Ruth Institute Blog

Did you hear about the two young guys in New Zealand who got married to enter a contest to win rugby tickets? I wrote about them the other day. The contest was open to married couples. The two guys are not gay, but have been buddies since they were 6 years old.  They got married to be eligible to enter the contest.

Now some gay activists were indignant about this marriage. They claimed that it trivialized marriage itself and made a mockery of the efforts of gay activists to win marriage equality.  I agree with them, except for this point: removing the gender requirement already trivialized

marriage.

But I will not press that point here. I want to ask a different question.

Q: Do you or I care whether these two rugby buddies stay married for a lifetime or divorce next year?  Does the public have any interest whatsoever in the success or failure of this particular friendship?

A: The public has no conceivable interest in what two men do together. Whether they are rugby buddies or golfing buddies or sodomy partners, the public couldn’t care less. (As a matter of fact, I don’t really want to know!)

Why then, does the public have any interest at all in the relationship called marriage? Read more…

Did you hear about the controversy brewing on Twitter? A congressional candidate and “left wing liberal” named Mike Dickinson has created a bounty of “100k” for nude pictures and/or sex tapes of Kendall Jones. You may recognize Kendall’s beautiful face from Facebook or elsewhere. She’s the cheerleader who is an accomplished hunter. Dickinson’s Twitter stream has many, many requests like this: Read more…

Have you ever seen a dog race up to the boundary of a yard, and abruptly stop?  It looks very odd, until you realize that the dog is wearing a fancy collar.  You surmise that there is an invisible electric “fence” embedded in the yard. The dog has been shocked so often that it stops itself before it actually touches the invisible fence line.

This image flashed in my mind as I was reading “Home Economics: The Consequences of Changing Family Structure,” by Nick Schulz. Mr. Schulz does a fine job laying out the harmful effects of the deconstruction of the family, both to individuals and to the larger project of the free society. This nice little book lays out the economic consequences of family breakdown.  But he studiously avoids anything that might have even the remotest chance of getting him tagged with the label of “moralizing.”  Or perhaps I should say, anything that would “zap” him with such a label.  

He throw out the obligatory protective covering right at the beginning of this small paperback by promising to refrain from “passing judgment about divorce or out-of-wedlock births.”  I think this is rather an odd position to take while describing such  socially destructive trends.   But that is where we are as a culture, due to the systematic strategy of the Life Style Left of zapping anyone who dares to challenge their Orthodoxy. You know the Orthodoxy, don’t you?

• The kids will be fine as long as their parents are happy.  Read more…

By Wesley J. Smith

Decadence is on the march! And now, a defense of pedophilia as just another “sexual orientation” has been published in the mainstream left wing UK newspaper The Guardian.  From, “Paedophilia: Bringing Dark Desires Into the Light:” Read more…

by Scott Yenor, Ph.D. Yenor is a political philosophy professor at Boise State University, and author of the book, Family Politics: The Idea of Marriage in Modern Political Thought.

This article was first published at thepublicdiscourse.com on October 2, 2012.

A new argument that reduces marriage to any consensual caring relationship is grounded by a cynical view of human nature that we ought not accept.

Elizabeth Brake’s Minimizing Marriage breaks new ground in the contemporary liberal critique of traditional arrangements. The object of her critique is what she calls amatonormativity-the belief that society should value two-person, amorous love relationships. Even same-sex marriage (SSM) advocates are too restrictive for Brake in that they would confer benefits on two people alone; SSM advocates are unwitting amatonormativists. Their defenses of marriage leave out “urban tribes, best friends, quirkyalones, polyamorists” and other diverse groups united by a common bond of caring. Brake argues for an almost complete disestablishment of marriage. Read more…

by Clive Hamilton

An Australian Senator is reviled for a slippery slope argument while a philosopher is honoured for celebrating it.

Senator Cory Bernardi has been reviled for associating homosexuality with something repugnant, bestiality. Yet Australia has just awarded its highest civilian honour to a philosopher who provides a moral defence of sex with animals. Read more…

by Alana S. Newman

Value depends on scarcity. In the world of human reproduction, the most valuable entity is the fertile female—specifically, her eggs and her womb.

The fierce politics surrounding female fecundity and women’s reproductive rights rests not only on a woman’s ability to create new life, but also on the incredible amount of commitment and risk involved when her eggs and her womb are accessed for procreation. Since women are fertile for a shorter period than men, since gestation takes forty long weeks, and since labor and delivery pose life-threatening risks, young women always will face disproportionately high demands for access to their bodies. But those demands are rising in unexpected ways, and from unexpected people.

