Written by Marissa Poulson

I’m getting married in May. My fiancé and I dated for three years before we got engaged and couldn’t be more excited to start our lives together. But in reflecting on marriage and getting married in a culture that frankly has forgotten what marriage means, I wanted to share three reasons why I believe marriage matters.

Whether you’ve been married for years, are engaged like me, or are hoping to be married one day, I hope you’ll feel a renewed appreciation for marriage today.

Marriage is a commitment.

And He answered and said, “Have you not read that He who created them from the beginning made them male and female, ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh’? So they are no longer two, but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let no man separate.” Matthew 19:4-6 (NASB)

Marriage, as God intended it, is a lifelong commitment. I like to think about it as going “all in”—as in a game of poker. In that moment, you’ve bet everything you have on the cards in your hand. Talk about commitment.

But here’s the thing about going all in: you have to give that commitment everything you’ve got. If you have 100 in chips and bet 99—that’s not going all in—it’s leaving room for error. It’s saying, “just in case I’m wrong, I’m going to leave a safety net—something that’ll keep me in the game.”

In our culture, no-fault divorce is that safety net. It’s our room for error, just in case we decide that we were wrong—that we want to take it back, that we deserve a better hand. But marriage deserves better. And marriage in its true form—committed for life—is a beautiful thing.

Marriage teaches us selflessness.

Wives, be subject to your husbands, as is fitting in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives and do not be embittered against them. Colossians 3:18-19 (NASB)

We live in a “selfie” culture. So it shouldn’t surprise us that marriages often end when one person (or both) feels like they’re not getting what they need—whether it’s more time, more excitement, more flexibility, more attention, more appreciation, more financial security, more, more, me, me.

In reality, marriage is about giving of yourself to another person. It’s about balance, compromise, and being better together.

My fiancé and I are pretty opposite in a lot of ways. He’s outgoing and great with people, while I am more introverted. We both face different challenges in life and have many different interests. I can’t read The Velveteen Rabbit without crying, and he prefers to hunt and cook rabbit for dinner. I like light, happy movies, and he’s all action and comedy.  I love my Arizona teams, and he’s a diehard Lakers, Niners, and Kings fan (that in itself is a challenge).

But for all our differences, we have just as many things that we enjoy and share together. And no matter what we’re going through, or what we’re doing on date night, it’s always better because we’re together. We’re going into our marriage eyes wide open and willing to make whatever individual sacrifices are necessary in order to make our family stronger as a whole.

Marriage reflects God’s love for us.

So husbands ought also to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are members of His body.  Ephesians 5:28-30 (NASB)

I firmly believe that love doesn’t depend on what you feel—love is a choice. In the same way, marriage is making the choice to love another person and show it for the rest of your life.

This is the love that we enjoy as believers in Christ. God reveals His love for us every day when He forgives us, and when He shows us mercy and grace. Human beings are so imperfect that we can’t help but fall short time and again, but we are a part of God’s family, and He chooses to love us anyways. That’s who He is.

I couldn’t be more thankful for all of the married couples who have been examples to me of commitment, selflessness, and God’s unconditional love through the way they love each other. By God’s grace, my prayer is that my marriage will also be a blessing to others, and serve as a practical demonstration of the love God has shown us.

This article was originally posted at the ADF Blog.

In God’s grand design for this world, He masterfully created man and nature, and in such a way that man and each critter would not be alone.

And God admonished Noah, after the flood Genesis 9:

And God blessed Noah and his sons, and said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.

Children were the natural result of marriage, a blessing from the Lord:

Children are a blessing and a gift from the Lord.

Millennia later, the foundation of society remains the family: one man married to one woman, bearing children within that covenant relationship. That is the recipe for true joy and intrinsic success; a safe and loving setting for man and wife and their offspring.

Moses writes about child rearing in Deuteronomy:

And ye shall teach them your children, speaking of them when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way, when thou liest down, and when thou risest up.

And thou shalt write them upon the door posts of thine house, and upon thy gates:

That your days may be multiplied, and the days of your children, in the land which the Lord sware unto your fathers to give them, as the days of heaven upon the earth.

The Apostle Paul pens in Ephesians more instruction for parents and children:

Children, obey your parents in the Lord: for this is right.

Honour thy father and mother; which is the first commandment with promise;

That it may be well with thee, and thou mayest live long on the earth.

And, ye fathers, provoke not your children to wrath: but bring them up in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

So the formula was set: a man and wife should have children and raise them steeped in love and love of God’s word, and children were to respect and honor their parents. Sons and daughters first learn of a father’s love from their dad. Sons learn how to love a future wife as they watch their father tenderly cherish their mother. Daughters learn how a good husband treats his spouse as they watch their father esteem their mother second only to God Himself.

When people stray from this setting, this “best” recipe for flourishing within the family, the repercussions are stunning.

Dr. Paul Kengor has written a tremendous book, Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left Has Sabotaged Family and Marriage. On pages 4 and 5:

A mess of marriage, of course, means a mess of the family. And as families fall apart, so does society. Research has confirmed time and time again that the best situation for a child is a two-parent home with a mother and father, which should always be the goal of any culture of polity.  Sociologists know this; their own studies show it. Common sense and experience show us. Children who grow up with the presence of a mother and father are less likely to be poor, to end up in prison, or to get addicted to drugs.

