Written by Regis Nicoll

Cohabitation has become so accepted and commonplace that for many couples it is not the result of a conscious decision or even a conversation. Instead, notes clinical psychologist Meg Jay, more often it “just happens,” as a couple slides, ever so surely, from dating, to having sex, to sleeping over, to sleeping over a lot, to moving in together without discussing goals or expectations.

Today, nearly 50 percent of women aged 25-39 admit to living, or having lived, with an unmarried partner. Most do so in hopes that the relationship will move to marriage. For most men, it is a “test drive” that allows them to postpone commitment while enjoying the benefits of available sex.

Predictably, women who acquiesce to an unbinding relationship set themselves up for frustration, disappointment, and objectification. Take “Jennifer,” who told Dr. Jay she felt that her boyfriend was never committed to her and that she “was on this multiyear, never-ending audition to be his wife.” Although they were eventually married, a year afterward Jennifer was seeking divorce.

Counting the costs

Contrary to the hopes of most women, cohabitation actually decreases their chance of getting married in their prime childbearing years, as a 2012 CDC survey reported. For those who do reach the altar, like Jennifer, there are increased risks of marital dissatisfaction, marital problems and divorce — especially if they cohabited before engagement — which carry emotional, psychological, and financial costs that far outweigh any economic benefits that might have used to rationalize their “decision.”

And there are social costs as well.

As the incidence of cohabitation shot up, the marriage rate plummeted (and is now at a historic low) and the out-of-wedlock birth rate skyrocketed (now at a record high). So, no longer can one assume that a pregnant woman is married or will be married.

Instead, after pregnancy, more couples are choosing cohabitation over marriage according to the National Center for Health Statistics. And that exacts a cost on their children, who, the National Institutes of Health reports, fare worse academically, cognitively, socially, and behaviorally than children raised by married biological parents.

What’s more, the cohabiters’ increased risk of divorce transfers the increased risks to children of fatherless homes, poverty, neglect, child abuse, and delinquency. And that’s for children whose parents want them. For the rest, it’s adoption or abortion.

How did we get here?

The trend in cohabitation follows a tectonic shift in public attitudes toward premarital sex.

In 1969, although the vast majority of people, 82 percent, reported having had sex before marriage by age 30, only 21 percent felt that was morally acceptable. Consequently, couples who “did it,” even at the height of the Sexual Revolution, were much more likely to do so out of the public eye, as it were.

Over the next 40 years, as public acceptance grew threefold (to 63 percent) and a slightly vaster majority of people (94 percent) admitting to having “done it,” there was far less social pressure to restrain it or keep quiet about it.

This sea change in attitudes and practices can be attributed to two things: “no-consequence” sex and a morally compromised Church.

When birth control and legalized abortion eliminated the “consequence” of sex (an unwanted child) for a woman, they shifted the balance of power in sexual negotiation from her to her boyfriend. The woman who, heretofore, held the upper hand in determining the sexual terms of their relationship, could no longer refuse her man on-demand sex for fear of becoming pregnant. Instead, as the sexual economy was upended, going from meeting a woman’s need for commitment to satisfying a man’s desire for sexual satisfaction, a new fear gripped her: If she “won’t,” she’ll lose him to someone who will.

It is a tragic outcome of our meet-up, hook-up, shack-up culture that a woman who “doesn’t” is at a competitive disadvantage with women who “do.” Indeed, the prospect of being edged out of the romance market has quelled the qualms of many a woman who, in a prior time, could have successfully held out for a ceremony, a ring, or, at least, a verbal commitment.

Today, fewer women worry about getting pregnant than fret over a relationship that hasn’t moved to the bedroom by the third date. For the rare woman who is intent on reserving sex for marriage, she can expect little support from her community or, for many women, their own church.

A failure of leadership

Considering that roughly 80 percent of the U.S. populace is Christian, at the above percentages, it is evident that a lot of Christians — very likely, the majority — are guilty of sexual sin. It is a result of a morally compromised Church that has failed to disciple its members, to the point of allowing sin in the camp to go unchallenged and unquestioned. The same failure of leadership drew a stinging rebuke from Paul to church in his day.

While the actual prevalence of non-marital sex among Christians is debated, I’m willing to bet that many of you know individuals who regularly worship, pray, read their Bible, and even teach in church, who are sexually involved with an unmarried partner.

Some among my acquaintance no longer trouble themselves with hiding what they are doing. To the contrary, with nary a hint of discomfort, they breezily talk about their apartment-hunting, house-making, and weekend getaways together, often posting the latest developments of their relationship on Facebook to a swarm of “likes” from their Christian friends.

These “posters” and “likers” wouldn’t hesitate to call sex between two men or two women a sin, while remaining blind — some willfully so — to the sinfulness of their own sexual practices. A man I’ll call “Kurt” is a case in point.

Kurt is a life-long Christian and student of the Bible. Over breakfast one morning, as he was telling me about his girlfriend, I was taken aback when he matter-of-factly insinuated the sexual nature of their relationship. When I asked how he squared that with biblical teaching, his eyes squinted and jaw went slack as if I’d asked about the burial rites of the Inuit.

After a long, pregnant pause, he said, “I’m committed to her!” as if that resolved any biblical difficulty I might bring up. I brought up a few. He was unmoved. A few months later I heard that he was in another “committed” relationship.

These are people who would consider themselves to be good Christians. They know their Bible, they are active in church, they are theologically conservative, and they embrace conventional church teaching, which, for the most part, they pride themselves in living by. Yet, when it comes to their sex lives, they have cultivated what Mary Eberstadt has called the “will to disbelieve” what the Bible plainly teaches.

The will to disbelieve may not cost a believer his salvation, but it will cost him, at a price indexed to his willfulness. As Jesus warned His disciples,

“The servant who knows the master’s will and . . . does not do what the master wants will be beaten with many blows. But the one who does not know and does things deserving punishment will be beaten with few blows. From everyone who has been given much, much will be demanded.”

The Christian who ignores his Master’s will and proceeds to build a relationship on a foundation of non-marital sex is like the man who built his house on straw only to have it burned up. Remember “Jennifer”? As to the man himself, Paul assures us, he will be saved, but only “as one escaping through the flames.” That’s a cost we should all want to avoid.

Regis Nicoll is a freelance writer and a BreakPoint Centurion. Serving as a men’s ministry leader and worldview teacher in his community, Regis publishes a free weekly commentary to stimulate thought on current issues from a Christian perspective. 

This article was originally posted at BreakPoint.org

Under the radar, near a campfire, a counter-cultural force is rising.

Only three years old, Trail Life USA, the Christian answer to the politically correct Boy Scouts of America, is operating 700 troops in 48 states, with nearly 30,000 troop members.  It’s still small compared to the BSA, which began in 1910 and claims more than two million members.  But Trail Life could be on the verge of far more growth as the culture descends into madness and parents seek a haven for their impressionable sons.

Chartered in 2013, shortly after the Scouts held a Soviet version of a national delegates vote to open their ranks to openly homosexual boys, Trail Life is modeled after the American Heritage Girls.

That’s the group founded in Ohio in 1995 by former Girl Scout leader Patti Garibay, who left the cookie-selling empire in disgust after they embraced their inner liberal selves, slipping feminist ideology into materials and allowing the girls to redefine God in the oath any way they wanted.

I was a Boy Scout myself for many years, reaching the Eagle rank.  We recited the Scout Oath and meant it.  I take their betrayal quite personally. Today, if we had a son the right age, we’d enroll him in Trail Life USA, where he’d get Scouting-type adventure plus appreciation for not only Creation but its Creator.

Trail Life, for which Mrs. Garibay was an advisor, took off rapidly.  In the first year or two, half of the troops comprised former Scout troops sponsored by churches or home schoolers that broke away after the Scouts chose political correctness over being “morally straight.”

The group’s colors correspond to the age levels of the boys, evoking Mt. Rainier, with green for grass at the base for the youngest (Woodlands—K through 5^th grade), gray for rocky terrain (Navigators—6^th through 8th grades), and blue for the sky (Adventurers – high school).

Boy Scouts who transfer can convert their BSA badges and credentials into equivalent awards, but Trail Life is markedly different in a couple of ways.

First, as they make clear, they are unabashedly Christian.  Trail Life is open to all boys, including those with different faiths or no faith, but adult leaders must sign a faith statement and incorporate spiritual lessons into activities.

Second, the program is “more robust, and outdoor-oriented,” Trail Life Chief Executive Officer Mark Hancock told me over lunch at the Army-Navy Club in downtown Washington.  “You won’t see a ‘video game’ merit badge,” which the Cub Scouts now offer.

Ah, if only they’d had that in Boy Scouts when I was trying to rack up 21 badges for the Eagle award. I had to settle for “basket weaving.”

Trail Life’s headquarters, just south of Greenville, South Carolina, is on 107 acres. It has a building housing the small, full-time leadership staff, and a camping area.  Provided by a donor, the campus had been a home for boys for 50 years, Mr. Hancock said.

John Stemberger, an Orlando attorney and one of Trail Life’s founders, was among those who tried mightily to save the Boy Scouts. He started On My Honor, which lobbied to keep the Scouts’ traditional moral standards.  Even before the BSA changed its policy in February 2013, Stemberger met with other men to plan a Christian version of the Scouts in case the BSA went bad.  They asked for help from the Heritage Girls, who now work alongside them, often meeting in the same churches at the same times, when entire families participate.

One of Trail Life’s best byproducts, according to Mr. Hancock, is the camaraderie of the Christian men who volunteer as leaders.

“There is this guy who did four tours in Afghanistan, and he works with the boys on archery and other outdoor skills, and the kids love him,” Hancock said. “I heard so much about ‘Mr. J.P.’ that I sought him out to thank him.  This gruff, special-ops guy teared up, and told me, “When I came back from Afghanistan, I never thought I would find a band of brothers again.”

At a Trail Life bonfire outside Immanuel Bible Church in Springfield, Va., Hancock said, a woman walked up and told him that her husband had died 10 years before when they had a two-year-old son. She had despaired for his future without a father. “Now, he’s surrounded by these godly men, and I can’t thank you enough.”

“We’ve got a heart for fatherless boys,” Stemberger said, noting that he was mentoring a 14-year-old from the inner city whose father had been shot.

I asked Hancock what really sets Trail Life apart from other youth organizations, and he said, “We were forged in the fires of the cultural struggle, and we will not bend or bow.”

He noted that his son, who earned his Eagle badge just before the Scouts caved, had not renewed his membership.  In response to a BSA letter asking why, he sent a three-word reply:  “You weren’t brave.”

