Family and Faith: The Roots of Prosperity, Stability and Freedom

The sumer of love has caused alot of pain and grief as the article here outlines in part. The chart to the left shows the results of a culture without restraint and without boundaries. Abstinence programs are bashed in the media in this country because they supposedly have no effect. A questionable claim considering the short time they have been implemented. But no one likes to talk about the obvious and devastating results of the alternative.
From Heritage:
To understand why I call this the Culture of Rejection and Alienation in America, let’s look at Chart 1, which shows the stunning increase in the numbers of children entering broken families after 1950. Children enter a broken home in two ways—by out-of-wedlock births or by their parents’ divorce. To understand the extent of this increasing ratio of rejection, consider:
In 1950, for every 100 children born, 12 entered a broken family—four born out of wedlock and eight from their parents’ divorce.
By the mid-1990s, 58 out of every 100 children born in the United States entered a broken home. (more at the Heritage link above)

Reality Says Cohabitation a Disaster for Marriage but Poll Shows Public Believes Otherwise

From Lifesite
Living together before marriage has skyrocketed since the 1960s, when Western cultures began to cast off traditional sexual mores; but the same period has seen a correlating upsurge of divorce.
The evidence has prompted a number of studies that have indicated that by trying to avoid divorce by cohabitation, unwed couples seriously compromise their marital success. A 2006 report published in the journal Demography indicated one-half of all cohabiting unions collapse within a year and 90 percent within five years.
“The common view of cohabitation as a steppingstone to marriage needs to be seriously questioned,” commented Daniel Lichter a professor of policy analysis at Cornell University and the study’s lead researcher. “Instead, serial cohabitation may be an emerging norm as cohabiting unions form and break up,” he said. “If marriage promotion programs hope to target poor cohabiting women, our results seemingly suggest that the likelihood of success is not assured.”(more)

Ten Principles on Marriage and the Public Good

Mandatory reading. Go and read it. Learn it, understand it and spread the word to your church, your school board. No need to bash your gay neighbor, but it is time to stop the indoctrination of our children, the splitting of our churches, and the destruction of our culture.
From the Princeton Principles:
In recent years, marriage has weakened, with serious negative consequences for society as a whole. Four developments are especially troubling: divorce, illegitimacy, cohabitation, and same-sex marriage…
Marriage protects children, men and women, and the common good. The health of marriage is particularly important in a free society, which depends upon citizens to govern their private lives and rear their children responsibly, so as to limit the scope, size, and power of the state. The nation’s retreat from marriage has been particularly consequential for our society’s most vulnerable communities: minorities and the poor pay a disproportionately heavy price when marriage declines in their communities. Marriage also offers men and women as spouses a good they can have in no other way: a mutual and complete giving of the self. Thus, marriage understood as the enduring union of husband and wife is both a good in itself and also advances the public interest. ..
We affirm the following ten principles that summarize the value of marriage- a choice that most people want to make, and that society should endorse and support.

Ten Principles on Marriage and the Public Good

1. Marriage is a personal union, intended for the whole of life, of husband and wife.
2. Marriage is a profound human good, elevating and perfecting our social and sexual nature.
3. Ordinarily, both men and women who marry are better off as a result.
4. Marriage protects and promotes the wellbeing of children.
5. Marriage sustains civil society and promotes the common good.
6. Marriage is a wealth-creating institution, increasing human and social capital.
7. When marriage weakens, the equality gap widens, as children suffer from the disadvantages of growing up in homes without committed mothers and fathers.
8. A functioning marriage culture serves to protect political liberty and foster limited government.
9. The laws that govern marriage matter significantly.
10. “Civil marriage” and “religious marriage” cannot be rigidly or completely divorced from one another.

Boycott McDonald’s

From the Boycott website:
What the boycott of McDonald’s IS NOT about
This boycott is not about hiring homosexuals.
It is not about homosexuals eating at McDonald’s.
It is not about how homosexual employees are treated.
What the boycott of McDonald’s IS about
It is about McDonald’s, as a corporation, refusing to remain neutral in the culture wars. McDonald’s has chosen not to remain neutral but to give the full weight of their corporation to promoting the homosexual agenda, including homosexual marriage. (more)

Poll: Support for Homosexual "Marriage" Grows in US

July 28, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) – A US poll suggests that support for homosexual unions, including homosexual “marriage,” is on the increase. Angus Reid found in a survey of 1,783 US voters that 32 percent said they would vote to allow homosexual partners to contract legal marriages. Only 29 percent said they would grant homosexual partnerings no legal recognition. (more)
We are losing the argument because we are not involved in the discussion. We are not doing are part to teach people. We are allowing our children to be indoctrinated in our public schools. We are letting this be framed as a civil rights issue (it’s not). Or allowing the claim that science has declared it a fact (science has not made such a statement) and we have failed to explain that marriage (not redefined) forms a strong foundation for society and is important for the health and vigor of the culture itself.

Bruni-Sarkozy and the Unbearable Lightness of Nudity

From the proexistence Blog..some good thoughts:
France’s First Lady Carla Bruni-Sarkozy seems to have second thoughts about having “posed for too many nude photos.”Good for her, and yet: How is this possible?Is she no longer “proud of my body”? What? She wants something special, private, reserved, unknown to others, with her husband?As if human love between husband and wife is more than the publicly accessible physics and chemistry of firing neurons.Here’s what may be bubbling to the surface: Despite the pronouncements of Darwinian and atheistic theory, human beings in fact are more than flesh, skin surfaces, and matter. (more)

Court says no to prayers in Jesus’ name

A praer to Ceaser is ok- that’s comforting… From OneNews Now
RICHMOND, Va. – The Fredericksburg City Council’s policy prohibiting a member from opening meetings with a prayer mentioning Jesus does not violate his free-speech rights, a federal appeals court ruled Wednesday.

