Marry, pray, love

In a book of self discovery so popular that it has been made into a movie -- Eat, Pray, Love -- the American writer Elizabeth Gilbert took herself to India to learn to pray. That was after bingeing on food in Italy and before stumbling on a new love in Bali.

Gilbert set the stage for the voyage around herself by getting a divorce. But if she had prayed with her first husband they might never have parted, as research on marital happiness shows that the couple that prays together is more likely to stay together.

This has been confirmed by a new study from the National Marriage Project based at the University of Virginia: "The Couple That Prays Together: Race and Ethnicity, Religion, and Relationship Quality Among Working-Age Adults," appears in the August issue of the Journal of Marriage and Family.

Co-authored by sociologists Christopher G. Ellison , W Bradford Wilcox and Amy M. Burdette, it is the first major study to compare religion and relationship quality across America's major racial and ethnic groups. It finds that for all groups, shared religious activity - attending church together and especially praying together - is linked to higher levels of relationship quality.

African-Americans derive the most benefits from that connection because they are significantly more likely than whites or Latinos to pray together and attend church together, offsetting other socio-economic factors tied to lower relationship quality - a finding dubbed the "African-American religion-marriage paradox," says Wilcox, director of the National Marriage Project and a professor of sociology at the U of V.

Narrowing the racial divide

"Without prayer, black couples would be doing significantly worse than white couples. This study shows that religion narrows the racial divide in relationship quality in America. The vitality of African-Americans' religious lives gives them an advantage over other Americans when it comes to relationships. This advantage puts them on par with other couples."

The same is true, to a lesser extent, for Latino couples, says Wilcox.

But religion may not always benefit couples. Couples holding discordant religious beliefs and those with only one partner who attends religious services regularly tend to be less happy in their relationships, the researchers found. Being on different pages religiously is a source of tension for couples across racial and ethnic lines. "That may be due to less time spent doing things together," Wilcox says, "or having different values about child rearing, alcohol use or any number of things."

A substantial body of research has shown that relationship quality tends to be lower among racial and ethnic minorities, and higher among more religious persons and among couples in which partners share common religious affiliations, practices and beliefs, explained the study's lead author, Christopher G. Ellison, a fellow of the National Marriage Project and a professor of social science at the University of Texas at San Antonio.

The study uses data from the National Survey of Religion and Family Life, a 2006 telephone survey of 1,387 working-age adults (ages 18 to 59) in relationships, funded by the Lilly Endowment and designed by Ellison and Wilcox. The overwhelming majority of respondents were married (89 percent), with a somewhat lower rate among the racial and ethnic minorities.

The respondents reported high levels of relationship satisfaction (4.8 on a 6-point scale), but African-Americans reported being significantly less happy than whites. However, after controlling for age, education and income, the racial differences disappear.

Blacks reported higher levels of church attendance, both with and without their partners. Forty percent of black respondents reported that they attended services regularly as a couple, compared to 29 percent of whites, 31 percent of Mexicans or Mexican-Americans and 32 percent of all respondents.

Home life

Blacks were also significantly more likely than the other groups to report shared religious activities like prayer or scriptural study. That difference is probably driving the relationship improvements more than shared church attendance.

"The closer you get to the home, the more powerful the beneficial effects," says Wilcox. "It makes sense that those who think about, talk about and practice their beliefs in the home, those who bring home their reflections on their marriage, derive stronger effects from those beliefs, especially compared to those who simply attend church weekly.”

One practical effect seems especially important, Wilcox suggests: "I think forgiveness is probably a pretty key dimension to the link between shared religious practice - prayer in particular - and success in the relationship." In past studies, forgiveness has been found to be a key influence on the success of relationships, home life and even workplace happiness.

Previous research linking religious involvement to improved relationship quality has ascribed the connection to three factors.

First, religious communities typically promote ethical behaviour (the Golden Rule, forgiveness) that helps define appropriate relationship conduct, encourage partners to fulfil their familial roles and responsibilities, and handle conflict in a constructive manner.

Second, family-centered social networks found in religious communities offer formal and informal support to couples and families, from financial help to models of healthy relationships, to advice from an elder about how to discipline a difficult child.

Third, religious belief seems to provide people with a sense of purpose and meaning about life in general and their relationship in particular, which increases resilience to stress.

That's particularly important for blacks and Latinos, says Wilcox, because they are more likely to experience "poverty, xenophobia, racism, neighborhood violence, underemployment, or similar factors that can stress a relationship."

None of this has anything to do with learning meditation techniques in India and is therefore unlikely to be the stuff of bestsellers and movies. But it is the stuff of real life and happiness, so people deserve to know.

This article incorporates a press release from the University of Virginia. Carolyn Moynihan wrote the introduction and the ending.

Technorati Tags: marriage,prayer,race

Welcome to the Club of Ancient Wrongs

With one war in Afghanistan, another in Iraq, a possible war with Iran, and an environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico, it seems bizarre that the biggest political issue in the US is whether to build a mosque near Ground Zero, the former site of the Twin Towers in lower Manhattan.

Muslims overseas are puzzled. “The mosque is not an issue for Muslims,” says Abdul Rahman Al-Rashid, a leading Arab journalist based in Dubai, “and they have not heard of it until the shouting became loud between the supporters and the objectors, which is mostly an argument between non-Muslim US citizens!”

First of all, some facts.

Only part of the US$100 million Cordoba Initiative is a mosque which will accommodate about 1,000 for Friday prayers. The rest of it is a community centre with a library, gym, auditorium, restaurant, 9/11 memorial and so on. Second, it is not a “Ground Zero Mosque”. It is a full two blocks away from the place where more than 2,700 people died.

