Reasons without virtue

A claim that gay marriage requires only modest changes to family laws has a Swiftian air, minus the satire In its June 21-22 edition the venerable Wall Street Journal published an op-ed, “Gay Marriage Is Good for America”, in which Jonathan Rauch argued in support of the California supreme court’s recent decision to allow homosexual marriage. There have been many such favorable articles, but this one is the best illustration I have seen of the inexorable logic of rationalization that drives those who choose a moral disorder upon which to base their lives. It achieved an air of complete unreality.

There is a Jonathan Swift aspect to Jonathan Rauch’s  argument that would serve it well if it were intended as satire. In his Modest Proposal Swift suggested eating babies to alleviate the famine in Ireland: “I have been assured by a very knowing American of my acquaintance in London, that a young healthy child well nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled.” This was brought to mind by Rauch’s suggestion that homosexual marriage required only “modest changes to existing family laws.” Homosexual marriage, he claimed, would serve to stabilize American society “on the conservative -- in fact, traditional -- grounds that gay souls and straight society are healthiest when sex, love and marriage all walk in step.” However, Rauch is not a satirist. He is serious, which would make it funnier, if it wasn’t so sad.

Rauch wrote, quite correctly, that marriage is not only a contract between two people; it is a contract with the community which recognizes it. The couple is...more here

Dignified arguments

The human embryo is very small, far smaller than the head of a pin. It cannot feel. It cannot think. It has no autonomous existence. And products derived from it are potentially both profit-making and wonder-working. No wonder scientists in the United States and Britain are exasperated by government restrictions. They see no ethical problem whatsoever with dicing embryos up on a laboratory bench.

But anyone who doubts the immense moral seriousness of the debate over the use of human embryos in stem cell research need only read a recent issue of Nature. Nature is the world’s leading scientific journal and its crisp editorials express the views of the world scientific establishment. For years it has been a fervent supporter of therapeutic cloning and embryo research, a harsh critic of President Bush’s restrictive stem cell policy and a cheerleader for the Labour government’s push to make the UK the world’s stem cell capital. In the words of Diana Schaub, a member of the President's Council on Bioethics, "It is recognizably one of us — recognizable not to the naked eye, but to the scientifically trained eye."

So what has the scientifically trained eye of Nature done? It has followed Groucho Marx’s precept: "Those are my principles. If you don't like them I have others." Since human dignity leads inescapably to the conclusion that embryo experimentation is inadmissable, it has ditched human dignity. "Dignity as a concept cannot be a director of moral judgement," it insists.

What is cringingly embarrassing about this argument is that it was cribbed from a controversial article by the Harvard neuroscientist Stephen Pinker in The New Republic. Nature has taken seriously Pinker’s bad-tempered and abusive attack on a report from the President’s Council on Bioethics. This strongly supported human dignity against a growing number of bioethicists and scientists who claim that it is too squishy to serve as a rationale for bioethical decisions. "[W]hat it reveals should alarm anyone concerned with American biomedicine and its promise to improve human welfare," sneered Pinker. "For this government-sponsored bioethics does not want medical practice to maximize health and flourishing; it considers that quest to be a bad thing, not a good thing."

From ‘safer sex’ to ‘safer drugs’

An official drug booklet used in some Australian secondary schools for two years has been withdrawn after an uproar in the community over its mixed messages. The New South Wales state government booklet -- Choosing To Use … But Wanna Keep Your Head Together? -- suggests young people should not experiment with drugs until they are over 18, know their family medical history and “use only small amounts and not too often”. It says: “The best way to keep your head together is not to use drugs at all. But, if you choose to experiment … remember some people will react badly and become seriously unwell after using only a small amount of a drug.”

State health minister Reba Meagher said that “the reference to what young people should choose to do if they ignore anti-drug advice or information is simply not acceptable.” However, the booklet was defended by a state health executive, the deputy director-general for schools, and the head of a charity whose son died of a heroin overdose. “We know from ongoing school surveys that up to 50 per cent of young people have experimented with alcohol and illicit drugs by the time they are 16,” said the health official. No wonder. 

