New study finds that egalitarian marriage doesn’t make women happier

Elusive Wapiti writes about in this blog post.

Excerpt:

Norwegian researchers confirm and extend Brad Wilcox and Steven Nock’s research suggesting that egalitarianism sets couples up to fail:

“What we’ve seen is that sharing equal responsibility for work in the home doesn’t necessarily contribute to contentment,” said Thomas Hansen, co-author of the study entitled “Equality in the Home”.

The lack of correlation between equality at home and quality of life was surprising, the researcher said. “One would think that break-ups would occur more often in families with less equality at home, but our statistics show the opposite,” he said.

The figures clearly show that “the more a man does in the home, the higher the divorce rate,” he went on. The reasons, Mr Hansen said, lay only partially with the chores themselves. “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,” he 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.”

See, Wilcox’s view is this:

The companionate theory of marriage suggests that egalitarianism in practice and belief leads to higher marital quality for wives and higher levels of positive emotion work on the part of husbands. Our analysis of women’s marital quality and men’s marital emotion work provides little evidence in support of this theory. Rather, in examining women’s marital quality and men’s emotional investments in marriage, we find that dyadic commitment to institutional ideals about marriage and women’s contentment with the division of household tasks are more critical. We also show that men’s marital emotion work is a very important determinant of women’s marital quality. We conclude by noting that her marriage is happiest when it combines elements of the new and old: that is, gender equity and normative commitment to the institution of marriage.

His full study from 2006 is here.

And more again from Elusive Wapiti’s post about the new Norwegian study:

Men’s emotion work (and women’s assessments of that work) is the most crucial determinant of women’s marital quality. It is more important than patterns of household labor, perceptions of housework equity, female labor force participation, childbearing, education and a host of other traditional predictors of global marital quality. This finding suggests that the functions, character, and stability of contemporary marriages are intimately tied to [women's] emotional well-being.

…our findings suggest that increased departures from a male-breadwinning/female-homemaking model may also account for declines in marital quality, insofar as men and women continue to tacitly value gendered patterns of behavior in marriage. Specifically, we find that the gendered character of marriage seems to remain sufficiently powerful as a tacit ideal among women to impact women’s marital quality, even apart from the effects of the continuing mismatch between female gender role attitudes and male practices.

[W]omen are not happier in marriages marked by egalitarian practices and beliefs…For the most part, marriages that are more egalitarian in belief and practice are not marked by higher levels of men’s positive emotion work [EW: love, affection, and understanding] or by women’s happiness with such emotion work…women who are more egalitarian-minded and more upset with the division of household labor receive lower levels of positive emotion work from their husbands, perhaps because they are more likely to initiate conflict with their husbands. Thus, rising expectations among women for marital equality may also have the unintended effect of lowering investments in marital emotion work on the part of men. [N]o measure of egalitarianism in practice or belief is associated with higher levels of men spending quality time with their wives. Indeed, in keeping with the gender model of marriage, wives’ gender egalitarianism and work outside of the home leads to less positive emotion work on the part of husbands.

Instead, we find modest evidence that wives’ gender traditionalism is independently related to higher levels of men’s positive emotion work in marriage. We also find evidence that homemaking wives report greater happiness with their husband’s emotion work, and may be more likely to receive such work from their husbands. In other words, adherence to traditional beliefs and practices regarding gender seems to be tied not only to global marital happiness but also – surprisingly enough – to expressive patterns of marriage.

[S]hared church attendance and normative support for the institution of marriage are associated with higher levels of women’s marital happiness. Thus, declines in religious attendance over the past four decades (Steensland, Park, Regnerus, Robinson, Wilcox and Woodberry 2000), along with the liberalization of attitudes to divorce and extramarital sex (Thornton and Young-DeMarco 2001), may also account for recent shifts in marital quality insofar as they reduce the social and normative supports that foster higher investments in marriage.

Wives who share high levels of church attendance are more likely to report happiness with their husband’s emotion work in marriage. Moreover, wives who share a normative commitment to marriage with their husbands are more likely to report happiness with the emotion work done by their husbands…socially conservative practices and (possibly) beliefs appear to be linked to lower expectations of marital emotion work on the part of women. But it is also possible that they are associated with more expressive marriages. In any case, women who share a commitment to the institution of marriage with their husbands express greater happiness. [2]

He has an interesting graph there of what women want from marriage, and what men want. Who knew that women wanted gardening?