Third, it is not a gathering place for radical Muslims. The Kuwaiti-American imam organising the project, Feisal Abdul Rauf, may have sent mixed messages, but he claims to be promoting dialogue between Americans and Muslims. He has even written a book titled, What's Right with Islam is What's Right with America. Since we have George W. Bush’s word for it that Islam is “a religion of peace”, at least New Yorkers should believe in Mr Rauf’s good intentions.

There are two strands in the commentary defending the proposed Islamic centre.

The first is that Muslims have a right, like other Americans, to build places of worship wherever they like. In the words of President Obama, "Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country." Rabbi Arthur Waskow, a prominent Jewish leader, says: “it is not only the constitutional right of the peace-committed Muslims of the Cordoba Initiative to build a community center in Lower Manhattan, but they are ethically right and profoundly wise to lift there a beacon.”

The other is that “Demonization of the Muslim religion is what this brouhaha is all about.” It is “as irrational an act of scapegoating as blaming all ethnic Germans for the acts of Nazis,” in the words of one left-wing pundit, Robert Scheer. Even the usually sensible Economist says that “The campaign against the proposed Cordoba centre in New York is unjust and dangerous.”

But the right to free commercial activity and the right to freedom from discrimination and vilification are very blunt instruments for dealing with a “sacred site”. His opponents may be using the controversy as a way to weaken President Obama (when 20 percent of Americans think he is a Muslim) but the source of the opposition is more an inarticulate sense of sacredness than bigotry.  

If New Yorkers were really that prejudiced, why is the current Islamic centre in downtown Manhattan located ten blocks away in the basement of a Catholic Church?

Today, in most Western countries, the concept of reverence for the sacred is often dismissed or ridiculed or simply viewed with perplexity. But even a secularised sense of the sacred is a tenuous link to transcendence and an important element in forging a personal and national identity.

To take a non-political example, would Walmart ever build a mall and parking lot in Yellowstone? Will California ever sell off Redwood National Park to timber companies to balance its budget? Such proposals somehow violate places revered for their awe-inspiring beauty. Or if Mr Rauf somehow managed to shift his centre to the battlefield of Gettysburg, would the ensuing protests be due to hatred of Islam or to outrage at the violation of this hallowed ground?

And for Americans Ground Zero has been hallowed by senseless deaths, heroic sacrifice, national humiliation and an outpouring of grief.

It is hard to find words to explain why a plot of ground should be revered for memories like these. That is what poets are for. But part of being human is to be connected to places and spaces and memories. Analysing the conflict in terms of constitutional rights is utterly inadequate. Something more ancient is at work which disappears in sterile political battles over rights.

It is not pandering to prejudice to recognise that America, like other societies with a long and deep history, now has its own taboos which ought to be respected even if they are legally indefensible.

A Pakistani professor Islamic Studies at American University in Washington DC, Akbar Ahmed, understands this. A former ambassador to the US, he has a deep knowledge of both cultures.

"I don't think the Muslim leadership has fully appreciated the impact of 9/11 on America,” he says. “They assume Americans have forgotten 9/11 and even, in a profound way, forgiven 9/11, and that has not happened. The wounds remain largely open. And when wounds are raw, an episode like constructing a house of worship – even one protected by the Constitution, protected by law - becomes like salt in the wounds."

Protectiveness and anger are typical of disputes over sacred sites in the Old World. Perhaps the passions in this controversy mean that America is growing up, or at least growing older. What could be more characteristic of an Old World society than fights over sacred sites?

In newer countries like Australia passions seldom run so high. I used to live in Tasmania where the indigenous people, the Tasmanian Aboriginals, had lived in complete isolation for perhaps 15,000 years. Within two generations after contact with Europeans they had all perished. It is one of the darkest chapters of Australian history, even of world history. Yet there is no fitting memorial to them, just a few wretched plaques and a hiking track named after Truganini, the last of her people.

Ancient cultures have deep feelings. Why is Jerusalem the world’s most volatile city? Because Christians, Jews and Muslims would all die to defend their sacred places. The Babri mosque in Ayodhya was destroyed in 1992 by a mob of 150,000 Hindus who believed that it had been built over the birthplace of their god Rama. Serbia fought a war rather than grant independence to Kosovo partly because the Field of Blackbirds, north of the capital Pristina, is hallowed ground where the Serbs made their last stand against the Ottoman Turks in 1389.

It is easy for unscrupulous politicians to exploit sacred sites for their own political gain, as Slobodan Milosevic did in Kosovo to rally Serbs against separatists, and perhaps Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin are doing now. But that doesn’t mean that ordinary Americans’ attachment to a sacred site should be dismissed as redneck prejudice. It’s more like the anger and exasperation you might feel if an intruding stranger made a scene at your mother’s wake.

And, to draw on the Australian experience, a sacred site can draw Western and Muslim cultures together. Arguably, Australia’s most sacred site is not on the island continent at all, but in Gallipoli, a Turkish peninsula in the Dardanelles Straits. There in 1915, thousands of Australians and New Zealanders died in a doomed attempt to capture Istanbul. Now it is a place of pilgrimage for both Australians and Turks who remember their forebears’ sacrifice and heroism.

Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey and the Turkish commander, later wrote a touching memorial which displays far more magnanimity and sensitivity than anything uttered by American politicians in the past few weeks:

“You are now lying in the soil of a friendly country. Therefore rest in peace. There is no difference between the Johnnies and the Mehmets to us where they lie side by side now here in this country of ours... you, the mothers, who sent their sons from faraway countries wipe away your tears; your sons are now lying in our bosom and are in peace. After having lost their lives on this land. They have become our sons as well.”

