This Week‘s Featured Article

Marriage/Family

Survey Says: You Can’t Replace Dad.

Last month, new research from the Institute for Family Studies demonstrated, once again, how important fathers are, especially for boys. For example, boys growing up without their dads are only half as likely to graduate from college as their peers who live with dad at home. Strikingly, those numbers remain steady even after controlling for other factors such as race, income, and general IQ. Boys without a dad at home are also almost twice as likely to be “idle” in their late twenties, defined as neither working nor in school, and are significantly more likely to have been arrested or incarcerated by the time they turn 35.

These are only a few of the data points which demonstrate that fatherlessness is one of the most pressing crises our culture is facing. Why doesn’t our culture talk more about this? Read more

There’s Nothing ‘Pro-Family’ About Tax Breaks That Discourage Parents From Raising Their Own Kids.

The childcare tax credit adopted in Pennsylvania is not good for our society because it expresses a bad policy preference. If a family has children, both the mother and father work outside the home, and the family uses full-time institutional daycare for the children, the government will subsidize that with thousands of dollars in tax credits.

If a family has children and one parent works while the other stays home to care for the children, the government does not subsidize the parent’s decision to stay home with the children. If both parents work (or if it is a single-parent household) and the children are cared for by a relative, the government also does not offer the tax credit. There is a clear policy preference expressed by the Pennsylvania government: It is better for families with children to have two working parents and to pay someone else to care for their children. This is bad policy. Read more

Defending Marriage Is ‘Social Justice for Children’.

“We’re making decisions based on adults’ feelings, because if we were making decisions based on children’s feelings, we would protect a child’s right to life, and we would protect natural marriage,” Katy Faust told “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins” on Thursday. “The problem is centering this around adult feelings rather than children, their rights, needs, desires, and what maximizes their development—which is the home of their married mother and father.”

Changing the definition of marriage based on adults’ romantic attachments frequently excludes one or both biological parents from the child’s life. Read more

Parenting/Parental Rights

As Reproductive Technology Advances, Remember: Just Because We Can Doesn’t Mean We Should.

Donating eggs or sperm, becoming a surrogate, or serially creating embryos are all scientific marvels, but they take a gamble on the meaning and responsibilities of reproduction, deprive children of humanity, and infringe on natural rights. At a time when being child-free is praised, it is worth celebrating that men and women crave the joys of parenthood. What’s not celebratory are practices that deprive children of parents in very unhelpful ways. Read more

When a quarter of the class identifies as trans.

The first issue is with what the school is teaching children. My daughter’s trans identity started when the school taught a module on “identity” during which they told a group of 11-year-olds that, if you feel uncomfortable in your body, it means you are transgender.

The second issue is a related one, and that is to do with the school’s non-stop celebration of LGBTQI+ identities.

The third issue is with how the school is approaching the children “coming out”. Their official policy seems to be to just go with whatever the kids say without informing the parents. Read more

Moving Forward, But Never Moving On: What Parents Who Lost Children Need You to Know.

To understand child loss better and how to support grieving parents, I spoke to seven mothers and one father about the deaths of their children. I asked each about the hardest part of their loss, their most important takeaway for other people, and how to help break the stigma which surrounds talking to people about losing a child. What they told me about grief, joy, faith, and intimacy helped me understand that those of us who are not part of the club can often be of most help by treating grieving parents like parents – asking about all of their children and keeping the memories of lost children alive. Read more

Sanctity of Life

Indian Supreme Court Allows Unmarried Woman To End Pregnancy At 24 Weeks.

The petitioner, a 25-year-old woman, had told the court that her partner, with whom she was in a consensual relationship, had refused to marry her.

She had stressed that giving birth outside the wedlock would cause her psychological agony as well as social stigma and she was not mentally prepared to be a mother.

Before passing the order, the high court had suggested that the petitioner can be kept “somewhere safe” until she delivers the child who can subsequently be given up for adoption. Read more

How Every State Pro-Life Law Handles Ectopic Pregnancy and Miscarriage.

The pro-life worldview has always held that both lives matter, that of the mother and that of her unborn child. It is always permissible to act to care for a pregnant mother whose life is at risk.

