Tag Archives: Women

Polemics

Dennis Prager: Why a good person can vote against same-sex marriage

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Dennis Prager mentioned this article on his show today, and I thought I would link to it, since it is somewhat complementary to my own secular case against gay marriage.

Excerpt:

So, the question is whether redefining marriage in the most radical way ever conceived — indeed completely changing its intended meaning — is good for society.

It isn’t.

The major reason is this: Gender increasingly no longer matters. There is a fierce battle taking place to render meaningless the man-woman distinction, the most important distinction regarding human beings’ personal identity. Nothing would accomplish this as much as same-sex marriage.

The whole premise of same-sex marriage is that gender is insignificant: It doesn’t matter whether you marry a man or a woman. Love, not gender, matters.

Some examples of this war on gender:

  • This year Harvard University appointed its first permanent director of bisexual, gay, lesbian, transgender, and queer student life. The individual, Vanidy Bailey, has asked that he/she never be referred to as he or she, male or female. Harvard has agreed.
  • In 2010 eHarmony, for years the country’s largest online dating service, was sued for only matching men and women. Its lack of same-sex matchmaking meant that it violated anti-discrimination laws in some states. As a result, eHarmony was forced to begin a same-sex online service.
  • Each year more and more American high schools elect girls as homecoming kings and boys as homecoming queens. Students have been taught to regard restricting kings to males or queens to females as (gender-based) discrimination.
  • When you sign up for the new social-networking site, Google Plus, you are asked to identify your gender. Three choices are offered: Male, Female, Other.
  • Catholic Charities, which operates the oldest ongoing adoption services in America, has had to end its adoption work in Illinois, Massachusetts, and Washington, D.C., because the governments there regard placing children with married man-woman couples before same-sex couples as discriminatory.

Increasingly, even the mother-father ideal is being shattered in this battle to render the male-female distinction insignificant.

  • The socialist French government has just announced that in the future no government-issued document will be allowed to use the words “mother” or “father.” Only the gender-neutral term “parent” will be acceptable in France.
  • And in Rhode Island this year, one school district cancelled its father-daughter dance after the ACLU threatened to sue the district for gender discrimination. Only parent-child events, not father-daughter dances or mother-son ballgames, will be allowed.

And all this is happening before same-sex marriage is allowed. Imagine what will happen should same-sex marriage become the law of the land.

It will hasten the end of the male-female distinction and of any significance to mothers or fathers as distinctive entities.

It will mean that those who, for religious or other reasons, wish to retain the man-woman definition of marriage will be legally and morally as isolated as racists are today.

And it will mean that teachers and other adults who ask little boys and girls who they would like to marry, will, in order to be in sync with the morality of our times, have to make it clear that it might be someone of the same sex. “Will you marry a boy or a girl?” will be the only non-bigoted way to ask young people about their marital plans.

Dennis Prager is a Jewish scholar – he’s not coming from a Christian perspective. And in this article, he doesn’t mention God or the Bible at all.

When it comes to any issue, my approach is to look at what the Bible says to get my basic position, to clarify it with good history and good theology, and then to find evidence from outside the Bible to confirm it and to make it practical and effective. The evidence from outside the Bible is also useful to speak about what the Bible says with people who don’t accept the Bible – and even the existence of God. If you want to influence the culture, you have to ready to speak to anyone – even people outside of church!

News

Government spends $61,194 on welfare for each household below the poverty line

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From the Weekly Standard. (With a rant from me below)

Excerpt:

New data compiled by the Republican side of the Senate Budget Committee shows that, last year, the United States spent over $60,000 to support welfare programs per each household that is in poverty. The calculations are based on data from the Census, the Office of Management and Budget, and the Congressional Research Services.

“According to the Census’s American Community Survey, the number of households with incomes below the poverty line in 2011 was 16,807,795,” the Senate Budget Committee notes. “If you divide total federal and state spending by the number of households with incomes below the poverty line, the average spending per household in poverty was $61,194 in 2011.”

This dollar figure is almost three times the amount the average household on poverty lives on per year. “If the spending on these programs were converted into cash, and distributed exclusively to the nation’s households below the poverty line, this cash amount would be over 2.5 times the federal poverty threshold for a family of four, which in 2011 was $22,350 (see table in this link),” the Republicans on the Senate Budget Committee note.

To be clear, not all households living below the poverty line receive $61,194 worth of assistance per year. After all, many above the poverty line also receive benefits from social welfare programs (e.g. pell grants).

How do people become poor anyway, in a rich country like America? Is it someone else’s fault, or is it a result of their own poor decision-making? Let famous black economist Walter Williams – chair of the Department of Economics at the prestigious George Mason University –explain it for us:

Avoiding long-term poverty is not rocket science. First, graduate from high school. Second, get married before you have children, and stay married. Third, work at any kind of job, even one that starts out paying the minimum wage. And, finally, avoid engaging in criminal behavior.

If you graduate from high school today with a B or C average, in most places in our country there’s a low-cost or financially assisted post-high-school education program available to increase your skills.

Most jobs start with wages higher than the minimum wage, which is currently $5.15. A man and his wife, even earning the minimum wage, would earn $21,000 annually. According to the Bureau of Census, in 2003, the poverty threshold for one person was $9,393, for a two-person household it was $12,015, and for a family of four it was $18,810. Taking a minimum-wage job is no great shakes, but it produces an income higher than the Bureau of Census’ poverty threshold. Plus, having a job in the first place increases one’s prospects for a better job.