Also, they are generally healthier, stronger and more successful. The most common denominator among men in prisons is not racial or ethnic background, not income or class distinction, not high school or college diploma, but whether or not they grew up with a father in the home.

In a speech for Father’s Day 2008, Senator Barack Obama was emphatic in championing fatherhood: “We know the statistics — that children who grow up without a father are five times more likely to live in poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to drop out of schools and 20 times more likely to end up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioral problems, or run away from home, or become teenage parents themselves. And the foundations of our community are weaker because of it. . . Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives. . . family is the most important. And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation.”

Dr. Alan Keyes remarked in an interview with World Magazine decades ago:

People like to ascribe disintegration of the family to poverty and joblessness — that’s all a lie. Black folks were poor and they didn’t have access to jobs and there was a rigid system of discrimination. Yet, after the Civil War they put families back together and sustained then at high rates: 75 to 80% of all children being raised in two-parent households, all the way through the 60’s.

What happened in the 60’s?

The sexual revolution combined with Johnson’s Great Society and the expansion of welfare which rewarded childbearing out of wedlock. Add to that the explosion of no-fault divorce and very rapidly God’s design was shattered.

It should come as no surprise then, when studies bear out the bad consequences of casting aside God’s perfect design of two parents, man and wife, raising children.

One such recent study was written up at Family Studies, “Parental Divorce Can Have a Lasting Effect on Children’s Health.”  Author Anna Sutherland notes:

Sociologists Jason Thomas of Penn State and Robin Högnäs of the University of Louisville used longitudinal data on almost 15,000 adults born in 1958 in England, Scotland, and Wales to explore how the timing of parents’ divorce affects people’s health later in life. Their findings, published in Longitudinal and Life Course Studies, suggest that experiencing parental divorce before the age of seven has a greater long-term effect on health than experiencing the same thing later in childhood.

Thomas and Högnäs discovered that parental divorce in childhood was positively associated with worse self-reported health at age 50, “but the estimates are significantly different from zero only…during the youngest age interval” (birth to age seven). Parental divorce in this period was also linked to lower physical functioning and to the number of health problems reported at age 50, though results for the latter were not statistically significant.

Socioeconomic status and health behaviors—smoking in particular—emerged as the most important factors, with emotional/behavioral problems coming in third. In other words, it appears that early parental divorce puts people at a slightly greater risk of poor health at age 50 primarily because it leads to a decline in families’ socioeconomic status, an elevated risk of behavioral problems in late childhood, and an increased propensity to smoke in adulthood.

All too often flippant modern advice suggests that children are resilient and divorce will have no lasting impact as long as there remain some ties with the mother and father, that a divorced family is only different in setting and geography.

But as with most of life, we learn that God’s design was best all along.

The Creator envisioned a safe place, a loving place, for children to be reared, for values to be caught. When done right, a marriage and family impacts generations with blessing.

When those biblical precepts are cast aside, people are impacted and lives mucked up, and children bear out this lesson as the living victims of divorce.

Worldview Conference with Dr. Wayne Grudem
We are very excited about our second annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Wayne Grudem on Saturday, February 20, 2016 in Barrington.

Click HERE to register today!

In the morning sessions, Dr. Grudem will speak on how biblical values provide the only effective solution to world poverty and about the moral advantages of a free-market economic system. In the afternoon, Dr. Grudem will address why Christians—and especially pastors—should influence government for good as well as tackle the moral and spiritual issues in the 2016 election.

We look forward to this worldview-training and pray it will be a blessing to you.

Click HERE for a flyer.

Written by Rev. Dr. Eric M. Wallace, PhD.

Part I exposed the motives and ideology of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) founders. Part II explores further why BLM is problematic for theologically orthodox Christians and how the church should respond to it.

The Danger of BLM

One of the dangers of BLM is that it pulls on the heartstrings of those who really care about life—both blacks and whites. Ironically, those who claim concern for black lives ignore the abortion of black babies and the killing of black boys by other black boys in gang violence. While focusing almost exclusively on race as the source of injustice and harm, BLM engage in the politics of racial grievance.

The politics of racial grievance trigger an emotional response that ultimately shuts down logical inquiry or debate, rendering people vulnerable to emotional manipulation. It is designed to exploit whites and blacks alike. In whites, it creates guilt for segregation, Jim Crow laws, and slavery even though systemic racism was defeated decades ago. The politics of racial grievance is intended to make whites feel guilty so that they’ll make concessions to black leadership, funding the programs and activities sanctioned by black leaders.

The politics of racial grievance works on black people too. It galvanizes black solidarity behind a cause, including causes unworthy of black allegiance. The idea is that if anyone should be “down with the cause,” black people should, and if you’re not, you’re a sell-out, an Uncle Tom. Black people are expected to support black causes, period. No questions asked.