Michael Cook is editor of MercatorNet.

Technorati Tags: Ground Zero,Islam,New York

‘We insist: leave your conscience at the door’

Pharmacists dispense advice to a colleague who will not sell the morning after pill.

I recently wrote an article expressing my delight that Washington State pharmacists will no longer be forced to dispense products or provide services they find morally objectionable. My elation at the Washington victory was quickly numbed, however, when an edited version ran as a “Point of View” on the Canadian Healthcare Network website. It is one thing for the public to oppose our freedom of conscience, quite another for pharmacists to be shooting themselves in the foot.

Only 42 per cent of pharmacists who voted on the network’s site agreed that “they should have the right to refuse to sell products or provide services they consider morally objectionable”. Sadly, the other 58 per cent believe they should be forced to do what they believe to be wrong -- “Well, Mr. Smith, I hate to do this to you, but if you really insist, take this overdose and don’t bother calling me in the morning.”

My happiness at the Washington victory was further squelched by the plethora of intolerant, and in some cases highly dogmatic, statements posted by fellow pharmacists. While some offered considered views that mirrored common misgivings among the public, others shot assertions from the hip, epitomizing the very judgemental attitude they so fear in their opponents. “Pharmacists are to be non-judgemental” -- except, it seems, when criticizing one another.

A common thread running through the posts is deep consternation about conscience, showing, at the very least, that the authors have one. Yes, every living, rational, being has this capacity for self-reflection, regardless of dogmatic beliefs. But, alas, some have decided it is best to leave their conscience at the pharmacy door. They propose that we all live by one set of mores at work and another set at home.

One person writes: “If moral issues are a concern, provide a reasonable alternative…”

And, were euthanasia legalized, what might that be when Mr Smith insists on his overdose? -- “Ah, er, sorry Mr Smith, I’m afraid I cannot offer you this service, but Frankie’s Pharmacy down the street most certainly will! Have a nice day… Um, see you in the next life… I hope?”

“In some cases”, the comment continues,” you just have to separate work from home, and the professional judgment involved cannot be swayed by moral beliefs.”

Yet no one makes judgments in a vacuum. What, then, will professional judgment be swayed by: Consumerism? Feminism? Drug-company-ism? The next ideological “ism”?

Let me stress that I agree it would be unethical to deny the sick treatment. But because neither fertility nor pregnancy constitutes an illness, I refuse to pander to the feminist ideology that forces us to view and treat them as such.

It is a rather scary thought, is it not, that pharmacists should leave their morals at home. (Care to help yourself to that left over morphine in the back of the safe? How about chewing on low-dose Concerta?) Do we want robots in the pharmacy, people devoid of ethical or philosophical insight who simply follow orders and take no responsibility for their actions? Did we learn nothing from the crimes of the Nazi doctors who separated moral judgement from professional “duties”?

If reason allows us to reflect upon our professional actions in the area of therapeutics, moral conscience accompanies us always so we can discern the goodness or baseness of our own actions. So, when a pharmacist decides not to provide you with an overdose, he uses both his moral judgement and professional judgement simultaneously.

Pharmacists who refuse to dispense products they believe to be harmful are putting the health of the patient first. A pharmacist who will not sell the morning after pill, for example, chooses not to stock it because he believes that life is precious from the moment of conception. This is not a religious feeling or belief, but an ethical opinion that is just as worthy of respect as any other. P>What if a pharmacist decides to not dispense a medication simply out of caprice or bigotry? The oft-cited hypothetical example is someone who will not dispense anti-retrovirals to AIDS patients. I can only say that no pharmacist with an upright conscience would ever deny necessary treatment to a patient on a whim.

Sean Murphy of the Protection of Conscience Project has summed up well the contradictory position of those who demand ethical conformity without demonstrating “the superiority of the ethical judgements [they] propose to force upon unwilling colleagues.”

They could, he says, at least explain “how professional ethics will be improved if the only candidates admitted to professions are those who promise to do what they believe to be wrong.”

By: Cristina Alarcon is a Vancouver pharmacist and writer. She holds a Masters in Bioethics.

Technorati Tags: conscientious objection,morning after pill,pharmacists

Waiting makes the heart grow fonder

It is always gratifying when research coincides with common sense and everyday experience, as in the case of a new study showing that a relationship in which sexual intimacy is delayed is more likely to endure.

Researchers questioned 642 adults and 56 per cent of them said they had “waited until they got serious before they had sex” (quoting the Toronto Sun here). Most of them also reported that they had “a high quality relationship”.

The number was higher than for the 27% of people who had sex while dating casually and the 17% who were intimate while in a non-romantic relationship.

Professor Anthony Paik of the University of Iowa who reported the study suggested that the courtship process acts as a screening mechanism.

“The debate is ‘why can’t we have sex now?’ The expectation is that sex should occur very quickly. But doing so, you’re losing out on some information that might be useful,” he explained in an interview.

It’s almost an economic equation, he added.

“On average, the more costly the process leading into the relationship, the more likely it is to work. That’s what the data would suggest.”

Alas, he then confuses us by saying that further analysis showed it was not the early sex that caused low-quality relationships but the personalities of the people:

Certain people are simply prone to finding relationships less rewarding, and they are more likely to have sex in casual relationships, he added.

Either way, rushing into sex is not a good sign.

Article by: Carolyn Moynihan

 

Technorati Tags: abstinence,relationships

China’s crisis conundrum

Despite the government's attempts to regulate consumer safety, corrupt business practices are deeply rooted in Chinese culture.

China lurches from one man-made catastrophe to another, despite the efforts of its government to improve laws and regulations to protect people and the environment. In the latest front-page scandal, baby girls have been developing breasts after consumption of milk powder allegedly laced with growth hormones.

