Tag Archives: Sex Education

Commentary

MUST-READ: Melanie Phillips blames single mothers for family breakdown

4 Comments
Melanie Phillips
Melanie Phillips

Melanie Phillips takes UK Conservative Party leader David Cameron to task in the UK Daily Mail. Sent to me by Dina! I love this article!

Excerpt:

Singling out ‘runaway dads’ for censure, [David Cameron] said that such individuals should be treated like drunk drivers — people who are beyond the pale and upon whom should be heaped ‘the full force of shame’.

Now, excoriating ‘runaway’ or ‘deadbeat’ dads is a familiar refrain. We all know the scenario: feckless youths getting one girl pregnant after another and abandoning each one in turn, playing next to no part in the upbringing of the children they have serially fathered.

This is, indeed, reckless and reprehensible behaviour. But it is only part of a much more complex and deeply rooted problem.

Most pertinently, it totally ignores the fact that there is another feckless actor in this dysfunctional family drama — the mother, who may be having children by a series of different men.

In line with politically correct thinking, Mr Cameron presents such girls or women as the hapless victims of predatory males. But that is just plain wrong. For at the most fundamental level, this whole process is driven by women and girls.

In those far-off days before the sexual revolution, relations between the sexes were based on a kind of unspoken bargain.

Women needed the father of their children to stick around while they grew up, in return for which a woman gave a solemn undertaking to be faithful to this one man.

For his part, the father’s interests were served by being offered not just a permanent sexual relationship but a guarantee from the trust placed in his wife that the children were, indeed, his.

With the combination of the sexual revolution, the Pill and the welfare state, however, women’s interests changed. Suddenly they were being told sex outside marriage was fine, unmarried motherhood was fine — and crucially, that the welfare state would provide them with the means to live without male support.

Among upper-middle-class trendies, marriage became an irksome anachronism and ‘living together’ became fashionable.

At the bottom of the social scale, however, these permissive signals from above combined disastrously with widespread unemployment among young men, whose lack of income made them an unattractive marriage prospect.

As a result, girls decided that, while they wanted a baby, the available fathers were usually a waste of space and so they didn’t want them to remain a part of their lives.

These young men then treated the message that they weren’t wanted as a licence for irresponsibility. And so the ‘runaway dad’ was born.

To single out these boys for censure — while calling lone mothers ‘heroic’, as Mr Cameron did — is not only unfair and perverse, but will fail to get to grips with the problem.

If it is to be remedied, women and girls have to come to a different conclusion about where their interests lie.

That means the welfare state has to stop playing the role of surrogate husband through the benefits it gives single mothers.

READ THE WHOLE THING. As with Canada’s Barbara Kay, I am not in full agreement with Melanie on every topic. But she is awesome on this topic!

Related posts

Polemics

What can Christians do to prevent abortion?

19 Comments

WARNING: This post is extremely opposed to Democrats, feminists and the postmodern/relativist/universalist church. Please do not read if you are easily offended.

Consider this account of an abortion. (H/T Mary, The Other McCain)

Excerpt:

My biological father abandoned my mother while we were toddlers.  He was a charming rogue of a gambler who came and went in our lives, leaving a wake of debt and infidelity.  My mother had been encouraged to get an abortion (illegally) by more than one family member when she found out she was expecting me, (the middle child).  Thankfully she gave birth to me and later to my younger brother, and was a loving mother. When Daddy’s gambling debts caused her small teaching salary to be garnished, she filed for a divorce.  Even after the first divorce she had been a good mother, taking us to church, reading us the Bible in the morning before school, singing to us at night, and praying with us for our wandering father.  She was gentle and supportive and I always knew I could go to her for help.  When mother remarried my first stepfather, (who was an alcoholic) things became difficult.

A devastating trauma struck our family in the summer of 1971 when I was 13 years old. My younger brother was killed in a car accident on our way home from a camping trip with our grandparents. He was 10 years old. My grandfather was also killed, my grandmother lost a leg, and my sister and I were injured.  The car accident and family trauma triggered a chain of events that led to my mother and first stepfather to divorce.

My stepfather was committed to a mental hospital briefly, and mother had an emotional breakdown. My sister and I went to live with my aunt and uncle for some months.

