Feminist Nancy Pelosi pushes national daycare program

CNS News reports on it.

Excerpt:

Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) told a gathering in Cleveland that childcare for all should be the next “pillar” of American government and “the president comes close in his budget when he says ‘preschool for all’ because we have a situation of children learning, parents earning.”

[...]“What we have to do and not necessarily as, shall we say, as transformative as Social Security and Medicare and the Affordable Care Act for everybody– but I think very important to our country is to have affordable quality childcare for all of America’s children. If we are going to unleash all that women have to offer we have to really get to this point.”

[...]“Now, the president comes close in his budget when he says ‘preschool for all’ because we have a situation of children learning, parents earning.”

With respect to children, the goals are feminism are simple. Force women to act like men. Women have to be encouraged not to marry and then raise their young children. Or, if they do have children, then the children must be taken away so that they keep working and paying taxes to the smart people in government. The one thing that is not permitted by the ideology of feminism is for a man to go to work and for a woman to stay home and attend to her young children. Having a mother stay home with the children is better for them,  according to science, but it’s not something that feminists like Nancy Pelosi support.

I think another one of the reasons why they don’t support it is that they don’t like the idea that some women make the choice to get married to a man who can protect and provide, and some don’t. They think “how can I make those women equal, so that no one is honored or shamed for choosing wisely?” And the solution is to have the government raise all the children. The woman who chose wisely has a husband who works for $80,000 in income. The government takes half of it and gives it to the single mother who didn’t bother to choose a good man. Both sets of children end up in government-run day care, and everyone is equal. Isn’t that a good idea? To make it easier for women to not have to care about finding and keeping a good man? Well, people on the left do think it’s a good idea.

Filed under: News, Child Care, Day Care, Daycare, Equality, Fascism, Feminism, Feminist, Indoctrination, Marriage, Nancy Pelosi, Socialism

Is Baltimore’s plan to use female prison guards in a male prison working?

The liberal Daily Beast reports. (H/T Ari)

Excerpt:

The secretary of Maryland’s Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services watched this week as the agency he has run for the last six years turned into a national laughingstock after federal officials indicted 13 women who, as guards at the Baltimore City Detention Center, acted like little more than underlings for members of a dangerous prison gang, the Black Guerrilla Family. Four of the correctional officers became reportedly pregnant by the leader of the gang, and two of them had his name tattooed onto their bodies—one on her neck, the other on her wrist.

[...]The allegations unsealed in the federal indictment are eye-popping. Many have been quick to make the comparison to The Wire, the crime drama that put Baltimore’s criminal underworld into the public consciousness, but what appears to have gone on at the Baltimore City Detention Center, a medieval-looking hulk of a jail in the center of town, would strain the credulity of HBO. Female guards smuggled cellphones, marijuana, and prescription drugs to inmates. Gang members ordered hits from inside the jail and dined on salmon and Grey Goose vodka that was smuggled in on their behalf. Corrections officers stood guard for one another so they could have sex with inmates. They warned prisoners of upcoming searches of their cells by unfriendly colleagues. Tavon White, the leader of the Black Guerrilla Family who allegedly impregnated four of the guards and was there waiting for his murder trial to commence, was caught bragging on a wiretap: “This is my jail. You understand that? I’m dead serious. I make every final call in this jail.”

Maybe we should be setting some limits on the feminist idea that men and women are interchangeable, and that women have to make up have the workforce of every job that men do. That’s the feminist ideal, but I don’t think that customers (in this case, the taxpayers) are well-served by it.

If we as citizens keep voting for bigger government, we need to understand that government is thoroughly compromised by left-wing ideologies that are not interested in producing results for us. If you want to get value for money, you go to the private sector and buy something from a private business that is accountable to you on price and quality. We already have lots of private sector run prisons here, and they work better than Baltimore, that’s for sure. Even other countries have tried privatized prisons, why not Maryland?

Filed under: News, Baltimore, Feminism, Feminist, Ideology, Jail, Maryland, Nationalized, Prison, Privatization

Do Christian apologists need to know how to defend chastity and marriage?

Rod Dreher, not one of my favorite people, writes about it in the American Conservative. (H/T Dalrock)

He writes:

Though he might not have put it quite that way, the eminent sociologist Philip Rieff would probably have said yes. Rieff’s landmark 1966 book The Triumph Of the Therapeutic analyzes what he calls the “deconversion” of the West from Christianity. Nearly everyone recognizes that this process has been underway since the Enlightenment, but Rieff showed that it had reached a more advanced stage than most people—least of all Christians—recognized.