This comes just two years after another milk formula scandal that killed six babies and saw nearly 300,000 others become ill with kidney ailments from powdered milk contaminated with a toxic chemical (melamine), which is used in the manufacture of plastics.

While it’s true that the West has its own problems, China’s crises point to fundamental problems in its corporate culture. Problems in food and pharmaceutical products in the West are usually due to a breakdown in systems or processes, or sometimes to malicious sabotage or extortion. In most cases companies move quickly to protect consumers, thereby enhancing their own reputations.

In China, on the other hand, crises have been too often caused by greed: companies place profits ahead of people. Health and safety standards are ignored to obtain better bottom line returns. Many Chinese glibly explain that life is not worth much.

To a large extent, the problem in China is compounded by the incestuous relationships between the Communist Party, government and business.  Indeed, they are often one and the same. Sanlu, the company at the centre of the 2008 melamine scandal, was part owned by the city government of Shijiazhuang where it was headquartered in Liaoning Province. Its chairwoman was a Party appointee and a member of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a political advisory body to the Central Government.

Often, too, laws are not enforced if they reduce profits that go directly to government coffers. The worst example is China’s mining industry where the annual death toll is unimaginable by Western standards. The government admits that 2,631 coal miners died in 1,616 mine accidents in 2009, down 18 percent from the previous year.

Many mines that breach occupational health and safety regulations are at least partly owned by local governments. In many cases local officials do not enforce strict regulations.

But don’t rush to blame Mao Zedong and Communism. China is also a prisoner of its ancient culture. Two deep-seated aspects of Chinese culture – guanxi and mianzi – are also important.

The concept of guanxi or connections allows many business leaders to act with impunity.  This dates back to the days of imperial rule and the Mandarins. Today it means weakened corporate governance as many companies are led by company directors with strong connections to members of the Party and politburo and can skirt laws and regulations.

The Sydney Morning Herald’s Beijing correspondent, John Garnaut, recently argued that Du Shuanghua, one of China’s richest entrepreneurs and the businessman at the heart of the Rio Tinto bribery scandal that landed three of its executives in prison, not only escaped censure but continues as a leading player in China because of his guanxi with the family of the nation’s president, Hu Jintao.

Mianzi or face is important when the government or companies seek to cover up a crisis. The melamine milk contamination crisis, for example, was covered up by Sanlu so that China would not lose face in 2008 when it was hosting the Olympics.

In some cases senior managers do not become aware of simmering issues until it is too late because subordinates either want to save face for themselves or for their bosses.  Simply put, junior managers are averse to reporting problems up the line.

While China is unlikely to end its system of State-sponsored capitalism or implement major democratic reforms to address these problems, the country needs some political reform, however limited. At least it should unshackle its judicial system. As long as courts remain under government and Party control, justice cannot be served and the darker aspects of culture and politics will continue to thrive. A freer judiciary might also provide China’s seething underclass with an outlet for its frustrations – a point not lost on the Communist Party, which came to power on the back of proletariat and peasant disenchantment.

But even limited reform seems revolutionary and unlikely. A truly independent judiciary would undoubtedly threaten government connections and vested interests. Where’s the face in that?  

By: Constance Kong is the pen name of a Shanghai-based business consultant.

Technorati Tags: business ethics,China,corporate governance,corruption

Who respects the human body? Not homosexuals

The ruling by Judge Vaughn Walker to strike down Proposition 8 raises a host of issues that go far beyond the California case. Especially troubling is Walker's view of gender. His ruling makes the sweeping assertion that "gender no longer forms an essential part of marriage."

This declaration is being quoted in astonishment for its sheer breathtaking exaggeration. Yet it reveals a pivotal element in the liberal view of human sexuality.

Liberal ethics is based on a fragmented view of the human being that pits biology against choice. Its roots go back to the French philosopher Rene Descartes, who proposed that the body is a machine controlled by a completely separate thing called the mind. The ghost in the machine.

As philosopher Daniel Dennett explains, "Since Descartes in the 17th century we have had a vision of the self as a sort of immaterial ghost that owns and controls a body the way you own and control your car." In other words, the body is no longer regarded as an integral part of the human person but as sub-personal, functioning strictly on the level of biology and chemistry – almost like a possession that can be used to serve the self's desires.

This is the philosophy that underlies arguments for same-sex "marriage." The assumption is that our bodies have nothing to do with our identity as persons. And that, therefore, anatomy can be overridden by sheer self-expressive choice.

The denigration of physical anatomy does not stop with same-sex "marriage." The cutting edge issue today is transgenderism, a movement that rejects the distinction between male and female itself as a mere social construction – and an oppressive one at that.

According to the New York Times, several universities now offer separate bathrooms, housing and sports teams for transgender students who do not identify themselves as either male or female. Some schools no longer require students to check male or female on their health forms. Instead, they are asked to "describe your gender identity history."' In other words: Which genders have you been over the course of your lifetime?

Gender has become a postmodern concept – fluid, free-floating, completely detached from physical anatomy.

Several states have already passed laws mandating that schools and workplaces accommodate transgenders, and supporters are pushing hard for the same laws at the national level. In 2007, California passed a law requiring schools to permit transgender students to use the restroom or locker room of their preferred gender, regardless of their anatomical sex. The new law redefines sex as socially constructed gender: "Gender means sex and includes a person's gender identity and gender related appearance and behavior whether or not stereotypically associated with the person's assigned sex at birth."

Note the assumption that your sex is "assigned" to you, as though it were purely arbitrary instead of an anatomical fact. The law is being used to impose a secular liberal worldview that dismisses physical anatomy as insignificant, inconsequential and completely irrelevant to gender identity.

