Amy Hall: Will right and wrong always be obvious?

Here’s a post from Amy Hall of Stand to Reason that will cause you to think.

She writes:

A person doesn’t have to know the Bible in order to know right and wrong, right? Well, yes and no. It all depends on what value system is being fed to that person by society. A society saturated in a Christian understanding of morality will reinforce that understanding, even among its atheists. A society without the background of Christianity behind it will enforce a different understanding of morality. Atheists have the mistaken idea that objective morality is simply obvious to everyone, but the truth is, it’s not. All one has to do is look back through history (and in other cultures today) to see that this is so. Our damaged consciences are malleable.

Is murdering your child right or wrong? Ask these mothers in India, where it’s commonplace in some areas to let your girl die if you prefer a boy. Ask pre-Christian cultures. This is why I think atheists are being far too hasty when they argue that Christianity is expendable—unnecessary for a good society. If we see atrocious moral crimes in cultures not influenced by Christianity, we have no reason to think our current standards will continue in a culture that rejects Christianity.

[...]As I’ve written before, intrinsic human value has to be taught. A society’s view of the human person and its value will affect what that society views as being moral: We are just animals. Imperfect animals aren’t worth the trouble. Therefore, there’s a case to be made for killing them rather than caring for them. That conclusion reasonably follows from the non-Christian premise. As Christianity fades in influence and a different view of the human person gains acceptance, don’t expect that our society will continue to recognize that conclusion to be immoral. At that point, people will still consider themselves to be perfectly moral…but only because they’re judging themselves by a different standard of morality.

It’s difficult for us to recognize the depth our depravity when “everyone else is doing it.” Ask Gosnell’s nurses.

I like this post because it connects an apologetic concern to real life. This concern about right and wrong isn’t merely theoretical. It’s practical.

Think about the abortion really means, in practice. Basically, you have two-grown ups who are engaging in a recreational activity. In the course of that activity, they create a new innocent life that is distinct from their lives. A new human genetic code. This new person is weaker than either of her two parents. And her life imposes certain obligations on them. She needs food, and safety, and care. Like a baby bird who has fallen out of her tree. But when there is no God, there is no purpose to putting your needs second, and someone else’s first. You could do it, if it makes you feel happy. But having to take care of a newborn doesn’t normally make people who are have risky recreational sex happy. After all, people who have recreational sex instead of procreative sex are looking for recreation not responsibility.

And so what do these powerful people do to the new life they have created? Do they let this new life impose obligations on them? Do they let this new life lower the amount of happiness they themselves will have? No. They kill it. For the strong to refrain from killing the weak when the weak impose obligations on them, there has to be a design for human nature that makes moral obligations and selflessness rational, instead of merely pleasurable. Because we all know that being saddled with a newborn baby is not fun. There has to be something more going on than the pursuit of pleasure if the baby is going to live.

Similarly with no-fault divorce and gay marriage. First, we enacted no-fault divorce, which weakened the stability of marriage so that many children now grow up fatherless.  No one is careful about marriage anymore in order to provide children with what they need. Instead, we just “marry for love” and then dissolve it when it doesn’t feel good anymore. Same-sex marriage is the same thing again. The voluntarily removal of the biological father or mother from a child’s life. And why? Because the needs of children don’t matter. They’re smaller than we are, so we don’t care about them.

Is there anything more going on in our society other than the seeking of pleasure? I think that the seeking of “happiness” instead of goodness is now the dominant view. No one wants to be responsible for anyone else. No one wants to be obligated to anyone else. We all seem to want to be free of feeling bad. If we do wrong, we don’t want to be judged or reminded about what we did. If we hurt someone else, then we don’t want to have to make restitution for what we did. We try to hand our children off to strangers so that we don’t have to teach them ourselves. We don’t want to learn anything that might make us feel obligated to do the right thing instead of what we feel like doing. Other people are  just there to give us pleasure. It’s sad.

All of these concepts had meaning in a Judeo-Christian society that encouraged marriage and families. But those days are drifting away. Once upon a time, we had a social consensus that what mattered was doing the right thing – what we were designed to do. And it was OK to not feel good and to not feel happy, if you were doing the right thing. Happiness wasn’t the main goal of life. Now things are different.