This article was originally posted at Townhall.com

Written by Walter E. Williams

One of the unavoidable consequences of youth is the tendency to think behavior we see today has always been. I’d like to dispute that vision, at least as it pertains to black people.

I graduated from Philadelphia’s Benjamin Franklin High School in 1954. Franklin’s predominantly black students were from the poorest North Philadelphia neighborhoods.

During those days, there were no policemen patrolling the hallways. Today, close to 400 police patrol Philadelphia schools. There were occasional after-school fights—rumbles, as we called them—but within the school, there was order. In contrast with today, students didn’t use foul language to teachers, much less assault them.

Places such as the Richard Allen housing project, where I lived, became some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional places in Philadelphia. Mayhem—in the form of murders, shootings, and assaults—became routine.

By the 1980s, residents found that they had to have window bars and multiple locks. The 1940s and ’50s Richard Allen project, as well as other projects, bore no relation to what they became. Many people never locked their doors; windows weren’t barred. We did not go to bed with the sound of gunshots. Most of the residents were two-parent families with one or both parents working.

How might one explain the greater civility of Philadelphia and other big-city, predominantly black neighborhoods and schools during earlier periods compared with today? Would anyone argue that during the ’40s and ’50s, there was less racial discrimination and poverty? Was academic performance higher because there were greater opportunities? Was civility in school greater in earlier periods because black students had more black role models in the form of black principals, teachers, and guidance counselors? That’s nonsense, at least in northern schools. In my case, I had no more than three black teachers throughout primary and secondary school.

Starting in the 1960s, the values that made for civility came under attack. Corporal punishment was banned. This was the time when the education establishment and liberals launched their agenda that undermined lessons children learned from their parents and the church.

Sex education classes undermined family/church strictures against premarital sex. Lessons of abstinence were ridiculed, considered passé, and replaced with lessons about condoms, birth control pills, and abortion. Further undermining of parental authority came with legal and extralegal measures to assist teenage abortions, often with neither parental knowledge nor parental consent.

Customs, traditions, moral values, and rules of etiquette are behavioral norms, transmitted mostly by example, word of mouth, and religious teachings. As such, they represent a body of wisdom distilled through the ages by experience and trial and error.

The nation’s liberals—along with the education establishment, pseudo-intellectuals, and the courts—have waged war on traditions, customs and moral values. Many people have been counseled to believe that there are no moral absolutes. Instead, what’s moral or immoral is a matter of personal convenience, personal opinion, what feels good, or what is or is not criminal.

We no longer condemn or shame self-destructive and rude behavior, such as out-of-wedlock pregnancies, dependency, cheating, and lying. We have replaced what worked with what sounds good.

The abandonment of traditional values has negatively affected the nation as a whole, but blacks have borne the greater burden. This is seen by the decline in the percentage of black two-parent families. Today, a little over 30 percent of black children live in an intact family, where as early as the late 1800s, over 70 percent did. Black illegitimacy in 1938 was 11 percent, and that for whites was 3 percent. Today, it’s respectively 73 percent and 30 percent.

It is the height of dishonesty, as far as blacks are concerned, to blame our problems on slavery, how white people behave, and racial discrimination. If those lies are not exposed, we will continue to look for external solutions when true solutions are internal. Those of us who are old enough to know better need to expose these lies.

This article was originally posted at the DailySginal.com

Illinois’ ban on sexual identity counseling is facing a legal challenge from pastors who fear they could be charged with consumer fraud if they provide pastoral counseling to young people who want to turn away from same-sex attraction.

IFI Faith, Family & Freedom Banquet

We are excited to have as our keynote speaker this year, former Congresswoman and Tea Party Caucus Leader, Michele Bachman!  She not only distinguished herself by forming and chairing the Tea Party Caucus in 2010 in the U.S. House, but as a courageous and outspoken pro-life leader, as attested to by her rating of zero from NARAL.

Please register today, before the early bird special expires…

Written by Bruce Frohnen

For decades, now, Christians have worried about the progressive push to strip naked the public square by forcing religion into the shadows of a private sphere. Recent events have made clear that this is not the case. Everything is public and political to the secular left. All aspects of our lives are fair game in the attempt to impose a new structure of individual choice monitored by a soft despotism overseen by professionals in government and education.

The family has become the center of the culture wars because it is where people’s characters are formed. Even as our educational institutions from pre-K through college become increasingly brazen in their drive to indoctrinate young people into an ideology of victimization, resentment, and individual entitlement, too many resist for the taste and comfort of progressives. Homeschoolers, parochial parents, and others still manage to raise millions of children devoted to faith, family, and freedom. And so the family, in particular, has come under assault in the name of choice, social justice, and an end to oppression.

The connection between Christianity and the traditional family of man, wife, and children is quite strong. Not only Catholics, who can look to the writings of Saint John Paul II among many others, but members of Orthodox, Calvinist, and Lutheran traditions are tied to “gendered” understandings of the family. The scriptural basis of this understanding are now, of course, considered utterly off-limits in public discourse. That being the case, their bases in moral anthropology now are attacked as “sexist” and therefore oppressive and dangerous to society and individual mental health. This, I think, poses for conservatives and Christians, in particular, the real question of our age: How do we continue to exist and lead decent lives in a culture that brands decent lives oppressive and dangerous?

At a conference I attended recently (convened to address contemporary challenges to Christian culture) one speaker addressed head-on a central problem with Christian responses to our secular culture: As a rule, we do not have enough children and we do not teach them from a young age their essential familial roles as male breadwinners and female nurturers.

For any Catholic, and any Christian who has taken the time to understand the fundamentals of our beliefs and traditions, it is undeniable that the sexes are different and are by nature suited to different roles within the fundamental unit of society, namely, the natural family. The vast majority of thinking Christians know this while the vast majority of secular Westerners reject it as a matter of unthinking ideological prejudice, so there really is no sense at this late date in attempting to argue over it. This is at the root of Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” proposal for Christians to concentrate their efforts on rebuilding faithful communities in the face of the cultural aggression of our public institutions.

The question remains, then, of how we are to renew our culture in the face of hostility toward our very sense of being and purpose. The speaker at the conference rightly pointed out that the beginning of any coherent response must be procreation. As a faith rooted in love of life this should make sense to all Christians. We all have a duty to recognize the great gift of life and to live accordingly, particularly in our sex lives, tying them to family and openness to the gift of life. More than this, however, we must teach our children to welcome life, not as an addition of little “bundles of joy” alone, but as a calling, in which men and women have distinct, complementary roles.

A way of life rooted in the recognition of our most essential purpose—to bring forth new persons and rear them in the ways of the Lord—is not easy. And, as our speaker pointed out (with, alas, a good bit of anger) too many Christians who claim to recognize its good do not live it in practice. Too many of us delay marriage until quite late, practice contraception, and/or buy into the contemporary ideology that says boys and girls must be taught that they may have all possible life choices (education and career chief among them) while still leading full Christian lives.

Clearly much of the problem has to do with the failure of persons, communities, and even churches to clearly and fully reject the ideology of individual choice in favor of a call to Christ, community, and service within our natural roles. But there is more to our current predicament than ideology. Our culture is dying not just because of frontal assaults from radical individualists, but also from the progressive effects of their ideology, and of modern economics, on our economy and our economic expectations. It also is dying because of abortion and its direct and indirect effects on family formation.

To take my second point first, not only has the abortion culture resulted in millions fewer children surviving until birth, it has denied to those of us who have been unable for various reasons to have more children of our own, a reasonable chance to adopt. Our speaker’s jeremiad was aimed at families with only two children. But my own family consists of only two parents and two (wonderful) children. Not all small families are small by choice—ours certainly is not. And we found for some time that adoption was prohibitively expensive or so tinged with statist ideology and humiliating procedures (principally through foster care) that I was unable to go through it.

I know families who have been luckier in adoption (laws and institutions vary wildly by state) and some who have had the tenacity and virtue to adopt through foster care, so I was weak not to go through with it despite the costs. But I have no doubt that many other families fail to adopt for the same reasons as me (my wife, trooper that she is, would have done whatever was necessary to adopt).

One can dismiss my failure to adopt as mere weakness, and I offer no excuse. That said, many, many people in our culture today face similar circumstances that cause them to fail to answer a very difficult call to virtue in forming families. We all know many families that started late because it has become difficult for Christians to find one another in secular society, colleges now being intentionally both anti-Christian and atomizing. Other families do not start because of the drive for material well-being—couples do not marry until their careers are “off the ground” and settled. This latter, all-too-common source of non-procreation also may be chalked up to weakness, ideology, or even greed. But Christians need to address it, along with a related cultural outgrowth of the modern economy: the dearth of good jobs for men.

It is all too easy to condemn small families when the fathers, in particular, are concerned with the basic fact that they do not make enough money to support a large, traditional family. Ironically, this is a particular problem among academics, where men find it all but impossible to find decent jobs amid the call for “diversity” defined as anyone but (by definition oppressive) white males. Women at times are literally forced to become breadwinners—even primary breadwinners—because of cultural hostility toward their husbands. It is all well and good to tell that husband to “man up” and get a better job, but there often are no better jobs available.

I have no satisfactory answers to these quandaries. But I do think it is important that we as communities of faith recognize the need to address them in a loving manner if we are to solidify our families in our current, difficult times. As we do so I am convinced that we need to be careful to emphasize the equal dignity of men and women in defending the traditional family. My own daughter has no discernible feminist leanings, in part because she knows that she is valued by God, her family, and her community as a full human being whose nature is different from but of equal value to her brother. Her brother rejected calls to the priesthood early on because he has wanted, from early on, to be a husband and father.

Both our children are great blessings and our major concern as parents is to get them to the right college for them: one that will provide a good education in an atmosphere that nurtures their faith and introduces them to the people who will serve as their most abiding source of friends and potential spouses outside their home town.

This points to the work that remains to be done. We must reclaim at least some colleges and universities for our own. We must do everything we can to foster a culture of life at least within our own communities, recognizing that contraception, as Catholics have been taught decade after decade, undermines our openness to life and teaches people to see family as merely an extension of self, to the detriment of both. And we must find some way to foster the economic well-being of traditional families in which men have decent enough jobs to provide the financial necessities for large families with wives and mothers who can concentrate on the indispensable work of rearing children of good character.

Article originally published at TheImaginativeConservative.org.

Recently, ABC 7 Eyewitness News anchor Terrell Brown interviewed Shari Runner, the president and CEO of the Chicago Urban League on the problems of black-on-black violence and the Black Lives Matter movement. Her predictable responses sound like she just returned from a White Privilege Conference and illuminate why “progressives” exacerbate rather than ameliorate inner city violence.

