Ruth Institute Blog

I was talking to Dr. Morse yesterday, and asked her to think back to when she was a young girl in school. “How many kids were from divorced families?” I asked her. She said she could think of one. The rest lived with their married biological parents. Before the Sexual Revolution, there used to be an important and unrecognized equality among children: nearly every child lived with his/her married parents.

Let’s think for a moment about what the Sexual Revolution has done to equality from the child’s point of view. In the name of adult sexual liberation, we now have a tremendous amount of family/structural inequality among children. Some kids live with their married parents, and many do not:

• Nearly 40% of births are out of wedlock
• A majority of teens don’t live in intact families
• One in three children live in single parent homes

Read more…

Proposal from the Ruth Institute:

Gender-Based Civil Unions

Since an essential public purpose of civil marriage in the United States has been to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another, and since this essential purpose is being overwritten and therefore discarded due to gender neutral marriage and parenting laws, we propose the following:

To establish civil unions that are gender based–one man and one woman. With respect to taxation, parentage, federal benefits, etc. (reference), they will be legally equivalent to (now gender neutral) marriage in everything but the name. The legal doctrine that was formerly known as the marital presumption of paternity, which existed in order to attach the father to the family, was distorted into the marital presumption of parentage under gender neutral marriage and parentage. It shall be restored to its former function of attaching the father to the family for these civil unions. Gender based terms shall be used to describe the parties, such as male, female, mother, father, etc.

Male/female couples who were previously considered married under the gender neutral system may opt into a gender-based civil union. Churches who uphold marriage as the union between a man and a woman can perform these ceremonies under whatever name they wish. If they wish to call it marriage, they can do so. There will be no speech restrictions regarding what individuals, churches, or other private entities call these unions. However, with respect to the legal code, they will be called civil unions.

Regarding divorce: generally, we prefer the state to have a higher bar to overcome before getting involved in a divorce for these civil unions than it does currently for civil marriage. Michael J. McManus, in the Spring 2011 edition of The Family in America (reference), proposes what he calls “Three Achievable No-Fault Reforms.” They are:

1. Mutual Consent.
2. Parental Divorce Reduction Act.
3. Responsible Spouse/Fit Parent.

We are open to discussion about any of these or other reasonable proposals. Our primary goals are to reaffirm sex differences in the legal code and to reaffirm the father’s attachment to the family. Secondarily, we see these civil unions as an opportunity to make long-needed reforms to divorce laws.

If you like this idea, we encourage you to share this post with your friends. You can also support our work by making a donation today. .

 

Hi Melanie,

My name is Jennifer Johnson and I am the Director of Outreach at the Ruth Institute. Since you linked to an important document created by my organization in your post called, “Conservatives Can’t Be Pro-Marriage and Oppose Gay Marriage,” I would like to respond to you.

You said that you haven’t found a conservative to “give you a satisfactory answer” as to “how gay marriage tangibly undermines traditional marriage arrangements.” That’s unfortunate, and I’m not very surprised. However, this kind of answer is the kind of answer specialize in here at the Ruth Institute (which is no longer part of NOM, BTW).

Before I answer, let me pose a question, Melanie. Have you researched the precise manner in which gay marriage is implemented into the legal code? I would like to make a prediction: that you have not done this research. Very few have. What I have observed, instead, is that gay marriage supporters make an assumption. Their assumption goes like this: Read more…

I have always tried to argue that there is a very serious civil outcome to redefining marriage, and it has nothing to do with religious liberty or the idea of “sacramental marriage.”

Since marriage is society’s primary way of acknowledging and understanding parenthood, redefining marriage redefines parenthood. Here in California, the affects of “SSM” and redefining parenthood are rapidly making their way through the legislature. Last year, Gov. Brown signed a bill allowing three or more legal parents for children, which was inspired by a “SSM” custody dispute.

Now we have this: AB 1951. This bill will change birth certificates to allow for a gender neutral option for parents. Gay couples will be able to list both of themselves on the child’s birth certificate. California recently did away with the terms “husband” and “wife,” because of “SSM,” and the lead legislator for that measure said that those terms were outdated and biased. I suppose we can infer the same thing for “mother” and “father.”  Read more…

I believe that the divide between conservatives on the marriage issue runs deeper than marriage. Over on Ricochet, on Peter Robinson’s marriage thread, several times I asked a question that went something like this:

Does society have a duty to place a nature-based limitation on the number of legally recognized parents for children?

