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News

UK Liberal Democrats oppose tax breaks for getting married and staying married

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From the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

 In a speech designed to reassert the Liberal Democrats’ voice in government, the embattled Deputy Prime Minister will also set out his vision of an “Open Society” — in direct contrast to the Big Society trumpeted by David Cameron, the Prime Minister.

Tax breaks for married couples are a key demand of the Tory faithful and Mr Cameron has committed to their introduction before the next election. The issue has the potential to become a major source of friction within the Coalition in the New Year.

As Mr Clegg delivers his speech in Westminster on Sunday, a number of Tory MPs will meet David Gauke, the Treasury minister, to press the government to introduce the tax break for married couples as soon as possible. It means Mr Clegg is now in open disagreement with the senior Coalition partner on two major areas of policy — the marriage tax break and Europe.

In his speech to Demos, the Left-leaning think tank, Mr Clegg will say: “We should not take a particular version of the family institution, such as the 1950s model of suit-wearing, breadwinning dad and aproned, homemaking mother, and try and preserve it in aspic.

“That’s why Open Society Liberals and Big Society Conservatives will take a different view on a tax break for marriage. We can all agree that strong relationships between parents are important, but not agree that the state should use the tax system to encourage a particular family form.”

[…] Research has suggested that children brought up by two married parents living together are happier, fare better at school and are less likely to become heavily involved in alcohol, crime or drugs.

The Centre for Social Justice [CSJ], a pro-family think tank set up by Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, said that just one in 11 married couples separated before their child’s fifth birthday, compared with a third of unmarried couples.

Gavin Poole, its executive director, said: “Nick Clegg’s stance flies in the face of all the evidence, completely ignoring national and international data demonstrating how important marriage is to the health and wellbeing of children and families.”

And this isn’t surprising – Obama has said the same thing about not preferring traditional marriage over other arrangements.

Excerpt:

President Obama has included homosexual couples raising children in a list of “American families” in a recent proclamation declaring Monday National Family Day.

“Whether children are raised by two parents, a single parent, grandparents, a same-sex couple, or a guardian,” said Obama in the proclamation, “families encourage us to do our best and enable us to accomplish great things.”

The president went on to encourage participation in Family Day by sharing an evening meal as a family unit.  “A strong nation is made up of strong families, and on this Family Day, we rededicate ourselves to ensuring that every American family has the chance to build a better, healthier future for themselves and their children,” he said.

The family day proclamation is in keeping with Obama’s oft-professed support for the homosexualist agenda.

When Obama proclaimed June “LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender) Pride Month,” he reiterated that he supports several issues on the homosexual docket, including homosexual hate crime legislation, homosexual “affirmative action” in the workplace, allowing open homosexuals in the military, and adoption to homosexual couples.

During the same month, Obama signed a presidential memorandum extending spousal benefits to homosexual partners and other unmarried partners of federal employees.

It’s important to realize that the secular left, including our own Democrats here at home, are committed to the destruction of marriage. They support policies like sex education, single mother welfare, no-fault divorce, redefining marriage, and so on. They do not support traditional marriage. And they will oppose and and all incentives given to people who choose to marry and who choose to stay married. They do not care about providing children with a stable environment to grow up in, with a mother and a father who are biologically linked to the children. They would rather have more children growing up in poverty and exposed to violence, neglect and abuse than promote traditional marriage.

The secular left opposes traditional marriage for 2 reasons. First, they do not like the way that traditional marriage tends to lend itself to the man working and the woman staying at home – they want both people to work and pay taxes, so the parents are “equal” and they want the government feed and educate the children instead, so all the children are “equal”. Second, they do want to encourage “healthy attitudes” about sex, so that people who have sex before marriage do not feel guilty about it – since the school has told them that “everyone is doing it”. The left doesn’t want people who decide not to marry to feel bad about sex. They prefer to remove the moral boundaries that protect children.

In fact, if you are a woman, and you vote for the leftists, and you are wondering why you are not married, you should understand that the very policies you vote for are the policies that take away a man’s willingness to marry and his ability to perform the traditional obligations of a husband and father. He has no reason to commit in order to get sex – you’re giving him sex for free. And he has no money to provide for a family – he paid it all to the state in taxes. And he has no ability to lead on moral and spiritual issues – that’s all been beaten out of him in the public schools, where objective morality and theism are frowned on. Think before you vote.

News

25% of UK women under 16 admit they’ve engaged in premarital sex

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From the UK Daily Mail.

Excerpt:

More than a quarter of young women today lost their virginity when they were below the legal age of consent, NHS figures reveal.

Some 27 per cent of 16 to 24 year-olds admit they were 15 or under when they had sex for the first time.

One in eight of this age group have already had sex with at least ten different partners.

[…][J]ust 4 per cent of women now aged 55 to 64 first had sex when they were under-age. This rises to 10 per cent of 45 to 54 year-olds, and 14 per cent of 35 to 44 year-olds.

[…]Norman Wells, director of the Family Education Trust said: ‘Over recent years we have witnessed the systematic removal of every restraint which in previous generations served as a disincentive to underage sexual activity.

‘Sex education in many schools has had the effect of breaking down the natural inhibitions of children with regard to sexual conduct, and the age of consent is rarely enforced, so young people no longer have any fear of legal proceedings.

‘On top of that, the ready availability of contraception means that a girl’s fear of pregnancy is no longer considered a good enough reason for rejecting her boyfriend’s advances, and confidentiality policies mean that a girl need not worry about what her parents would think about her being sexually active, obtaining contraception, being treated for a sexually transmitted infection or even having an abortion, because they don’t have to be told.’

The figures have come from a survey of the sexual behaviours of 8,420 men and women aged 16 to 69, carried out by the NHS this year for the first time.