Rieff, who died in 2006, was an unbeliever, but he understood that religion is the key to understanding any culture. For Rieff, the essence of any and every culture can be identified by what it forbids. Each imposes a series of moral demands on its members, for the sake of serving communal purposes, and helps them cope with these demands. A culture requires a cultus—a sense of sacred order, a cosmology that roots these moral demands within a metaphysical framework.

You don’t behave this way and not that way because it’s good for you; you do so because this moral vision is encoded in the nature of reality. This is the basis of natural-law theory, which has been at the heart of contemporary secular arguments against same-sex marriage (and which have persuaded no one).

Rieff, writing in the 1960s, identified the sexual revolution—though he did not use that term—as a leading indicator of Christianity’s death as a culturally determinative force. In classical Christian culture, he wrote, “the rejection of sexual individualism” was “very near the center of the symbolic that has not held.” He meant that renouncing the sexual autonomy and sensuality of pagan culture was at the core of Christian culture—a culture that, crucially, did not merely renounce but redirected the erotic instinct. That the West was rapidly re-paganizing around sensuality and sexual liberation was a powerful sign of Christianity’s demise.

[...]As philosopher Charles Taylor writes in his magisterial religious and cultural history A Secular Age, “The entire ethical stance of moderns supposes and follows on from the death of God (and of course, of the meaningful cosmos).” To be modern is to believe in one’s individual desires as the locus of authority and self-definition.

Gradually the West lost the sense that Christianity had much to do with civilizational order, Taylor writes. In the 20th century, casting off restrictive Christian ideals about sexuality became increasingly identified with health. By the 1960s, the conviction that sexual expression was healthy and good—the more of it, the better—and that sexual desire was intrinsic to one’s personal identity culminated in the sexual revolution, the animating spirit of which held that freedom and authenticity were to be found not in sexual withholding (the Christian view) but in sexual expression and assertion. That is how the modern American claims his freedom.

To Rieff, ours is a particular kind of “revolutionary epoch” because the revolution cannot by its nature be institutionalized. Because it denies the possibility of communal knowledge of binding truths transcending the individual, the revolution cannot establish a stable social order. As Rieff characterizes it, “The answer to all questions of ‘what for’ is ‘more’.”

Our post-Christian culture, then, is an “anti-culture.” We are compelled by the logic of modernity and the myth of individual freedom to continue tearing away the last vestiges of the old order, convinced that true happiness and harmony will be ours once all limits have been nullified.

Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology. In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation. This is why gay marriage negates Christian cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and other fundamental goods of modernity. Whether we can keep them in the post-Christian epoch remains to be seen.

It also remains to be seen whether we can keep Christianity without accepting Christian chastity.

One of the reasons why I write so much about chastity and dating and courting on this blog is to try to convince people that it is necessary to have a rigorous, grounded understanding of the practical execution of chastity and marriage. See, a lot of apologists have tunnel vision. They want to focus on apologetics, especially on philosophy, without talking about sexual morality, politics, current events, and other things that will affect whether a person is open to Christianity or not. Like it or not, Christianity has regulations on sexual behavior, and we have to be able and willing to defend those regulations.

I am not opposed to basic Christian apologetics on God’s existence and Christ’s resurrection, but I recognize that people who are too deeply compromised by unbounded sexual appetites are not going to be open to a genuine Christian re-prioritizing following conversion. I am not saying that we need to stop talking about the problem of evil and the women discovering the empty tomb and the fine-tuning of the cosmological constant. I am saying that we need to add onto all of that good stuff an understanding of public policy and ideology. We need to promote, in the culture, lifestyles and moral rules that are going to make it easier for a person to become a Christian. And that means studying to be persuasive on things like premarital sex, cohabitation, no-fault divorce, same-sex marriage, and so on.

I think a very important thing that Christians need to be able to do is to explain and demonstrate that chastity empowers an individual to love others in a way that is not available to them if they are sexually active with that person before marriage. See the papers below for more.