This is not a new phenomenon. Booker T. Washington identified people in his day that used the politics of racial grievance to manipulate blacks:

There is another class of coloured people who make a business of keeping the troubles, the wrongs, and the hardships of the Negro race before the public. Having learned that they are able to make a living out of their troubles, they have grown into the settled habit of advertising their wrongs — partly because they want sympathy and partly because it pays. Some of these people do not want the Negro to lose his grievances, because they do not want to lose their jobs.

The dubious goal of the politics of racial grievance exploited by BLM and others is to finance their causes. Thus, in order to advance their agendas, they have to come up with a negative narrative regardless of its veracity. The story must pull on the heartstrings of blacks to ensure solidarity and of whites to keep them feeling guilty and compliant. Hence, the false narrative that “Blacks are being gunned down by white cops” excites those who have been conditioned to accept the claim regardless of its factual accuracy.

Black solidarity is often at odds with the truths of God’s Word. It pulls black Christians away from their solidarity with our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. For an example, in 1995 Louis Farrakhan and purportedly Christian ministers called on black men to travel to Washington D.C. for a day of atonement for their sins and individual and collective signs of reconciliation to their families and community. On the surface such an appeal appears reasonable and even praiseworthy. Those who take the Bible seriously, however, understand that the work of atonement was made through Jesus’ death, burial, and resurrection:

And by that will we have been sanctified through the offering of the body of Jesus Christ once for all. And every priest stands daily at his service, offering repeatedly the same sacrifices, which can never take away sins. But when Christ had offered for all time a single sacrifice for sins, he sat down at the right hand of God, waiting from that time until his enemies should be made a footstool for his feet. For by a single offering he has perfected for all time those who are being sanctified.  (Heb. 10:10-14)

Hebrews 10:26 says, that there is no other sacrifice for sin. Therefore, it is impossible for us to find any other atonement other than what Jesus did for us at Calvary. Neither the Nation of Islam nor Islam understands or adheres to this theology.

Furthermore, Christians should not be following people who don’t understand who Christ is and what He did. The Million Man March gave legitimacy to Farrakhan who neither understands nor affirms Christian theology. I would speculate that neither did the many ministers who were involved in this charade, which birthed nothing and made a mockery of Christianity. It is the people of God—committed followers of Jesus Christ—not the Nation of Islam or BLM, who must take a stand for true reconciliation and repentance.

Loyalty to the King

We can’t allow people who have no loyalty to Christ and His Kingdom to move us to disloyalty simply by appealing to the color of our skin. The call to follow Christ means leaving racial solidarity behind, especially when it conflicts with our identity in and solidarity with Jesus. Racial solidarity, apart from Christ, is idolatry.

In Matthew 10:37 Jesus says, “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me, and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. And whoever does not take his cross and follow me is not worthy of me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”

He repeats it again in Matthew 16:24: “‘If anyone would come after me, let him deny himself and take up his cross and follow me. For whoever would save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.’”

The forsaking of familial relationships also applies to racial and ethnic allegiances. Allegiance and honor to Christ must always be first.

Response of the Church

Matthew 5:13 tells us that as members of the Kingdom of Heaven and disciples of Christ, we are the “salt of the earth”—the preservative and seasoning agents of the earth. Verse 5:14 also calls us the “light of the World.” As Christ followers, our purpose is to bear light in the world, so that our good works will be seen by others and give glory to God. The question is, does Black Lives Matter meet these criteria? It depends on how you understand “good works.”

Just before these verses are found the Beatitudes where Jesus teaches about the foundations of righteous living: those who are poor in Spirit, those who mourn, the meek, those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, the merciful, the pure in heart, the peacemakers, and those persecuted because of righteousness. Jesus, the righteous King, calls upon his disciples to be righteous: doing what God commands us. By doing so, we act as salt and light to the World.

So, how do we do that? How do we apply these principles of righteousness in our daily lives?

In Matthew 5:20, we are told that our righteousness must exceed the righteousness of the scribes and Pharisees. This is not a works-based salvation but, rather, a recognition that Jesus is the fulfillment of all righteousness, the law, and the Prophets (Matt. 5:17). True disciples of Jesus take on His righteous mantel as sons and daughters of God.

In contrast, the scribes and Pharisees are hypocrites who practice “their righteousness” before men.  Jesus warns, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before other people in order to be seen by them, for then you will have no reward from your Father who is in heaven” (Matt 6:1).

God’s righteousness is different from that of the Pharisees, or in our case the practices of BLM.

1. It must exceed the Pharisees’ interpretation of the Law (5:21-48)
2. It must exceed the Pharisees’ motivation (6:1-21)
3. It must exceed the Pharisees’ value system (6:22-34)
4. It must exceed the Pharisees’ relationships (7:1-12)

If our righteousness does not affect our relationships with others, it lacks true fellowship with God.

Conclusion

BLM has created a false image. The BLM movement is interested in promoting a “progressive” social and political agenda—not in truly protecting black lives. They affirm homosexual activity and relationships, illegal immigration, and black liberation. Stories of the indisputably tragic deaths of black people at the hands of white cops are continually propagated while the tragic and senseless loss of preborn black babies’ lives and the lives of blacks gunned down in gang violence receive relatively little public attention.