A three-judge panel of the 4th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals unanimously rejected the Rev. Hashmel Turner’s lawsuit challenging a nonsectarian prayer policy adopted by the council in 2005. The court said the policy does not violate Turner’s rights because the prayer is “government speech,” not individual speech.

Turner filed the lawsuit after the mayor refused to recognize him to open the meeting with prayer. Turner, an ordained minister and part-time pastor of the First Baptist Church of Love, had told the mayor he planned to pray in the name of Jesus Christ in keeping with his faith and in defiance of the new policy….(more)

The Vindication of Humanae Vitae

A long but worthwhile read on the vision and wisdom of the papap encyclical Humanae Vitae. Not being a Catholic the teachings of this document against contraception are difficult but thought provoking and shoudl at least give Christians of any “flavor” a moments pause in prayerful meditation. The warnings of the document give added weight to it’s teachings. It is my understanding that the Eastern Orthodox are a bit more flexible in their teachings. Either position is preferable to the cavlier and (pardon) “devil may care” attitude of most Protestants.

An excerpt from First Things:
…Let’s begin by meditating upon what might be called the first of the secular ironies now evident: Humanae Vitae’s specific predictions about what the world would look like if artificial contraception became widespread. The encyclical warned of four resulting trends: a general lowering of moral standards throughout society; a rise in infidelity; a lessening of respect for women by men; and the coercive use of reproductive technologies by governments.
In the years since Humanae Vitae’s appearance, numerous distinguished Catholic thinkers have argued, using a variety of evidence, that each of these predictions has been borne out by the social facts. One thinks, for example, of Monsignor George A. Kelly in his 1978 “Bitter Pill the Catholic Community Swallowed” and of the many contributions of Janet E. Smith, including Humanae Vitae: A Generation Later and the edited volume Why Humanae Vitae Was Right: A Reader.
And therein lies an irony within an irony. Although it is largely Catholic thinkers who have connected the latest empirical evidence to the defense of Humanae Vitae’s predictions, during those same forty years most of the experts actually producing the empirical evidence have been social scientists operating in the secular realm. As sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox emphasized in a 2005 essay: “The leading scholars who have tackled these topics are not Christians, and most of them are not political or social conservatives. They are, rather, honest social scientists willing to follow the data wherever it may lead.”
Consider, as Wilcox does, the Nobel Prize-winning economist George Akerlof. In a well-known 1996 article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Akerlof explained in the language of modern economics why the sexual revolution—contrary to common prediction, especially prediction by those in and out of the Church who wanted the teaching on birth control changed—had led to an increase in both illegitimacy and abortion. In another work published in the Economic Journal ten years ago, he traced the empirical connections between the decrease in marriage and married fatherhood for men—both clear consequences of the contraceptive revolution—and the simultaneous increase in behaviors to which single men appear more prone: substance abuse, incarceration, and arrests, to name just three.
Along the way, Akerlof found a strong connection between the diminishment of marriage on the one hand and the rise in poverty and social pathology on the other. He explained his findings in nontechnical terms in Slate magazine: “Although doubt will always remain about what causes a change in social custom, the technology-shock theory does fit the facts. The new reproductive technology was adopted quickly, and on a massive scale. Marital and fertility patterns changed with similar drama, at about the same time.” …(more)

From Townhall:
“Explain the minaret ban,” I asked.
I was sitting in the side room of a house, overlooking a flat plot somewhat larger than the trampoline outside. Beyond that trampoline, still visible in the evening light, rose the Swiss Alps. Across the table, Oskar Freysinger sat poised to address my query over some cups of espresso, speaking as a local leader of the Swiss People’s Party.
Or perhaps I should say — a local leader of the “extremist,” “bigoted” and “xenophobic” Swiss People’s Party. That’s how this largest political party in tiny Switzerland is routinely discussed, or, rather, dismissed by elites, glitterati and other social deadweights.
Why? Because the Swiss People’s Party is, with noticeable success, fighting to bring massive immigration, including Islamic immigration, under control in Switzerland before this rigidly neutral, quite independent, non-European Union country loses its uniquely Swiss character. (Hardly unimaginable given that 21.1 percent of Swiss residents are foreign.) This makes men like Freysinger a dire threat to the multicultural world order. Hence the very nasty, but meaningless names. (more)

Not Your Ordinary Wafer

A very disturbing link to a very disturbed associate professor at the University of Minnesota-Morris:
Our Salvo editor sent me this link today, and I confess that I was both horrified and amused by PZ Myers’ comments.
Because what’s sadder? The anger or the stupidity behind his arguments and indignation? While reading his rant, I sat dumbfounded at his ignorance and also burst out laughing a few times because his outrage seemed…utterly ridiculous.
As a Roman Catholic, I understand exactly why Catholics were appalled and upset by the young man who ran off with a consecrated host. Catholics believe in Transubstantiation, Mr. Myers. That boy wasn’t just waltzing off with a cracker – to Catholics, that is Jesus. We believe in Jesus’ real, actual, divine presence in the Eucharist as strongly as some people believe we evolved from apes, the earth was created by aliens or we are all one with nature through the mother goddess.
Are we to be denied our first amendment rights to hold such a belief? Must we be mocked and ridiculed for our traditions? How would anyone like it if his or her house was broken into and something precious was stolen? (more)