The harm minimisation approach of the booklet was condemned in a Daily Telegraph editorial, which pointed out that 170,400 people aged 14 and older claimed to have used the highly destructive methamphetamines (or “ice”) in NSW in just one year. It noted how “Just say no” has evolved into “Just say maybe” among “certain bureaucracies”, and noted the need for vigilance against creeping drug tolerance.

Gay Couples Find Marriage Is a Mixed Bag

As same-sex couples rush to “marry” in California (again) following a state high court ruling and before a referendum there on the subject, the New York Times takes a look at the “mixed bag” which is same-sex marriage across the country in Massachusetts, the first state to legalise such contracts (2004). Case studies cover a wide range: partners who never wanted to marry; who were advised against it; who couldn’t agree about the step; those who say it has changed their relationship for the better; those who have since divorced; those who are struggling to make it work; those who allow third parties in.

After an initial rush, “marriages” have dropped right back: of more than 10,500 since 2004, 6121 happened in the first six months and the number has dropped each year to 867 in the first eight months of 2007. The Census Bureau reported that there were 23,655 same-sex households in Massachusetts in 2006. Nearly two-thirds of the weddings have involved lesbian partners, and while nearly half of real marriages involve people under 30, same-sex couples tend to be older -- nearly a third are in their 40s.

One lesbian couple who had been together for nine years but five months after the wedding one of them decided she was "straight". "Maybe being married trigged those feelings," said the other. "I didn't see it coming." Prominent among the split couples are Julie and Hillary Goodridge, the lead plaintiffs in the case that paved the way for same-sex “marriage” in the state. One of them has a daughter, Annie. Their separation after only two years was described by a spokeswoman as “the maturation of marriage”.

The shameful history of population control

“The great tragedy of population control, the fatal misconception, was to think that one could know other people’s interests better than they knew it themselves,” says Matthew Connelly, summing up one of the major global forces of the last 50 years. Although that assessment comes nowhere near my own sense of outrage at the movement that has filled the world with aborted fetuses and sterilized men and women, Connelly’s book as a whole is an unprecedented admission, from a supporter of what is now known as “reproductive rights”, that the movement, historically at least, has trampled wholesale on the rights of Third World people. As a citizen of a developing country I can breathe a sigh of relief: finally, the truth is coming out.

Connelly, an associate professor of history at Columbia University in the United States, set himself a task that has been avoided by mainstream academics; the result is what his publishers call “a withering critique [that] uncovers the cost inflicted by a humanitarian movement gone terribly awry”.

In spite of my familiarity with human rights violations committed in the name of population control in the Philippines, I am still appalled by what this movement has done in India, China, Bangladesh and other Third World countries.

Connelly has done well to expose the failure of the population control movement to get the consent of its victims, but to see this alone as its “fatal misconception” is to fail to get to the heart of the matter. The historian does not see, or at least acknowledge, that the “reproductive rights” he champions involves the systematic violation of the rights of the unborn child through abortion, the unbreakable link between abortion and contraception, and the disastrous personal and demographic effects of the culture of birth control.

And all for what? The population control/reproductive rights movement has never produced one single piece of evidence showing the direct connection between family planning and economic development. But if Connelly is neither an economist nor a moral philosopher we must be grateful that at least he has used his historical skills to salutary effect. As the saying goes, those who do not acknowledge their history are condemned to repeat it.

Obama preaches responsibility to black dads

Father’s Day in the United States brought some hard-hitting comment from black leaders. Presidential candidate Barack Obama preached a message of responsibility to black fathers at a church in his hometown, saying too many were missing from their families lives, “acting like boys instead of men” and weakening “the foundations of our families”.

Obama himself grew up without his father from the age of two, but said he was lucky to have loving grandparents who helped his mother. “I resolved many years ago that it was my obligation to break the cycle -- that if I could be anything in life, I would be a good father to my girls,” he told the congregation, which included his daughters Sasha and Malia, and his wife, Michelle. He urged black parents to demand the best from themselves and their children -- not to be satisfied with just B grades but to go for A's.

Bill Cosby, who has been hassling black dads for several years, wrote a comment in USA Today together with Alvin F Poussaint (they co-authored the book, Come On People: On the Path From Victims to Victors) about father-child estrangement. Unemployment and imprisonment made many black men unmarriageable but they tried to prove their manliness by sexual conquests; abandoning their “drive-by babies” only showed their insecurity. Many had never seen a real father in action.