Unfortunately, instead of uniting voices in an urgent call for righteousness and right relations between people, in Ferguson, Missouri, and Baltimore, Maryland, BLM encouraged civil disobedience that became violent. How does that square with what Jesus said in Matthew 5:43-44: “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven.”

The church has lost its way. We are suffering the consequences of having far too many church attendees and not enough disciples. After his resurrection, Jesus spoke these words:

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you. And behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age. (Matt. 28: 18-20).

It’s high time we focus on what Jesus commands. Indeed, He died and rose again because black lives do matter. However, He calls those black lives and all who would follow Him to a greater righteousness that is only found through life lived in Him. The church has the authority to change our communities for Christ, but it must be done for His glory and not our own agenda. It must be done in a way that glorifies God and does not promote racial division. May God help us to faithfully follow after Him, forsaking all else.

Read Part I here.

Dr. Eric Wallace is the co-founder and president of Freedom’s Journal Institute, and has organized the Black Conservative Summit and a one day conference “In Defense of Life: Why All Lives Matter.”  Dr. Wallace and his wife Jennifer live in the south suburbs of Chicago.

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A new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Northwestern University and the University of Florida analyzed 10 years of data of children born between 1992 and 2002.    The study looked at poverty, low education levels and fatherlessness and concluded that family disadvantage and breakdown hurts children.

That’s not news. There are mountains of research going back decades showing that out-of-wedlock births and divorce can harm children educationally, economically and in a host of other areas.

What is interesting about this study is that it finds that family breakdown hurts boys much more than girls.   Boys in broken homes tend to fare far worse than their sisters in behavioral, educational and economic outcomes.    Researchers found (again) that a large portion of school suspensions, poor test scores, and cognitive or behavioral disabilities could be accounted for by “family disadvantages.”

The researchers also noted that while this problem significantly impacts schools and neighborhoods, the negative impacts upon children, ”are largely independent of neighborhood quality and school quality.”   In other words, family breakdown hurts children, particularly boys, in both “good” and “bad” neighborhoods and school districts.

The study also notes that family breakdown is largely responsible for differences between racial groups.  They noted, “These estimates imply that a sizable portion of the minority-white difference in educational and behavioral gender gaps is attributable to higher degrees of family disadvantage among minority families.”

CNSNews.com asked Christina Hoff Sommers, a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and author of The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men, for her views regarding the study findings about differences between boys and girls.

“One theory is that in a broken home, you’ll typically have a single mother, and she’s working very hard, struggling, and the daughter will identify with her, so she’ll have a role model, someone who’s hardworking and resilient. And young men may define themselves, as they do, they need a father figure, they don’t have one. They’re not necessarily going to identify with the mother, and they also have primarily women teachers, and [so they] develop the sense of themselves probably from their peers,” Somners said.

CNSNews.com asked her for possible solutions to resolve the gender gap issue.

“There are different solutions,” she replied. “One is, and this has been tried, to create some charter schools, like all-male academies. And those have been very successful. And you organize the school typically with a lot of male teachers, and many things that boys need and enjoy, teachers that use a lot of humor, and very active classrooms.

“The problem is a number of organizations, led by the ACLU, have gone around to try to shut down these programs. They say it’s gender segregation. And they want to tell us all kids are the same. If you treat them the same, you won’t have male/female differences.

“Well, it’s just not true. If you treat them the same, you’ll have far more boys languishing and at a disadvantage,” Sommers said.

There are a number of issues that divide and/or confuse conservatives, including the claim that marriage should be left to the states. Some conservatives argue that whether homosexual unions should be legally recognized as marriages is a matter left to the states. This claim is vociferously opposed by other conservatives. The origin of that claim is the battered, beleaguered U.S. Constitution, specifically the Tenth Amendment which states that “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.”

So, the argument goes that since the U.S. Constitution says nothing about marriage, the power to regulate it is reserved to the states.

The confusion or disagreement among conservatives and between conservatives and liberals arises over what precisely states are entitled to do with regard to marriage. In order to answer that question, a prior question must be addressed: Is marriage a thing at all? Does marriage have an ontology—that is to say, a nature—that each state merely recognizes and regulates, or is “marriage” just a word with no inherent meaning that the states may infuse with any fanciful ideas people can imagine?

If marriage has no nature, no inherent, constituent features, then the people can justifiably fashion it into anything. They can re-imagine it as a poly-structure (multiple-partner marriage); an age-diverse, intergenerational structure (children or teens marrying adults), and/or an incestuous structure (close relatives marrying). The states could conclude that marriage—being wholly a social construct with no inherent features—can be construed as either an erotic/romantic union or a wholly platonic union.

In this view, all that really defines marriage is a desire to “marry.” If reproductive potential, the needs and rights of children, and the sex of partners are arbitrary, irrelevant, and dispensable with regard to marriage,  then surely the number of partners, their blood kinship, age, and type of love experienced (e.g., erotic or platonic) are equally arbitrary, irrelevant, and dispensable.