As I show in "Saving Leonardo," this represents a devastatingly disrespectful view of the physical body. It alienates people from their own bodies, treating anatomy as having no intrinsic dignity. No dignity is accorded to the unique capabilities inherent in being male or female.

Ironically, Christians are often dismissed as prudes and Puritans because of their "repressive" sexual morality – and yet the Christian worldview actually affirms a much higher view of the body than the liberal, utilitarian view. It offers the radically positive affirmation that the material world was created by God, that it will ultimately be made whole by God and that God was actually incarnated (made flesh) in a human body.

In the ancient world, these claims were so astonishing that the Gnostics rejected them, and tried to turn Jesus into an avatar who only appeared to have a human body. They could not accept the idea of a Creator who celebrates our material, biological, sexual nature.

Today's liberal elites such as Judge Walker may pose as enlightened liberators, but in fact they are secular Gnostics, treating physical anatomy as having no intrinsic dignity or purpose. In an unexpected twist of history, it is once again Christians who are defending a high and holistic view of the human person.

---

Best-selling writer and speaker, Nancy Pearcey, editor at large of the Pearcey Report, is author of "Saving Leonardo: A Call to Resist the Secular Assault on Mind, Morals, & Meaning," which launches Sept. 1.

 

Technorati Tags: Proposition 8,Marriage,Catholic,Gay,California,Liberal,Nancy Pearcey,Same-sex marriage

What’s driving earlier puberty in girls?

Evidence that girls are reaching puberty as early as seven years of age is in the news this week following the publication of an article in the journal Paediatrics. It is a topic that has been debated for decades.

The new data shows that in the United States white girls are catching up with Black and Hispanic girls, who are still well ahead statistically when it comes to maturing early but among whom the trend has slowed right down.

More than 10 percent of white 7-year-old girls in the study, which was conducted in the mid-2000s, had reached a stage of breast development marking the start of puberty, compared to just 5 percent in a similar study conducted in the early 1990s.

Most lay people would be concerned about little girls’ physical development getting ahead of their intellectual and emotional development. For one thing it could make them vulnerable to sexual interest by older males. They are also more likely to mix with older children and mimic older behaviour.

But the current study (which did not include menstruation) was driven by concern about increasing rates of breast cancer among women:

Early puberty in girls is a growing public health concern because studies have shown that girls who start puberty earlier are more likely to develop breast and uterine cancer later in life. The National Institutes of Health funded the study as part of a larger investigation into the environmental factors that contribute to breast cancer risk.

Experts are not certain about the factors driving the trend, which has been evident since the 1950s. Among the chief suspects are excess body fat which affects the level of hormones (estrogen and progesterone) that trigger puberty; environmental chemicals; and the environment in the womb resulting from maternal characteristics -- including first period before age 12, smoking during pregnancy, and being pregnant for the first time.

Some researchers have found links with television viewing, as Aric Sigman has noted:

Dr Sigman’s report, which is based on his analysis of 35 scientific studies, claims that television viewing affects levels of melatonin, a hormone linked to when puberty occurs in girls. Melatonin levels increase in the evening, at the onset of darkness, but staring into a bright screen during this period hinders its production.

Another factor, cited by Leonard Sax in his book Girls On The Edge, is the absence of a girl’s biological father. Sax writes:

Robert Matchock and Elizabeth Susman at Penn State University are convinced that pheromones are the mechanism whereby the presence of the biological father slows down the tempo of his daughter’s sexual development. They believe that this phenomenon is hardwired in our species, as it is in many other mammals, in order to decrease the likelihood of a father having sex with his daughter. “Biological fathers send out inhibitory chemical signals to their daughters,” says Matchock. “In the absence of these signals, girls tend to sexually mature earlier.

As for early exposure to the sex hormones oestrogen and progesterone, no-one seems to be mentioning the possible contribution of hormonal contraceptives. Could they, for example, help explain why a first pregnancy -- after coming off the pill etc -- is among the risk factors for starting puberty earlier?

By:Carolyn Moynihan

Technorati Tags: tags : breast cancer,girls,puberty

THE WORLD'S MOST DANGEROUS IDEA

We have asked several of our contributors to respond to a question in our occasional series of forums. This time the question is: What is the world's most dangerous idea? We expect that the answers will be quite controversial. Please add your comments. 

* * * 

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world. ~ Preamble to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR)

One day, we may remember 1948 as the peak of mankind’s respect for one another. Sixty years later, ivory tower snobs, animal rights activists, abortion and euthanasia proponents are increasingly attacking the foundation for freedom and justice declared in the UDHR, the special value of each and every human being, also known as human dignity.

A few years ago, a New York Times reporter celebrated the extension of human rights to nonhuman animals, after the environmental committee of the Spanish Parliament voted to grant great apes the right to life and freedom. In an odd but recurrent pattern of increasing animal rights at the expense of human dignity, the reporter exclaimed that we were kidding ourselves with our belief in unalienable “human” (his quote) rights.

Animal right activists often exhibit a stunning insensitivity to human tragedy. Animal liberation is routinely compared to slavery or the women’s rights even though no one would suggest a radical difference between blacks and whites or men and women. Over the last few years, the increasingly shrill People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA) have compared the victims of the Holocaust to animals kept in warehouses or killed. Whatever sympathy Holocaust on a Plate ad may bring for chickens, can such campaigns do anything but trivialized human suffering?

