This Week’s Featured Article

Marriage/Family

Assisted Suicide is a Horrifying Abuse of Human Dignity.

Doctors killing their patients—even when those patients request death—fundamentally alters medicine. Everywhere this has been tried, the weak and vulnerable have been endangered, the medical profession corrupted, and family relationships poisoned. In places like Oregon, in which doctor-assisted death was legalized on arguments from stories of unbearable physical pain (like the one told by Will in his column), a significant number of patients choose death for psychological factors. Read more

Too Risky to Wed in Your 20s? Not If You Avoid Cohabiting First.

The thinking goes that, if you wait until 30 or later to marry, you’re much more likely to have the maturity required both to make a good choice and to be a good spouse. The fact that the median age at first marriage for American women is now almost 29 (it’s 30 for men)—and higher still among those with at least a college degree—suggests that this view is widely held.

However, there is an interesting exception to this idea. In analyzing reports of marriage and divorce from more than 50,000 women in the U.S. government’s National Survey of Family Growth (NFSG), we found that there is a group of women for whom marriage before 30 is not risky: women who married directly, without ever cohabiting prior to marriage. Read more

Infidelity Is Bad For You And For Society, So Why Does Entertainment Keep Romanticizing It?

Overall, cheating is bad for people and bad for society. It hurts souls, destroys relationships, and leaves people feeling wounded.

A nation already struggling with rampant hookup culture, declining marriages, falling birth rates, and no baby booms in sight doesn’t need to encourage people to violate their relational commitments. It needs to encourage true love based on trust, loyalty, devotion, and faithfulness. It needs people to get married, start families, and raise them with moral values and religion that automatically decrease their chances of cheating in a relationship. Read more

Parenting/Parental Rights

A history lesson on families.

Schools across North America and around the globe now have explicit policies to hide a child’s trans identity from his or her parents, often under the guise of the human rights code. Read more

Meet The Sex Shop Founder Who Is Grooming Children Through Books In School Libraries.

It isn’t a fluke that a leftwing sex shop founder has been propped up as an authority on sexuality, with direct access to children. Media and education institutions, alongside several leftwing activists, have helped mainstream such fringe beliefs. The author is praised because of, not in spite of, the extremism of his sexual worldview.

What’s so telling isn’t the book itself, but that the beliefs behind it, undoubtedly considered reprehensible by massive swaths of the world, have been intentionally mainstreamed by both an activist base and an institutionally backed political movement that’s hostile to traditional notions of decency. No wonder parents are getting active. Read more

The Silver Lining in Single-Income Families.

Perhaps the pandemic is causing a pendulum swing back toward a better balance between work and home-life, something more conducive to successfully raising children and supporting marriages.The theory that women are leaving the workforce and staying home was confirmed by a recent Washington Post article, which explains that although the U.S. added nearly 500,000 jobs in January, the gender divide is very evident in that growth, for the more than 1 million women who left the workforce at the start of the pandemic still haven’t returned to it. Read more

Sanctity of Life

Malta Rejects Europe’s Demand to Legalize Abortion: There is No “Intrinsic Right” to Abort a Baby.

The nation’s leaders affirmed their support for sexual and reproductive health services but rejected the notion that these services include an “intrinsic right” to abort an unborn baby, according to Malta Today.

They pointed out that their pro-life laws do not put women’s lives in jeopardy. Maltese leaders also emphasized that Council of Europe member states have the right to make their own laws about abortion. Read more

Adoption, IVF, and surrogacy: What pro-lifers need to know.

When struggling to have children, many couples today turn to the fertility industry for help; accordingly, the use of IVF and surrogacy has exploded. But fertility methods are fraught with ethical concerns, and have helped to create a world in which children are no longer seen as gifts, but as commodities or as things that adults are owed. When weighing the options of IVF, surrogacy, and adoption, pro-lifers — and anyone longing for children — must understand the ramifications of using an industry to create their children. Adoption is the more ethical solution. Read more

New York Times Falsely Claims Unborn Babies’ Hearts Aren’t Really Beating.

The New York Times claimed that the consensus among most medical experts is that the electrical activity picked up on an ultrasound at six weeks is not the sound of a heart beating and does not guarantee a live birth.

That contention is completely false. The New York Times disguises the truth and attempts to manipulate the public into believing something different from what they know to be true. Read more

Religion

This Religious Prosecution in Finland Could Be ‘Harbinger’ for Other Democracies.

Räsänen published a pamphlet in 2004 about the Bible’s teaching on marriage. In 2019, she was on a radio program and tweeted a picture of a Bible passage. She is charged with three counts of violating Finland’s ethnic agitation law.

This type of prosecution could come to other Western democracies, including the United States, Rep. Chip Roy, R-Texas, said. “The idea of Christians being persecuted in America just for living out our faith is not far away,” Roy told The Daily Signal in a written statement. Read more

Australian schools and religious discrimination: a story told with toilet blocks.

The principal issue is whether religious schools should be allowed to “discriminate” against LGBTQI+ staff and students. A number of private schools want to retain the right to discipline or sack teachers who do not support their distinctive ethos, be it Christian, Jewish, or Muslim, with their words or their lifestyle. They want to be able to ask students to leave if their actions are disruptive. And, above all, they do not want governments monkeying with the curriculum to force-feed their children with unwelcome ideas. Read more

Do critics of ‘conversion therapy’ live in a fact-free zone?

First, in 2022, what is “conversion therapy”? Abusive violence no longer happens – at least not in the countries which are banning it.

Second – and even more important –where is the peer-reviewed expert proof that “talking conversion therapy” is harmful?

A lot is at stake. The terms of the various laws vary, but some of them would prevent psychologists, pastors, or even parents from dissuading children from a belief that they are gay or lesbian or trans. Read more

Sexuality

UN Commission Rejects LGBT Agenda.

The unanimous addition of LGBT language in a General Assembly resolution last year may have acted as extra motivation to oppose the addition of LGBT terms in new resolutions. When delegations debated adding “LGBTI persons” in the resolution of the Commission for Social Development in recent weeks, more delegations spoke out against it than at any point in recent years, including the entire African Group. Read more

National Advocacy Groups Sound Alarm, Call on Arizona Republicans to Oppose State LGBTQ Bill.

National family and culture advocacy organizations are targeting an Arizona LGBTQ bill, warning state lawmakers that the legislation does not protect religious liberty and enshrines sexual orientation and gender identity into law as protected categories. Read more

Therapists Treat Dysphoria As A Trauma Symptom, Until It’s About Sex.

New Zealand passed a law on Tuesday banning talk therapy, often painted as “conversion therapy,” for patients who suffer from dysphoria about their biological sex. The law specifically targets therapy aimed at children, and threatens a hefty prison sentence for those found in violation. Read more