Some naively argue that neither the states nor the supremacist Supreme Court would ever permit adults to marry minors because minors can’t give consent. Silly naïfs. Here is a blueprint for ever-evolving “progressives” to follow in order to once again redefine marriage:

1.)  Rename pedophilia something less stigmatizing. How about the cozy, non-threatening, a-sexualized “intergenerational intimacy.” Oh, wait that’s been done already.

2.)  Challenge current conceptualizations of child development. Oh, sorry, that too has been done already. Here’s what 70-year-old homosexual professor emeritus of sociology at Essex University, Ken Plummer, wrote twenty-five years ago:

Cross-generational sexuality may serve to reinforce such assumptions—the child is a child, the adult is an adult. But it also harbours the potential to suggest that the child is an adult and the adult is a child; that such categories are neither fixed nor universal. Such meanings are likely to be relatively rare, given the dominance of our developmental view of age. But the constructionist view at least signposts a greater flexibility than is usually thought. 

Plummer is suggesting that cultural opposition to sexual relations between children and adults is a consequence of fallacious theories about child development.

3.) Find some social “science” research (including even poor studies) that demonstrates that children are not harmed and may be helped by “intergenerational intimacy.” Papers like the one from which this excerpt derives portend the future:

Intergenerational intimacy, social as well as sexual, has been studied in the United States and abroad for some time. In recent years the general trend has been to label such behavior “child sexual abuse.” Interest in this type of abuse has generated a considerable amount of more or less scientific literature, some of which seems to have been produced in a “rush to judgment” attempt to build a “professional” literature that supports popular beliefs. This tradition of child-abuse-defined literature, along with the work of investigative and helping agencies which some refer to as a “child abuse industry,” has fostered a one-sided, simplistic picture of intergenerational intimacy. A close look at the empirical studies in this tradition reveals flaws associated with two problems: the studies nearly always (1) maintain a narrow focus on sexual contact, and (2) proceed from the related basic assumption that sexual contact in intergenerational relationships by definition constitutes abuse. While sexual abuse certainly occurs, those who apply this assumption to all situations are ignoring empirical findings that show otherwise.

4.)  Redefine “consent” and “abuse.” That should be a cinch for those who have redefined “gender,” “sex,” “man,” “woman,” “discrimination,” “tolerance,” “bigotry,” “hatred,” and “safety.”

Follow these Deviance for Dummies instructions and, abracadabra, marriage will become even more inclusive. Marriage “equality” will expand to include those whose right to marriage had been unjustifiably denied. Finally, intergenerational couples like interracial couples will no longer be treated as second class citizens. If the Left can eliminate the most enduring, cross-cultural constituent feature of marriage—sexual complementarity—they will surely be able to eliminate the criterion regarding minimum age.

But perhaps marriage has a nature. Perhaps there are features that must be present in a union to make it truly marital and without which a union ceases to be in reality a marriage. If that’s the case, then neither the states, nor supremacist judges have a right to jettison them. I suspect that our Founders and all Americans until the latter half of the latter half of the 20^th Century presumed that marriage has an indisputable, inherent nature central to which is sexual complementarity and without which a union is not and cannot be marital. Therefore, the unspoken assumption would have been that states have the right to tinker with certain peripheral aspects of this thing universally understood as marriage but not to extract from it its sexually-differentiated essence and foundation.

Now, back to the question about the power reserved to the states with regard to marriage. All conservatives would agree that the states have the right to regulate marriage. States have the right, for example, to establish requirements regarding blood tests, teen marriages, and waiting periods between application for and receipt of a marriage license. But states would not be justified in declaring that inherently non-marital unions are marriages. Since cross-culturally and historically, everyone understood that the central constituent feature of marriage was sexual complementarity, it would have been absurd to claim that the state is justified in declaring that marriage includes non-marriage.

Similarly, the issuance of drivers’ licenses is a power reserved to the states. No one would sensibly argue that, therefore, states are justified in declaring that the term “driver” now includes non-drivers and require pedestrians to apply for drivers’ licenses.

Nor may states, which have the right to regulate education, justifiably change the definition of “education” to include non-schools. So, for example, while the state can mandate that schools teach particular courses, and can establish the length of the school day and year, the state cannot justifiably declare that non-educational institutions like roller rinks are educational institutions.

Conservatism means to conserve. Anyone who believes that the reserved powers referenced in the Tenth Amendment justify states not merely regulating at the periphery the institution of marriage but also recognizing non-marital unions as marriages is no conservative.

“In essence, the conservative person is simply one
who finds the permanent things more pleasing
than Chaos and Old Night.” ~Russell Kirk

Worldview Conference with Dr. Wayne Grudem
We are very excited about our second annual Worldview Conference featuring world-renowned theologian Dr. Wayne Grudem on Saturday, February 20, 2016 in Barrington. Click HERE to register today!

In the morning sessions, Dr. Grudem will speak on how biblical values provide the only effective solution to world poverty and about the moral advantages of a free-market economic system. In the afternoon, Dr. Grudem will address why Christians—and especially pastors—should influence government for good as well as tackle the moral and spiritual issues in the 2016 election.