Such rhetoric may be mere attention-grabbing, hyperbole. However, the race card and Nazi bogeyman also reflect a popular rational basis for animal rights articulated by Princeton University bioethics professor, Peter Singer. Singer argues in Animal Liberation (1973), the Magna Carta of four-legged freedom, that the belief in the inherent dignity of human beings is speciesism and no more rational than racism. Of course the implication is that since racism is evil then the belief in human dignity is also evil.

Singer is not alone in the halls of our academies. Earlier this year, London School of Economics sociology professor Alasdair Cochrane published a paper contending that the concept of human dignity should be removed from bioethics.  Cochrane at least avoids dragging in the KKK but attacks the claim that only and all humans have inherent moral worth as “unhelpful and arbitrary.”

If human dignity is only a crazy, cruel fiction, what happens when we dump the myth?

First, the most vulnerable human beings, the very young and the very sick increasingly may be left outside the umbrella of the human community. In Practical Ethics Singer argues that infants are no more self-aware than snails or dogs. Therefore, killing a preborn child or a week old infant is not murder, nor anymore immoral than squashing a slug.

The inversion of ethical sensibilities doesn’t stop with issues of life as ethicist look to animals as our new moral guides.

Repulsed by cannibalism? Grow-up. A New York Times writer declares that we are in a “community of equals” with apes and female chimpanzees who are known to eat their rivals’ babies.

How about cuddling with animals? Singer argues that we are all animals and sex with animals cannot be an offense to our dignity as a human being.

In the end, if with lose our connection to the high ideas expressed in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, our moral universe would be turned upside down. Both man and animal will suffer. Can human beings be human without dignity?

Theron Bowers MD is a Texas psychiatrist.

Technorati Tags: tags : animal rights,forum,human dignity,Peter Singer

Flawed evidence about gay marriage

In one sense, Judge Walker can’t be blamed for his decision since he was provided a great deal of inaccurate and incomplete information through the trial process. I hope that future amicus briefs will be able to correct those deficiencies.

It’s not that heterosexuals think their marriages are superior per se but that heterosexual marriage has vulnerabilities that are not found in same-sex relationships. Kurdek (2008) found that gay/lesbian couples reported greater levels of happiness over time than did heterosexual couples, especially the latter who had children. Kurdek admitted that gender conflicts would be expected to be more prevalent in heterosexual relationships. There are also more risks in heterosexual relationships in terms of unwanted pregnancies or struggles over fertility control.

At the same time that heterosexual relationships inherently entertain higher risks, they also provide society with a very important product – biological children who are genetically related to both of their parents, which tends to be correlated with taking better care of children (unrelated boyfriends, for example, often abuse their girlfriend’s biological children).

As an example of the bad information provided to the court, it is clear that lesbian parents have far less stable same-sex relationships than do heterosexual parents, even when the lesbian parents have advantages in terms of higher education or income (Schumm, 2009). The court was told that lesbian relationships are just as stable as heterosexual relationships, which may be true but only for persons who are not parents. The court may not have been told about the high rates, on the order of 50 percent within three years, of extramarital affairs engaged in by gay men in civil unions or marriages (Schumm, 2009).

The court was probably told that lesbian and gay parents are not more likely to have non-heterosexual children, which my research shows is false (Schumm, in press). The court was probably told that the children of lesbian and gay parents are doing just as well as the children of heterosexual parents. What is overlooked is that there is a great deal of cherry-picking going on, pitting highly educated, high income gay or lesbian parents against less educated, lower income heterosexual parents. I have yet to see any study control for education and for per capita household income before making comparisons between the two types of parents.

For example, Patterson and her colleagues (Farr, Forssell, & Patterson, 2010) recently published an article claiming that gay and lesbian parents of adopted children were parenting just as well as heterosexual adoptive parents. I tried to submit a rejoinder to that journal but the editor told me that his journal doesn’t accept any letters to the editor or criticisms of their published reports. Now there’s a great ploy – send your papers to outlets where you know in advance that your research, once published, will escape any criticism no matter how flawed your article might be!

However, in Patterson’s report, the gay father households had an average income of US$190,000 compared to $150,000 for heterosexual households and probably had fewer children. Neither level of household income represents anything close to what the average parent, heterosexual or non-heterosexual, must manage economically. For example, my base pay at the University after working here for over 30 years is less than $83,000, though I earn more by teaching overtime and getting occasional summer research money. With that, I have had to support my wife and seven children over years, including many years which involved much less income. And most people would consider me quite advantaged economically compared to the average household. And yet, our per capita household income would be almost trivial compared to that of the subjects who participated in Patterson’s research.

Patterson presented data from the “teachers” of the three-year-old children but the “teachers” were mostly daycare providers being paid by the parents. Now, why would anyone expect such an employee to run down the children in their care by describing them as psychologically troubled? Furthermore, there were no measures of social desirability used that could have been used to statistically control for any tendencies to overrate their children’s levels of psychological adjustment.

These types of flaws are widespread in research on gay and lesbian parenting but whether Judge Walker apprehended these issues, or even was provided clear evidence about them, is questionable.

Judge Walker was correct in that legal marriage does provide many benefits for legally married couples. Clearly, legally married gay or lesbian couples would be helped from such benefits. But, in my view, it’s just like universal healthcare. Sure, if free healthcare were provided to all residents of a nation, that would seem a great help. But someone has to pay the bill, surely some more than others. You end up with an equality of outcome but an inequality of input.

It’s easy enough to establish an apparent equality of outcomes for different types of couples, but if their inputs in terms of risks are unequal and their contributions to society in terms of jointly biological children are unequal, have you really established an equality or actually an inequality? That is why I have argued (Schumm, 2009) that making same-sex relationships socially and morally equivalent to heterosexual relationships creates an injustice rather than correcting one.

