Tag Archives: UK

Polemics

Why is it so hard for a working man to provide for a family these days?

3 Comments
Welfare spending
Welfare spending

Here’s my argument which answers the question:

  1. Feminism was behind no-fault divorce.
  2. Making it easier to divorce means that more divorces will occur.
  3. Marital instability causes women to vote for bigger government.
  4. Unmarried women vote mostly for Democrats.

When government spending increases for social programs and welfare, then taxes must be raised to pay for it. When taxes rise, men keep too little of their salaries to hold onto the provider role.

*Please note that I am talking about unmarried (never married, divorced) women throughout this post.

Here’s the evidence for each point.

1. Feminism was behind no-fault divorce, according to this feminist, pro-no-fault-divorce writer.

Excerpt:

Households of 2010 don’t look quite like they did in 1969, when no-fault divorce actually was a controversial topic and these counter-arguments held some weight. The working dad/stay-at-home mom model of the middle class has been replaced by two-parent earner households and a growing number of working mom/stay-at-home dad arrangements. In working poor and impoverished families, the one-parent provider model was never the norm. No-fault divorce seemed scary when it had never before existed, but the truth is that its introduction was long overdue. Feminist groups at the time supported no-fault divorce, as it provided women an escape hatch from desperately unhappy marriages in a society where they were already disadvantaged on almost every level, regardless of their marital status. Imagine an abusive marriage in 1968, when the court-savvy abuser could actually force the victim to stay in the relationship forever. Imagine that now, and you know why domestic violence attorneys are in full support of introducing no-fault divorce to New York. And the judges aren’t the only problem.

Note that the author of this piece thinks that it is not women’s fault that they choose men who they then want to divorce. It’s not the woman’s fault that she is unhappy with the man she courted with and then chose and then made vows to – women need a no-fault escape hatch, and children do fine without fathers.

2. Easier divorces means more divorces.

Abstract:

This paper analyzes a panel of 18 European countries spanning from 1950 to 2003 to examine the extent to which the legal reforms leading to “easier divorce” that took place during the second half of the 20th century have contributed to the increase in divorce rates across Europe. We use a quasi-experimental set-up and exploit the different timing of the reforms in divorce laws across countries. We account for unobserved country-specific factors by introducing country fixed effects, and we include country-specific trends to control for timevarying factors at the country level that may be correlated with divorce rates and divorce laws, such as changing social norms or slow moving demographic trends. We find that the different reforms that “made divorce easier” were followed by significant increases in divorce rates. The effect of no-fault legislation was strong and permanent, while unilateral reforms only had a temporary effect on divorce rates. Overall, we estimate that the legal reforms account for about 20 percent of the increase in divorce rates in Europe between 1960 and 2002.

It seems obvious, but more evidence never hurts. About 70% of divorces are initiated by women, either because they chose to marry the wrong man, or because they are unhappy with the right man.

3. Marital instability causes women to vote for bigger government for security.

Excerpt:

Giving women the right to vote significantly changed American politics from the very beginning. Despite claims to the contrary, the gender gap is not something that has arisen since the 1970s. Suffrage coincided with immediate increases in state government expenditures and revenue, and these effects continued growing as more women took advantage of the franchise. Similar changes occurred at the federal level as female suffrage led to more liberal voting records for the state’s U.S. House and Senate delegations. In the Senate, suffrage changed voting behavior by an amount equal to almost 20 percent of the difference between Republican and Democratic senators. Suffrage also coincided with changes in the probability that prohibition would be enacted and changes in divorce laws.

[…]More work remains to be done on why women vote so differently, but our initial work provides scant evidence that it is due to self-interest arising from their employment by government. The only evidence that we found indicated that the gender gap in part arises from women’s fear that they are being left to raise children on their own (Lott and Kenny 1997). If this result is true, the continued breakdown of the family and higher divorce rates imply growing political conflicts between the sexes. 19

Bigger government must be paid for by higher taxes, of course, which makes it harder for one working man’s income to provide for a family. In fact, feminists wanted men to be displaced as sole-providers. They would prefer that women are “equal” to men, and that means making women get out and work like men. Feminists had every reason to want bigger government and higher taxes to make traditional single-earner families unfeasible financially. They did it for equality.

4. Women are in fact observed to vote for bigger government.

Excerpt:

On Tuesday, the nation made history. It made history in electing the first African American president; it made history in building a bigger margin for the first female Speaker of the House; it made history in delivering the biggest Democratic margin since 1964; it made history in sending a record number of people to the polls and the highest percentage turnout since the 1960 election. Analysts will spend the next few months sifting through the data, trying to figure out what happened and why. Historians will likely spend the next several years and decades studying this election, as well. But one thing is immediately clear. Unmarried women played a pivotal role in making this history and in changing this nation. They delivered a stunning 70 to 29 percent margin to Barack Obama and delivered similarly strong margins in races for Congress and the U.S. Senate. Although unmarried women have voted Democratic consistently since marital status has been was tracked, this election represents the highest margin recorded and a 16-point net gain at the Presidential level from 2004.