Filed under: News, Abortion, Atheism, Bible, Child, Children, Christianity, Divorce, Gay Marriage, Human Rights, Judaism, Morality, Right to Life

Lightning round: Ryan T. Anderson answers several questions about marriage

John Stonestreet interviews marriage defender Ryan T. Anderson: (Source: The Colson Center)

Questions:

• Don’t gay couples have a right to express their love in marriage like everyone else?
• How would legalizing gay marriage hurt your marriage?
• Marriage is already in such bad shape, how could it hurt marriage to allow more people to marry?
• Aren’t natural marriage proponents on the “wrong side of history”?

Every word counts in this concise primer on defending marriage. Blink, and you’ll miss pure gold.

You can watch Ryan debate gay marriage at Arizona State University right here.

Filed under: Videos, Adult, Child, Children, Definition of Marriage, Divorce, Exclusivity, Gay Marriage, Institution of Marriage, Love, Marriage, Permanence, Polyamory, Polygamy, Redefinition of Marriage, Ryan Anderson, Ryan T. Anderson, Selfishness, Society

How marital affairs can lead to divorce, which harms children

Dina tweeted this article from the UK Daily Mail about affairs and the harm they cause.

Excerpt:

Jean Duncombe, a sociologist who has conducted extensive research on the subject, says: ‘I’m puritanical when someone tells me they’re having an affair — because of the work we’ve done on the impact of divorce on the children.

‘If people say to me that the children don’t know, I say: “Are you sure?” or “Think about what you’re doing to the children” — and I never would have said that 20 years ago.’

For parents who have affairs are not only lying to their partners, they are often deceiving themselves about the impact their infidelity can have on their offspring.

‘The children are too young to understand what’s happening,’ they reason. ‘In any case, it doesn’t concern them. And children are resilient.’

All of the evidence points to the contrary. People don’t just betray their partners when they shatter family life with a serious affair — the sad truth is that their children grow up believing their parents have been unfaithful to them, too.

There is substantial research on the short and long-term effects of divorce if it isn’t handled well.

For children, these include low self-esteem, a sense of being abandoned, poor performance at school, anti-social behaviour and the heartbreak of simply missing the absent parent.

Separations provoked by an affair tend to be the most acrimonious. Each parent shoves the blame for the split on to the other, sometimes forcing the children to take sides by supporting his or her version of events.

By tearing a child’s loyalty in two, parents can inflict profound damage. To make matters worse, research has shown that around half of all fathers lose contact with their offspring within two years of the separation.

An acrimonious divorce, according to research, doesn’t simply hurt children at the time; it can also store up problems for their future.

So, even if their parents separated when they were small, they won’t necessarily suffer the full effects until they become adults themselves.

It can contribute to their own marital problems — including affairs of their own — or hamper their ability to form lasting relationships.

[...] When an affair is discovered, both parents are so anxious, angry and even traumatised that they have limited resources for dealing with more stress from their children, who are likely to be more demanding than usual.

In some families, sons and daughters are sucked into the emotional vortex. In others, they are given little by way of explanation other than: ‘Mummy and Daddy aren’t getting on very well at the moment.’

Lily says her adult children find it hard to trust and respect their father because he lied to them as children and still denies he had an affair with the woman to whom he’s now married.

‘My son went through a very bad time as a teenager, drinking too much and running away,’ she says.

‘Both children mind to this day that my ex has never come clean about what really happened.

‘My daughter hasn’t settled down with anyone yet — she doesn’t trust that it could last.

‘My son, who’s married, once asked me if I thought infidelity might be in his genes because of the fact his father was serially unfaithful.

‘He seriously considered not getting married at all because he didn’t want to risk hurting his girlfriend in the way that he’d been hurt.’

Very interesting read about what it is like to be a child in an environment like that. I think it’s worth it for us to read articles like this so that we take the problem seriously and make plans to avoid it. If we know how hard it is for children to go through something like this, then not only will we be more careful ourselves, but we’ll be more confident when telling other people who ask for our advice on these things. Sometimes, knowing the details of the harm that can be caused helps us to avoid behaviors that lead up to the harm. We have to know the harm, and we have to know the causes of the harm. Affairs cause divorces, and divorces harm children.

So let’s be careful when we choose who to marry. Has this person shown that they can be faithful? Can they control themselves sexually? Are they good at providing for our needs so that we won’t be tempted to have an affair? Are we good at providing for their needs so that they won’t be tempted to have an affair? How serious are they about religion and morality – do they care about moral obligations when they go against their self-interest? How accustomed are they to limiting their own conduct for the good of others, especially children and animals? Those are the questions we should be asking before getting married.