In any case, I really do think that this is important to understand, because I see a lot of pastors and evangelical leaders embracing egalitarianism, because they can’t make the case for complementarianism using anything except the Bible. Well, the Bible does support complementarianism. But when you are debating it with an egalitarian, it helps to have the evidence.

Related posts

• New study: higher risk of divorce when men do housework
• New study: relationship quality diminished by early sexual activity, especially for women
• What do radical feminists want women to want?
• New study finds that Christians who regularly attend church divorce less
• New study shows that children of working mothers live unhealthier lives
• Can a person be a feminist and still believe in marriage?

Filed under: News, Child, Church, Church Attendance, Cohabitation, Dependence, Divorce, Family, Father, Fatherlessness, Feminism, Feminist, Marriage, Mother, Parents, Research, Study

Are young people really leaving Christianity?

J Warner Wallace of Please Convince Me summarizes the research by citing a number of sources.

Here’s one:

Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers

Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Oxford University Press, 2005

Book Findings: The majority of teenagers are incredibly inarticulate about their faith, religious beliefs and practices, and its place in their lives. The de facto dominant religion among contemporary U.S. teenagers is what they call ‘Moralistic Therapeutic Deism’: A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth; God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions; the central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself; God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when God is needed to resolve a problem; and good people go to heaven when they die.

And another:

Southern Baptist Convention Data

Pinkney, T.C., Remarks to the Southern Baptist Convention Executive Committee, Nashville, Tennessee (2001)

Study Findings: Data from the Southern Baptist Convention indicates that they are currently losing 70-88% of their youth after their freshman year in college. 70% of teenagers involved in church youth groups stop attending church within two years of their high school graduation.

And another:

Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers

Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton, Oxford University Press (2005)

Book Findings: Students leave faith behind primarily because of intellectual doubt and skepticism (page 89). “Why did they fall away from the faith in which they were raised?” This was an open-ended question there were no multiple-choice answers. 32% said they left faith behind because of intellectual skepticism or doubt. (“It didn’t make any sense anymore.” “Some stuff is too far-fetched for me to believe.” “I think scientifically and there is no real proof.” “Too many questions that can’t be answered.”)

And one more:

Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood

Christian Smith with Kari Christoffersen, Hilary Davidson and Patricia Snell Herzog

Oxford University Press (2011)

Book Findings: Young adults are unable to think coherently about moral beliefs and problems. Young adults have an excessive focus on consumption and materialism as the good life. The prevalent lifestyle of young adults includes routine intoxication and drug usage. The sexual encounters of young adults are not practiced in an environment of physical, mental, or emotional health. Young adults appear to have an inability to care about, invest in, and hope for the larger world through civic and political participation.

He concludes:

There you have it; a short summary of some of the research being done on the exodus of young people from the Church and some of the reasons they give for their departure. Can a case be made that young Christians are leaving the Church in record numbers? Yes. Can a case be made that many of these young people are leaving because the culture around them has impacted them deeply and caused them to question the truth claims of Christianity? Yes, again.

He finishes the post with a cliff-hanger ending, in which he promises to give us a plan for dealing with this problem. Stay tuned!

Filed under: Commentary, Apologetics, Bible, Christianity, Church, College, Faith, Parents, Pastor, Reason, Science, University, Young, Youth, Youth Group

After legalizing gay marriage, France set to ban ‘mother’ and ‘father’ from official documents

From the UK Telegraph.

Excerpt:

France is set to ban the words “mother” and “father” from all official documents under controversial plans to legalise gay marriage.

The move… means only the word “parents” would be used in identical marriage ceremonies for all heterosexual and same-sex couples.

The draft law states that “marriage is a union of two people, of different or the same gender”.

It says all references to “mothers and fathers” in the civil code – which enshrines French law – will be swapped for simply “parents”.

The law would also give equal adoption rights to homosexual and heterosexual couples.

[...]President Francois Hollande pledged in his manifesto to legalise gay marriage. The draft law will be presented to his cabinet for approval on October 31.

Hollande is a socialist, just like Barack Obama, who also favors gay marriage, and infanticide, too. Not just abortion, infanticide.

This is not surprising – the same thing has been done in other countries, like Spain:

Ironically, the Socialist government claims that although it pushed through legislation to benefit a small minority of the population – and in the process changed the definition of marriage – that this could in no way be construed as an attack on the traditional family. Indeed, the government claims that it is in truth pro-family.