Related posts

• New study: delaying sexual activity produces improves relationship quality and stability
• New study: staying a virgin longer enables more satisfying relationships
• Study explains why college women abandon courtship for hook-ups
• New study: relationship quality diminished by early sexual activity, especially for women
• New study: marriage drops probability of child poverty by 82%
• New study finds that Christians who regularly attend church divorce less
• Can recreational sex turn a selfish, irresponsible man into a marriage-minded provider?
• New study finds that cohabitation damages children
• New peer-reviewed paper highlights the benefits of pre-marital chastity/abstinence
• Does being a virgin before marriage affect marital stability?
• How important are biological fathers for healthy child development?
• What causes women to become single mothers, and how are children affected?
• New study shows that children of working mothers live unhealthier lives
• New Scientist article shows why fathers are necessary for children’s well-being
• New study finds that women choose mates based on appearance
• Study: 80% of single evangelicals aged 18-29 are no longer virigins
• For women under 30, most births occur outside of marriage
• In the UK welfare state, single motherhood is passed from mother to daughter
• New study finds that teens who lose their virginity are more likely to divorce
• How more compassion and less moral judgments increases teen pregnancy
• New survey finds women more sexually active than men in high school
• Why do feminist academics think that feminism has empowered women?
• Who is responsible for the abolition of marriage? Men or feminists?
• Who is to blame for the hook-up culture?
• How the feminist welfare state causes generations of fatherlessness
• Less than half of 7 to 21 year old women think that marriage precedes child-bearing

Filed under: Commentary, Abstinence, Adultery, Chastity, Christianity, Feminism, Feminist, Hookup, Premarital Sex, Self-Control, Sex, Sexual Liberation, Sexual Revolution, Sin, Worldview

New study: couples who divide housework on traditional sex roles have a lot more sex

Here’s the press release from Agence France Presse. (H/T Stuart Schneiderman)

Excerpt:

The road to hell is paved with good intentions, as they say: the more housework married men do, the less sex they have, according to a new study published Wednesday.

Husbands who spend more time doing traditionally female chores — such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping — reported having less sex than those who do more masculine tasks, said the study in the American Sociological Review.

“Our findings suggest the importance of socialized gender roles for sexual frequency in heterosexual marriage,” said lead author Sabino Kornrich, of the Center for Advanced Studies at the Juan March Institute in Madrid.

“Couples in which men participate more in housework typically done by women report having sex less frequently. Similarly, couples in which men participate more in traditionally masculine tasks — such as yard work, paying bills, and auto maintenance — report higher sexual frequency.”

His study, “Egalitarianism, Housework, and Sexual Frequency in Marriage,” looks at straight married couples in the United States, and was based on data from the National Survey of Families and Households.

[...]“The results suggest the existence of a gendered set of sexual scripts, in which the traditional performance and display of gender is important for creation of sexual desire and performance of sexual activity,” Kornrich said.

Prior to that study, there was this Norwegian study.

Excerpt:

Couples who share housework duties run a higher risk of divorce than couples where the woman does most of the chores, a Norwegian study sure to get tongues wagging has shown.

The divorce rate among couples who shared housework equally was around 50 per cent higher than among those where the woman did most of the work.

“The more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,” Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled Equality in the Home, said.

[...]“Maybe it’s sometimes seen as a good thing to have very clear roles with lots of clarity … where one person is not stepping on the other’s toes,” Mr Hansen suggested.

“There could be less quarrels, since you can easily get into squabbles if both have the same roles and one has the feeling that the other is not pulling his or her own weight,” he added.

Men, if you want to avoid losing everything by marrying the wrong woman and getting a divorce, then pay attention to these studies and choose wisely. Find out what you are designed to do in a marriage, and what women are designed to do. Train to do your jobs well, and pick a woman who not only does her jobs, but wants you to do yours. And respects you for doing your jobs.

Filed under: News, Child Care, Counseling, Courting, Dating, Divorce, Family, Feminism, Feminist, Housework, Husband, Man, Marriage, Men, No-Fault Divorce, Planning, Wife, Woman, Women

New study: feminism in education causes boys to underperform academically

From the Belfast Telegraph.

Excerpt:

A five-year study of hundreds of post-primary pupils in Northern Ireland has found flaws in our education system that could be hindering boys’ ability to learn.

The research — funded by the Departments of Education and Justice — was carried out following concerns about boys’ educational underachievement, health and well-being.

It has previously been noted as a particular problem among boys from working-class Protestant areas.