In fact, there was a recent (2011) study showing that unmarried women do in fact vote for higher taxes and more government as a substitute for a husband’s provider role.

Abstract:

The last three decades have witnessed the rise of a political gender gap in the United States wherein more women than men favor the Democratic party. We trace this development to the decline in marriage, which we posit has made men richer and women poorer. Data for the United States support this argument. First, there is a strong positive correlation between state divorce prevalence and the political gender gap – higher divorce prevalence reduces support for the Democrats among men but not women. Second, longitudinal data show that following marriage (divorce), women are less (more) likely to support the Democratic party.

What follows from voting Democrat?

Since the Democrats took the House and Senate in 2006, and then the Presidency in 2008, the national debt has more than doubled from about 8 trillion to 20 trillion. A lot of that money was spent in welfare for single mothers, which only makes the women and their fatherless children more dependent on government. Children raised in unmarried home are far less likely to marry themselves, and to be independent of government. Which means that they will vote for bigger government when they start to vote, since they can’t make it through life on their own strength.

If more people vote for Democrats then we will get higher taxes to pay for all the government spending. Higher taxes means that a married man can no longer retain enough of his earnings to support a family. And that means his wife has to work, and that means that his children will learn what the government schools decide they should learn – so that all the children will be equal and think the same (pro-government) thoughts. This should not be controversial, because it is what it is. But if we want to talk about the decline of marriage honestly, then we need to be talking to single women about how they choose men, when they have sex with men, and how they vote at election time. You really can’t have it all.

News

Whose policies are responsible for the Islamic State terrorist attack against children?

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Muslim populations in Europe
Muslim populations in Europe

First, the news story from the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

Salman Abedi, 22, who was reportedly known to the security services, is thought to have returned from Libya as recently as this week.

Devout Muslim:

He had become radicalised recently – it is not entirely clear when – and had worshipped at a local mosque that has, in the past, been accused of fund-raising for jihadists.

Abedi’s older brother Ismail had been a tutor at Didsbury mosque’s Koran school. The imam last night said that Salman Abedi, who wore Islamic dress, had shown him “the face of hate” when he gave a talk warning on the dangers of so-called Islamic State.

A family friend described him as “very religious”.

Parents were Islamic refugees:

Born in 1994, the second youngest of four children, Abedi’s parents were Libyan refugees who fled to the UK to escape Gaddafi.

Well educated:

Abedi went to school locally and then on to Salford University in 2014 where he studied business management before dropping out.

He lived in a “red-brick terrace” home with his parents. No poverty to speak of.

Wall Street Journal says:

Islamic State on Tuesday claimed responsibility for the attack, the deadliest in the U.K. since 2005.

[…]In a statement published online, Islamic State said the attack was revenge for “aggression toward Muslim countries” and identified the assailant as a “soldier of the caliphate.”

The root problem is, of course, the open borders immigration policies enacted by the Labour Party of the UK. It was their attempt to tilt the electorate away from the free enterprise system, towards government dependency. And it worked. Of course, if a few UK citizens have to die for the far left Labour Party to win election after election… so be it, right?

Sober-minded Christian writer David French commented on this story at National Review:

While it’s impossible to predict any given terror attack, there are two laws of terrorism that work together to guarantee that attacks will occur, and they’ll occur with increasing frequency. First, when terrorists are granted safe havens to plan, train, equip, and inspire terror attacks, then they will strike, and they’ll keep striking not just until the safe havens are destroyed but also until the cells and affiliates they’ve established outside their havens are rooted out. Second, when you import immigrants at any real scale from jihadist regions, then you will import the cultural, religious, and political views that incubate jihad. Jihadist ideas flow not from soil but from people, and when you import people you import their ideas.

Let’s look at how these two ideas have worked together in both Europe and America. The map below (from AFP) charts significant terror attacks in Europe (including Turkey). You’ll note a significant increase in activity since 2014, since ISIS stampeded across Syria and into Turkey and established a terrorist caliphate in the heart of the Middle East. There existed a safe haven and a population to inspire back in Europe. The result was entirely predictable:

This is the predicable result he mentions:

Map of terrorist attacks in EuropeMap of terrorist attacks in Europe

And this is significant:

What about the United States? A similar phenomenon was in play. This Heritage Foundation timeline of terror attacks and plots documents a total of 95 incidents since 9/11. The numbers are revealing. After the implementation of the (now) much-derided Bush strategy, there were a grand total of 27 terror attacks and plots — almost all of them foiled.

After the end of the Bush administration, the numbers skyrocketed, with 68 plots or attacks recorded since. A number of them, including the Fort Hood shooting, the Boston Marathon bombing, the San Bernardino mass murder, and the Orlando nightclub massacre, have been terrifying successful. Indeed, there have been more domestic terror plots and attacks since the rise of ISIS in the summer of 2014 than there were in the entirety of the Bush administration after 9/11. And make no mistake, jihadist terrorists are disproportionately immigrants and children of immigrants.

What did Bush do that was so successful? He not only pressed military offensives in the heart of the Middle East, he fundamentally changed the American approach to immigration and implemented a number of temporary measures that, for example, dramatically decreased refugee admissions and implemented country-specific protective measures that have since been discontinued.