So now, jump fast forward to last Friday.

That’s when the Spanish government announced a ministerial order that new births would have to be registered at the State Civil Registries in the Family Book under the headings of Parent (progenitor) A, and Parent (progenitor) B.

In other words, the terms “Father” and “Mother” were to be no longer used.

In Spain, marriages, births and deaths are all recorded at Civil Registries, with most of those actions being noted in a Family Book (Libro de Familia). While the example isn’t perfect, think of the Family Book as an extended birth certificate.

Juan Fernando López Aguilar, Spanish Minister of Justice, excused the ministerial order by claiming since the government modified “the status of civil marriages, to allow the union of same-sex couples, it was necessary for a new format for the Family Book (Libro de Familia) and one that used terms such as “Parent A” and “Parent B” instead of “Father” and “Mother.”

That’s right. To match up it’s same-sex marriage legislation to the Civil Registry, the government deemed that Spaniards could no longer qualify themselves as either “Fathers” or “Mothers” of their children.

Canada does the same thing:

In Canada, they’ve already done this. Following the passing of the Civil Marriage Act, all official documentation and legislation was amended, erasing “husbands” and “wives”. And because same-sex couples primarily use reproductive technology to procreate, some Canadian legislation has been amended to replace the term “natural parent” with “legal parent”. As one report describes it: “In short, the adoption exception – that who is a child’s parent is established by legal fiat, not biological connection – becomes the norm for all children.” Most strikingly, on birth certificates some Canadian provinces have replaced the term “father” and “mother” with “Parent 1″ and “Parent 2″.

That policy was put in place by the Liberal party, which is the socialist party in Canada, and with the full support of the communist party of Canada, the New Democrat Party.

It’s important to understand what effects these leftist, anti-family, anti-marriage policies have, especially on children. This is what Barack Obama and his socialist friends in other countries want. Leftists are anti-marriage and anti-family. They don’t like mothers and fathers raising children. They want the children to be alone in the world, and shuffled around to various people, and eventually raised by the state and brainwashed to serve the state. Feminism has so poisoned people against the traditional family – and especially the traditional male roles of protector, provider and moral/spiritual leader – that no one is willing to resist the push by socialists to destroy marriage and family.

Imagine being a child and growing up with no access to your biological mother or your biological father, or both of them. This is the horror that the left unleashes on little children, assuming they don’t murder you in the womb. As if it isn’t bad enough to push feminist policies like no-fault divorce and subsidized single motherhood, now they have to go even further. Let me be clear. We should be putting into place policies that promote the nuclear family – a mother and a father being chaste, marrying once for life, and having children who grow up in a loving, stable environment. We should not be promoting recreational sex and promiscuity as equivalent to marriage. Children deserve better.

Related posts

• Some supporters of gay marriage favor normalizing pedophilia and incest
• Law professor uses same-sex marriage law to argue for legalizing polygamy
• Queen’s University feminist says that polygamy should be permitted
• British Columbia Supreme Court considers striking down ban on polygamy
• Will Canada add polgygamy and polyamory on top of same-sex marriage?
• Taxpayer-funded polygamy in the UK, France and Canada
• Mark Regnerus’s research vindicated by University of Texas at Austin
• Growing up with two lesbian mothers: a child’s perspective
• Mark Regnerus and the progressive war against science
• More social scientists stepping forward to defend Regnerus study
• Do children of gay parents perform as well as those of heterosexual parents?
• Are gay relationships typically stable and monogamous?
• The American Psychological Association (APA) on lesbian and gay parenting
• Do children raised by gays and lesbians do as well as those of married parents?
• New study finds that children do best in traditional mother-father families
• Obama openly supports gay marriage: 48 hours after top gay donors cut off funding
• Democrat introduces bill to defund adoption agencies that favor married couples
• A secular case against same-sex marriage

Filed under: News, Canada, Children, Court, Family, Family Court, Feminism, France, Gay Marriage, Government, Health, Marriage, Parenting, Parents, Polyamory, Polygamy, Same-Sex Marriage, Sex, Slippery Slope, Society, Spain, State, Status of Women, Study

NYC Department of Education to hand out Plan B to high school students

From the New York Post. (H/T Strange Herring)

Excerpt:

The Department of Education is giving morning-after pills and other birth-control drugs to students at 13 high schools, The Post has learned.

