Why the Left hates families

How can I be ‘Right-wing’ when I am driven by the desire to make a better world, stand up for right over wrong and look after the most vulnerable in society?

Rather, I fight the Left on its very own purported moral high ground, which I once believed we all shared, but which I came to realise it had most cynically betrayed.

The defining issue for me — the one that launched me on a personal trajectory of confrontation with the Left and with my colleagues and friends — was the persistent undermining of the family as an institution.

By the late Eighties, it was glaringly obvious that families were suffering a chronic crisis of identity and self-confidence.

There were more and more divorces and single parents — along with mounting evidence that family disintegration and the subsequent creation of step-families or households with no father figure at all did incalculable damage to children.

‘Too many children lack a consistent mother or father figure,’ researchers told me.

Poverty, the Left’s habitual excuse, could not be the culprit since middle-class children were also not receiving the parental attention they required.

For me, the traditional family is sacred because it embodies the idea that there is something beyond the selfish individual.

Read more at Mail Online.

Memorial Service Will Give Names to Babies Kermit Gosnell Killed

A pro-life Catholic group will hold a memorial service tomorrow to give names to the babies killed via late-term abortions and infanticides at the Kermit Gosnell abortion clinic.

Fr. Frank Pavone, National Director of Priests for Life, told LifeNews today about his plans. As he mentions, he has requested the actual bodies of the babies victimized in the abortion-infanticides at Gosnell and his staff’s hands.

“As we await the verdict in the trial of Kermit Gosnell, Priests for Life, which has requested from the Medical Examiner the bodies of the babies retrieved from Gosnell’s clinic so that a funeral and burial can be arranged, will take the step this week of giving names to those babies,” Pavone said.

Read more at Life Site News.

The Feminist, Pro-Father, and Pro-Child Case against No-Fault Divorce

How appropriate that Justice Alito brought up cellphones in the recent Supreme Court hearings on the marriage cases. Because these days it seems like it is easier to get out of a marriage than it is to get out of a cellphone contract.

It is no secret that marriage is in a state of severe crisis in America. And while academics, statisticians, and pundits may quarrel about the exact divorce rate or its causes, no one would deny that the widespread legalization of no-fault divorce beginning in the early 1970s saw an explosion of divorce in this country.

Yet as social conservatives, and even many liberals, wring their hands about marital and familial breakdown, few seem to question whether our experiment with treating marriage like a restaurant experience—order what you like and send it back if you change your mind—is worth reconsidering.

Instead, no-fault divorce has become an assumed feature of the landscape of unbridled American freedom. Whereas once freedom in this country meant the right to live a good life, the ability to be a moral agent in the human enterprise, the chance to chase happiness, it now increasingly appears to mean the right to do whatever you want whenever you feel like it, regardless of whom you destroy in the process.

No-fault divorce is destroying women, children, and men. More precisely, divorce destroys marriage, and the destruction of marriage harms every party involved. The legality of no-fault divorce just makes it infinitely easier to hurt people. There are no two ways about it. No one comes out of a divorce a happier and more whole person.

Particularly offensive no-fault divorces are those where one spouse is protesting. In these cases, one spouse is literally abandoning the other (and frequently the children as well), despite having made public vows and having signed a contract before civil and religious officials stating their lifelong commitment to his or her spouse.

In this country you can come home from work and tell your spouse the marriage is over and he or she can do nothing but cry, and fight for the best financial payout possible. Try doing that with Verizon. Or while under contract to buy a home. Or with your gym membership. You’ll get laughed at.

Eighty percent of divorces are unilateral. The legal sanctioning of human abandonment must end.

Read more at Public Discourse.

Truth, Responsibility, and Love

We live in trying times. Horror stories come out of Philadelphia about the abortionist Kermit Gosnell; terrorists strike across the globe, and here at home; unemployment plagues our nation; the Supreme Court may redefine marriage; religious institutions are being coerced into violating their consciences; our entitlement programs put us on the brink of bankruptcy.

Our world, our country, and yes, our churches and our families, are in crisis. And these communities desperately need what Regent University graduates have to offer.

You graduate into a society of widespread individualism and relativism, where man is the measure of all things. You will hear people speak of human rights, but rarely of human nature, or nature’s Author. You will hear people appeal to natural rights, but rarely to natural law, or the Natural Lawgiver.

You will hear some claim a right to do whatever they want, provided it doesn’t harm others, by which they mean others who can complain about it. (Notice where this leaves the vulnerable, the marginalized, and the unborn.) You will hear others claim a right to fulfill their desires without consequence, without judgment, but with subsidies. (Just think of the Life of Julia.)

Many believe that they have no responsibilities to others except those that they choose. But what if you have unchosen obligations? What if you have obligations to others by the sheer fact that you exist—and that you exist alongside neighbors, in the context of community?

What if, in addition to rights, we thought of the other R-word: Responsibilities? What if we spoke of duties and obligations?

Read more at Public Discourse.