They also reveal that one in seven women aged 16 to 24 who had lost their virginity had caught a sexually transmitted infection at least once. Only four in ten said they always used contraception when having sex.

The UK Daily Mail reports on a new study that shows that women who lose their virginity as teenagers are more likely to divorce. (H/T Dina, Mysterious C)

Excerpt:

Women who lost their virginity as young teenagers are more likely to divorce – especially if it was unwanted, according to new research.

The University of Iowa study shows that 31 per cent of women who had sex for the first time as teens divorced within five years, and 47 per cent within 10 years.

Among women who delayed sex until adulthood, 15 per cent divorced at five years, compared to 27 per cent at 10 years.

The findings were published in the April issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Author Anthony Paik, associate professor of sociology in the university’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, examined the responses of 3,793 married and divorced women to the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth.

The study showed, however, that if a young woman made the choice to lose her virginity as a teenager, there was no direct link to a marital split later in life.

If the sexual act took place before the age of 16 women were shown more likely to divorce, even if it was wanted.

So what caused this explosion of premarital sex?

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.”

When I hear about things like this I think about the statistics that how that relationship stability is directly correlated to the number of pre-marital sexual partners. The more pre-marital sexual partners you have, the less like that your marriage will last. Those are the facts. And my concern is for the children who are being born from these women who will not have a stable development to grow up in, with a mother when they’re young, and a father as they grow older.

Why does the left push premarital sex even when we know that it undermines marriage? Two reasons. First, they oppose marriage because it traditionally implies different sex roles – men work, women stay home. Feminists on the left want women to work like men work. They don’t want women to aspire to marriage and family. Second, the left thinks that the best way to stop people from having feelings of shame and guilt when they have premarital sex is to encourage everyone to do it. They want to normalize it.

The way that the left deals with the skyrocketing numbers of teen pregnancies and sexually-transmitted infections that result from this policy is to double down with more sex education, free abortions and more government spending on social programs, followed by tax hikes to pay for all the lifestyle-outcome-equalizing. And then, of course, fewer working 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, the left things that 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, because if you make getting sick free, people will stop getting sick. And if all of these broken homes create children who commit criminal acts, we can always ban guns. That should get rid of the crime problem, because if you make it impossible for law abiding people to defend themselves, then criminals will stop committing crimes. That’s how the left thinks. Or rather – that’s how the left feels.

Commentary

Is it moral for a woman to conceive a child from an anonymous sperm donor?

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I am opposed to any policy or program that increases the odds that a child will not have a relationship with their biological father as they grow up. This would include anything that makes it easier for parents to divorce or that facilitates single motherhood. Consequently, I oppose premarital sex, abortion, sex education in schools, no-fault divorce, and giving legal recognition to cohabitation or same-sex marriage. I want children to be able to have their biological father and biological mother close at hand, and to be able to rely on them and know them, so that they don’t feel alone and lost in the world. Although I am willing to permit other arrangements, I think society should celebrate traditional marriage – for the sake of the children.

Well, consider one challenge to this ideal situation where a child grows up with a mother and a father: conception via anonymous sperm donor.

Here’s a video that shows how children are hurt when they are denied a relationship with their biological father: (H/T Stacy McCain)

Robert Stacy McCain writes this:

The practice of anonymous sperm donors, and children fathered by them, is certainly legal and has a market. That would lead one to conclude that it is ethical, rather than unethical. In other words I’d say ethical means ‘not illegal’.

But is it moral? […]That is, does anyone think that the Almighty is pleased, and/or glorified by people thumbing their noses at the clear, simple, obvious, form-follows-function beauty of:

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh. Gen 2:24

There is vast capacity to use modern technology to tinker about with the natural order of things. I’d like to fall short of a sweeping judgement here, in the space of a blog post. It’s possible that there may exist a really good case for why using an anonymous sperm donor is not immoral. But it seems that protecting the father’s (or the mother’s in the case of an egg donor) privacy at the expense of dropping a sizable existential dilemma on the offspring is immoral. That is, the biological parents (i.e. DNA providers) are doing to the child emotionally what the government is doing economically: casting debts upon them without any sort of dialogue. A variation on taxation without representation, if you will. Progressivism seems to be about finding the least vocal victim.

I don’t think that it’s enough for the child to just know who their biological father is, or to just see a picture of their biological father. I think it’s important that we promote the best situation for children, where each child has a real relationship with their biological father. And we can do that, if we are serious, in several ways.

Promoting marriage

Here are few wild, shoot-from-the-hip ideas to help children to have access to their fathers:

  1. We can research how fatherlessness affects children
  2. We can research what decisions are likely to lead to stable marriage, e.g. – regular church attendance and chastity
  3. We can repeal laws that are hostile to lasting marriage, e.g. – no-fault divorce
  4. We can enact laws that are hostile to divorce, e.g. – shared custody laws
  5. We can stop paying unmarried women to have babies
  6. We can give tax deductions to married couples who have babies
  7. We can give tax deductions to couples planning on marrying if they undergo marital counseling from a program of their own choosing
  8. We can give tax deductions to married couples whose children earn incomes, e.g. – the parents get a tax deduction for 1% of income earned by each child for life
  9. We can give tax deductions to married couples whose children don’t collect government assistance, e.g. – the parents get a 1% tax deduction on their household income for every child who doesn’t collect government welfare during the year
  10. We ban IVF for women who have not been married for at least 5 years
  11. We ban all taxpayer funding of IVF treatments
  12. We ban ban all private insurance coverage for IVF treatments

And so on, like that. This communicates to women that it is not OK to have a baby with an anonymous sperm donor. It communicates that we as a society want fathers to be around their children. It communicates that cohabitation is not the same thing as marriage. It communicates that marriages are for life. We need to get tough if we want children to be spared from the harm of not knowing their biological fathers.