School nurse offices stocked with the contraceptives can dispense “Plan B” emergency contraception and other oral or injectable birth control to girls without telling their parents — unless parents opt out after getting a school informational letter about the new program.

CATCH — Connecting Adolescents To Comprehensive Health — is part of a citywide attack against the epidemic of teen pregnancy, which spurs many girls — most of them poor — to drop out of school.

While Big Apple high schools have long supplied free condoms to sexually active teens, this is the first time city schools have dispensed hormonal birth control and Plan B, which can prevent pregnancy if taken up to 72 hours after unprotected sex.

[...]Parents at the 14 schools were sent letters informing them about CATCH. Parents may bar their kids from getting pregnancy tests or contraceptives if they sign and return an opt-out statement.

If they do not, schools can confidentially give the contraception without permission.

Does handing children contraceptives make them less likely to get pregnant?

Here’s the article from Life Site News.

Excerpt:

Abortion advocates often promote contraception by claiming that as contraception use increases, the number of “unwanted” pregnancies and therefore abortions will decrease. But a new study out of Spain has found the exact opposite, suggesting that contraception actually increases abortion rates.

The authors, who published their findings in the January 2011 issue of the journal Contraception, conducted surveys of about 2,000 Spanish women aged 15 to 49 every two years from 1997 to 2007.  They found that over this period the number of women using contraceptives increased from 49.1% to 79.9%.

Yet they noted that in the same time frame the country’s abortion rate more than doubled from 5.52 per 1,000 women to 11.49.

Does this Plan B cause an abortion?

Consider this story from Life Site News about the morning after pill.

Excerpt:

A poll has shown that as many as one fifth of all young women in the UK have used the morning after pill (MAP) in the past year after “unprotected sex.”

A Co-Operative Pharmacy survey of 3000 people found that 20 percent of women aged 18 to 35 took the “emergency contraceptive” pill last year. The same group said they had typically used the drug, which only acts as a genuine contraceptive in some cases, when they had had sex after using drugs and/or alcohol.

The poll further found that up to 250,000 women had used the drug two or more times during the year. One in fifty 18-21 year-olds said they used the MAP as their normal form of contraception. One sixth of the women surveyed said they had contracted a sexually transmitted disease.

While a National Health Service spokesman warned that the MAP fails to protect women from sexually transmitted diseases, the Society for the Protection of Unborn Children (SPUC) has long warned that the medical community is simply not telling women what MAP really is, or what it does.

The morning after pill, a large dose of the same hormones used in contraceptive pills, can either prevent ovulation or prevent the implantation of an existing embryo in the uterine lining.

“Very few women will know precisely when they ovulate,” SPUC said, “so, if they take the morning-after pill, they will not know whether it has prevented conception or caused an abortion.”

This is what happens when you are forced to fund public schools. They don’t get paid more for pleasing you and they don’t get paid less for not pleasing you. They get paid regardless of performance. They get paid by lobbying politicians and influencing elections. They go to work every day and their main goal is getting more money by influencing elections. They don’t get paid more to teach your children better. What they would really like to do is turn your children into little leftists who will vote them higher salaries and better benefits. That’s what they really do all day.

Related posts

Must-see videos on education policy

• MUST-SEE: John Stossel’s documentary about public schools and school choice
• MUST-SEE: Cato Institute lady explains why competition is better than monopoly

Related posts

• Atlanta public schools caught helping students to cheat on standardized tests
• Republicans in Florida, Indiana and Pennsylvania push school choice
• Do public school teachers want to give children a quality education?
• Sex-education video prompts mother to transfer out 7-year old daughter
• 10% of US students are subject to sexual misconduct by school staff
• How Obama’s new 2011 budget fails the poorest children in two ways
• How teacher unions lobby government to block educational reform
• What helps kids to learn? Parents, teacher unions or education bureaucrats?
• New study reveals how school choice benefits the poorest students
• Eleven schools teaching children to praise and worship Obama
• Do teacher unions care about providing high quality education?
• Does the education system discriminate against boys?
• NEA lawyer explains the real goals of teacher unions: money and power
• Are teacher unions interested in helping your children to succeed in life?
• Economist Walter Williams evaluates whether teachers are earning their huge salaries
• How teacher’s unions make war on charter schools

Filed under: News, Abortion, Contraceptives, Democrat, Democrat Party, Education, Feminism, Leftism, Oral Contraceptives, Parents, Plan B, Premarital Sex, Promiscuity, Public School, Recreational Sex, Sex Education, Teacher, Teacher Union, Teen Pregnancy, Voucher

Some supporters of gay marriage favor normalizing pedophilia and incest

Three data points. The first two from John Hawkins of Right Wing News.