Brown: “Gun violence is still a big problem in the city, and it’s often gang-on-gang and it’s black- on-black crime….What do you do to stop it?”

Runner: “Well, I think the root cause is…jobs for kids who are disengaged. We have 46,000 disengaged youth in our city. That means that they are out of school and out of work, and they need jobs. And they really want to be in legal jobs. And they want to be able to be trained to do those jobs rather than be involved in gangs. So, that’s really a big focus of ours for the next ten years, to make sure that happens.

“We need to have better schools. We need to train our kids for the things they’re gonna face when they graduate, and make sure that they graduate, make sure that they stay in school.

“College is an option for many, not for all. Certificates are good. There are a lot of opportunities in the city that just are not being taken advantage of because people cannot get access to them.”

Brown: “Let’s talk about the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement. There’s a lot of debate right now about the genesis of the movement, what it represents, where it’s going. Often when someone says, ‘Black lives matter,’ the response is, ‘Well, you know what? All lives matter.’ What’s your take on that?”

Runner: “I think the thing is that ‘black lives matter’ is a cry about the fact that institutional, systemic racism still exists in our society. And when you look at the evolution of [BLM] coming from the police violence and the shooting of young black men, unarmed men and boys, 12-year-olds who are confused as 30-year-old men, and the kind of narrative and stereotyping that goes into those kinds of decisions, it is a real cry about the racism that still is very endemic in our society.”

What was most stunning in her troubling comments was her assertion that the absence of jobs for teens is the “root cause” of gang-on-gang and black-on-black violence. The dearth of jobs for teens cannot possibly be the “root cause” of gang-on-gang or black-on-black violence. By the time young males in urban areas who join gangs or engage in violence reach the age at which they are able to work, the root causes have been operative in their lives for a decade.

The root cause of violence perpetrated by black men against the black community and others is family turmoil, including the absence of fathers or the presence of poor fathers. In a 2013 research paper titled “Why American boys join street gangs” about Mexican and black boys who had joined street gangs, author Stanley S. Taylor writes that “Each gang affiliated subject…expressed deep-seated frustrations in early childhood (prior to 10 years old). In addition, each gang member (and the reformed members interviewed) attributed their feelings directly to unstable home lives.”

A poor economic climate may be one of the contributive factors to family instability, which points to the importance of creating an economy able to sustain families. But it is not a dearth of jobs for teens that makes them vulnerable to gang membership, which in turn results in black-on-black crime.

Taylor identifies the factors that contribute to gang membership, the top two of which are “frustration and anxiety stemming from family problems such as fatherlessness,” and “sadness, frustration, and anxiety in home life.” To illustrate this tragic reality, Taylor shares the story of how 32-year-old “Joseph” became a member of the Crips, a black Los Angeles gang:

Joseph…described what his life was like as a 7 year old. He mentioned that he and his younger brother who was 6 years old had their father in the home. However, at around the time he turned seven years old his father moved in with a woman on the same city block and had children with her, while he and his brother were left to live with their mother. Joseph explained how this devastated him and that… abandonment was on his mind constantly….

Joseph mentioned his father never visited with them nor allowed he and his brother to come to the father‘s residence. Joseph spoke of several instances where his father would not stop to talk to he and his brother when the father drove by. He mentioned the few times that his father did stop and speak to them as they played outside, that he made promises to visit them or take them for car rides with him that he never kept. He stated that their father stopped once and gave them both one dollar and left. Joseph stated that he would see his father taking Christmas presents out of the car for his other children while they received nothing for Christmas. Joseph said that it hurt him very badly. He mentioned that as he got older the inner pain was with him every day and that he and his brother were unsupervised by their mother because she worked late.

He had begun to associate with boys in the neighborhood that were in gangs and participated in delinquent activities such as defacing property, bullying non gang members, and missing classes at school to spend time with the local gang members. By the time Joseph was 12 he had joined the Crip gang….

Joseph described how a 31-year old veteran gang member began taking him to parties where he met older girls, smoked marijuana, and drank alcohol. He said that it made him feel like he was “on top of the world.” He gained a reputation in the neighborhood as being “gangsta” because he was accepted by the gang and could therefore “hang out” with various members. Many of them sold drugs and had money and cars. Joseph stated they did many things to make him feel like part of the family so he joined the gang.

Camaraderie was developed by doing delinquent acts, drinking together and just hanging out. But as time went on, he said that he was expected to commit delinquent acts from vandalism and fighting rival gang members, to drive-by shooting.

It would take tortured reasoning to identify the “root cause” of Joseph’s problems as a dearth of jobs for teens. Gang members are telling us that they join gangs—not because they couldn’t find “legal jobs” as teens—but because they found no peace, security, and stability in their families during childhood. Why isn’t society listening to them?

The factors that contribute to gang membership, gang-on-gang violence, and black-on-black violence are numerous and tied up in a tightly woven Gordian knot. Certainly, a weak economy in which both parents must work or in which parents cannot find work contributes to family tension and breakdown, but there are other issues at play as well.

When divorce is hailed as a solution that is “best for the children,” when “progressives” normalize motherless and fatherless family structures (e.g., same-sex faux-marriage), when Hollywood normalizes and glamorizes non-marital sex, when having and raising children is viewed as a “right” to which single men and women and homosexuals are entitled, when children are objectified and commodified, and when purported Christians—including Christian leaders—turn a blind eye to or even affirm the unbiblical sexual and marital views and values of “progressivism,” family instability increases and children suffer.

If progressives truly cared about the violence destroying our black urban communities, they would be willing to sacrifice their deleterious sexual views and values for the good of black children. The Chicago Urban League and Black Lives Matter would turn their focus, energy, and money away from finding “legal jobs” for hurting teens to ensuring that all children grow up with mothers and fathers, preferably their own biological mothers and fathers. Of course that goal has been made even more politically challenging now that our president has endorsed legalized homoerotic pseudogamy—a family structure that necessarily deprives children of mothers or fathers.

Read more:  Exposing Black Lives Matter

Marriage is a beautiful and sacred institution, created by God for procreation and as a picture of Christ and His Church.

Genesis 2:24 instructs, “Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.”

And in Ephesians 5:31 we read, “For this cause shall a man leave his father and mother, and shall be joined unto his wife, and they two shall be one flesh.”

The formula for a lasting, loving marriage is also found in Ephesians 5:

²² Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord.

. . .

²⁵ Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her

The Apostle Paul painted a splendid picture of marriage, that of the wife loving the husband enough to live for him, and the husband loving his wife enough to be willing to lay down his life for her. That’s not a 50-50 formula–that’s God’s design of a man and a woman committed to giving 100 percent to each other and their marriage.

But modern America seems to believe it knows better than the Creator of the heavens and earth, the Grand Designer of men, women, and marriage. In a recent Barna study, 65% of all adults either strongly or somewhat agree that it’s a good idea to cohabit prior to marriage.

When comparing “practicing Christians” v. non-religious/non-believers, 41% of Christians agreed cohabitation was a good idea versus 88% of the non-churched:

Unsurprisingly, the most religious groups in America are the least likely to think cohabitation is a good idea. Most Christian teaching on pre-marital relationships encourages abstinence and other boundaries that tend to exclude cohabitation, and the data reflects these beliefs. Practicing Christians (41%) are highly unlikely to believe cohabitation is a good idea, and the stark contrast with those who identify as having no faith (88%) further demonstrates the acute impact of religious belief on views regarding cohabitation.

Let that sink in. Forty-one percent of so-called practicing Christians believe cohabitation is a “good idea.” Whatever form of Christianity those respondents are practicing, it most certainly is not biblical Christianity.

The Bible is very clear on sexual relations. God intended such intimacies to be glorious and exclusively for a husband and wife. Hebrews 13:4 cautions, “Marriage should be honored by all, and the marriage bed kept pure, for God will judge the adulterer and all the sexually immoral.”

The world concocts ideas that turn God’s principles on their head at its own peril. God’s admonitions are not to stifle our joy but to increase it.

Consider this. First Things First (FTF), “an award-winning not-for-profit organization dedicated to strengthening families in Hamilton County, Tennessee” responds to the “myths about living together.”

MYTH: Living together is an easy way to “try out” the relationship before committing to marriage.

Truth: While the idea of “test driving” a car before you buy it is a good idea, it doesn’t apply to marriage. Living together is basically a “pretend marriage” and nothing like the real thing. Couples who live together often have attitudes like: “I can leave any time,” and “My money vs. your money” that married couples don’t typically have. Married couples often have a stronger bond to each other because of their vow of permanence. Married couples also tend to have less volatile relationships.

The worn-out “kicking the tires” analogy is often employed when describing cohabitation. But the problem is, people are not cars. Living together teaches those involved to bail when one no longer satisfies the desires or fulfills the needs of the other or when things get tough. The attitude from the outset is “we’ll try this out, see if we fit.”

But here’s a relevant truth: “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.” What that means is none of us “fit” perfectly because we’re imperfect creatures.

Cohabitation fosters an attitude of selfishness. It reinforces the natural desires of fallen humans to put their desires and need first. But marriage, as God intended, is about self-sacrificial giving.

Another myth addressed by FTF:

MYTH: Marriage is just a piece of paper.

Truth: Emotionally, physically and spiritually, marriage is so much more than a piece of paper. It is a commitment. Viewing marriage as only a legal arrangement strips it of its meaning and sets the relationship up for failure. If couples do not view marriage as a loving, committed relationship, divorce is almost inevitable.

The Barna findings showed that cohabitation was primarily seen as a way to “test the waters before taking the plunge.” But cohabitation as a test period is an abysmally poor training ground for marital bliss.

Indeed, studies bear out “shacking up” consequences:

…nearly a dozen studies from the 1970s into the early 2000s showed that men and women who lived together before marriage were far more likely to divorce than couples who moved directly from dating to marriage. In fact, on average, researchers found that couples who cohabited before marriage had a 33 percent higher chance of divorcing than couples who moved in together after the wedding ceremony. *

The plain truth is that what we practice we do. Men and women entering live-in relationships practice keeping their guard up, looking out for number one. Those couples, even if they end up married, will have entrenched attitudes and habits that erode the trust and unconditional love necessary to a happy, lasting marriage.

And what about children?

Psalm 127:3 tells us that “Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him.”

The divine plan was children within marriage–a man-woman union–committed to each other and loving only the Lord God more than spouse. That healthy, God-ordained relationship is the perfect setting for rearing offspring and imparting God’s transcendent values. The strong commitment of a mother and father to each other creates a secure home for their children.