We look forward to this worldview-training and pray it will be a blessing to you.

Click HERE for a flyer.

Written by Rev. Dr. Eric M. Wallace, PhD.

In my lifetime I have seen a number of organizations and movements pull at the heartstrings of the African American community. In 1995 it was the Million Man March calling on black men to atone for their failings. Today, it is the Black Lives Matter movement that draws our attention and concern. Who of African descent can disagree with the idea that black lives matter? My mother is black. My father is black. My brother and cousins are black. My wife and children are black. How could I not be interested in this movement? How could we not be concerned about the young black men dying at an alarming rate at the hands of police officers and gang violence?

A few months ago, I reluctantly accepted an invitation to speak on the topic of whether Christians should be involved with the Black Lives Matter movement. The topic was especially timely because of growing racial unrest over the murder of Laquan McDonald in Chicago (October 2014), the shooting death of Michael Brown (August 2014) and the gang assassination of Tyshawn Lee. It was also timely because in July 2015, our organization, Freedom’s Journal Institute, held a conference titled “In Defense of Life: Why All Lives Matter.”

The video of Laquan McDonald’s murder had just come to light, and demonstrations were happening in Chicago. These demonstrations were led by people I didn’t necessarily agree with and whose tactics I did not view as glorifying to God. Once I visited the Black Lives Matter (BLM) website, however, I was glad I had accepted the speaking engagement. The BLM website specifically identifies itself with the black liberation movement:

#BlackLivesMatter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-Black racism that permeates our society….It goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within Black communities, which merely call on Black people to love Black, live Black and buy Black, keeping straight cis Black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all.

Black Lives Matter affirms the lives of Black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all Black lives along the gender spectrum.  It centers those that have been marginalized within Black liberation movements.  It is a tactic to (re)build the Black liberation movement.

The history, leadership, and troubling emphases of the BLM movement–including how it addresses homosexuality and gender confusion–must be exposed.

The differences between the Civil Rights Movement and the black liberation movement are significant. While the Civil Rights Movement was led by ministers, many of whom held a biblical worldview and infused their protests with prayer, the black liberation movement was associated with the Black Panthers, Angela Davis, and Marxist ideology.  Unfortunately, today’s civil right leaders have largely abandoned a biblical worldview.

The identity of the founders of BLM helps explain the radical underpinnings of the BLM movement. Three community organizer/activist women founded this organization after the death of Trayvon Martin. Two of the three, Alicia Garza and Patrisse Cullors, identify as “queer” black women. The third founder, Opal Tometi, executive director of Black Alliance for Just Immigration, explained in an interview with The Nation that “we are diligently uplifting black trans women and so the work on the ground in many places does reflect that.”

According to Truthout, Tometi, who is the child of parents who immigrated to the United States illegally, explains that BLM was “[n]ever simply a reaction to police violence against African Americans in the United States, Black Lives Matter was always conceived of as a strategic response to white supremacy.”

In an interview with Cosmopolitan Magazine, Ms. Cullors shared that she is inspired by Assata Shakur who was convicted of first-degree murder for the killing of a New Jersey state trooper and who escaped from federal prison and has been living freely in Cuba since 1984. Shakur was also a member of the former Black Panthers and Black Liberation Army.

Christians who take the Bible seriously must not affirm either homosexuality or gender-confusion. In Romans 1:18-32, Paul teaches  that God unequivocally condemns homosexual practice. Paul also made clear in 1 Corinthians that God can bring deliverance from sins—including homosexual practice:

Or do you not know that the unrighteous will not inherit the kingdom of God? Do not be deceived: neither the sexually immoral, nor idolaters, nor adulterers, nor men who practice homosexuality, 10 nor thieves, nor the greedy, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.  11 And such were some of you. But you were washed, you were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by the Spirit of our God.

By affirming what God condemns, BLM stands in opposition to the transformative power of Jesus.

While BLM claims to seek justice for oppressed and victimized persons around the world, they fail to address the genocide of black babies through abortion or the deaths of young African American males from gang violence in their list of social injustices. Apparently, what matters most to BLM is ideology.

Reading the “Herstory” page on the BLM website illuminates the organization’s central concerns:

1. Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.
2. Black Lives Matter is an ideological and political intervention.
3. Black people are deprived of basic human rights and dignity.
4. Black poverty and genocide is state violence.
5. When black people get free, everybody gets free.
6. Black liberation has played an important role in inspiring and anchoring, through practice and theory, social movements for the liberation of all people.

I was surprised to find that with the exception of the last one, I agree with these beliefs. I disagree, however, with the causes of the problems as well as the solutions. What is omitted from the concerns of BLM is the place that both liberal public policy and Planned Parenthood have had in “systematically and intentionally” targeting and destroying the black community. And because BLM gets the causes wrong, it gets the solutions wrong as well.

Whereas BLM sees white supremacy and institutional racism as the causes of the poverty and violence that afflict the black community, conservatives view the causes as bad governmental practices and policies. Most conservatives have long argued that liberal public policies have “systemically targeted” the black family. Blacks have been “deprived of their human rights and dignity” through government largess, which has perpetuated poverty and destroyed the black family. In other words, the “state” has committed violence against black people.