When we returned home to my mother after the divorce, things were not the same. My mother seemed wounded and disillusioned with life.  Without the stability of the family, or the church, we all struggled to recover from my brother’s death. She was still working as a teacher but she was living with my second stepfather, though they were not married yet.  He is a man I have grown to love and respect over time, yet in the 1970’s, when he was living with my mother, he was a different person than he is today and we disliked each other.

My sister and I were left on our own most of the time.  Previously, I had been raised going to church, but after the accident we just never went back. My sister and I became angry and rebellious. My sister left home when she was about 16, and backpacked around the country with her boyfriend. There I was at age 15, my sister gone, and feeling like I was in the way. There was a sense of being an obstacle to my mothers’ relationship with this new man.

My friendships changed from the kids we knew at church to the kids who hung out at the local Teen Center. Some of them took drugs and drank.

[…]My mother signed over guardianship of me to Steven after I had moved to Boston. I remember my surprise when Steven told me she had signed the papers and trying to take this in mentally. A sense of vulnerability came over me, knowing that I was his ward, but we were not married. He had not expressed his intentions of a long-term relationship with me. He had mentioned that he wanted guardianship papers so I could travel across state lines when he was on tour. I had told him my mother would not sign me over to him. I asked him how he had got her to do it. He said, “I told her I needed them for you to enroll in school.” I felt abandoned by my mother as well as my father and stepfather. Steven was really my only hope at that point.

So now what do we learn from this? Who is responsible for Julia’s abortion according to these facts? And what should Christians do to prevent a situation like this from occurring again? Should we wait until the pregnancy happens, or is there a way to attack the root of the problem with pro-family policies and effective church involvement?

First of all, it’s important to point out that fatherlessness causes women to engage in early sex.

Consider these facts:

– Adolescent females between the ages of 15 and 19 years reared in homes without fathers are significantly more likely to engage in premarital sex than adolescent females reared in homes with both a mother and a father.

Source: Billy, John O. G., Karin L. Brewster and William R. Grady. “Contextual Effects on the Sexual Behavior of Adolescent Women.” Journal of Marriage and Family 56 (1994): 381-404.

– Children in single parent families are more likely to get pregnant as teenagers than their peers who grow up with two parents.

Source: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. National Center for Health Statistics. National Health Interview Survey. Hyattsville, MD 1988.

– A white teenage girl from an advantaged background is five times more likely to become a teen mother if she grows up in a single-mother household than if she grows up in a household with both biological parents.

Source: Whitehead, Barbara Dafoe. “Facing the Challenges of Fragmented Families.” The Philanthropy Roundtable 9.1 (1995): 21.
(Source)

Fatherlessness has many causes, but the most obvious cause is that women freely choose to have sex with men who will not stick around to raise the children. That is why we have an out-of-wedlock birth rate of over 40% – women are consenting to sex with men who will have not demonstrated that they are willing and capable of committing to marriage and parenting. The choice of who to have sex with is, in virtually every situation, the woman’s decision. Women with low self-esteem are especially prone to avoid men who have strong moral character, and definite ideas about religion. They want to avoid being “controlled” or “rejected” when they act immorally. So they deliberately choose men who will not judge them or lead them spiritually. So the blame for fatherlessness lies solely on the woman – she chooses the man who she intends to have sex with.

Women cannot blame an irresponsible MAN for hurting them if they CHOOSE HIM and then he acts… IRRESPONSIBLY. He was irresponsible BEFORE the woman got there, and yet she still chose him of her own free will. Women are very well educated these days, and they have plenty of time to think about marriage. But what I have found is that they often resent the idea of using any criteria for men other than entertainment, feelings and peer-approval. How will they look in wedding pictures, they wonder?

We have already talked a lot about how women choose men using the 180-second rule, based on physical appearances and “confidence”. Women are not doing a good job of evaluating men for the role of husband and father. They are choosing based on shoes and voice and shoulders. So of course this is not going to work. Everything else in life requires lots of time spent reading, planning and testing if you hope to have success. But when it comes to men, many young, unmarried women choose irrationally and stupidly, based on selfishness and vanity. And the problem gets worse as successive generations are raised without fathers. Fathers matter. Fathers need to respected for the role they play in parenting.

Politics

Exacerbating the situation is the fact that leftist social engineers push sex education and welfare subsidies for women who chose to deliberately avoid men who are protectors and providers. However, women again do not escape blame here, since 77% of young, unmarried women voted for Obama in 2008, according to exit polls. Obama is a Democrat, and Democrats are the party of sex education, single mother welfare, no-fault divorce, and same-sex marriage. Democrats are the anti-marriage party, and young, unmarried women turn out in droves to vote for Democrats. And these policies cause the out-of-wedlock birth rate to skyrocket.