In contrast, because cohabitation offers no real assurance of security, children  learn to fear: every argument, every disagreement could signal the end of their family. Thus, not only is living outside of wedlock a dreadful precursor to marriage, it is also an insecure environment for rearing kids.

Barna’s study portends a dismal future for America. Our time-tested societal foundation has been the nuclear family, but as God’s guiding principles are ignored, ruin and heartbreak increase.

People are not meant to be traded in. Unlike cars, people are intrinsically valuable, meant to be treasured in spite of defects and mileage.

*One recent research paper suggests that premarital cohabitation may not increase the likelihood of divorce.

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Written by Paul Kengor

Last week I looked at the history of the original socialists and at what Pope Francis aptly termed their “ideological colonization” of the family and marriage, work that started in the 19th century with the likes of Robert Owen, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Whether they know it or not, today’s nature-redefiners — who target the family or marriage or sexuality or gender — are standing on the shoulders of those 19th century ideologues, utopians who sought to replace the natural-traditional-Biblical family with their own conceptions. Socialism’s new strategies are certainly different from the old, but the rebellion against God and His absolutes remains the same.

In recent decades, eager socialists in the West have been ripping down the traditional family from Scandinavia to Ireland. The spectacle in Ireland was especially disturbing. It was one of the few places where marriage was redefined not by unhinged judges or a left-wing Parliament but by national referendum in a one-time Catholic country where the majority no longer cares about the 2,000-year Christian teaching on the sanctity of marriage. Ireland’s citizenry once led the way in sending priests and nuns to the English-speaking world. Today the Irish take the lead as angry scoffers at their ancestors’ faith.

Socialism’s Bait and Switch

The contemporary left’s effort to fundamentally transform the family has been relentless, opportunistic and multi-faceted. Even in countries like Italy and France, where the populace was not demanding same-sex marriage, socialist politicians are hell-bent on giving it to them anyway.

Under the leadership of socialist Prime Minister Matteo Renzi, Italy just approved same-sex civil unions, which everyone in the country understands as the Italian left’s mere first step to securing same-sex marriage and adoption of children as well. Still, even there we can mainly blame the electorate. Italian citizens, after all, voted for the socialists. They did so not because they wanted the left’s wider cultural-social agenda. They voted for cradle-to-grave freebies and never-ending pensions from the nanny state, not for the redefinition of family and marriage.

But sadly, what they do not realize (or tolerate as a trade-off for socialism’s wondrous freebies) is that when you vote for the left for economic reasons you inevitably also get its cultural-social agenda — which undermines the natural-traditional-biblical family. If you are addicted to the welfare the socialist doctor provides, then you also accept his cultural brew. Such is the plight of the welfare junkie addicted to the state’s largesse.

Thus, Italians en masse remain sympathetic to Pope Francis and his appeals against same-sex marriage and the “demon” of gender ideology. Nonetheless, when you hold out your hands for “free” government goodies, among the candy in the socialist bag is family redefinition. You want the fat pension? Okay, fine, but you also must give a thumbs-up to gay unions.

Time to pay the socialist piper, kiddies.

Obama and the Democratic Socialists of America

As for America, our situation is not wildly different. We are getting an aggressive “LGBTQ” political-cultural agenda under Barack Obama’s expansive left-wing umbrella of “fundamental transformation.” That was not what the rank-and-file Obama voter was expecting in November 2008. Certainly, the record number of millions of African-Americans (historically the most religious voting demographic in the country) who enthusiastically voted for Obama did so for reasons that had nothing whatever to do with transgender bathroom edicts. But alas, the fundamental transformation they are getting is a White House literally illuminated in the rainbow colors of the gay-rights movement.

We should not delude ourselves that Barack Obama, the most far-left president we have ever had, is not a socialist of some sort. As Stanley Kurtz showed several years ago, we know that Obama was actually for a time in the 1990s a member of the socialist New Party. (For extended analysis, see my book on Obama’s long-time mentor, The Communist.) If Obama remains a socialist, he remains one from a cultural perspective as much as an economic one.

But moving away from Obama, look at the platforms of the dominant socialists in America today when it comes to family-sexuality issues.

The website of the influential Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is quite open about its social goals. Its “About DSA” section lists among its three planks the broad objective of seeking to “restructure gender and cultural relationships.” The DSA has been carrying the rainbow flag for quite some time. It passed a resolution at the annual convention in November 2011:

DSA calls for the legalization of same-sex marriages in all the States and Territories of the United States of America; the enactment of anti-discrimination laws in housing, jobs, education, and health care; and the repeal of state sodomy laws and anti-lesbian and gay restrictions.

That was merely point one in a very comprehensive seven-point statement on “Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer (LGBTQ) Rights” that also included (among other things) “making public schools safe and bias-free for LGBTQ students, defending their free speech in school and allowing students to start gay-straight alliance clubs” and advancing “the rights of LGBTQ people to parent.” Very tellingly, point four in the DSA statement insisted: “DSA advocates for local and federal non-discrimination laws and insists that religious beliefs cannot be used to justify bias.”

For the record, the objectives of the DSA statement are almost identical to those of Socialist Party USA, whose official platform includes a statement pledging, “We are committed to confronting the heterosexism that provides the fertile ground for homophobic violence, and support all efforts toward fostering understanding and cooperation among persons and groups of differing sexual orientations.”

And if you want to go further left still, John Bachtell, Communist Party USA chair, recently writing in People’s World (successor to the Daily Worker), called for a socialist-communist-progressive-liberal-Democrat coalition, coalescing around Bernie Sanders, to “fight uncompromisingly against racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia.”

Marx and Engels: Proud Papas

What would Marx and Engels have thought about their name and ideology being invoked in the modern left’s crusade against “transphobia?” Well, they would have been shocked speechless. But they surely would have appreciated how their left-wing descendants found such handy tools to undermine the traditional family. Today’s leftists may not succeed in a total “abolition of the family” (to borrow from the phrase in The Communist Manifesto), but they are certainly succeeding in fundamentally transforming the institution.

Once upon a time, when we worried about socialists undermining the family, our concern was the economic destitution wrought by the ideology and its counterfactual theories about property and wealth confiscation and redistribution. In the old days, socialists harmed the family by leaving a dad jobless or the household scratching for income in a decimated economy. Today, we need to widen our horizon of socialism’s destructive possibilities. Modern socialists are not thinking merely about managing the state’s economic means of production; they are seeking to completely manage and revamp society’s very understanding of the human family itself.

They are, in short, fundamental transformers not just economically but culturally. And they operate a giant wrecking ball that is wreaking havoc in millions of lives.

This article was originally posted at the Stream.org

“So, what is your relationship with your father like?”

As a volunteer chaplain for our county’s juvenile detention center, I asked this question about three hundred times over the course of about six years. I only recall two occasions where a young inmate told me that he had a good relationship with his father.

What was interesting to me was that in our county there really was no demographic consistency that you could point to that would explain youth crime. We had Caucasians, African-Americans, Hispanics and Asian-Americans. Economically, we had upper class, middle class and lower class (the rich youth would often steal, which was ironic). There were Christians (mainly), Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist and Atheist. They came from urban, suburban and rural settings. The only absolute consistency was that there was no healthy relationships with their fathers.

On Mother’s Day, nearly all of the inmates would send cards to (and receive cards or letters from) their mothers and/or grandmothers. But Father’s Day was simply a non-event.

Many never met their biological fathers. Many had abusive step-fathers, or lived with a revolving door of men coming in and out of their lives. Some lived with their fathers, but their dads were too preoccupied with work or other responsibilities to take time for them. The conclusion I reached, from my own observation, was that the lack of a father’s guidance was the single-most dominant factor in juvenile crime.

The Influence of a Father

Some time back, I read a study in a news magazine, where school students were asked which academic subject was the most important. It turns out, surprisingly, that all of the students gave the exact same response! No, they didn’t all choose the same subject in their answers, but the underlying reason for that choice was exactly the same. The most important academic subject that you could learn, according to school students, was whatever subject their father helped them with for homework. So if their father tutored them in Math, then Math was the most important subject. If Science, then the students said Science, and so on.

The reason for this is that children intuitively understand that their father has limited time, and if he is going to take his precious time and help a child learn something, it must be very important (at least in the mind of his child). This speaks to me of how important it is for us as fathers to be intentional about how we spend our time investing in our children.

Shortly after reading that report, I had a conversation with a man after church one Sunday who had three adult children. He proudly informed me, “Israel, over the years there was one thing that I made sure to impress upon my children. If there was one thing I really wanted them to embrace, and learn to love, it was sports! And they have! All of them are huge sports fans, just like me. They played all kinds of sports, we watched lots of sports on television, and even had season tickets to the local stadium games. Yep, they are now teaching their children to love sports as well.”

While I recognize some of the benefits of organized sports, I had to wonder about the wisdom of promoting sports as such a high value in life. If a father has one chance to pass on values and beliefs to his children, he had better be mindful and selective with what he chooses to emphasize.

God Give Us Men!

As a young man, I grew up with a very limited fatherly influence. My parents divorced when I was six, and I saw my father only one weekend a month until I was fifteen, and then not at all. From six to fifteen, I lived with a physically abusive step-father. Today, I am a blessed father of nine children! By the grace of God, I have been able to break the cycle of abuse and dysfunction and my children are able to live in a peaceful home with two parents who love them.

I believe that when men turn their hearts to their wives and children, and commit to be godly servant-leaders in their own homes, we will see the beginning of the stabilization of society. Consider the many areas of society impacted by fatherless homes:

Read more HERE.

I strongly encourage churches and civic institutions to do everything they can to train, equip and encourage men to take seriously their roles as husbands and fathers. The future of our nation, in many ways, depends upon it (see Malachi 4:6 & Luke 1:17).

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*WARNING: Explicit content not suitable for younger readers*

A recent New York Post story  illuminates the tragic consequences of the sexual revolution that separated sex from procreation, sex from marriage, and marriage from children. Children are intentionally and cavalierly separated from their biological parents.

The Post tells the story of peculiar 40-year-old City University New York (CUNY) math professor Ari Nagel who has sired 22 children with 18 women over the past 12 years.

Sometimes he “donates” his sperm the old-fashioned way by having sex with women. Sometimes he “donates” his sperm by masturbating—with the help of porn viewed on his cell phone—into a cup in Target or Starbucks men’s bathrooms and rushing it to an ovulating recipient, who then scampers into the women’s restroom to deposit the donation where the sun don’t shine. Nagel says, “‘It’s better when it’s fresh.’”