The very liberal social agenda embraced by “progressives” who pursue bigger, more intrusive government continues to harm the lives of blacks. For example, here in Illinois, the economy and public school system, shaped for decades by liberals and liberal policy, are among the worst in the nation. Whose lives are harmed most directly and significantly by our terrible economy and government schools? Black lives.

Worse still, Planned Parenthood (and the abortion lobby in general) has targeted the black community “for demise” since the days when its racist founder Margaret Sanger led the organization. Planned Parenthood continues to commit genocide against black babies.

According to BLM, “black liberation” can be achieved only by reversing the roles of master and slave. The tragic truth is that the policies sought by BLM only serve to keep the black community enslaved. The freedom BLM proposes is not freedom at all. It is slavery under a different master. It calls on black Christians who are already free in Christ to abandon their freedom for black solidarity, which for the Christian is a form of idolatry. The politics of BLM is the politics of racial grievance, a tool used to manipulate both blacks and whites alike.

Read part two HERE.

Dr. Eric Wallace is the co-founder and president of Freedom’s Journal Institute, and has organized the Black Conservative Summit and a one day conference “In Defense of Life: Why All Lives Matter.”  Dr. Wallace and his wife Jennifer live in the south suburbs of Chicago.

Support IFI

Please consider helping to support IFI’s ongoing work to educate, motivate and activate Illinois’ Christian community.  To make a credit card donation over the phone, please call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.  You can also send a gift to:

Illinois Family Institute
P.O. Box 88848
Carol Stream, Illinois 60188

Written by Teddy James

There was a time in my life when I questioned everything. I questioned the existence of God. I questioned the reality of heaven and eternal life. I questioned what it meant to be saved. I had many, many questions. And my dad had to listen to each and every one of them.

Sometimes he would give me answers as soon as I made an inquiry. Other times he would give me a quizzical glance and say, “I don’t know how to answer that. Give me a day to find something for you.” That was my introduction to apologetics.

After I became a follower of Jesus, the questions did not stop. Actually, they increased. My questions became deeper and more focused. I began to see the life-changing ramifications of some of the answers to my questions. I began learning what it meant to live out the Christian life in a fallen world. That was my introduction to the idea that apologetics does not end when salvation begins.

I have been pursuing apologetics ever since. Through that pursuit, I had an opportunity to listen to Sean McDowell, a speaker, author, and nationally known apologist at Alex McFarland’s Truth for a New Generation in 2013 and heard McDowell speak about relational apologetics. It made such an impact that when I recently had a chance to interview him two years later, I focused specifically on that idea. The result is my latest article in the January 2016 issue of the AFA Journal.

During the interview, I asked McDowell how apologetics fits into the home. He conveyed several important ideas parents and grandparents should keep in mind if they hope to pass their faith on to their children.

Passing faith on to young children

It is clichéd to say children are like sponges. They soak up everything they see and hear. But there is much truth in that adage. They do not have the ability to articulate everything they learn, but it does impact them in very real, tangible ways. That is why presenting the person of Jesus to them, even at a very young age, is very important. But McDowell said that what we say is secondary to what we do as parents of young children.

He said, “The most important thing for any parent of a young child to do is invest in his or her spouse. Make sure your spouse knows you love and support him or her. Make certain your children see that you are investing in your spouse. Second to that is investing in your children. Start small. Look for little opportunities to have conversations. You want to model biblical truth so they see you living it, doing it. Their faith journey will begin with small steps, but it will be small steps you help them take.”

Passing faith on to teens

According to the book Families and Faith by Vern Bengston, one of the largest studies on faith transmissions, the single most important factor for children adopting the faith of their parents is a warm relationship with their fathers.

McDowell was quick to point out, “This does not mean a strong relationship with mom is not important. But the study does specifically mention fathers. But the bigger picture we have to see is that if we want to pass on the faith, it has to be done in the context of relationship, love, and care.”

So many parents are afraid of their children asking a question they do not know the answer to, but McDowell said apologetics and passing on one’s faith is about more than knowing right answers. He said, “Look at Deuteronomy 6:4-9. It says to speak of God in conversations, in the everyday interactions of life. That only takes place in relationships.”

Utilizing solid resources

Even families with great relationships can use great resources. The problem is knowing what resources can be trusted to help children and grandchildren build a solid, biblical worldview. McDowell said, “If you have a child or grandchild between 16 and 23, one of the best things you can do is send him or her to Summit Ministries. If I could only recommend one thing, that would be it. Hands down.”

Summit Ministries host conferences in Colorado, California, and Tennessee. It also invites students to come for Summit Semesters where they are taught from some of the top Christians scholars in America. Summit Ministries offers a plethora of other opportunities to help teens and young adults build a strong biblical worldview.

Every parent and grandparent desires for the young in their families to come to faith early and pursue Jesus for the rest of their lives. Pursuing those children in the context of a healthy, loving relationship and taking advantage of the great tools available can help make that desire a reality.