However, there were now many organised efforts to help young black men address these problems. Some men avoided their children because they saw themselves as bad role models. “What they need to appreciate is that from the moment they commit themselves to their child, they can still become good role models,” said Cosby and Poussaint.

Can happiness be bad for your child?

For a few years, now, the British government, hounded by professionals and various do-gooders, has been exercised over the question of how to make children happier. To counter a veritable epidemic of anxiety and depression among youngsters, education authorities have engaged the services of a happiness expert from the United States to conduct workshops for teachers and have run pilot programmes on emotional literacy in schools. Richard Layard, a professor at the London School of Economics and a peer in the House of Lords, goes so far as to say that teaching “the secrets of happiness” should be the central purpose of schools. 

It looked like sabotage, then, when it was revealed early this week that researchers had discovered that sad children could concentrate better than happy ones and so cope better with tasks demanding attention to detail -- which real learning generally does. Efforts to boost happiness in children may have a negative impact on their cognitive development, warned academics at the University of Plymouth in the UK and the University of Virginia in the United States. “The good feeling that accompanies happiness comes at a hidden cost,” they wrote in the journal Developmental Science. “It leads to a particular style of thinking that is suited for some types of situations, but not others.” (1) 

Does that mean it is time to enforce a little misery among the young and the sanguine? Not at all. The fact is that the study tells us very little about either happiness or misery, which are stable conditions; it tells us mainly about feelings, or moods, produced by passing stimuli.

Teachers everywhere know this. They are well aware that the quality of home life -- the presence of two parents who are able to impart to their children good values and habits -- is the key to the behavioural and mental health problems they encounter in so many young students. Family breakdown was a major issue at teachers’ conferences in the UK earlier this year. It emerged as the leading factor in a recent poll of children and adults on the subject of children’s happiness. It has been highlighted by masses of social research.  

Authorities who really care about children’s wellbeing know where they should start: support for the two-parent family based on marriage -- real marriage, that is, not the up and coming look-alikes. Focusing on remedial “emotional intelligence” lessons in schools is a feeble substitute that looks more and more dishonest.

Notes:

(1) “A hidden cost of happiness in children,” by Simone Schnall et al, Developmental Science, June 2008

The empty European village

"It Takes a Village to Raise a Child," was Hillary Clinton’s Big Idea in the 1990s. Hillary’s supporters and detractors alike regard that slogan as a thinly-veiled code for increasing the government’s responsibility for the care of children. The demographic decline of Europe illustrates what would happen if we took this Village-Raising-Children image seriously.

The State Village takes over a substantial portion of the economic responsibility for the family, regardless of the marital status of parents. As state support becomes more significant, the mutual support of family members becomes less important. Parents no longer feel the need to marry each other, or even cooperate with each other. The state replaces the married couple as the primary support for children. And as a not-so-unintended consequence, state-funded child-care frees women from child-care responsibilities inside the home so they can work outside the home.

Welfare state advocates on both sides of the pond are quick to point out the benefits of state support. But let’s look at the cost side of the equation.

A recent report by the family-friendly Madrid-based Institute for Family Policies reports the broad European demographic trends. The number of marriages has dropped precipitously since 1980. The percentage of children born outside marriage has increased to one third. More children are born outside of marriage than inside marriages in Estonia, Sweden, Bulgaria and France. Divorce rates have soared.

One out of every four European household is a lone individual. Two out of three households have no children. Half of European children have no siblings. So much for the Fraternity part of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity.

Unfortunately, the Institute for Family Policies recommends more of the same, failed welfare state policies. Steve Mosher, president of the US-based Population Research Institute, has a different approach. "Not one of the schemes adopted by the European countries has succeeded in recovering the birth rate to replacement. Why?" he asks rhetorically in his new book, Population Control: Real Costs, Illusory Benefits.

