see what that might look like, take a look at this article on birth rates in countries that are further along the marxist-feminist agenda than the United States.

More in my series on how Democrat policies discourage marriage: Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here and Part 3 is here.

Polemics

Why do people oppose same-sex marriage?

12 Comments

UPDATE: The research paper seems to have expired from the FRC web site, but you can see the whole thing here.

I found this research paper at the Family Research Council web site. The paper compares same-sex couples and heterosexual married couples, in the following ways:

  • relationship duration
  • monogamy vs. promiscuity
  • relationship commitment
  • number of children being raised
  • health risks
  • rates of intimate partner violence

Are there really significant differences between the two arrangements? Let’s take a look at the some of the data.

Relationship duration

% of Marriages Remaining Intact
% of Marriages Remaining Intact

Source: National Center for Health Statistics, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (2001)

Length of Current Homosexual Relationship
Length of Current Homosexual Relationship

Source: 2003-2004 Gay/Lesbian Consumer Online Census

Monogamy vs Promiscuity

% Reporting Sexual Fidelity
% Reporting Sexual Fidelity

Sources:Laumann, The Social Organization of Sexuality, 216; McWhirter and Mattison, The Male Couple: How Relationships Develop (1984): 252-253; Wiederman, “Extramarital Sex,” 170.

Rates of intimate partner violence

Intimate Partner Violence
Intimate Partner Violence

Sources: “Extent, Nature, and Consequences of Intimate Partner Violence,” U.S. Department of Justice: Office of Justice Programs: 30; “Intimate Partner Violence,” Bureau of Justice Statistics Special Report:11.

Conclusion

Marriage is a relationship that has a specific purpose. That purpose is to bind together two opposite natures and to produce children that are biologically linked to the parents. The children gain the benefits of being parented by the two different natures, so they get two perspectives. The fact that the children are genetically linked to two parents helps to ensure the stability of the commitment, as we see in the animal kingdom where animals protect their young.

The goal of marriage is not to increase the happiness of the adults, or to “recognize” the love of adults. The goal of marriage is have two people enter into a relationship where they understand that it is not about adults being fulfilled. Marriage is about people having a goal of raising children, which are tremendously stressful to raise. Marriage requires self-denial and sacrifice in order to raise those children – that is the main point of it. It also requires fidelity and chastity, so that the environment is kept stable for the children over a long period of time.

Children benefit from the stability that is more common in traditional marriages than it is in other arrangements, including heterosexual co-habitation which is similarly unstable (50% greater chance of divorce, more domestic violence, etc.). Therefore, it is important to keep the concept of marriage separate from other kinds of relationships so that the focus on commitment for the sake of the children is clear to those who contemplate marriage. Society needs to give special recognition to married couples, in view of their child-focused commitment.

I apologize in advance if this post causes anyone any harm or distress, I am just trying to explain why people have that opinion. They could be wrong, but that is the case they make. Obviously, married couples fall short of the goal, but that is their goal.

Further study

Two much bigger challenges to marriage are big-government socialism and especially no-fault divorce. I also wrote about same-sex marriage and co-habitation before, in the context of European states like Sweden and Norway.

You may also be interested in a recent post about whether homosexuality is caused by a “gay gene”.