Filed under: Commentary, Affair, Children, Divorce, Husband, Marriage, Psychology, Wife

New study: pro-gay television shows have shifted public opinion on gay marriage

Life Site News reports.

Excerpt:

Ipsos MediaCT, a global market research company, have just released a study…

According to the report, 18 percent of Americans between the ages of 13 and 64 said that television has directly contributed to their increasing support for same-sex “marriage.”

That’s nearly double the number (10 percent) who reported television had increased their opposition to marriage redefinition.

“Based on this data, I think we can conclude that TV has, at least in part, moved the needle of public opinion to see same-sex marriage in a positive way,” Ben Spergel, Senior Vice President and Head of TV Insights at Ipsos MediaCT said in a statement.

“With everything from higher profile portrayals of gay characters, to celebrity support of gay marriage, to last year’s groundbreaking endorsement by President Obama, we are seeing a shift in our culture that is being influenced by popular culture,” he said.

Last month, liberal writer Andrew O’Hehir wrote an article for Salon crediting the American movement toward homosexual acceptance to television shows like “Will and Grace,”"Roseanne,” “The Real World,” “Ellen DeGeneres,” “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “Modern Family,” and “Glee.”

“From ‘Soap’ to Ellen DeGeneres to Richard Hatch on ‘Survivor’ to the macho male couple who won season 4 of ‘The Amazing Race,’” O’Hehir wrote, “televisual images of sexual diversity have gradually moved away from victimology and ‘gay best friend’ stereotypes toward a ‘normalizing vision’of LGBT culture.”

“While the startling public shift on gay marriage – something few people of my generation, straight or gay, thought they’d ever see — is not solely the product of TV, it represents the ultimate fulfillment of TV’s vision of sexual equality,” O’Hehir added.

Support for same-sex “marriage” is on the rise in the United States. Recent polls show more than half of Americans support redefining marriage to include homosexual couples, and several states now allow gay nuptials in defiance of federal law.

One reason I don’t have a TV in my house is because television is used as a way to change people’s minds without making rational arguments or showing evidence. It’s easy enough for gay-friendly Hollywood to make TV shows where all the gay characters are funny, hard-working, faithful and moral. But that doesn’t reflect what studies tell us about gay relationships. They are non-exclusive, short-lived, have higher rates of violence and abuse, etc.

If gay marriage were to become legal, then marriage would would no longer be permanent, faithful, or child-centered, as this gay activist recently explained.

It’s a no-brainer that (homosexuals) should have the right to marry, but I also think equally that it’s a no-brainer that the institution of marriage should not exist. . . . 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, and that is a lie.

The institution of marriage is going to change, and it should change. And again, I don’t think it should exist. And I don’t like taking part in creating fictions about my life. That’s sort of not what I had in mind when I came out thirty years ago.

I have three kids who have five parents, more or less, and I don’t see why they shouldn’t have five parents legally. . . . I met my new partner, and she had just had a baby, and that baby’s biological father is my brother, and my daughter’s biological father is a man who lives in Russia, and my adopted son also considers him his father. So the five parents break down into two groups of three. . . . And really, I would like to live in a legal system that is capable of reflecting that reality, and I don’t think that’s compatible with the institution of marriage.

The purpose of gay marriage is to normalize and celebrate any arrangements that makes adults happy, whether or not it provides for the needs of the children. Evidence from large-scale studies shows that gay relationships are not as good for children as natural marriage. But people who watch TV and don’t read studies will have their minds changed by TV, and then they will vote. And children not yet born will have to grow up without mothers and fathers because of it.

In a very real sense, stupidity and selfishness are destroying the next generation of children. It’s not just the crushing 17 trillion dollar debt being run up by selfish adults for their entitlements. It’s not just that our public schools are insulated from reform by powerful politically connected teacher unions. It’s not just that we liberalized divorce laws so that women can divorce men when they are not “happy” any more. It’s not just that we force employers to ship jobs overseas by raising their corporate taxes and burdening them with nonsense regulations. It’s not just that government pays irresponsible women to have babies out of wedlock. It’s not just that we abort the next generation of taxpayers because we can’t be bothered to get married and make a home for them before having sex. Now, we have to go beyond all that . We have to go even further. Now we have to formalize and normalize the complete supremacy of selfish adults over the needs of children. God help us all.