Dr Walter Schumm is a Professor of Family Studies in the School of Family Studies and Human Services at Kansas State University. He has published over 250 scholarly articles and book chapters and is co-editor of the Sourcebook of Family Theories and Methods: A Contextual Approach (Plenum, 1993; Springer, 2009). He is a retired colonel in the US Army Reserve, a former brigade and battalion commander. His views may not reflect the positions of Kansas State University or the US Department of Defense.

References

Farr, R. H., Forssell, S. L., & Patterson, C. J. (2010) Parenting and child development in adoptive  families: Does parental sexual orientation matter? Applied Developmental Science, 14(3), 164-178.

Kurdek, L. A. (2008). Change in relationship quality for partners from lesbian, gay male, and heterosexual couples. Journal of Family Psychology, 22, 701-711.

Schumm, W. R. (in press). Children of homosexuals more apt to be homosexuals? A reply to   Morrison and to Cameron based on an examination of multiple sources of data. Journal of  Biosocial Science.

Schumm, W. R. (2009). Gay marriage and injustice. The Therapist, 21(3), 95-96.

Technorati Tags: tags : homosexuality,Proposition 8,same-sex marriage

Girls On The Edge

American family doctor turned writer Leonard Sax talks in his latest book about what's driving the new crisis for girls.

When Leonard Sax, doctor, psychologist and promoter of single sex education, wrote his second book, Boys Adrift, in 2005 he tapped into a widespread concern that boys were doing badly in education and social development. The girls are fine, people said, pointing to their superior academic performance, but the boys were in trouble.

After 15 years in family practice Sax knew that was not true. Sure, the girls were hardworking and achieving, but those traits often had an obsessive character that was the flip side of the boys’ retreat into their bedrooms with World of Warcraft and a bit of porn on the side.

Increasingly, girls he dealt with in his practice were fixated on some ideal -- to be the top student, the top athlete, the girl who’s really thin -- to the point where failure could bring on a major existential crisis, if not psychological collapse.

Beyond his office, observation, research and lots of contact with girls’ schools showed that an increasing proportion of girls were locked in a cyberbubble. When not honing their image on Facebook they were texting non-stop, keeping the cellphone under their pillow at night and under the desk at school, so that they could receive messages (“OMG, I thought you were Jason’s girlfriend but I just found out that…”) 24/7, and picking up a double-shot espresso coffee on their way to school to stay awake.

More fundamental, and in a way driving other trends, was the wholesale sexualisation of girls that has been increasing in momentum over the past 50 years, causing an identity crisis. With even pre-pubescent girls dressing as though they had a sexual agenda, in their hot pants and midriff-baring tops, sexual confusion reigned.

Something else, not so obvious, was bothering the doctor: environmental toxins (leaching out of plastic food packaging, for example) that contribute to the early onset of puberty, depriving girls of part of their childhood and exposing them to higher risks of depression, eating disorders and delinquency, not to mention cardiovascular problems and breast cancer in the long run.

Sexual identity, the cyberbubble, obsessions, environmental toxins: these are the four factors driving the current crisis for girls that Sax describes in his latest book, Girls On The Edge. It could just as easily have been called Girls On The Surface, because that is the cumulative effect of the risks he is concerned about: girls focused on how they look, on performance, on what they do rather than who they are; girls insatiable for the next bit of gossip or the next A grade, and inconsolable when they meet with setbacks and failures.

That grim scenario represents only half the book, however; the other half is about solutions, and what those solutions have in common is the importance of gender -- one of the most fraught issues of our age, and one on which Sax definitively took a stand when he helped found the National Association for Single Sex Education back in 2002.

Some people think Sax is obsessed with gender -- his first book was Why Gender Matters -- but that is because the dominant gender narrative in recent decades has ignored or tried to obliterate the roots of gender in masculinity and femininity, concepts which he takes seriously, if not in quite the way some of us might want (more on this later). In his new book he says:

Most enduring cultures of which we have any record have taken this process -- the process of transition to a gendered adulthood -- very seriously. We ignore it. Indeed American parents seldom speak to their children at all about the meaning of womanhood or manhood (as opposed to generic, un-gendered adulthood). Most parents today don't know what to say.

But girls still want to know, What does it mean to be a woman? Boys still want to know, What does it mean to be a man? We don't tell them. As a result, the marketplace fills the vacuum, providing "the ready-made masculine and the ready-made feminine" which are caricatures of the real thing; but young people don't recognize them as caricatures, because they have received no guidance. (page 185)

In a conversation with MercatorNet when he was passing through Auckland (on his most recent speaking tour of schools in New Zealand and Australia) Dr Sax said he has never had a “gender agenda” as such. He simply had to confront its importance in his work as a family doctor -- in much the same way that he was faced with the greater need for general practitioners when he entered medical school to become a neurosurgeon.

“In the course of my 22 years of medical practice I dealt with children who I felt had issues that were gender issues and yet, not only the parents but also the consultants didn’t seem to be aware of the importance of gender, and that’s what led me to start writing about it.”

But there was also a very personal motive for writing Girls On The Edge. Extracting some photos from his bag, an obviously proud father spoke about his four-year-old daughter Sarah.

“I would never, ever have written the third book if were not for the birth of our daughter. My wife and I were infertile for the first 15 years of our marriage. Then my wife, Katie, gave birth to our one and only child.” Baby Sarah provided a new incentive to think about girls’ issues and to identify the keys to success in bringing up a daughter. These keys he treats in his book in chapters headed “mind”, “body” and “spirit”.

