Tag Archives: Obligations

Videos

Should we kill children who impose obligations on us?

23 Comments

This woman thinks that we should. (H/T ECM)

Lori Ziganto writes:

According to author and columnist Virginia Ironside, most adopted kids would be better off dead. As would most children she considers “unfit”. In fact, she says, a “loving” mother would smother a sickly child with a pillow, because the “suffering” of being ill makes that life meaningless and not worth living. She made these vile assertions in defense of abortion while appearing on the BBC’s Sunday Morning Live during a discussion grossly entitled “Can abortion be a kindness?” First, her odious attempt to argue that abortion is a “loving choice” because some kids, in her mind, are unwanted. Her tunnel-visioned, sad excuse for a mind can’t seem to fathom the fact that the children are always wanted, by someone. You know, like people with hearts and compassion.

[…]To pro-abortionists, an illness is a reason to kill a baby. In fact, they believe that life is expendable for any reason if it doesn’t fit into your personal plans. This includes life that is outside of the woman’s body. Ms. Ironside, like most pro-abortionists, also fails to mention those pesky babies who won’t cooperate and who survive abortion attempts. Much like our President, who gives them so little thought that he, as a Senator in Illinois debating a Born Alive bill, said this:

As I understand it, this puts the burden on the attending physician who has determined, since they were performing this procedure, that, in fact, this is a nonviable fetus; that if that fetus, or child — however way you want to describe it — is now outside the mother’s womb and the doctor continues to think that it’s nonviable but there’s, let’s say, movement or some indication that, in fact, they’re not just coming out limp and dead..

However you want to describe “it”. Sort of like the suffering “things” Ms. Ironside referred to above. And, not coming out limp and dead. How dare they insist on having the human will to live and the strong spirit to survive.

This is what that fabulous, adorable Jennifer Roback Morse is always saying about feminism. The feminist idea is that relationships are never engaged in order to serve others, but only to make the strong women happy and fulfilled. Women in relationships should never have to fulfill obligations to other people, feminists tell us. Everything should be about selfishness, amusement, and personal fulfillment – including using men and children for those ends – or even killing them if they become too demanding.  (Men and children are “needy” and “pouty” – they have no right to have expectations about what women should do). The feminists have forgotten that there is a purpose for the suffering that is part of self-sacrificial love.

By the way, I spent most of last night listening to Jennifer Roback Morse lectures from her conference. If you listen to the first Bill Duncan speech, (or maybe the second), he talks about this refusal to take on the natural obligations to others in a relationship context. Look, relationships can’t last if the person is unwilling to honor their commitments. If you make a vow to take on those obligations to love someone (and children) self-sacrificially then you have to do it. Whatever happened to compassion and nurturing?

And like my virginity post showed, the ability to fulfill those obligations depends on a host of other decisions that you’ll have made before you ever get married – decisions about chastity, but also decisions about volunteering, education, earning and saving. The habits you set when dealing with people of the opposite sex before you marry affects how well you can potentially treat a spouse. If you use other people like objects, you don’t suddenly magically develop the capacity to love them self-sacrificially with magic vows. You can only love as well as the decisions you make. Unselfishness has to be a practiced habit in order for the marriage to last.

UPDATE: Alisha has more here.

Commentary

Jennifer Roback Morse writes about the real issue in the marriage debate

2 Comments
Cloning her would solve the marriage problem
She knows about love and marriage

Because I’m so busy working and writing the blog, I almost never have time to read books any more. Right now I am reading Jay Richards’ “Money, Greed and God” and Jennifer Roback Morse’s “Smart Sex”. I read Smart Sex on Saturday when I go to lunch.

I found a wonderful series of passages on marriage and child development in Smart Sex, and I’m going to type the whole thing in for you, because I think it’s so important.

Excerpt from p. 41-43. Dr. J writes:

I believe the real issue driving the “marriage debate” is the question of what we owe to children. Do we owe them material resources, provided by society at large? Or do we owe them personal relationships, provided for them by the particular people who brought them into existence? If children truly need a two-parent, married-couple family, this would place obligations upon the adults to get married and stay married. Many adults are reluctant to accept these particular obligations. So they, along with their allies in high policy-making places, try to minimize the importance of the evidence or to reinterpret it to mean that children really need more material support from government and business.

From this perspective, the questions are: What is the minimal set of human relationships that a child can have and still turn out tolerably well? What is the least adults have to do in relationship terms for their kids to get by? How much money does society have to pump in from outisde the family to make up for the loss of relationship, so that I won’t have to give up my belief that parents are entitled to any lifestyle choices they want?

This minimalist mentality shows up in the conclusions people draw from these studies. For instance, people reinterpret the studies showing that a stepfather who spends enough time with this stepchildren can ward off some of the problems often seen in divorced families. A one level, this is undeniable. Of course children benefit from more time and attention from their fathers and stepfathers. But we are not justified in drawing the conclusion that there is no reason to be concerned about family structure as long as stepfathers spend enough time with their stepchildren. The very same study also shows that stepfathers, on average, spend much less time with their wives’ children than do biological fathers.