Filed under: News, Amusing Ourselves to Death, Art, Brainwashing, Children, Children's Rights, Culture, Divorce, Entertainment, Family, Father, Feminism, Gay Agenda, Gay Marriage, Gay Rights, Hollywood, Irrationality, LGBT, Marriage, Mother, Ondoctrination, Peer Pressure, Persuasion, Plato, Pop Culture, Same-Sex Marriage, Sex, Television, TV

Should government get out of the marriage business?

Dina sent me three articles by Jennifer Roback Morse, post on The Public Discourse. The articles answer the charge from social liberals and libertarians that we should “get the government out of marriage”.

Here’s the first article which talks about how government will still be involved in marriage, even if we get rid of the traditional definition of marriage, because of the need for dispute resolution in private marriage contracts. She uses no-fault divorce as an example showing how it was sold as a way to get government out of the divorce business. But by making divorce easier by making it require no reason, it increased the number of disputes and the need for more government to resolve these disputes.

Here’s the second article which talks about how the government will have to expand to resolve conflicts over decisions about who counts as a parent and who gets parental rights. With traditional marriage, identifying who the parents are is easy. But with private marriage contracts where the parties are not the biological parents, there is a need for the state to step in and assign parental rights.

Here’s the third article which talks about how marriage is necessary in order to defend the needs and rights of the child at a time when they cannot enter into contracts and be parties to legal disputes.

The third article was my favorite, so here is an excerpt from it:

The fact of childhood dependence raises a whole series of questions. How do we get from a position of helpless dependence and complete self-centeredness, to a position of independence and respect for others? Are our views of the child somehow related to the foundations of a free society? And, to ask a question that may sound like heresy to libertarian ears: Do the needs of children place legitimate demands and limitations on the behavior of adults?

I came to the conclusion that a free society needs adults who can control themselves, and who have consciences. A free society needs people who can use their freedom, without bothering other people too much. We need to respect the rights of others, keep our promises, and restrain ourselves from taking advantage of others.

We learn to do these things inside the family, by being in a relationship with our parents. We can see this by looking at attachment- disordered children and failure-to-thrive children from orphanages and foster care. These children have their material needs met, for food, clothing, and medical care. But they are not held, or loved, or looked at. They simply do not develop properly, without mothers and fathers taking personal care of them. Some of them never develop consciences. But a child without a conscience becomes a real problem: this is exactly the type of child who does whatever he can get away with. A free society can’t handle very many people like that, and still function.

In other words I asked, “Do the needs of society place constraints on how we treat children?” But even this analysis still views the child from society’s perspective. It is about time we look at it from the child’s point of view, and ask a different kind of question. What is owed to the child?

Children are entitled to a relationship with both of their parents. They are entitled to know who they are and where they came from. Therefore children have a legitimate interest in the stability of their parents’ union, since that is ordinarily how kids have relationships with both parents. If Mom and Dad are quarreling, or if they live on opposite sides of the country, the child’s connection with one or both of them is seriously impaired.

But children cannot defend their rights themselves. Nor is it adequate to intervene after the fact, after harm already has been done. Children’s relational and identity rights must be protected proactively.

Marriage is society’s institutional structure for protecting these legitimate rights and interests of children.

I recommend taking a look at all three articles and becoming familiar with the arguments in case you have to explain why marriage matters and why we should not change it. I think it is important to read these articles and to be clear that to be a libertarian doctrine does not protect the right of a child to have a relationship with both his or her parents.  Nor does libertarianism promote the idea that parents ought to stick together for their children.

The purpose of marriage is to make adults make careful commitments, and restrain their desires and feelings, so that children will have a stable environment with their biological parents. We do make exceptions, but we should not celebrate exceptions and we should not subsidize exceptions. It’s not fair to children to have to grow up without a mother or father just so that they adults can make poor, emotional decisions and have fun.

Filed under: Polemics, Adult, Adults, Child, Children, Court, Divorce, Father, Freedom, Gay Marriage, Government, Judge, Law, Libertarian, Liberty, Marriage, Mother, Parent, Parenthood, Role, Ron Paul, Same-Sex Marriage, Society, State