“Mind” is largely about the education of girls and the advantages of single sex schooling, both in the way traditionally non-girl subjects such as physics are (or can be) taught and in the community of “women who bridge the generations” that girls schools provide. Sax is strong on the importance of girls learning from older women what it means to be a woman -- something much more difficult to learn in the sexually precocious and distracting environment of a co-ed school.

(It is worth noting here that Sax has visited more than 300 schools -- not only in the US but in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the UK during the last 10 years to conduct workshops for professionals and speak to parents. )

The single-sex advantage also applies to athletics and sports, which are treated in the chapter, “body”. Not only sexually but in other ways the bodies of boys and girls are different, and this needs to be taken into account. Contrary to what is often supposed, the single-sex format can have a broadening effect, and co-ed a narrowing and homogenising effect on girls sporting choices and achievements.

But it is when he deals with the “spirit” that Sax gets particularly interesting and, he hints, controversial with crusading secularists. Some parents, too, are uncomfortable when he tells them that the core of their daughter’s identity is “about the spiritual journey”. But since parents are “the greatest single influence on children’s spiritual development” he urges them to put aside their own hang-ups from the past and encourage the interest in spiritual questions which often arise after puberty. He writes:

If you fail to nurture your daughter’s budding spirituality, it may be extinguished. And if that happens, your daughter will be at risk for the all-too-common substitution of sexuality in place of spirituality. The spiritual and the sexual are often tightly linked, especially for teenagers and young adults. Some girls will try to find the deepest meaning of their lives in a romantic or sexual relationship. They will be disappointed, because no young man (or woman) can fill the niche in the heart that belongs only to the spirit. But those girls don’t know that. In the first thrill of sexual awakening, they may plunge into sex and romance with the zeal of a new convert.

This may involve giving boyfriends a kind of authority that belongs to God, with disastrous results.

The protective effects of religion for adolescents are well documented in research. Sax cites a study of 3000 American teenagers which shows, for example, that only 3 per cent of religiously devoted teens think it’s OK to have sex “when you’re ready for it emotionally” compared with 56 per cent of disengaged teens. Religious teens are also less likely to smoke, drink alcohol and be unhappy with their body image -- something that is a major source of malaise for many girls.

Sax talks about girls who discovered their spiritual centre -- who they are -- in quite different ways, though all with the assistance of single-sex educational communities. But the need for inter-generational communities of women extends beyond schooling; Sax recommends it in place of co-ed church youth groups. His ideas on these things seem very sound to me.

If there is one thing I disagree with him about it is his acceptance of the idea that gender is mainly a personal “construction” and not mainly a given. Relying -- rather too much -- on the work of philosopher Robert Bly and psychoanalyst Marion Woodman, he writes of the transition to womanhood in terms of finding one’s personal balance of feminine and masculine traits.

While it is true that masculine and feminine are not simple opposites, and that women can have masculine qualities and act in masculine ways, it is going too far to say, as Sax does, “Any individual may be very feminine; or very masculine; or both feminine and masculine, androgynous; or neither feminine nor masculine, undifferentiated.” This seems to me to separate the psyche and behaviour, which are shaped by circumstances, from the fact of the body, from one’s given sex and what it tells us about who we are.

But girls still want to know, What does it mean to be a woman? Boys still want to know, What does it mean to be a man?

When we discussed these words of his during our conversation he made it clear that he was not referring to anything like “the essential” feminine or masculine -- the idea that sexuality means something different for men and for women and that this fundamental to the question of identity. "I don't think sexuality has one meaning, but rather a diversity of meanings," he said.

It is a conversation I would like to pursue with Dr Sax because it seems to me so important for the success of his project on behalf of young people. And because everything else he says on the subject of girls and boys makes such a lot of sense.

Dr Sax’s website: leonardsax.com

Technorati Tags: book reviews,education,girls,psychology

Carolyn Moynihan is deputy editor of MercatorNet

Prop 8 judge displays ignorance of marriage

Jennifer Roback Morse, foundress and president of the Ruth Institute, laments the overturn of Proposition 8 by Judge Vaughn Walker, who is widely reported to be g*y.

The Ruth Institute has been active in the efforts to educate the public about the essential public purpose of marriage, the social benefits of natural marriage, and the harms to society from redefining marriage. Dr. Morse is a former economics professor at Yale and George Mason Universities. In a press release she says:

Judge Walker’s reasoning today in overturning Prop 8 illustrates that he does not understand the essential public purpose of marriage, which is to attach mothers and fathers to their children and to one another. He replaces this public purpose with private purposes of adults’ feelings and desires.

By the time Judge Walker and his ilk are finished, there will be nothing left of marriage but a government registry of friendships. The essential problem of attaching children to the mothers and fathers will be pushed aside, and will have to be solved some other way.

* Redefining marriage as the union of any two persons will undermine the biological basis for parenthood, which amounts to a redefinition of parenthood.

* Same sex Marriage will marginalize men from the family.

* Redefining marriage will increase the power of the state over civil society, including religious bodies.

Surely the voters have the right to be consulted before making such a major change in public policy,” Dr. Morse said today. “Judge Walker has no right to disparage the voters of California the way he does in this opinion. “His opinion amounts to this sloppy syllogism. ‘First, I don’t understand that there are any arguments in favor of natural marriage. Therefore, there are no arguments in favor of natural marriage. Conclusion: unlawful animus against gays and lesbians is the only possible reason 7 million voters supported natural marriage.’

The fact that he doesn’t understand the arguments, doesn’t mean there aren’t any. And it is truly unprecedented for a judge to decide that some ideas cannot even be contested in public debate. The Ruth Institute will continue to educate the public about the significant role of natural marriage in society, and the harms from redefining marriage.

tags : Proposition 8, same-sex marriage, U S Constitution