Many people seem to beleive it is unreasonable to expect or even encourage people to get married and stay married. But asking stepfathers to behave like biological fathers may be every bit as unreasonable . Stepfathers behave systematically differently from biological fathers. It is unrealistic to expect men to work as hard to on a relationship with another man’s child  as he would with his own child. It is more straightforward, as well as more sensible, to expect men and women to work together to maintain their marriages in the first place.

Some people argue that the children of single and divorced parents would do fine if only society would increase the resources available to the children. The government should provide some combination of subsidized day care, housing allowances, and income supplements to increase the standard of living of the children of single-parent households. This postition is unpersuasive because most studies show that problems remain even after accounting for differences in economic resources. The resources that two parents can provide are not likely to ever be fully replaced by a single parent, no matter how heavily subsidized.

I bellieve that children are harmed by the loss of relationship itself, not simply by the loss of resources. The primary business of parenthood is relational. Parenthood is much more than a process transferring resources from Big People to Little People. If that were true, resources from outside the family could possibly make up the losses that children experience from the loss of a parent.

The primary responsibility of parents is to build relationships with their children and prepare their children to build relationships on their own when they mature. The whole attachment process, upon which conscience development depends, is a relationship-building process. Replacing a father with a paycheck is not a service either to the child, who misses out on the father’s love, or to the father, who becomes reduced to a combination sperm donor and wallet.

I propose that we confront these relationship issues with more generosity toward children. Instead of asking how little we have to do, we should ask what children need from their parents in order to thrive. Instead of asking how much money it takes to substitute for the presence of both parents, we could ask what parents can do to keep growing in love and regard for each other. We should not embrace a collective responsibility for financial support for children when we could embrace the personal obligation to nurture and cultivate loving relationships between spouses. We should be asking how we adults can support each other in maintaining our marriages.

The reason why I am chaste is because I need to court effectively so I can choose a wife who believes what Dr. Morse wrote – that parenting is an important purpose in marriage, that both parents matter and that the government is not a subsitute for mothers and fathers. I can test if a woman is qualified to parent annoying, aggressive, insolent little child monsters letting her try to nurture me during the courtship. If she can develop my Chrsitian worldview, then should be able to handle the children.

I think my single male readers should think the same way. Stop thinking with your hormones and start thinking about what women can do for God in relationships. We all need to realize that the time to address marital problems is during the courtship phase of the relationship. Therefore, choose wisely. And we should stop trying to grow a secular government to replace the parents. If a secular government is responsible for the children, then those children will never form relationships with God in Christ.

On the contrary, Christian parents must jealously guard their children from a secular government. And that means we should favor limited government and a free market, with unregulated, low-taxed small businesses creating plenty of jobs so that we have lots of pay left over after taxes to spend on stay-at-home moms, private schools, and apologetics training materials. We can spend our own money better than any secular government can to buy anything that our children may need. It’s our responsibility.

Jennifer Roback Morse’s blog is here.

Commentary

Dennis Prager investigates why men are in decline and how to fix it

Leave a comment

Another great column by Jewish scholar Dennis Prager.

Excerpt:

What is a man (as opposed to a boy)? The traditional understanding was that a man is he who takes responsibility for others — for his family, his community and his country — and, of course, for himself. A man stood for ideals and values higher than himself. He conducted himself with dignity. And he was strong.

[…]Boys today have fewer adult men in their lives than ever before. Many boys are not raised by any father. More are not raised by a father who lives in the home full time. Nearly every teacher and principal American boys have in elementary and high school is a female. The boy’s clergy person and physician may well be women. And few male figures in contemporary film radiate manhood as defined above.

[…]America has become a rights-centered rather than a responsibility-centered society. Aside from helping to produce a pandemic of narcissism, the rights-centered mindset is the opposite of the obligation/responsibility-centered mindset that makes a boy into a man. It is not good for either sex to be rights-preoccupied; but it is particularly devastating to developing men, as men are supposed to be obligation-directed.

[…]Males no longer have distinctive roles. Men do best when they are relied upon, when needed; and they feel most needed when they do something distinct from women.

[…]Many churches and synagogues have been feminized. This has occurred in at least three important ways: Clergy are increasingly female (and touchy-feely males) — for the first time in Christian and Jewish history; God is often depicted as androgynous and no longer either demanding or judging (He just loves all the time); and religion has been changed from morally and theologically demanding to a therapeutic model.

I think one of the big problems today is that men have abandoned their responsibilities to protect and provide because they are no longer appreciated. Instead, people have shifted the traditional male responsibilities to the government. Men have been replaced with a police force, welfare checks, social workers, and single-payer health care. If there is no recognition for doing hard things, having good character, and filling an important role, then men won’t even try.