To augment what Dr. Williams said with a study:

Nearly three out of four poor families with children in America are headed by single parents. When a child’s father is married to his mother, however, the probability of the child’s living in poverty drops by 82 percent.

The collapse of marriage, along with a dramatic rise in births to single women, is the most important cause of childhood poverty but government policy doesn’t reflect that reality, according to a special report released today by The Heritage Foundation.

I had to spend all day Saturday and all day Sunday this weekend working to fix a defect so that I could get back on track on my next project. I am still 4 days behind schedule on that new project. If I can’t catch up, I’ll probably have to cancel my November vacation, and maybe even my December vacation. The massive expenditures on welfare for “the poor” is the reason why I have to come in on Saturday and Sunday to work. I have to  to work to pay for these people, and their enablers in the Democrat party.

Don’t I have a right to pursue my dreams and my marriage plans and my plans to be a public, effective Christian, with the money that I earn through my work? For example, on Saturday, I sent $125 to a young Christian scholar so that he could attend a conference and present a paper on a moral issue that we both care about. The government would never give him money, but they will tax me to pay for contraceptives for everyone else. I am a virgin – I don’t even buy contraceptives for myself! I really have better things to do with my earned income than buying “Obamaphones” for people who spend their entire lives collecting welfare. Don’t I have a right to spend what I earn on my own goals and priorities?

UPDATE: The Manhattan Institute explains how welfare waivers water down the work incentives for welfare.

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News

Traditional marriage is a threat to the values of single women

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Stuart Schneiderman takes a closer look at view of marriage among single women today.

Excerpt:

You probably haven’t heard of Nicole Rodgers, editor a gender-bending feminist website called Role/Reboot.

[…]While Democratic politicos and pundits are happy to pay lip service to Mitt Romney’s sterling personal character and exemplary private life, behind the scenes many of them are surely thinking what Nicole Rodgers is thinking, namely that Romney’s life represents a counterrevolutionary, even a reactionary force in American cultural politics.

Rodgers got herself totally lathered up because Romney dared to suggest, at the last presidential debate, that there would be less gun violence if there were fewer illegitimate births.

In truth, the point is not even controversial. Everyone but Nicole Rodgers knows that children who are brought up in families that look like the Romney family do much, much better in life than children who are brought up in any other family configuration.

Here’s the research to back up his assertion about single motherhood vs marriage, but that’s not what I am interested in. I am interested in why feminists are opposed to traditional marriage and why they fear Romney’s positive example of marriage with 5 children. Do feminists really want traditional marriage at all? It depends on what you mean by marriage.

This reminds me of a fascinating article on Dalrock’s blog in which he looks at the changing definition of marriage, which he calls the “debasement” of marriage. This is a must-read post.

Excerpt:

Feminists and their enablers have slowly shaved off the value of marriage for men.  Marriage for men no longer means:

  • Being the legally and socially recognized head of the household.
  • An expectation of regular sex.
  • Legal rights to children.
  • Lifetime commitment.

He also adds the elimination of the preservation chastity and the embrace of the hook-up culture on campus to the list, so that there are 5 debasements to marriage in total. Men liked the original version of marriage without the debasements. Do they like the new debased version as much?

It’s very important, especially for Christians, to understand that many women who say that they want marriage do not really want what marriage has always been. They want to live happily ever after. What this means is not what traditional marriage means. Traditional marriage means preparing for marriage by making good decisions – like premarital chastity. It means a separation of roles where each side performs roles that are of value to the other. Today, the majority of single women today have been influenced by feminism and they reject that view of marriage. They have been taught that marriage means happiness and full autonomy for the woman at the expense of men and children. They have been taught that there is no need to prepare for marriage with good decisions like chastity, and no need to prefer men who are good leaders, providers and protectors in the home. The moral dimension of marriage – the obligations and virtues – have been obliterated.

The majority of single women also vote for policies that will enable this new definition of marriage: social programs that make husbands dispensable, welfare subsidies for single mothers, early sex education to turn young men away from chastity and fidelity, co-ed education, recognition of cohabitation as marriage, no-fault divorce, punitive anti-male divorce courts, taxpayer-funding of contraceptives, taxpayer-funding of abortions, taxpayer-funding of day care, affirmative action in education, affirmative action in employment decisions, discrimination against male teachers in schools, and so on. The goal of all of this is to eliminate male leadership, men as main providers, and men as protectors. Many single women who choose poorly do not even want other women who prefer traditional men and traditional marriage to succeed, which is why they vote Democrat in order to tax, regulate and undermine the marriages of these more responsible married women.

Men start off chaste. We start off wanting romantic love and life-long traditional marriage. But it is drummed out of us because of a society in which feminist notions of recreational sex without consequences are on us through taxes, policies, schools and culture. Men learn that recreational sex is “normal” at very young ages, in schools that are dominated by female teachers and female administrators. The majority of these women are feminists who value careers first, and who seek to undermine traditional marriage and chastity. More and more men are being raised fatherless so there is no resistance from husband-fathers (who know better!) in the home. The result is a generation of men who trained to expect the sexual ethics of Sandra Fluke: government-funded promiscuity, irresponsibility, big government socialism and selfishness. Sandra Fluke doesn’t want marriage, and neither do single women like her who mostly vote Democrat.

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