Tag Archives: Selfishness

News

Alliance Defense Fund’s strong opposition to divorce

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This is timely, at a time where I am considering whether I would do more good supporting Christian/conservative groups on campus as an assistant professor or as a free speech lawyer defending campus groups from student governments.

No one is better at these kinds of issues than the ADF.

Here’s the article.

Excerpt:

The longer I live, and the more time I spend in the Christian conservative movement, the more keenly I’m aware of the extent to which divorce is devastating the Body of Christ.  It’s destroying children’s lives, destroying their parents, and destroying our cultural witness.  I’m 41 years old, and by this point I’ve seen friends’ marriages end because of adultery, because they felt “trapped,” because the other spouse was cruel, because they allegedly “fell in love” with someone else, because of addictions, or because they simply “wanted to be happy.”  Every single time — every time — one or both of the spouses made a series of deliberate decisions to place their own desires over those of their husband or wife, over the best interests of their children, and over the explicit admonitions of the God they allegedly serve.

I am increasingly of the opinion that the Christian community simply will not prevail in the cultural battle to preserve marriage — especially when the argument for marriage absolutely depends on the fact that marriage does not exist merely to fulfill adult desires and sustain adult happiness — if we treat our own marriage vows so shabbily.  How can we tell any population of Americans — whether inclined to homosexual behavior or even polygamy — that marriage is the earthly model of Christ’s relationship to his church if we treat it as an instrument of our own happiness?

[…]Frequently I hear talk of “divorce recovery” or someone saying they’re “going through” a divorce.  This passive language detaches individuals from the acts of will that cause the dissolution of their family.  You “recover” from the flu.  You decide to divorce.  Divorcing couples are capable of almost-epic feats of rationalization.  Divorce without adultery?  They rationalize it by saying that their spouse’s failings are the moral equivalent of adultery.  Fall in love with someone else?  They rationalize it through facile arguments that God loves them and wants them to be happy.  Children devastated?  They rationalize their actions as ultimately for the best because (despite all social science to the contrary) divorce is better for kids than living in conflict.  Couples float away on oceans of psychobabble — incapable of confronting the hard truth: They are making a deliberate choice to defy God.

A bit more from a follow-up post.

Excerpt:

Marriage is particularly fragile not just because of very real cultural changes in the Body of Christ, but because of a key (and catastrophic) legal change — the institution of no-fault divorce.

[…]And so we’re faced with an enabling church and an enabling legal system — two escape hatches that are all too tempting in times of distress.  The enabling church (including, sadly, many pastors and Christian peers) argue that various real or imagined spousal sins are the “equivalent” of adultery or the “equivalent” of abandonment.  The enabling church tells you that “God’s best” or “God’s plan” is not the cross but a happy life, a joyful life.  And the enabling legal system is all too ready to take your check, put you in the system and process your (sometimes) very fast, and (occasionally) very cheap divorce.

It then lists the well-known damage done to children, and continues:

How, you ask, can parents be so much happier when their children are so much worse off?  Wouldn’t the emotional and sexual collapse of their own children cripple the parents’ emotional well being?  Not if they long ago shifted their life priorities — away from the Biblical model of self-denial and to the world’s model of personal fulfillment.

Divorce is child abuse. Period. I’d like to see the church come out and preach sermons with the facts and statistics on what divorce does, and then provide people with practical advice and STRICT RULES about how to conduct courtships, marriages and parenting to the glory of God.

Marriage as an engineering problem

God is the customer of the marriage product, and he expects adults to love each other self-sacrificially, to honor moral obligations, and to raise the children to know him and serve him effectively.

There is no room in marriage for amusement and self-centeredness.

  • No emotions
  • No intuitions
  • No “chemistry”
  • No “fun”

We should be designing marriage as a solution to specific problems with the aim of serving God in our relationships.

If we can’t agree to do that, then we should all serve the Lord as singles. Marriage isn’t about YOU.