Neither miscarriage care nor treatment for ectopic pregnancy has anything to do with an induced-abortion procedure, which intentionally kills an unborn child. Every successful elective abortion has a single aim: to end the life of the child growing in his or her mother’s womb. What’s more, medical professionals acknowledge that induced abortion is never medically necessary to treat a pregnant mother; modern medicine can treat the mother without intentionally killing the child. Read more

Kamala Harris: “Women are Getting Pregnant Every Day and This is a Real Issue”.

Harris told Cohen on Sunday: “We need to act with a sense of haste about what is at play, what is at stake. And codifying Roe will be an important moment in terms of putting back in place protections for the folks who are at risk” of getting pregnant.

Harris and Biden are lobbying Congress to pass legislation to “codify Roe,” meaning states would be forced to legalize the killing of unborn babies for basically any reason up to birth and taxpayers would be forced to pay for their deaths.

The bill, nicknamed the Abortion Without Limits Up to Birth Act, passed the U.S. House last week, but it is expected to fail in the U.S. Senate. Read more

Religion

Ibero-American youth: Family- oriented, educated and less religious.

Young people in Ibero-America 2021 makes a comparative study of how young people are, think and behave in nine countries, through 13,500 interviews carried out during 2019 and 2020 in Mexico, Peru, Dominican Republic, Chile, Brazil, Argentina, Ecuador, Colombia and Spain.

“For over 90% of young people, family and education are vital priorities when it comes to shaping their ideas and interpretations of the world,” explain the authors, who also highlight “health” and “the environment” as issues of greatest interest and concern.Religion and politics, on the other hand, are the two issues that score lowest on average in terms of importance. Read more

Why America needs churches.

At the height of the Great Depression in the 1930s, the role of the church in providing social services decreased. The decline in charitable church activity occurred due to the rise in government spending under the New Deal, according to a study published by the National Bureau of Economic Research . The study’s authors concluded, “Our estimates suggest that church spending fell by 30% in response to the New Deal, and that government relief spending can explain virtually all of the decline in charitable church activity observed between 1933 and 1939.”

In the following decades, even as the “wall of separation between church and State” was heightened through the Everson v. Board of Education Supreme Court decision in 1947 and later, with the abolishing of school prayer in 1962, it became clear that the needs of local communities could not be met by government alone. Just consider the role that black churches played during the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Read more

Most Danes believe religion is a path to conflict.

“As religion becomes less important in society, we know less and less about what faith and religion are. And when you know less, you become more afraid of the unknown, which is why there is a pronounced fear of religion in this country”, pointed out historian and author and former interfaith consultant, Mogens S. Mogensen.

He explained that that fear “was even endorsed from the highest level when the then Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen (V) declared that all religion should be removed from the public sphere”. Read more

Sexuality

Worldwide parents coalition forms to resist pro-LGBT ‘grooming’ in the classroom.

An international movement of parents from nations including the United States, Ireland, Canada, and nations in South America are all rising up against the sexualization of children by their teachers, districts, and school boards in a new Parents’ Pledge taking effect throughout the 2022-23 academic year. Read more

Monkeypox’s Inconvenient Truth.

“This particular outbreak has been fueled, suffice it to say, by gay bacchanalia,” Dr. Andrew G. Bostom, an epidemiologist and research physician at Brown University, said on Monday’s “Washington Watch with Tony Perkins.” He highlighted the study’s finding that those who contracted the virus had a median number of five sex partners in the past three months, and 20% engaged in “chemsex” (sex under the influence of drugs).

“Not to cast aspersions on the gay community,” Bostom said, because such practices occur in a subset of the LGBTQ community: “ … This is typical of aggressively hypersexualized gay men.” Read more

Biden is using US tax dollars to spread radical LGBT ideology around the world.

Since arriving in the White House, Joe Biden has picked up where Barack Obama left off, making promotion of abortion and the LGBT agenda abroad a fundamental cornerstone of his administration’s foreign policy.

A key aspect of this promotional strategy is using American taxpayer dollars to fund LGBT groups around the world. According to the Washington Free Beacon, the latest example of this is the Portuguese international film festival Queer Lisboa, which according to a State Department spokeswoman received $10,000 from the Biden Administration as part of their initiative to “support LGBTQ+ and Diversity, Equity, Inclusion & Accessibility efforts.” Read more