There is a specific reason I asked this question. When it comes to legally recognized parents for children, there is a divide between the socially conservative view and the libertarian view. In fact, I don’t believe there is a principled difference between the libertarian view and the extreme Left on this particular point. By “extreme Left” I am referring specifically to  that she made in about March or April of 2013: Read more…

If you’re debating marriage with somebody and they bring up the interracial marriage ban (which was struck down by SCOTUS in a famous decision called Loving v. Virginia), show them this graphic and start talking about what the interracial marriage ban actually DID. 

Under California law, there are no longer husbands and wives. Only spouses.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so. I have been saying this in debates for some time. A few years ago, I was in a debate at UCLA, with Prof Gary Gates of the Williams Institute. He took offense at the fact that I referred to his partner as well, as “partner.”  “He is not my partner. He is my husband!” Dr. Gates said indignantly.

To which I replied, “Dr. Gates, under the laws you advocate, there will be no husbands or wives. I won’t have a husband. No one will have a husband. Everyone will have generic “spouses.”  (His comment is around 42 minutes. My response is around 52 – 55 minutes. You can’t see his facial expression, but he did seem to be surprised by this news.)

Today it happened: Governor Jerry Brown signed into law, a bill that would remove the gendered terms from the law and replace

them with generic “spouse” terms.

Sex radical Mark Leno, is of course, delighted.

“I am pleased Governor Brown has recognized the importance of this bill, which makes it explicitly clear in state law that every loving couple has the right to marry in California,” Leno said. “This legislation removes outdated and biased language from state codes and recognizes all married spouses equally, regardless of their gender.”

Outdated and biased language. Sorry Gary Gates, you don’t get to have a husband and neither do I.

I hate to say I told you so, but I told you so.

 

 

I like religious liberty just fine, thank you very much. But I must say, I am tired of hearing the pro-family movement making religious liberty their primary argument against the Sexual Revolution. Too many of us have done this with the HHS Mandate (which amounts to creating a Contraceptive State) and Gay Marriage (which amounts to creating Genderless Marriage.)

I realize that we are poised for the US Supreme Court’s decision on the Hobby Lobby case on Monday. Still, I want to share my

objections to this rhetorical strategy:

First, religious liberty arguments do not address the underlying issue we are fighting about. We can make good rational, natural law arguments for our position, arguments that should be comprehensible to intelligent people of good will.

If we do not make such arguments, we sound as if we are dodging that issue. Some people on our side would rather talk about bakers and wedding photographers, than the real issue of why
marriage is the social institution that links the generations to each other, and that children have genuine rights that adult society ought to strive to respect.  Some people frame the HHS Mandate issue in terms of the harm to Christian employers and institutions, when the real question is HOW THE HECK DID THE STATE EVER GET IN THE CONTRACEPTION BUSINESS IN THE FIRST PLACE??!?!?!?!

Second, religious liberty is a losing argument. The Sandra Flukes and Dan Savages of the Read more…

Found this on Twitter today. Question: if there are really no gender roles, who will bear the children? Maybe that will be outsourced?

 

 

Men and women are different. You can learn more about why men and women are different by ordering our brochure, “77 Non Religious Reasons to Support Man/Woman Marriage.” It’s available as a PDF download, as well as a physical brochure. Learn how to counter the lies of the Sexual Revolution and order the brochure today.

The legal recognition of new gender identities will further distance marriage from the natural family unit.

by Barend Vlaardingerbroek

A binary classification is one in which there are two, and only two, states in which a given entity may exist. Sex has long been such an entity, the two states in which it may be manifested being male and female. Nature occasionally presents us with individuals who do not fit in well with the binary schema in the form of genetic anomalies and morphogenetic quirks resulting in indeterminate sexual appearance; the standard response has been hormonal treatment and/or corrective surgery to assign such individuals to one of the two members of the binary set. Read more…