With Target’s new co-ed bathroom policy, he will no longer have to make that long trek from the men’s restroom to a waiting recipient. He can masturbate in the women’s restroom with the recipient waiting in the neighboring stall to make her deposit. His donation will be uber-fresh.

Sometimes when Nagel is “donating” the old-fashioned way to a lesbian who has never had sex with a man, her partner will sit in bed with them holding her partner’s hand for moral support. Loss of virginity can be traumatic, so it’s nice to see that human compassion still exists.

Single women and lesbians all over the country have found Nagel via word-of-mouth, Craigslist, and “Known Donor Registry, a free website for those looking for sperm donors.” They solicit his services because of his “’good looks, personality and high sperm count.” Man-boy Nagel toots his own horn, claiming that his sperm count is “off the charts.”

Nagel’s children range in age from 11 months to 12-years-old and live in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, Florida, Virginia, Illinois, and Israel. According to the Post, “Some he sees once a week, some he sees once a year, some he’s never met.”

Half of Nagel’s paycheck is garnished as a result of five mothers successfully suing him for child-support. But that’s okay with Daddy Nagel: “‘Financially, it’s bankrupted me, but I’m still very happy with the way things turned out….I got 22 million in the bank — in my kids.’”

His kids? Does he mean the ones he sees once a week, or the ones he sees once a year, or the ones he’s never met? How valuable to his kids is he, if his primary investment in them was a porn-induced teaspoon of semen delivered in a Target men’s bathroom.

Glib New York television news anchors, Sukanya Krishnan and Scott Stanford, interviewed a smirking Nagel on his unseemly hobby, mischaracterizing Nagel’s rejection of normal sperm donation channels as evidence of his desire for a more “rewarding experience.” Waxing sycophantic, Krishnan exults, “He knows most of the children and has connections with them, which I think is great!”

Only fools would think that men who know most of their children but raise none are “great” fathers.

In the world of “progressivism” where virtually every desire transmogrifies into a “right” which society is obligated to accommodate, facilitate, and celebrate, the rights of children are little discussed. Women who are not blessed with marriage or choose not to marry are not entitled to children. And those  who choose to be in intrinsically sterile homoerotic unions—that is, unions that are by design non-procreative—should not be procuring children. Children have intrinsic rights, one of which is to be raised whenever possible by a mother and a father, preferably their own biological parents. This right supersedes the desires of single women and lesbians to bear and raise children.

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Written by Mike McMannus

On Sunday The New York Times published a front page story on a weekend of crime in Chicago with 64 people shot, six of whom died. With in-depth reporting on four inside pages, the Times said “It is a level of violence that has become the terrifying norm, particularly in predominantly black and Latino neighborhoods.”

The Chicago Police Department with 12,000 officers, the nation’s second largest, is so distrusted that witnesses of crimes say they cannot remember what happened and victims drive themselves to hospitals rather than call the police.  In 2015 there were 470 homicides, few of which are solved. By June 3, another 239 were dead. Since the start of the year, Chicagoans have called the police 28,000 times to report gunfire.

Contrast this carnage with El Paso, a city of 679,000, a quarter the size of Chicago.  In 2010 El Paso had only five murders in the entire year – compared to six in one Chicago weekend.  El Paso had 23 murders in 2012, 11 in 2013 and 20 in 2014.

In fact, El Paso, America’s 18th largest city, had the nation’s lowest crime rate of all major cities for four straight years.

Why is El Paso’s murder rate a tiny fraction of Chicago’s?

Does Chicago have a much bigger percentage of blacks and Hispanics in its population?  No. A third of Chicago is white compared to only about 12% of El Paso, where 80% are Hispanic.

The city also has a high poverty rate, high unemployment and many school dropouts.  It is also across the river from Ciudad Juarez in Mexico, which suffered 3,500 murders in 2010.

I credit Barney Field, the leader of El Paso for Jesus, for the city’s success.  He took two major initiatives 20 years ago that transformed the city. (Full disclosure: I was involved with one of them – the creation of the El Paso Community Marriage Policy.)

Barney heard me interviewed on a radio show about our work at Marriage Savers to help a cross-section of churches in a city to better prepare couples for a lifelong marriage, enrich existing ones, and save those in crisis.  I asserted that if Catholic priests and Protestant pastors took these steps together, citywide divorce rates fall.

I was invited to make a presentation to El Paso clergy in 1996.  For example, I proposed that all churches require any couples getting married to take a premarital inventory in which the man and woman indicated whether they agreed or disagreed with statements like these:

1.      I am concerned that in-laws may interfere in our marriage relationship.

2.      I am concerned that my partner is more of a spender than I am.

I suggested training couples in healthy marriages to discuss 150 such items over six sessions and teach skills to resolve conflict, and consider becoming chaste till the wedding.

In addition, I proposed that churches hold an annual event to enrich existing marriages, such as “10 Great Dates,” in which couples come to church weekly, watch a brief DVD on such topics as “Resolving Honest Conflict” or “Becoming an Encourager.” Couples then go on a date to discuss that item! It is a fun way to strengthen marriages.

For troubled marriages, I proposed the pastor ask the congregation, “Are there couples whose marriages were once on the rocks, but who have healed them?  If so, meet with me after the service.” When that was first asked in Jacksonville, out of 180 people present, 10 couples met with the pastor.

He asked them if they would share their stories with each other.  Seven did so, which trained them to tell their stories to couples in crisis. Over the next five years, they met with 40 troubled marriages and saved 38 of them.

I suggested that if they agreed with such goals, that they sign an El Paso Community Marriage Policy. Thirteen Catholic priests and 45 Protestant pastors took this step in 1996.

An independent study by the Institute for Research and Evaluation reported that El Paso’s divorce rate plunged 79.5% by 2001 – the biggest drop of 240 cities that created a Community Marriage Policy. (On average, divorce rates fall 17.5% in seven years.)

The second initiative Barney Field took in 1997 was to persuade The El Paso Times to publish the entire New Testament with daily excerpts that took five minutes to read. Also, any reader could write for a free New Testament, and 70,000 people did so.

These initiatives to strengthen the faith and marriages of El Paso transformed the city. Few kids became delinquent.

That’s how El Paso became America’s safest big city.

In an act of extraordinary hypocrisy, PayPal, which last month announced its plans to expand into Cuba, has decided not to expand into North Carolina because the state is determined to keep its public bathrooms and locker rooms safe.

PayPal has now sent a loud and clear message to America: The common sense values of conservative Americans should be scorned; the destructive values of Cuban Communists, including decades of human rights abuses that continue to this hour, should be embraced.

I say it’s time to send a message to PayPal. Perhaps we can communicate most clearly to them through our money?

According to PayPal’s president and CEO, Dan Schulman, North Carolina’s HB2 is a violation of his company’s “deepest values.”

As he explained in a written statement, “This decision [not to open new offices in Charlotte] reflects PayPal’s deepest values and our strong belief that every person has the right to be treated equally, and with dignity and respect. These principles of fairness, inclusion and equality are at the heart of everything we seek to achieve and stand for as a company. And they compel us to take action to oppose discrimination.”

Schulman’s statement is not just dripping with hypocrisy. It is absolutely saturated with it.

First, PayPal made its plans to open new offices in Charlotte many months before the Charlotte bathroom bill was passed in February (and subsequently overturned). In other words, six months ago or one year ago, when all the laws were exactly as they are today, PayPal was quite happy to do business in Charlotte.

HB2 simply reversed a wrong-headed, potentially dangerous bill and put things back exactly as they were two months ago.

This begs the question: If the current law, which is identical with previous statutes, is so bad, why was PayPal so eager to do business in Charlotte before? Why is today different from one year ago? And who was stopping PayPal from setting up whatever standards it wanted in its own buildings and among its own employees?

Second, HB2 ensures that men cannot use women’s bathrooms and locker rooms in public buildings, meaning that heterosexual predators cannot use transgender bathroom access as a means to carry out their own voyeuristic (or worse) acts. (For those who deny that such things take place, please take a few minutes to watch this video.)

In short, because of HB2, a man cannot claim to be a woman and walk into the women’s locker room of the local YMCA where women and girls are showering and changing. Yet PayPal wants to defend the “rights” of the gender-confused male rather than protect more than 99% of the population that does not identify as transgender.

What kind of madness is this?

And what about the rights of the all-too-many female rape victims, some of whom have expressed horror at the thought that biological males who identify as females could share their bathrooms or, even worse, locker rooms and shower stalls? (Stop and think about the insanity of all this. How can this even be an issue?)

Mr. Schulman, I urge you to take a minute to read this article, “A Rape Survivor Speaks Out About Transgender Bathrooms.” Then come back and tell me that you are really concerned about treating everyone equally with dignity and respect. In fact, look this rape victim in the face and tell her.

Third, HB2 protects the Constitutional liberties of the people of North Carolina by not forcing a Muslim or Christian or Mormon or Jew to violate his or her religious convictions.

Consequently, just as no one would think that a Muslim caterer should be forced to cater a wedding with pork or a religious Jewish baker should be forced to photograph a wedding on the Sabbath, under HB2, a Christian baker could not be forced to bake a cake for a homosexual “wedding” ceremony.

What could be more basic than this? And would anyone dare argue that when our Founding Fathers guaranteed our religious liberties in the very first amendment of the Bill of Rights, what they really meant was, “Your liberties are guaranteed unless they come in conflict with homosexual activism”? Really!

This further underscores the extreme hypocrisy of PayPal, along with quite a few other major American companies, since they express their righteous indignation against HB2 while announcing their partnership with countries like Cuba.

How, pray tell, does Cuba treat its LGBT population?

And what of PayPal’s working relationship with many countries in Africa and Asia that forbid homosexual practice and imprison or even execute practicing homosexuals?

It seems that what really matters to PayPal is money and political correctness, and while we can’t stop them from acting hypocritically, we can send a message by directing our business elsewhere. Why not send a PayPal a loud and clear message by taking action with your money today?

The safety and security of our women and children and the protection of our most fundamental liberties will not be scorned without consequence.

This article was originally posted at TheStream.org.

[On Friday] in a 170-page ruling, the Alabama Supreme Court rejected the U.S. Supreme Court’s marriage opinion by issuing its own Judgment in favor of Liberty Counsel’s Petition for Mandamus. In the petition, Liberty Counsel demanded on behalf of its Alabama clients – Alabama Policy Institute (“API”) and Alabama Citizens Action Program (“ALCAP”) – that the state’s probate judges obey Alabama’s Constitution and laws. On March 4, 2015, the Alabama Supreme Court ordered the probate judges to immediately cease issuing same-sex marriage licenses.