Contraceptive Pills kill 20 Women a Year in France

Photo: E-magine art/Flickr

Contraceptive pills cause the deaths of 20 women and lead to around 2,500 cases of blood clots each year in France, according to a report released on Tuesday, which appears to confirm newer generation pills pose a greater risk of causing thrombosis.

According to the report by France’s Medicines Agency (ANSM), which looked at the years from 2000 to 2011, the premature deaths are related to pulmonary embolisms (blocked arteries).

The agency published its report on Tuesday in the light of warnings issued earlier this year on the dangers of taking 3^rd and 4^th generation pills.

The new report appears to confirm fears that newer generation of pills pose a greater risk of causing thrombosis. Of the 20 deaths each year, 14 are due to the these latest generations of contraceptives and 6 are linked to 1^st and 2^ndgeneration pills.

In a statement following the release of the report the ANSM said: "We remind people that there are a large variety of methods of contraception and health professionals are the best placed to inform and help women choose the method of contraception that best suits them."

France have asked the European Medicines Agency (EMA) to change prescription guidelines for so-called 3rd and 4thgeneration oral contraceptives after these drugs were found to carry a higher risk of blood clots compared to earlier versions.

Read more at the Local.

Marriage as Purposeful Institution

By: Ryan T. Anderson (Diary)  

When a baby is born, a mother always is nearby. The question is whether a father will be involved in the life of that child and, if so, for how long.

Marriage increases the odds that a man will be committed to both the children that he helps create and to the woman with whom he does so.

The recent oral arguments at the Supreme Court highlighted this and other key questions about redefining marriage as we’ve always understood it in America. That is, marriage is the union of a man and woman as husband and wife to provide any children of that union with a father and a mother.

A leading argument from liberals is that marriage so understood unjustly excludes same-sex relationships. However, Chief Justice John G. Roberts, during arguments on California’s Proposition 8, resisted any characterization that marriage was about “excluding a particular group.”

As Roberts explained: “When the institution of marriage developed historically, people didn’t get around and say let’s have this institution, but let’s keep out homosexuals. The institution developed to serve purposes that, by their nature, didn’t include homosexual couples.”

What are those purposes? In the book What Is Marriage? Man and Woman: A Defense, my co-authors and I argue that marriage is based on the anthropological truth that men and women are different and complementary, the biological fact that reproduction depends on a man and a woman, and the social reality that children need a mother and a father.

Indeed, there is no such thing as “parenting.” There is mothering, and there is fathering, and children do best with both. Although men and women are each capable of providing their children with a good upbringing, we typically see differences in the ways mothers and fathers interact with their children as well as in their functional roles. Dads are particularly important in the formation of sons and daughters.

David Popenoe, a sociologist at Rutgers University, put it this way:  “We should disavow the notion that ‘mommies can make good daddies,’ just as we should disavow the popular notion…that ‘daddies can make good mommies.’… The two sexes are different to the core, and each is necessary—culturally and biologically—for the optimal development of a human being.”

Read more at Red State.

The Big Same-sex Marriage Lie

They do want to change this basic institution

BY RYAN T. ANDERSON / NEW YORK DAILY NEWS

SUNDAY, MAY 5, 2013, 4:39 AM

JEWEL SAMAD

Same-sex marriage supporters shout slogans in front of the US Supreme Court on March 26, 2013 in Washington, DC. The US Supreme Court on Tuesday takes up the emotionally charged issue of gay marriage as it considers arguments that it should make history and extend equal rights to same-sex couples. Waving US and rainbow flags, hundreds of gay marriage supporters braved the cold to rally outside the court along with a smaller group of opponents, some pushing strollers. Some slept outside in hopes of witnessing the historic hearing. AFP PHOTO/Jewel Samad (Photo credit should read JEWEL SAMAD/AFP/Getty Images)

Same-sex marriage will never be widely accepted in America for a simple reason: It’s based on a lie. But don’t take my word on this; leading LGBT scholars and activists say as much.

Take Masha Gessen, acclaimed author and former Russian director of Radio Liberty. “Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there — because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change,” Gessen said last year.

Last month, I was part of a debate at the NYU School of Law at which Judith Stacey, a sociology professor at the university, declared: “Children certainly do not need both a mother and a father.”

Stacey went on to suggest that three parents might be better than two. In fact, while asserting she is in favor of same-sex marriage because of “equal justice,” Stacey admitted she isn’t a fan of marriage. “Why should there be marriage at all?” she asked.

I pointed out that marriage exists, and the government takes an interest in marriage because the sexual union of a man and woman produces children — and children need both a mom and a dad.

I quoted President Obama making a closely related point:

“We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it.”

Stacey’s response? President Obama “was deeply misled.” Indeed, “Obama was dead wrong.”

But most Americans know that on this point, Obama is right. Children are better off with both a mother and a father. And marriage is the institution that unites a man and a woman as husband and wife to be father and mother to the children their union produces.

Obama is wrong, though, in his “evolved” thinking that we can redefine marriage to make fathers optional while still insisting that they are essential. This inherent contradiction empowers those who want to weaken the foundation of the nuclear family.

Read more at Daily News.