News

New study shows that children of divorce twice as likely to have a stroke

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Science Daily reports on a recent peer-reviewed Canadian study that links an increased risk of stroke to divorce. (H/T Ruth Blog)

Excerpt:

“We were very surprised that the association between parental divorce and stroke remained so strong even after we had adjusted for smoking, obesity, exercise and alcohol consumption,” said [study leader Esme] Fuller-Thomson.

[…]Of the 13,134 total study respondents, 10.4 percent had experienced parental divorce during their childhood, and 1.9 percent reported that they had been diagnosed with a stroke at some point in their lives. When adjusting for age, race and gender, the odds of stroke were approximately 2.2 times higher for those who had experienced parental divorce.

When other risk factors — including socioeconomic status, health behaviors, mental health, and other adverse childhood experiences — were controlled in a logistic regression analysis, the odds ratio of stroke for those who had experienced parental divorce remained significantly elevated.

I also noticed that Stephen Baskerville has a new article on no-fault divorce up in the (ugh! blech!) American Conservative.

Excerpt:

First: Marriage exists primarily to cement the father to the family. This fact is politically incorrect but undeniable. The breakdown of marriage produces widespread fatherlessness, not motherlessness. As Margaret Mead pointed out long ago—yes, leftist Margaret Mead was correct about this—motherhood is a biological certainty whereas fatherhood is socially constructed. The father is the weakest link in the family bond, and without the institution of marriage he is easily discarded.

[…]The notion that marriage exists for love or “to express and safeguard an emotional union of adults,” as one proponent puts it, is cant. Many loving and emotional human relationships do not involve marriage. Even the conservative argument that marriage exists to rear children is too imprecise: marriage creates fatherhood. No marriage, no fathers.

[…]Here is the second unpleasant truth: homosexuals did not destroy marriage, heterosexuals did. The demand for same-sex marriage is a symptom, not a cause, of the deterioration of marriage. By far the most direct threat to the family is heterosexual divorce. “Commentators miss the point when they oppose homosexual marriage on the grounds that it would undermine traditional understandings of marriage,” writes family scholar Bryce Christensen. “It is only because traditional understandings of marriage have already been severely undermined that homosexuals are now laying claim to it.”

[..]Thus the third inconvenient fact: divorce is a political problem. It is not a private matter, and it does not come from impersonal forces of moral and cultural decay. It is driven by complex and lucrative government machinery operating in our names and funded by our taxes. It is imposed upon unwilling people, whose children, homes, and property may be confiscated. It generates the social ills that rationalize almost all domestic government spending. And it is promoted ideologically by the same sexual radicals who now champion same-sex marriage. Homosexuals may be correct that heterosexuals destroyed marriage, but the heterosexuals were their fellow sexual ideologues.

Conservatives have completely misunderstood the significance of the divorce revolution. While they lament mass divorce, they refuse to confront its politics. Maggie Gallagher attributes this silence to “political cowardice”: “Opposing gay marriage or gays in the military is for Republicans an easy, juicy, risk-free issue,” she wrote in 1996. “The message [is] that at all costs we should keep divorce off the political agenda.”

No American politician of national stature has seriously challenged unilateral divorce. “Democrats did not want to anger their large constituency among women who saw easy divorce as a hard-won freedom and prerogative,” writes Barbara Dafoe Whitehead. “Republicans did not want to alienate their upscale constituents or their libertarian wing, both of whom tended to favor easy divorce, nor did they want to call attention to the divorces among their own leadership.”

If we social conservatives care about children, then we need to be opposed to no-fault divorce. We need to be more careful about who we choose to marry, and not choose mates because of “chemistry” or “hotness” or because our friends approve of them based on arbitrary cultural standards gleaned from Lady Gaga and Dancing With The Stars. There are defined roles for the participants to a marriage, and there is a design for marriage, and there are specific tasks that need to get done. Marriage is a job, and it requires skills to execute difficult tasks that are morally obligatory. It’s not about immature selfish adults pursuing happiness at the expense of their children. It’s not about feelings. It’s not about sentimentality. It’s not about fun.