“The ruling last year by the Alabama Supreme Court was historic, and is one of the most researched and well-reasoned opinions on marriage to be issued by any court in the country. Today’s opinion by the Alabama Supreme Court calling the U.S. Supreme Court’s marriage opinion ‘illegitimate’ will be remembered in history like the ‘shot heard around the world,’” said Mat Staver, Founder and Chairman of Liberty Counsel.

Following the June 26, 2015, U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 Obergefell opinion on marriage, the Alabama Supreme Court requested the parties to file additional briefs. [On Friday], the Alabama Supreme Court issued its final Judgment, thus affirming and implementing its March 4, 2015 opinion.

“The Alabama Supreme Court has openly rejected the U.S. Supreme Court’s 5-4 marriage opinion, labeling it ‘illegitimate’ and without legal or precedential authority. This is a clear victory for the rule of law and an historic decision by the Alabama Supreme Court. The Judgement makes permanent the Alabama Supreme Court’s order prohibiting probate judges from issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples. The Alabama Supreme Court has rejected the illegitimate opinion of five lawyers on the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Staver.

Chief Justice Roy Moore and Justice Tom Parker issued concurring opinions openly criticizing the U.S. Supreme Court marriage opinion. Using Supreme Court Chief Justice John Robert’s term of “five lawyers” when referring to the U.S. Supreme Court Obergefell opinion, Alabama Chief Justice Roy Moore wrote a blistering 105-page concurring opinion:

• Today this Court by order dismisses all pending motions and petitions and issues the certificate of judgment in this case. That action does not disturb the existing March orders in this case or the Court’s holding therein that the Sanctity of Marriage Amendment, art. I, § 36.03, Ala. Const. 1901, and the Alabama Marriage Protection Act, § 30-1-9, Ala. Code 1975, are constitutional. Therefore, and for the reasons stated below, I concur with the order.

• I agree with the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court, John Roberts, and with Associate Justices Antonin Scalia, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, that the majority opinion inObergefell has no basis in the law, history, or tradition of this country. Obergefell is an unconstitutional exercise of judicial authority that usurps the legislative prerogative of the states to regulate their own domestic policy. Additionally, Obergefell seriously jeopardizes the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

• Based upon arguments of “love,” “commitment,” and “equal dignity” for same-sex couples, five lawyers, as Chief Justice Roberts so aptly describes the Obergefell majority, have declared a new social policy for the entire country. As the Chief Justice and Associate Justices Scalia, Thomas, and Alito eloquently and accurately demonstrate in their dissents, the majority opinion in Obergefell is an act of raw power with no ascertainable foundation in the Constitution itself. The majority presumed to legislate for the entire country under the guise of interpreting the Constitution. 

• The Obergefell majority presumes to amend the United States Constitution to create a right stated nowhere therein. That is a lawless act. 

• I submit that our Founders knew a lot more about freedom than [Justice Kennedy’s opinion] indicates. They secured the freedoms we enjoy, not in judicial decrees of newly discovered rights, but in the Constitution and amendments thereto. That a majority of the Court may identify an “injustice” that merits constitutional correction does not dispense with the means the Constitution has provided in Article V for its own amendment.

• Although the Court could suggest that the Constitution would benefit from a particular amendment, the Court does not possess the authority to insert the amendment into the Constitution by the vehicle of a Court opinion and then to demand compliance with it. 

• Novel departures from the text of the Constitution by the Court are customarily accompanied by pretentious language employed to conceal the illegitimacy of its actions. Justice Scalia in hisObergefell dissent refers to this abandonment of “disciplined legal reasoning” as a descent into “the mystical aphorisms of the fortune cookie.”

• Some of the ostentatious phrases used in the majority opinion [are] more suitable to a romance novel.

• The majority seeks to invoke the grief, sorrow, and compassion associated with a Greek tragedy. Riding a tidal wave of emotion, the ensuing tears and pathos then suffice to fertilize a new constitutional right nowhere mentioned in the Constitution itself.

• Abandoning the role of interpreting the written Constitution, the majority has instead decided to become the supposed “voice” of the people, discerning the people’s sentiments and updating the document accordingly. The function of keeping the Constitution up with the times, however, has not been delegated to the Court — or to Congress or the President; that function is reserved to the states under Article V. 

• Historically, consummation of a marriage always involved an act of sexual intimacy that was dignified in the eyes of the law. An act of sexual intimacy between two men or two women, by contrast, was considered “an infamous crime against nature” and a “disgrace to human nature.”Homosexuals who seek the dignity of marriage must first forsake the sexual habits that disqualify them from admission to that hallowed institution. Surely more dignity attaches to participation in a fundamental institution on the terms it prescribes than to an attempt to wrest its definition to serve inordinate lusts that demean its historic dignity.

• A “disgrace to human nature” cannot be cured by stripping the institution of holy matrimony of its inherent dignity and redefining it to give social approval to behaviors unsuited to its high station. Sodomy has never been and never will be an act by which a marriage can be consummated.

• Government exists to secure that right. Because liberty is a gift of God, it must be exercised in conformity with the laws of nature and of nature’s God.

• Liberty in the American system of government is not the right to define one’s own reality in defiance of the Creator. . . . But the human being, as a dependent creature, is not at liberty to redefine reality; instead, as the Declaration of Independence states, a human being is bound to recognize that the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are endowed by God. Those rights are not subject to a redefinition that rejects the natural order God has created.

• Citing Genesis 2:24 — The Obergefell majority’s false definition of marriage arises, in great part, from its false definition of liberty. Separating man from his Creator, the majority plunges the human soul into a wasteland of meaninglessness where every man defines his own anarchic reality. In that godless world nothing has meaning or consequence except as the human being desires. Man then becomes the creator of his own reality rather than a subject of the Creator of the Declaration.

• This false notion of liberty, which permeates the majority opinion in, is the ultimate fallacy upon which it rests. In a world with God left out, the moral boundaries of Scripture disappear, and man’s corrupt desires are given full rein. The end of this experiment in anarchic liberty is yet to be seen. The great sufferers will be the children — deprived of either a paternal or a maternal presence — who are raised in unnatural families that contradict the created order.

• The invocation of “equal dignity” to justify the invention of a heretofore unknown constitutional right is just another judicial mantra to rationalize the invalidation of state laws that offend the policy preferences of a five-person majority.

• The majority opinion in Obergefell represents the culmination of a change in our form of government from one of three separate-but-equal branches to one in which the judicial branch now exercises the power of the legislative branch.

• The Obergefell majority, presuming to know better than the people themselves how to order the fundamental domestic institution of society, has usurped the legislative prerogatives of the people contrary to the Ninth and Tenth Amendments.

• In short, the majority acts not as a court of law but as a band of social revolutionaries. The Chief Justice, amazed at this presumption, exclaims: “Just who do we think we are?”

• The Chief Justice’s quotation of Justice Curtis’s Dred Scott dissent merits serious consideration. If acquiescence to Obergefell indicates that “we have no longer a Constitution,” then the legitimacy of Obergefell is subject to grave doubt. If five Justices of the Supreme Court may at will redefine the Constitution according to their own policy preferences, the mechanism of judicial review, designed originally to protect the rights of the people from runaway legislatures, has morphed into the right of five lawyers to rule the people without their consent.

• Indeed, as the Chief Justice warns, the plenary power the majority asserts to redefine the fundamental institutions of society offers no assurance that it will not give birth to yet further attacks on the social order.

• If, as the Chief Justice asserts, the opinion of the majority is not based on the Constitution, do state judges have any obligation to obey that ruling? Does not their first duty lie to the Constitution? 

• The right to change the form of government in this country belongs to the people themselves through the amendment process, not to judicial oligarchs.

• These metaphors identify the essence of the majority’s actions: an illegal displacement and usurpation of the democratic process. Chief Justice Roberts accuses the majority of imposing “naked policy preferences” that have “no basis in the Constitution.” Accordingly, the majority’s “extravagant conception of judicial supremacy” is “dangerous for the rule of law.” The unmistakable theme that emerges from these critiques is lawlessness.

• Justice Scalia also emphasizes the revolutionary character of the majority’s assault on the social order — elevating the “crime against nature” into the equivalent of holy matrimony. This decision, “unabashedly not based on law,” represents a “social upheaval” and a “judicial Putsch.” Justice Alito sounds the same themes. The Court has not unwittingly tread into forbidden territory; instead, it has acted “far beyond the outer reaches” of its authority, boldly trampling the right of the people “to control their own destiny.” 

• For the last 50 years, the Supreme Court has consistently misused the Fourteenth Amendment to destroy state laws that protect the marital relation and its offspring. Obergefell is the latest fruit of this corrupt tree (refer to Matthew 7:17-18).

• Truly, the less basis the majority has for its innovations upon the Constitution, the grander is the language employed to justify them, as if high-blown rhetoric could compensate for the absence of constitutional substance. 

• Obergefell is but the latest example of the Court’s creation of constitutional rights out of thin air in service of the immorality of the sexual revolution. Like Roe, Obergefell is no more than “an exercise of raw judicial power … an improvident and extravagant exercise of the power of judicial review that the Constitution extends to this Court.”

• Amendments to the Constitution are the business of the people pursuant to Article V; they are not the business of the Court under Article III. Truth may not always be clearly seen, but the majority’s reasoning should not blind us to the reality that the Court seems determined to alter this nation’s organic law. 

• The definition of marriage as the union of one man and one woman has existed for millennia and has never been considered an “ill tendency.” By contrast, the Court’s attempt to redefine marriage is “a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty.” 

• The Obergefell majority, conspicuously overlooking the “essential and historic significance” of the connection between religious liberty and “supreme allegiance to the will of God,” failed to appreciate the seriousness of imposing a new sexual-revolution mandate that requires Alabama public officials to disobey the will of God. 

• Religious liberty, however, is about more than just “teaching” and “advocating” views of marriage. The majority condescendingly approves religious speech against same-sex marriage but not religious practice in conformity with those beliefs. As Chief Justice Roberts states in his dissent: “The First Amendment guarantees … the freedom to ‘exercise’ religion. Ominously, this is not a word the majority uses.”

• Obergefell promises to breach the legal protections that have shielded believers from participating in acts hostile to their faith. As Chief Justice Roberts points out, the Obergefellmajority piously declaims that people of faith may believe what they want and seek to persuade others, but it says nary a word about them practicing or exercising their faith as the Free Exercise Clause provides.

• The Free Exercise Clause, an express constitutional provision, logically takes precedence over a pretended constitutional right formulated from whole cloth by “five lawyers.”