Naturally, the more that these young, unmarried women vote for bigger and bigger government to bail them out of their own irresponsible choices with men, the higher taxes will go, and the less money marriage-minded men will have. Men with less money DO NOT GET MARRIED. And the decline of boys in the schools isn’;t going to help them to find jobs, either. Instead of valuing good men, it seems as though young, unmarried women prefer to marry the government, since government mails out the checks but makes no moral demands. Parenting is left to taxpayer-funded day care and public schools – not fathers. We need to realize that fathers can only be effective when they have authority in the home, and this is usually related to the fact that they are primary breadwinners.

Postmodernism, moral relativism and universalism in the church

Another factor is the church. Julia’s mother was a very devout, spiritual and pious Christian. She attended church regularly, read the Bible and sung all the praise hymns. And how did this affect her decision making? Well – it didn’t. And the reason for this is two-fold. First of all, the church has stopped providing boundaries for behaviors and making moral judgments. Churches have embraced postmodernism (there is no truth), moral relativism (moral judgments are evil because people feel bad when they are judged) and universalism (believe anything you want as long as it makes you feel good). Christianity is no longer presented as being TRUE, with evidence and arguments (apologetics). Instead it is presented as something that makes people feel better, and you choose the religion you like.

The purpose of going to church for Julia’s mother was to have good feelings and a sense of community. She was not interested in discovering scientific and historical evidence that would make the moral rules of Christianity incumbent on her – she was not interested in moral obligations. Moral rules, like the rules around chastity and courtship, are “too strict”. It’s better to just take church as another way of feeling happy, and then do whatever you want. I once knew an adulterous woman who had sex with her boyfriends in the same house as her children, yet she loved to attend church and to sing Handel’s Messiah at Christmas – for the spectacle and the emotional high. Imagine what view of marriage her children got from that?

Anti-intellectualism in the church

In addition to the failure of the church to defend against postmodernism, moral relativism and universalism, there is the problem of the fundamentalist churches that just preach from the Bible without ANY idea of why the Bible should be taken as an authority. So, not only is the church disinterested in talking about the Big Bang, the fine-tuning, the origin of life, the Cambrian explosion, the habitability problem, irreducible complexity and so forth, but they are also disinterested in explaining moral issues like abortion and traditional marriage. When churched parents have discussions with their children, they use church merely as a way to boss the children around so that they have less trouble with the kids. They scare them with the Devil and Hell (which are both real) without ever explaining prescriptive moral obligations using evidence.

For example, Julia’s mother’s church and parents SHOULD HAVE explained to her the importance of chastity and courting using evidence from social science that shows how chastity improves marital stability and marriage quality – things like communication and fidelity. The bad effects of cohabitation and hooking-up should have been explained WITH EVIDENCE, like you find in Dr. Laura books or Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse books. I can walk into churches to hear some of the most famous preachers, like John Piper and Alistair Begg, and never once hear a single piece of real-world evidence. All I get is “the Bible says” and that has no effect on people who do not have reasons to accept the Bible as true, and an  understanding of how that truth is applied in the real world. Apparently, in many churches it is considered high-treason to ask – “are these things really true? And how do we see that they are true here in the real world, with publicly testable and observable data”? (Mark Driscoll is an exception, much as I disagree with his male-bashing, feminist bias)

Conclusion

So, in short, young, unmarried Democrat-voting women cause problems for their daughters by raising them without fathers, and the church’s refusal to engage in apologetics and to connect faith to public evidence just makes the problem worse. That’s where abortion comes from, and many, many pro-lifers need to get engaged on these problems instead of waiting until the woman is already pregnant. Yes, we need sonograms Yes, we need to cut public funding for Planned Parenthood. Yes, we need parental notification laws. But we also need to address the problem with pro-family policies and with apologetics and statistics in the church.

Related posts

News

Does sex education reduce teen pregnancies and sexually-transmitted infections?

3 Comments

The American Thinker evaluates Planned Parenthood’s sex education strategy for reducing teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections.