Historically, it was understood that sex created babies. Cultural scripts thus emerged that valued and preferred certain types of sex and male-female relations. The profession of prostitution has always been highly stigmatized for this reason. As we’ve learned the hard way, when female prostitutes engage with their clients, fatherless children can be born, and grow up distinctly disadvantaged.

By far, men have always been the main buyers of sexual access to fertile females. Women virtually never pay for sexual access to either gender. Women and girls make up the overwhelming majority of prostitutes and escorts, and men overwhelmingly make up the clientele. This is true for every human culture, in every period in history. And it has everything to do with reproduction and the scarcity of the fertile female.

Keep reading.

By Dr. Keith Ablow

In an interview published Monday, Hollywood director Nick Cassavetes, whose new movie Yellow tells the story of a fictional love affair between an adult sister and brother, claimed that incest is just the latest frontier in people throwing off the shackles of rigid, cultural convention and following their hearts. Read more…

by Carolyn Moynihan

US Presidential hopeful Newt Gingrich was accused by ex-wife number two last week of wanting, at one stage, an “open marriage” in order to accommodate an affair he was having with present wife (number three). The New York Times has rounded up some experts to discuss the merits of such arangements. Brad Wilcox of the National Marriage Project, who can be relied on for common sense and objectivity, says: Read more…

A friend sent me photos of street light posters he saw lining the streets of Hollywood. These posters were recruiting foster and adoptive parents in honor of National Adoption Month. What could be better than trying to recruit more foster and adoptive parents? 

But my friend noticed something odd: there were absolutely no mothers in any of these posters. All posters featured pairs of men, smiling with their adoptive African American children. 

 

So I went and took a look at the website for the campaign called www.RaiseaChild.us  It is a campaign specifically to recruit gay men and lesbians to become foster and adoptive parents. 

 

One of the partners in this campaign is called, “Southern California Foster Family and Adoption Agency.”  They state in their press release supporting this campaign, “nearly 50% of the families our agency works with are headed by single or partnered gays and lesbians.”

Why isn’t 50% gay families “inclusive” enough? Let’s say this particular private agency chooses to specialize completely in placing children with same sex couples and same sex attracted individuals.  Yet I doubt that religious agencies are allowed to specialize in adoptions with heterosexual married couples.

And there is disinformation associated with this campaign.  One of the partners in the campaign states, “Throughout the United States, there are an estimated 1 million gay households raising 2 million children.” But according to the very gay-friendly Williams Institute’s analysis, there are less than 650,000 same sex couples in the United States.  Of those, about 111,000 are raising their “own” children, which the Williams Institute defines as, “never-married children under 18 who are sons or daughters of one partner or spouse (Person 1) by birth, marriage (stepchild), or adoption.” 

How the Raise A Child campaign and its partners come up with a number of “1 million gay households raising 2 million children,” is a mystery to me. 

And look at the children in these posters.  I wonder what the African-American community thinks about recruiting gay men to become foster parents for the children of their community who have been taken from their parents.  Do the African-American pastors have any thoughts and opinions about this? I imagine they do. But I will let them speak for themselves. 

What I want to know is this: Why aren’t we recruiting stable heterosexual married couples to be foster parents? After all, we know for sure that children do best in married couple low-conflict households.  Same sex parenting is an untried social experiment. Parenting by male couples is especially unstudied, since it is exceedingly uncommon.  Even the very pro-gay researchers Judith Stacey, could find only one study comparing gay male parenting with heterosexual couples that qualified for  inclusion in her comprehensive survey of gay parenting studies.[1]

 Now I realize that stable heterosexual married couples might not be so easy to find in Hollywood.  But hey, LA is a big town. There are lots of nice neighborhoods you could go to recruit stable heterosexual married couples, assuming, of course, that helping children really is the main point of the campaign.  

From the beginning of the sexual revolution, from no fault divorce to widespread cohabitation to out of wedlock childbearing, society has been surrendering the interests of children to the interests of adults, far too often and far too lightly. Many of the children in foster care, landed there precisely because of the failures of earlier episodes in the sexual revolution. Some are the children of unmarried mothers, or teen mothers.  Some have been abused by their mothers’ live-in boyfriends, who are statistically by far the most dangerous people for children to live with.

Children in foster care are the most vulnerable children in society.  These kids deserve better than to be human guinea pigs, in yet another round of social experimentation.  We should be pulling out all the stops to recruit stable heterosexual married couples to care for these children, not using their plight as an opportunity to “celebrate diversity.”  End of story. 

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