• Foreseeing the dire consequences for religious freedom in the principle that same-sex marriage must be given equal stature with holy matrimony and foreseeing the inevitable pressure to compel religious institutions, businesses, and practitioners of professions to conform to that unreality, it would be imprudent to wait for the onset of these persecutions, to stand idle until Obergefell “usurped power had strengthened itself by exercise, and entangled the question in precedents.” Rather “the axe [must be] laid unto the root of the trees,” (refer to Matthew 3:10) and the consequence avoided by denying the principle. To allow a simple majority of the United States Supreme Court to “create” a constitutional right that destroys the religious liberty guaranteed by the First Amendment violates not only common sense but also our duty to the Constitution. 

• I disagree with the conclusion that the “rule of law” requires judges to follow as the “law of the land” a precedent that is “a super-legislative imposition,” “a mockery,” “a legal fiction,” and “an utter travesty.”

• By the plain language of Article VI, state judges are bound to obedience to the Constitution, laws made in pursuance thereof, and treaties made under the authority of the United States, not to the opinions of the United States Supreme Court. 

• Thus, in the plainest terms and employing emphasis, Hamilton declared that acts of the federal government that invade the reserved rights of the states are “acts of usurpation” that deserve to be treated as such. Such acts “would not be the supreme law of the land, but an usurpation of power not granted by the Constitution.”

• The Supremacy Clause, quite obviously, by this chain of reasoning, does not give the United States Supreme Court or any other agency of the federal government the authority to make its every declaration by that very fact the supreme law of the land. If the Court’s edicts do not arise from powers delegated to the federal government in the Constitution, they are to be treated not as the supreme law of the land but as mere usurpation. 

• Thus, if precedents are “manifestly absurd or unjust,” “contrary to reason,” or “contrary to the divine law,” they are not to be followed.

• Applying Blackstone’s analysis, which is compatible with that of Hamilton, one must conclude that the Obergefell opinion is manifestly absurd and unjust, as demonstrated convincingly by the four dissenting Justices in Obergefell and the writings of two Justices of the Louisiana Supreme Court in Costanza. Basing its opinion upon a supposed fundamental right that has no history or tradition in our country, the opinion of the Obergefell majority is “contrary to reason” as well as “contrary to the divine law.”

• The Obergefell opinion, being manifestly absurd and unjust and contrary to reason and divine law, is not entitled to precedential value. 

• If, as an individual who is sworn to uphold and support the United States Constitution, I were to place a court opinion that manifestly and palpably violates the United States Constitution above my loyalty to that Constitution, I would betray my oath and blatantly disregard the Constitution I am sworn to uphold. Acquiescence on my part to acts of “palpable illegality” would be an admission that we are governed by the rule of man and not by the rule of law. Simply put, the Justices of the Supreme Court, like every American soldier, are under the Constitution, not above it. 

• The general principle of blind adherence to United States Supreme Court opinions as “the law of the land” is a dangerous fallacy that is inconsistent with the United States Constitution. Labeling such opinions as “the rule of law” confuses the law itself — the Constitution — with an opinion that purports to interpret that document.

• Opinions of the Supreme Court that interpret the Constitution are, as Lincoln said, “entitled to very high respect and consideration,” but only insofar as they are faithful to that document. In a case like Obergefell, the “evil effects” Lincoln described should be confined to the unfortunate defendants in that case. We must protect the institution of marriage from judicial subversion and maintain loyalty to the principles upon which our nation was founded.

• Finally, we should reject the conversion of our republican form of government into an aristocracy of nine lawyers.

• Some contend, however, that Obergefell, by its mere existence, abrogates the March 2015 orders in this case. Those orders, of course, were not the subject of review in Obergefell. 

• The Court had no jurisdiction to order nonparties to Obergefell to obey its judgment for they have not had an opportunity to appear and defend.

• No Alabama probate judges were parties to Obergefell. Neither were they officers, agents, or servants of any of the defendants in those cases, or in active concert or participation with any of them. The Obergefell defendants were state officials in the four states in the jurisdiction of the United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit, namely Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee. Needless to say, Alabama probate judges were not agents, servants, or employees of any of those state officials. Nor were they in “active concert or participation” with any of them.Thus, the judgment in Obergefell that reversed the Sixth Circuit’s judgment does not constitute an order to Alabama probate judges.

• The dissents of Chief Justice Roberts, Justice Scalia, Justice Thomas, and Justice Alito provide ample justification to refuse to recognize Obergefell as a legitimate judicial judgment. Obergefellconstitutes an unlawful purported amendment of the Constitution by a judicial body that possesses no such authority. As Chief Justice Roberts stated: “The right [Obergefell] announces has no basis in the Constitution or this Court’s precedent.”

• Rather than limiting themselves to the judicial function of applying existing law to the facts and parties before them, the Obergefell majority violated “the metes and bounds which separate each department of power” by purporting to rewrite the marriage laws of the several states to conform to their own view of marriage.

• Even more injurious to the rule of law, the Obergefell majority “overleap[ed] the great Barrier which defends the rights of the people” as expressed in the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment. The majority thus has jeopardized the freedom to worship God according to the dictates of conscience and the right to acknowledge God as the author and guarantor of true liberty. 

• By transgressing “the metes and bounds which separate each department of power” and “overleap[ing] the great Barrier” which protects the rights of conscience, the Obergefell majority “exceed[s] the commission from which they derive their authority” and are “tyrants.” By submitting to that illegitimate authority, the people, as Madison stated, become slaves. Free government, rather than being preserved, is destroyed.

• Obergefell is completely without constitutional authority, a usurpation of state sovereignty, and an effort to impose the will of “five lawyers,” . . . on the people of this country. 

• In my legal opinion, Obergefell, like Dred Scott and Roe v. Wade that preceded it, is an immoral, unconstitutional, and tyrannical opinion. Its consequences for our society will be devastating, and its elevation of immorality to a special “right” enforced through civil penalties will be completely destructive of our religious liberty.

• Obergefell contradicts “the laws of nature and of nature’s God” that were invoked in the organic law upon which our country is founded. To invariably equate a Supreme Court decision that clearly contradicts the Constitution with “the rule of law” is to elevate the Supreme Court above the Constitution and to subject the American people to an autocracy foreign to our form of government. Supreme Court Justices are also subject to the Constitution. When “that eminent tribunal” unquestionably violates the limitations set forth in that document, lesser officials — equally bound by oath to the Constitution — have a duty to recognize that fact or become guilty of the same transgression.

In a separate concurring opinion, Alabama Supreme Court Justice Parker wrote:

• “Obergefell conclusively demonstrates that the rule of law is dead.”

• “Obergefell … trampled into the dust the last vestiges of the legitimacy of the United States Supreme Court.”

• “Obergefell is not based on legal reasoning, history, tradition, the Court’s own rules, or the rule of law, but upon the empathetic feelings of the ‘five lawyers’ in the majority.”

• “[The Supreme Court] majority illegitimately imposed its will upon the American people. We now appear to be a government not of laws, but of ‘five lawyers.’”

• “Obergefell is ‘no judicial act at all’ because it is ‘without principled justification.’”

• “Obergefell is without legitimacy.”

• “This is not the rule of law, this is despotism and tyranny.”

• “Despotism and tyranny were evils identified in the Declaration of Independence as necessitating the break with King George and Great Britain.”

• “Obergefell is the latest example of judicial despotism.”

•  “As justices and judges on state courts around the nation, we have sworn and oath to uphold the United States Constitution. We have not sworn to blindly follow the unsubstantiated opinion of ‘five lawyers.’”

Justice Parker quotes from the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1992 abortion decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey:

[T]he Court cannot buy support for its decisions by spending money and, except to a minor degree, it cannot independently coerce obedience to its decrees. The Court’s power lies, rather, in its legitimacy, a product of substance and perception that shows itself in the people’s acceptance of the Judiciary as fit to determine what the Nation’s law means and to declare what it demands…. [A] decision without principled justification would be no judicial act at all…. The Court must take care to speak and act in ways that allow people to accept its decision on the terms the Court claims for them, as grounded truly in principle, not compromises with social and political pressures having, as such, no bearing on the principled choices that the Court is obliged to make. Thus, the Court’s legitimacy depends on circumstances in which their principled character is sufficiently plausible to be accepted by the Nation.

“Justices and judges are bound to interpret the U.S. Constitution. When they write opinions that have no legal foundation, then their opinions lack legal legitimacy. That is what the five lawyers did on the U.S. Supreme Court in the marriage opinion. They ignored the Constitution, the Court’s precedents, and millennia of human history. Their opinion calls into question the legitimacy of the Supreme Court. When we the people lose trust in the Justices, the authority of the Supreme Court is undermined. If the people accept this 5-4 opinion, then we have transitioned to a despotic form of government. The people must now decide if we are governed by the rule of law or the whim of unelected judges,” concluded Staver.

Liberty Counsel is an international nonprofit, litigation, education, and policy organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom, the sanctity of life, and the family since 1989, by providing pro bono assistance and representation on these and related topics.

Written by Rachel Lu

Men were built for fighting. Women were built for childbearing. It’s interesting to note how stubbornly true—even obvious—these statements remain, despite aggressive efforts to bury them.

Modern people have a penchant for denying obvious things. Dysfunctional politics and political correctness have brought us to the point of potentially approving women’s inclusion in a military draft. The Senate Armed Services Committee recently entertained arguments in favor of requiring women to register for the selective service, and three candidates endorsed the plan in New Hampshire’s Republican debate. The trickle is turning into a stampede. Suddenly political correctness requires that we all agree that girls can fight just as well as boys.

The problem is that it’s just not true. We need to return to some basic Aristotelian principles in order to explain why drafting women would be both imprudent and unjust.

Playing Politics

From a political standpoint, it’s easy to understand why Marco Rubio, Jeb Bush, and Chris Christie were all prepared to agree that women should register for the selective service. (U.S. Senator Mike Lee is pushing legislation to block the drafting of women, which has won support from Rubio and from Ted Cruz.) Somewhat farcically, all three candidates treated selective service registration as a wonderful new “opportunity” for women. That’s silly; the system exists to enable conscription in a time of extreme need. Women already have the opportunity to enlist in the military if they meet the relevant requirements.

Rubio specified that most likely a draft would apply only to women who met the physical requirements. But this would be a foolish policy in an emergency scenario. If you desperately need a large number of soldiers in a hurry, is it sensible to start screening populations of people that will mostly be unfit for the job? Should children and retirees also be included, in case a few turn out to be suitable for active service? This is nonsense. Every society in history has built its armies primarily of young men, for an excellent reason: They are overwhelmingly the most fit for the job.