Excerpt:

The first was an article talking up pedophilia in Gawker.

Van Gjiseghem says what he and his colleagues mean by sexual orientation is a person’s inborn and unalterable sexual preference, irrespective of whether that preference is harmful to others or not.

…Imagine a world in which admitting your attraction to busty women or tall men led to alienation, jail time, or your murder.

…The old adage is that the true mark of a society is how it treats the weakest in its ranks. Blacks, women, Latinos, gays and lesbians, and others are still in no way on wholly equal footing in America. But they’re also not nearly as lowly and cursed as men attracted to children. One imagines that if Jesus ever came to Earth, he’d embrace the poor, the blind, the lepers, and, yes, the pedophile.

Then, there are these comments in favor of incest from the director of The Notebook.

“I have no experience with incest…You know what? This whole movie is about judgment, and lack of it, and doing what you want,” he said.

“Who gives a sh-t if people judge you? I’m not saying this is an absolute but in a way, if you’re not having kids – who gives a damn? Love who you want. Isn’t that what we say? Gay marriage – love who you want? If it’s your brother or sister it’s super-weird, but if you look at it, you’re not hurting anybody except every single person who freaks out because you’re in love with one another.”

And the third from Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse at the Public Discourse.

Excerpt:

Can a child have three parents? If California State Senator Mark Leno has his way, children in California will be able to have three legal parents. Before we dismiss SB 1476 as another example of California Weird, we had best look into it more closely. After all, the bill has passed both houses of the California Assembly and is awaiting Governor Brown’s signature or veto.

I believe this development was inevitable, more inevitable in fact than the much-vaunted inevitability of gay marriage. Once we started trying to normalize parenting by same-sex couples and redefine marriage to remove the dual-gender requirement, we had to end up with triple-parenting.

[...]It all sounds very nice and agreeable to allow people to make any parenting agreements they want on the front end of their relationships. But when a relationship breaks down, the long arm of the law will end up involved in the life of the family, on the back end, to resolve disputes. We are replacing the natural pre-political concept of biological parenthood with an artificial, government-created concept of parenthood that is entirely socially constructed. Instead of the government simply recognizing and recording the pre-political reality of biological parenthood, we are giving agents of the state the authority to construct parenthood, all in the best interests of the child, of course.

Gay marriage advocates can’t object to any of these practices. Their view is that people should be able to “marry” whoever they “love”. And that means pedophilia, incest and polygamy. It’s not broadening the definition of marriage – it’s destroying marriage. Marriage used to be the union of a man and a woman in order to have a stable environment to contain sexual attraction and to raise children to whom both parents are biologically related. Marriage put moral boundaries on the sexual act for the benefit of children, and consequently, for the benefit of society.

Related posts

• Law professor uses same-sex marriage law to argue for legalizing polygamy
• Queen’s University feminist says that polygamy should be permitted
• British Columbia Supreme Court considers striking down ban on polygamy
• Will Canada add polgygamy and polyamory on top of same-sex marriage?
• Taxpayer-funded polygamy in the UK, France and Canada
• Mark Regnerus’s research vindicated by University of Texas at Austin
• Growing up with two lesbian mothers: a child’s perspective
• Mark Regnerus and the progressive war against science
• More social scientists stepping forward to defend Regnerus study
• Do children of gay parents perform as well as those of heterosexual parents?
• Are gay relationships typically stable and monogamous?
• The American Psychological Association (APA) on lesbian and gay parenting
• Do children raised by gays and lesbians do as well as those of married parents?
• New study finds that children do best in traditional mother-father families
• Obama openly supports gay marriage: 48 hours after top gay donors cut off funding
• Democrat introduces bill to defund adoption agencies that favor married couples
• A secular case against same-sex marriage

Filed under: Commentary, Children, Court, Family, Family Court, Gay Marriage, Government, Health, Marriage, Parenting, Parents, Polyamory, Polygamy, Same-Sex Marriage, Sex, Slippery Slope, Society, State, Status of Women, Study