Key findings of the ‘Taking Boys Seriously’ report, by Dr Ken Harland and Sam McCready from the University of Ulster, include:

• A lack of basic literacy and numeracy skills from primary school which is not being dealt with early post-primary.
• Boys from lower academic class streams perceiving they are not given the same opportunities to learn as those from higher.
• Boys being unprepared for key transitional stages (such as moving schools or moving from junior stream into senior) during adolescence.
• Bullying.
• The formal nature of the classroom leaving a significant number of boys feeling bored, frustrated and impacting negatively on their concentration.

The study of 378 male pupils from nine post-primary schools across Northern Ireland quizzed the boys annually between Years 8 and 12.

[...]Recommendations in the 114-page report include:

• Encouraging more males into teaching.
• Teacher training should support teachers to understand the changing needs of adolescent boys.

Life Site News adds:

The problem of boys’ underachievement in primary and secondary school follows them into their later lives. Research from 2006 has tracked the decline in male academic performance over the same period as the rise of feminist-dominated ideologies in academia and policymaking.

The ratio of males to females graduating from a four-year college stood at 1.60 in 1960, fell to parity by 1980, and continued its decline until by 2003, there were 135 females for every 100 males who graduated from a four-year college. Another study found that half of the current gender gap in college attendance can be linked to lower rates of high-school graduation among males, particularly for young black men.

The work of one American researcher may offer clues to the question of why and how. Professor Christopher Cornwell at the University of Georgia has found that a heavily feminist-driven education paradigm systematically favours girls and disadvantages boys from their first days in school.

Examining student test scores and grades of children in kindergarten through fifth grade, Cornwell found that boys in all racial categories are not being “commensurately graded by their teachers” in any subject “as their test scores would predict.”

The answer lies in the way teachers, who are statistically mostly women, evaluate students without reference to objective test scores. Boys are regularly graded well below their actual academic performance.

Boys are falling significantly behind in grades, “despite performing as least as well as girls on math tests, and significantly better on science tests.”

After fifth grade, he found, student assessment becomes a matter of “a teacher’s subjective assessment of the student’s performance,” and is further removed from the guidance of objective test results. Teachers, he says, tend to assess students on non-cognitive, “socio-emotional skills.” This has had a significant impact on boys’ later achievement because, while objective test scores are important, it is teacher-assigned grades that determine a child’s future with class placement, high school graduation and college admissibility.

Eliminating the factor of “non-cognitive skills…almost eliminates the estimated gender gap in reading grades,” Cornwell found. He said he found it “surprising” that although boys out-perform girls on math and science test scores, girls out-perform boys on teacher-assigned grades.

In science and general knowledge, as in math skills, the data showed that kindergarten and first grade white boys’ grades “are lower by 0.11 and 0.06 standard deviations, even though their test scores are higher.” This disparity continues and grows through to the fifth grade, with white boys and girls being graded similarly, “but the disparity between their test performance and teacher assessment grows.”

[...]The study, he said, shows that “teachers’ assessments are not aligned with test-score data, with greater gender disparities in appearing in grading than testing outcomes”. And the “gender disparity” always favours girls.

This is why I recommend homeschooling for boys especially up until grade 6 or later, when grading is more objective. And boys should focus on math, science, technology and engineering, where there is less room for discrimination by feminist teachers who are biased against boys. Unfortunately, even though you are homeschooling, you still have to pay taxes for the feminist-dominated public school system, which enjoys overwhelming support from women voters, especially single women voters.

The best book on this topic is by Christina Hoff Sommers, entitled “The War Against Boys“. If you click through to the Life Site News article, they have a section on it towards the end of the article. It is very important that pastors and other conservatives understand that the current problems with boys and young men are not going to be solved by ignorant male-blaming slogans like “Man Up!”. Christians and conservatives need to think more deeply about these problems, and they may find that they are actually espousing the very thing (feminism) that is the root cause of the decline in men, and their lack of interest in marriage. Let’s take a look at the studies and be bound by research instead of the desire to please women in our churches by telling them that men are to blame for their woes.

Check out my previous post about the Cornwell study, which compared teacher-assigned test scores with standardized test scores for girls and boys.

Filed under: News, Achievement Gap, Anti-Male, Boys, Discrimination, Education, Family, Fatherlessness, Feminism, Feminist, Men, Misandry, School, Social Programs, War Against Boys