If the Republican candidates were thinking clearly, they would be racing to specify that they support drafting women only to non-combat roles. This is a more sane position, modeled on the example of other nations (such as Israel) that use female conscripts primarily in supporting roles (as medics, logistical support, etc.). Considering that a draft would only be implemented in a time of extreme need, asking unattached young women to serve their country in these capacities could be reasonable. Demanding that they serve as infantry would not be.

The Collapse of Gender Sanity

It’s disconcerting to see even Republicans sanctioning this kind of foolishness, but there may be a silver lining here. There is value to discussing this issue at a moment when we desperately need a starting point for a more reasonable conversation about sex and gender. Sending thousands of young women to die in battle would be morally monstrous, but luckily, we are not currently threatened with a draft. Instead we are facing a near-total collapse of gender sanity.

With schools banning the concepts of “boyhood” and “girlhood,” single-sex restrooms being treated as an affront, and even the Olympics allowing anatomical males to compete in women’s events, American gender politics has reached freakish levels of absurdity. If there is any chance of returning to sanity, our understanding of gender will need to be rooted in reflections on something objective and measurable: the body.

Americans have been suspicious of stark gender claims for a long time, and in some cases this is actually reasonable. Do boys really excel in math and science? Are girls really more nurturing or “emotionally intelligent”? These stereotypes are not groundless, but it may not be appropriate or necessary to assert them too forcefully. Boys and girls are indeed different in certain respects, including in how their brains develop. Nevertheless some boys are well attuned to emotion, while some girls may be assertive, independent, or analytical. Gender skeptics may reasonably ask: Isn’t it time we stopped defining people by dated stereotypes and allowed them to prove for themselves what they can do?

Much of the public finds these arguments persuasive, which is why politicians are happy to echo them—even on the political right. Most of us don’t mind when increased gender-role flexibility means a girl can become a sportswriter or an electrical engineer. In our time, however, the lines of reasonableness clearly have been crossed. Given that so many of our compatriots have rejected tradition as offensive and anachronistic, what other grounds are there to restore some sort of natural order?

The case of women in the draft may fit this purpose, because the objections are so obvious and so rooted in physiology. One can understandably argue that stereotypes play a role in holding women back from, say, achievements in the STEM fields. But military service is an entirely different animal. By significant margins, women are physically weaker and slower and have poorer reflexes than men. On the battlefield, these shortcomings make a literally life-or-death difference.

The Marine Corps commissioned a study that found that their strongest female recruits (top 25%) were about on par with the weakest male recruits (bottom 25%). Women undergoing entry-level marine training were an appalling six times more likely to suffer injury, including especially high rates of musculoskeletal injuries due to movement with heavy loads. (Even women who seem spectacularly fit may still sustain pelvic fractures from long marches with a standard military pack.) Mixed-gender units were slower and less lethal, and sustained more casualties.

In short, women don’t make very good soldiers. The exceptions are few and don’t stand out much by elite military standards. Women can certainly be courageous, patriotic, and self-sacrificing, but the female body was not built for combat.

From Biological Determinism To Biological Escapism

Suppose you consider chivalry outdated or even sexist. Perhaps you scoff at the idea that all-male units will have a stronger sense of fraternity, and you’re unworried about the possibility of romantic entanglement. But have you considered the strong evidence that female conscripts would be less effective in achieving military objectives, but far more likely to die trying? Are you moved by the consideration that under-qualified soldiers are a danger to everyone in their unit? Drafting women to combat roles just doesn’t make sense.

You may reply, won’t girls feel bad if we tell them they are weak, slow, and generally unimposing in combat? Isn’t this tantamount to saying that women are physically inferior?

Not at all, if you put the claims in a larger context. Women have bodies of amazing power: Nothing can compare to holding a newborn and realizing with awe, “My body built that.” It’s a remarkable feat that men can never simulate.

Women are physiologically awe-inspiring, but not in a way suited for soldiering. Their energies go towards something else; indeed, the female reproductive system is far more “expensive” in terms of invested energy, whether or not a woman ever bears a child.

Might these physiological differences tell us anything about what a flourishing life should look like, for men or women? Modern feminists would say “no”; that kind of reasoning is angrily rejected as “biological determinism.” Gloria Steinem famously declared, “Everybody with a womb doesn’t have to have a child any more than everybody with vocal cords has to be an opera singer.”

Steinem’s comment is a good illustration of how far feminist thinking is removed from reality. Singing opera is a highly rarified use of a part of the anatomy that most of us use all the time, whereas wombs are useful for gestating babies and really nothing else. Still, feminists are right to object against any claim that a person who is physically suited to X must be restrictively mandated against doing anything besides X. But does anyone make this claim? It is possible to find moral significance in the body without engaging in hackneyed reductionism.

Women should not be commodified as baby-builders, any more than men should be commodified as body-builders. It turns out, though, that a flight from “biological determinism” sometimes ends in a kind of biological escapism. If we insist that our physiology has no moral significance, we may find ourselves desperately trying to hide from the obvious consequences of refusing to be what, in fact, we are.

Being Corporeal

We see manifold evidence of this escapism in modern life. Schools tie themselves into knots trying to prevent boys from doing what boys of virtually every culture like to do: wrestle, compete, and play warlike games. Boys are not suited to sitting in chairs all day long: The lack of movement in school is a huge problem for them that seems to be undercutting their scholastic achievement. Later in life, if they enlist in the military, the physical standards they are expected to meet will probably have been lowered to make it more possible for women to compete. Let’s have no overt expressions of masculinity in the military, please! It makes the ladies feel bad.

In a different way, girls are taught to suppress their most uniquely feminine characteristics. Progressive liberals have poured enormous energy into ensuring that girls can suppress their reproductive potentialities without cost, without judgment, and preferably as early as possible. Obsessed with lifting the “burden” of reproduction, these liberals lose any sense of healthy respect for motherhood or new life. They regularly reveal their disdain for pregnancy, children, and families, as we saw when NARAL activists threw themselves into a frenzy of indignation over a Super Bowl commercial that presented unborn children as humans.

Virtually no one would argue that either men or women should be enslaved to their physiology. But should we see it as an awkward physiological accident that men have (larger) biceps, and women the power to bring forth new life? Surely it’s more reasonable to incorporate these features into a complete and fully humane understanding of manhood and womanhood, in a way that gives meaning and social purpose to both.

What this means is that both boys and girls should be raised to embrace the unique potentialities of their bodies. Not every boy will grow up to be a soldier, but every boy can be taught to channel his natural competitiveness and aggression towards good. Young men should view themselves as protectors,ready to do what is needed to prevent the wicked from victimizing the innocent.

In a similar vein, not every girl will become a mother. Most will, but a woman who is unafraid of her physiology will find a healthy outlet for her life-giving impulses whether or not she literally bears a child. That doesn’t mean she can’t also (if she wants) learn to write software, but it does mean that she should expect her contribution to society to take the form of giving life, not taking it.

Again and again, the progressive left has proven that prudent living, once neglected, is soon spurned. Drafting women would be a particularly tragic illustration of this point: Even women who don’t want to serve could be forced to throw their lives away in a desperate effort to act like men. Might we use this moment to walk the conversation back in the other direction? Our military needs at the moment are happily not so dire, but in the war against nature and common sense, the enemy seems to be winning. Let’s step up our recruitment efforts.

Rachel Lu teaches philosophy at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota where she lives with her husband and three boys. Dr. Lu earned her Ph.D. in philosophy at Cornell University.

This article was originally posted on ThePublicDiscourse.com.

Earlier this month, a group of Marine Corps and Army generals dropped a bombshell on an unsuspecting U.S. Senate committee. In doing so, they opened a can of worms that our society desperately wants to keep closed: the one containing the real-world consequences of denying the innate differences between men and women.

General Robert Neller, the Commandant of the Marine Corps, in response to a question from Missouri U.S. Senator Clair McCaskill told the Senate Armed Services Committee, “I think that all eligible and qualified men and women should register for the draft.”

Neller’s position was seconded by General Mark Milley, the Army Chief of Staff.

While their responses delighted McCaskill, it put the current secretaries of the Navy and Army in an awkward position. While the Obama administration has pushed for the full integration of women into combat roles, it has not come out in favor of requiring women to register for the draft when they turn eighteen.

The problem is that in opening up combat roles for women, the Obama administration has removed the only legal justification for treating men and women differently when it comes to the draft.

In 1981, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld this differential treatment on the grounds that “the purpose of registration was to prepare for a draft of combat troops.” Since women were excluded from combat, they could be excluded from registration. Doing away with the exclusion from combat logically leads to taking away any exclusion from the draft.

Andrew Walker of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission is absolutely correct when he wrote that the proposal to make women register for the draft isn’t just a military proposal; “it’s about an entire worldview built on the bankrupt ideology of egalitarianism.”

This ideology denies that there are any meaningful differences between men and women, and that all legal and cultural distinctions are impermissible discrimination against women, even when women are the beneficiaries of these distinctions.

This ideology has led to what Walker has called our culture’s “weakened understanding of masculinity that makes male obligation optional if women are willing to do the duty of men.” This weakened understanding is reflected in public opinion polls showing that strong majorities favor allowing women in combat units.

It’s against this cultural setting, and the “tectonic shift” it represents, that we must see this proposal. A society that is increasingly reluctant to make men fulfill their obligations as husbands and fathers is, not surprisingly, increasingly reluctant to make them fulfill their obligation to protect those in need of protection.

Let me be clear: I’m not against requiring young people to perform public service, whether in the military or in some other capacity. And I wouldn’t dare imply that women aren’t as tough or as capable as men. As a happily married man and the father of a talented daughter, I can tell you that if anything, the opposite is true.

But subjecting women to the military draft ignores the way God created us, male and female. As Walker says, “God didn’t make us automatons. He didn’t make us asexual monads. He made us gendered, embodied, and different. The differences extend to all levels of our being—our emotional, physical, and psychological selves. The Christian tradition finds these differences beautiful; and we embrace them with glad acceptance.”

And because we Christians embrace these beautiful differences, we should vigorously oppose drafting women into the military. It’s a bad idea—one that would sacrifice our daughters on the altar of an ugly ideology.

Read more:

Experimental barbarism: Why drafting women is wrong
Andrew Walker | erlc.com | February 8, 2016

Threats Of Drafting Women Reveal The Lies Of Equality
D.C. McAllister | The Federalist | February 8, 2016

This article was originally posted at BreakPoint.org