"Statist solutions will not solve the problem of the empty cradle, for it is the modern welfare state itself that relentlessly suppresses fertility. By its very existence, it discourages the formation of the very kind of strong, independent families that are necessary for robust fertility by fracturing the intergenerational dependency of the family, by adopting "gender-neutral" policies that undermine the complementarity that is at the heart of successful marriage, by providing abortion on demand, by mandating sex education for children, by pushing state-funded contraception schemes on teenagers and young adults, and above all, by high tax rates."

I think Mosher is correct. The statist Village has sucked the life out of marriage, which just happens to be the one self-sustaining institution that can oppose the pretensions of the state to control all of social life.

The European experience demonstrates that the Village needs the family far more than the family needs the Village.

Thanks for supporting family values, but what about the family?

If strong, intact, loving families are so important, why don’t politicians have them, too? Of all the issues facing the two American presidential candidates -- Iraq, the economy, health care, climate change, immigration -- the one that is most crucial to the future of the United States doesn’t even rate a mention on the Washington Post’s Issues Tracker for election coverage, namely, the family.

There is no doubt at all that both Barack Obama and John McCain talk about families in their speeches -- social security for families, health care for families, employment, education and many other things families need -- but do they talk about “the family”? Do they think about it? Do they realise how important it is for the health and prosperity of America to support the domestic unit founded on marriage and open to the generation of children? Not so as you’d notice, unfortunately. 

The United States is doing better than most Western nations when it comes to producing children, but the birth rate masks a disintegrating marriage culture that makes the future much less certain. By the time the last state has signed gay marriage into law, the troubles of the Iraq war may seem light by comparison with those of a generation who have no idea what marriage actually means.

The final phase of the presidential election presents us with two apparently happily married candidates -- Barack Obama for the first time and John McCain for the second. In this respect Mr Obama, whose website says he is “especially proud of being a husband and father of two daughters”, has more credibility, but it seems unlikely he would use it to promote the family as such. He speaks of his “fight for working families” in the form of tax cuts and early childhood education, but he supports civil unions, opposes a constitutional amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman, and defends the abortion regime ushered in by Roe v Wade.

Among the other original candidates there was some potential. But having good values is not enough to get you into the White House or the prime minister’s office. Whatever it takes, the world needs more of it.

Italian film festival has family focus

A new type of film festival will be launched at the end of July when families, celebrities, officials and film aficionados gather at Fiuggi in Italy for the first edition of the International Festival of Cinema. The week-long family-friendly festival will see the Italian premiere of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, and will feature a competition for good movies that are not readily available at the box office. Among the latter this year is Bella, the Public Prize winner at Toronto last year.

As participants relax among the attractions of the popular holiday spot, they can also choose from a menu of entertaining films suitable for all the family -- hits such as Finding Nemo, The Incredibles and Harry Potter. Also on offer are sessions in which leading figures will speak on topics related to the family, the arts and communication. A “family passport” allows any size family to watch all the films and attend all the activities for only 45 euros.

Backed by Italy’s Forum of Family Associations, the Fiuggi Family Festival aims to become an international point of reference for the family and the cinematic world

U.S. campaign to Promote Abstinence Begins

Encouraging sexual abstinence among teenagers is receiving a boost in the United States from a national campaign, called Parents For Truth, aimed at enlisting the support of one million parents. The National Abstinence Education Association sent emails last week to about 30,000 supporters, practitioners and parents and planned to email 100,000 this week as part of the first phase of the campaign. A registration fee of $30 per participant will provide funds to back lobbying efforts by parents to get schools to adopt sex education programmes focusing on abstinence and work to elect officials who support this approach.

“There are powerful special interest groups who can far outspend what parents can in terms of promoting their agenda,” said NAEA executive director Valerie Huber. “But we recognise that parents more than make up for that by their determination and motivation to protect their own children.”

The campaign comes as Congress is debating whether to authorise about $190 million in federal funding for abstinence education programmes, which have been under attack by advocates of so-called comprehensive sex education. The Parents For Truth website has a very effective video conveying the message that comprehensive sex ed typically puts its emphasis on safer sex practices and teaches kids how to have sex rather than how to avoid it. The website also offers advice to parents about sex education. 

Experimenting with children’s sexual identity!