Excerpt:

Planned Parenthood’s anointed sex missionaries received their first federal funding in the Lyndon Johnson administration. The sort of “sex education” now pushed in Santa Fe and elsewhere started in 1968 when the National Education Association Journal called for “sex education as an integral part of school curriculum beginning in early grades.”[3] Planned Parenthood, the NEA, and herds of shrill progressives were following a behavioral pattern characteristic of the 1960s left.

An early example of the pattern emerged in the reactions to Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring scare-book, which got DDT banned and still enables the malaria deaths of about 3,000 children a day. Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 Population Bomb — turned dud — warned of mass starvations unless humanity curbs its reproductive enthusiasm. Then also in 1968, the NEA Journal demanded solutions to imagined problems.

Imagined, because calls for sex education were based on “problems” that lived only in the minds of anointed ones seeking to spread agendas. “Contraception education” would allegedly reduce unwanted pregnancies and illegitimate births.[4] A “crash educational program”[5] would arrest out-of-control venereal disease, while general sex education would address “the emotionally disastrous results of irresponsible sexual behavior.”[6] The claims shared a common thread: fictitious bases.

Not only were there no disease and illegitimacy crises, but indicators were solidly improving at the time of the alarmists’ claims. As Sowell documents in The Vision of the Anointed,[7] teenage pregnancies and venereal disease declined during the 1950s and 1960s. Yet over skeptics’ protests that sex education would increase sexual behavior, Planned Parenthood and public schools forged ahead to curtail behaviors that were already fading. Sex-ed was off and running.

And results followed.

During the 1970s, pregnancies among fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds jumped 41 percent.[8] Between 1970 and 1984, abortions among unwed fifteen- to seventeen-year-olds more than doubled and birth rates jumped 29 percent.[9] By 1976, five years of data showed unmarried girls fifteen to nineteen having sex at increasing rates.[10] And not only did venereal disease not subside, but teen gonorrhea rates tripled between 1956 and 1975.[11]

In the 1950s, 13 percent of teen girls had been sexually active. By the late 90s, the figure had tripled. Premarital intercourse, approved by less than a third of women in the 1950s, was acceptable to 91 percent by the late 80s. By 2005, over two-thirds of Blacks and half of Latino high-schoolers were having intercourse, while over half of all teens fifteen to nineteen were performing oral sex. By 2006, babies born to unmarried women accounted for 37 percent of all births, [12] 70 percent among Blacks. The Black illegitimacy rate reflected a 218 percent explosion over forty-five years.

Such realities have drawn dismissive responses from sex-ed advocates. Incredibly, the horrific trends of the 1970s and 1980s were offered as reason for more sex education.[13] Yet amid cover-ups and excuses, the sex-ed crowd’s true motives were exposed in 1978, in of all places, Congress. One committee report noted that despite sex education’s stated objective of reducing teen pregnancies and sexually-transmitted disease, the real goal “of most sex educators appears to be encouragement of healthy attitudes about sex and sexuality.”

This is the same thing that happened in the UK – it’s not just here.

So there was no crisis for the pro sex-education to solve.

Sex education was always about indoctrinating children against the wisdom and morality of their parents. And they got their funding and their access to the public schools from the Democrat party. A vote for a Democrat politician is a vote for sex education. A vote for sex education is a vote for teen pregnancies, abortions, and sexually-transmitted diseases. And according to the research I posted about before, the premarital sex in and of itself is lousy preparation for a stable, fulfilling marriage. The left is ruining the lives of our children, and our children’s children by deliberately lying to them about right and wrong. There is also this new Oxford University Press book that links premarital sex and promiscuity with reduced mental health.

Why do they do this? They do this because they think that the best way to stop people from having feelings of shame and guilt is to break down the moral boundaries that specify what is right and wrong. That’s what’s behind this – normalizing risky, irresponsible behavior. And the way that the left deals with the skyrocketing numbers of teen pregnancies and sexually-transmitted infections is to double down with more sex education – and more government spending on social programs, followed by tax hikes to pay for all the lifestyle-equalizing. And then, of course, fewer men can afford to marry because of those tax rates, and fewer women can afford to stay home and raise their young children.

After all, there’s no social problem in the world that can’t be fixed by a little more government intervention and public school indoctrination. If worse comes to worse and the health care costs costs increase, we can just make health care “free” by nationalizing it to completely separate behaviors from consequences. That should get rid of the problem. And if all of these broken homes create children who commit criminal acts, we can always ban guns and legalize drugs. That should get rid of the problem.

That’s how the left thinks. Or rather – that’s how the left feels.