Divorce causes damage to the health and well-being of children, resulting in behaviors that will give us less liberty (greater intervention of government) and higher taxes (for social welfare programs) later on. There are consequences to selfishness and irresponsibility in relationships. Other people do not exist to entertain you. Relationships are not a form of recreational activity. At least they should not be for Christians. For Christians, the goal of relationships is to get the other person to have a closer relationship with God and to be equipped to serve God better. If children are the result, then the same obligation applies to them. That is the purpose of relationships in Christianity.

News

British woman has sex with strangers in order to get fatherless child

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Story here in the UK Sun. (H/T The Other McCain)

Excerpt:

LARA CARTER has slept with 20 strangers in the past year – in a desperate and reckless bid to get pregnant.

[…]Lara, an assistant office manager, says: “This is absolutely the right time for me to have a baby and nothing is going to stand in my way.

“All my friends have babies and I desperately want to be a mum.

“I don’t have a steady boyfriend and feel my time to have a baby is running out. I only need a man to provide his sperm – I would have no interest in seeing him again. That is why I’m a sperm hunter.”

Her obsession with getting pregnant started a year ago, when she attended the birth of a friend’s baby.

She says: “The moment I saw my friend hold her newborn child, I had a huge desire to feel that love too.

[…]She says: “First, I check if I’m ovulating… I meet some friends at a bar and instantly start looking for potential sperm donors.

“When I find a potential sperm donor, I get their first name and ask if they have any STDs. If they haven’t and we end up spending the night together, I’ll sneak out in the morning.

“When I don’t want to spend the whole night with a man, I’ll get the deed over and done with before I go home. I’ve had sex in some unusual places, including a car and even nightclub toilets.

“Obviously, I encourage them to have unprotected sex, but some men want to use a condom.

“If they do, I always have one that I have pre-pricked in my handbag. That way the sex isn’t a waste of time.”

[…]Most people are very honest when asked if they have an STD. I trust my instincts.”

Lara has already spent hundreds of pounds on baby clothes.

She says: “Whenever I see a lovely baby outfit, I have to buy it for my future child.

“I’ve also chosen the names my children will have. They will be Tilly and James or Matthew. I also take pregnancy vitamins, even though they are expensive.

Lara admits her yearning for a baby is made worse by her circle of 20 close female friends – 17 of them have had children.

She says: “I look at my friends with envy and know I would make such a good mum. They know about my quest to be a mother and support what I’m doing.

“However, I haven’t told my family, and am worried about their reaction. I’m happy to be a single mother and I wouldn’t want anything to do with the father.

“My parents are still together, so I didn’t grow up in a single-parent family, but plenty of people do it these days. I have plenty of savings to give a baby a loving, well-rounded home and lots of friends close by who can babysit. I have it all planned out.”

She adds: “When I do get pregnant after a one-night stand, I won’t contact the father… I want a baby, not a man.

The UK has generous welfare benefits for single mothers.

Excerpt:

Single mother Tracey Turner, 26… currently receives £136.50 a week in benefits, which includes £42.50 income support and £94 child tax credit.

On top of this, her local council pays all of her £161-a-week rent and gives her a hefty discount on local rates.

A British pound is worth about $1.60 USD. 300 pounds a week x 52 weeks = 15500 pounds = about $25000 USD per year in benefits, not including the “hefty discount on local rates”. Local rates = local tax rates.

I think what is the most interesting is analyzing the parts of the first article that I have bolded. It tells a story about what is causing this woman to act this way, and what she thinks about herself, her relationships with others, and about the purpose of her life. Keep in mind that this is not unusual – the out-of-wedlock birth rate in the United States is 40%.