Gender benders are consigning more and more disturbed children to the path of sex change on the basis of a shaky philosophy. Adolescents, by definition, are immature people. Once, the pop scientific diagnosis of teenage rashness was all about “raging hormones”. Now, it’s mainly about brains; hardly a week goes by that does not bring new revelations about the teen brain and its unfinished, evolving nature. No-one is really grown up until they are at least 25, we are told.

It turns out that some people have significant lapses of common sense even then. Among them are the mother of 12-year-old Australian girl who is encouraging her daughter to become a boy; the psychiatrist, family counsellor and endocrinologist who support the move; and the Victorian family court judge who decided last December after a two-day hearing that the girl had the right to begin hormone treatment with a view to a complete sex change. It has taken six months for the judgement to be issued. 

Despite the claim of her lawyer that she is capable of giving informed consent, and a claim that the hormone treatment is reversible should she change her mind, the girl is patently too young to make such a life-changing decision According to researchers, someone of her age has barely begun the process that should ultimately see the higher functions of the brain -- those connected with self-awareness, empathy with others and wise decision making -- wrest control from the pleasure seeking functions that burgeon during adolescence. A Dutch team has been conducting a trial involving youths since the late 1990s, according to Spiegel. The prestigious Boston Children's Hospital runs a clinic where children are helped to change their sex.

Collapsed schools: a preventable tragedy

One of the most heart-rending results of the devastating May 12 earthquake in China has been the deaths of thousands of children in collapsed schools. More than 13,000 schools in Sichuan -- over 40 per cent of schools in the province -- were damaged. Nearly 7000 collapsed. As many as 10,000 students and teachers may have been killed. The children’s deaths are more than usually tragic among people generally forbidden to have more than one child. Population planners have proved just as heedless of nature as the construction industry and its official overseers in that regard.

As bereaved parents come to realize the vulnerability of the schools their grief is turning to anger at officials, whom they are accusing of corruption. Beichuan Middle School, at the heart of the disaster, opened in 1998 after taking five years to build, then collapsed in a matter of seconds in the earthquake. More than 1300 of the school’s 2900 students and teachers are either dead or missing. In the small town of Wufu a junior school was reduced to rubble, burying the children, while the buildings around it stood firm. “We believe this disaster was man-made,” said a parent who lost his son. 

Local authorities have promised an investigation and say that builders will be held responsible for shoddy work. Yesterday an official in Sichuan withdrew from the prestigious Olympics torch relay as "atonement" for construction problems at collapsed schools. The government has moved quickly to offer families whose children have been killed or disabled exemption from the one-child policy. 

But the Beichuan earthquake is a wake-up call to more than the Chinese. Experts attending an international conference on school safety in Islamabad, Pakistan, shortly after the quake warned that the problem of poor buildings was widespread, and not just in developing countries.

IT'S NOT BIRTH CONTROL, IT'S ANTI-NATALISM

"It's not TV, it's birth control!" trumpets NBC Television's home page for The Baby Borrowers, a new reality show in which five teenage "couples" will pretend to be parents.

A "riveting social experiment" they call it, although one can think of less complimentary terms for it. The concept, borrowed from the UK, involves putting each pair of young people (aged 18 to 20) in a house and asking them to set up a home, find a job, and become "caring parents first to babies, then to toddlers, pre-teens and their pets, teenagers and senior citizens -- all over the course of three weeks".

The promo continues: "Through this emotional, dramatic journey, each young couple will get a unique opportunity to peer into the future and see what they (and their partners) might be like if they remain together and decide to build a family. Tested by the everyday ups and downs of taking care of others and maintaining a relationship, most of the teens find themselves looking at all of their relationships and notions of parenthood in a new light."

It's hard to know where to begin in criticizing this concept, but starting with the most obvious thing, it is first of all an experiment in living together without the benefit of marriage. Putting real babies and children into that set-up is simply further exploitation, even if their real parents are hovering nearby. The message is: move in with your boyfriend by all means but DO NOT have a baby.

One video clip shows a distraught girl declaring that she's had enough and can see herself staying single for the rest of her life. Maybe this is the real and intended effect of the show: not birth control but anti-natalism, disgust with the whole idea of children and family life. Fast-track to adulthood? To parenthood? No way.