You’ll recall that Islamic State was caused by Barack Obama’s decision to retreat from Iraq. The refugee crisis worsened because of his other failed interventions in Libya and Syria. This is what happens when people are carried away by a happy-sounding “anti-war” message. Wiser voters thought about what would happen if we pulled out of Iraq, and voted against Obama. The wiser voters lost.

Speaking of Democrats, I wonder if Barack Obama and his Democrat supporters will call this terrorist attack “workplace violence”, like he did with the Fort Hood terrorist attack by Major Nidal Hassan? I’ve talked to a few Democrats about immigration from countries with a significant population of radicalized Muslims, and they are all in favor of increased immigration from those countries. Democrats are more scared of pro-marriage, pro-life Christians than of Islamic terrorists. After all, it’s not them dying in these attacks. Give them their gay marriage and their free birth control.

But I’m also noticing a lot of Christians trying to appear generous and compassionate lately, by embracing the same open borders policies as the progressives. They’re claiming generosity and compassion in public by spending other people’s money and risking other people’s lives. This is especially popular among Christians in academia, seeking to curry favor with their secular colleagues. For many Christian leftists like Russell Moore, embracing open borders immigration policy, is a quick way to avoid charges of lacking compassion. Except nobody ever asks these pious Christians who has compassion for the victims of their policies.

Finally, national security expert Andrew C. McCarthy notes that the current Republican administration’s efforts to vet incoming immigrants from Muslim countries has been opposed by Democrats in the judiciary, and far-left civil rights groups. Republicans are trying to prevent terrorist attacks like this at home, but they are opposed at every turn by naive Democrat voters who are more interested in feeling good and looking good than in protecting the victims of terrorist attacks. You can’t have it both ways when it comes to national security.

Commentary

Muslim immigrants yell “Allahu Akbar!” as they are sentenced for underage sex-trafficking

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Muslim populations in Europe
Muslim populations in Europe

I have to be careful with this post, because I know a lot of open borders “Christians” who will be offended by hearing about the effects of their open borders advocacy.

Here are the facts from Powerline Blog:

Full text:

You are probably familiar with the Rotherham scandal. Rotherham is a city in England where over a period of years, more than 1,400 girls, many of them pre-teens, were raped and trafficked by a loose consortium of men. The men were all Muslim immigrants or sons of immigrants, the girls were all, or nearly all, white. When the scandal finally came to light in 2014, city officials said that they had been reluctant to do anything about the problem for fear of being accused of racism.

Several criminal trials have resulted from the scandal. The third such trial has just been completed. Six defendants were convicted and sentenced to 10 to 20 years for rape and other crimes. The Sun identified them:

Brothers Basharat Dad, 32, and Nasar Dad, 36, of both of Rotherham, and Tayab Dad, 34, of Sheffield, were jailed on Tuesday for sex offences along with Matloob Hussain, 41, of Rotherham, Mohammed Sadiq, 40, of Rotherham, and Amjad Ali, of Worksop, Nottinghamshire.

This is the most curious aspect of the news report:

There were emotional and chaotic scenes at Sheffield Crown Court after two of the defendants shouted “Allahu Akbar” as they were led from the dock.

What do you suppose they meant by that?

As their supporters began shouting down into the court, one of the victims shouted back “justice is served” as police moved into the public gallery.

They have supporters? Why?

I blogged about this trial many times on this blog. It’s good to know that justice has been done. By the way, the mass immigration policies that were in effect in the UK for a very long time were brought in by the leftist Labour Party. So if you know someone who votes Labour, or worse, Liberal Democrat, now you know what they voted for. Everyone who voted for Labour or Liberal Democrats is complicit in this crime. They put into motion the causes that led to this effect.

I did ask some of my open borders Christian friends about this story, and they basically said that they didn’t care about a few victims of crime, so long as the Muslim immigrants were benefiting from liberal spending of taxpayers money. Especially in academic circles, where professors are insulated from reality, there is widespread ignorance about how open borders affects taxpayers who have to pay the bills for unskilled immigrants.

Russell Moore

Sometimes, even pious pastors start to seek praise by spending the money of working taxpayers. One of those pious pastors is Russell Moore, who advocates for open borders.

Christian apologetics blog Triablogue explains, quoting the well-respected National Review:

Evidently, Russell Moore, President of the SBC Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, is a tool of George Soros:

Russell Moore? He’s one of the leaders of the Evangelical Immigration Table, a Soros front group pushing for Obama’s immigration agenda.

I found a pretty good article from an actual scholar that counters the open borders push by Soros-funded immigration groups. You might want to bookmark it when you run into people who want to push for open borders. And remember. Always ask who is paying for it. George Soros is an atheist. He doesn’t believe the Bible. But he can pay people to quote the Bible selectively to advance his leftist agenda. Christian leftists are very anxious to appear generous – so long as they are spending other people’s money, and risking other people’s lives. As long as their daughters are not sex-trafficked by pedophile gangs, they are all in favor of open borders.