This article was originally posted at AFA.net.

After years of lobbying by homosexual activists, the FDA has lifted its lifetime ban on “men who have sex with men” (MSM)—which is the Centers for Disease Control designation—from donating blood. Homosexual activists view the ban as unjustly discriminatory, a relic from the beginning of the AIDS crisis when testing was far less effective. The change means that donations from MSM who claim not to have had homoerotic encounters for one year will be now be accepted.

While many homosexuals claim the lifetime ban was based on “homophobia,” they can’t explain why it didn’t apply to lesbians. Facts are such stubborn and inconvenient things.

While many cheer this decision as a victory for science, others are wondering if it’s a political victory for male homosexual activists.

The FDA explains that “its policies to date have helped reduce HIV transmission rates from blood transfusions from 1 in 2,500 to 1 in 1.47 million.” Further, the FDA cites an Australian study that showed no increase in HIV/AIDS transmission rates following their switching from a lifetime ban to a one-year deferral period.

News reports cite similar policy shifts in other developed countries. For example, the United Kingdom, Australia, Sweden, and Japan all have one-year deferral periods, and Canada and New Zealand have five-year deferral periods. It is interesting to note, however, the HIV/AIDS adult (ages 15-49) prevalence rates in these countries as compared to the United States:

• United Kingdom: .3%
• Australia: .2%
• Sweden: .2%
• Japan: <.1%
• New Zealand: .1%
• Canada: .2%
• United States: .6%

The United States has twice the HIV/AIDS prevalence rate as the country with the next highest rate.

The reason for a one-year deferral period is that during what is called the “eclipse” phase” or “window period,” the HIV virus has infected the first cell but is present at levels undetectable by current testing. The eclipse phase is estimated to last from 7-90 days. Therefore, the one-year deferral period is viewed as more than sufficient.

The ban on donations from MSM grew out of concern not just for HIV/AIDS transmission but also for the transmission of hepatitis. According to the CDC the risk of transmission of acute hepatitis, which is caused by the hepatitis C virus, is just under “1 chance per 2 million units transfused.” It has also been reported that the rate of hepatitis C among MSM is approximately 5%, whereas the rate among the general population is .78%. Since the rate of hepatitis C among MSM is over 500% higher than the rate among the general population, will the lifting of the ban on this high-risk group donating blood increase the number of people infected by hepatitis C?

The CDC also reports that “[a]mong adults, an estimated 10% of new hepatitis A cases and 20% of new Hepatitis B cases occur in MSM.” So, 10% of new hepatitis A cases and 20% of new hepatitis B cases come from a demographic group that the CDC claims constitutes 2% of the population. A 2011 study reports that the level of Hepatitis B infections per donations is “1:500,000 to 1:1,000,000.” Will this rate remain steady or increase now that MSM are permitted to donate blood?

The FDA assures the public that “[m]oving forward, the FDA will continue to reevaluate and update its blood donor deferral policies as new scientific information becomes available.” Let’s hope and pray that the new scientific information does not include an increase of even a small percentage in the HIV/AIDS or hepatitis transmission rates. And let’s hope and pray that when screened, men who have sex with men will be truthful about the duration of time since their last homoerotic encounter.

Support IFI

Please consider supporting IFI’s ongoing work to educate, motivate and activate Illinois’ Christian community.  Your donation will help us stand strong in 2016!  To make a credit card donation over the phone, please call the IFI office at (708) 781-9328.  You can also send a gift to:

Illinois Family Institute
P.O. Box 88848
Carol Stream, Illinois 60188

Written by Ben Peterson

The American Dream is about equality of opportunity. It includes the belief that a person can rise from any station in life to success and the idea that artificial barriers tied to race, class, or gender need not—must not—stand in the way of climbing the commercial, social, or political ladder. Yet today, despite massive federal investments in a national public education system, social security, welfare, and expanded public health insurance, a class line paralleling W.E.B. Du Bois’s “color line” is solidifying.

The new class line is the theme of esteemed political scientist Robert D. Putnam’s latest bestseller, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis. Putnam’s book struck a nerve because it puts the crisis of the American dream into focus:a majority of Americans see economic mobility as a possibility only for the already wealthy, and Republicans and Democrats alike recognize the serious problem of income inequality. Putnam spoke at two high-profile conferences this year, one at Georgetown University with President Obama and Arthur Brooks, and another at the American Enterprise Institute, where Brooks is president.

Daniel Patrick Moynihan sought to address a similar crisis. In his controversial report for the U.S. Department of Labor, “The Negro Family: The Case For National Action,” he raised concerns about “deterioration of the Negro family” in poor, black communities. After a long saga of denial and allegations of “blaming the victim,” sociologists and policy analysts increasingly recognize the merit of his warning that family breakdown resulting from the legacy of slavery would prevent many black communities from securing equal opportunities and taking advantage of political gains from the Civil Rights Movement. As William Julius Wilson and Orlando Patterson have observed, the problem has intensified in poor, black communities. Wilson called the report “prophetic” in its analysis of both structural and cultural factors threatening to perpetuate cycles of poverty.

Today, we find ourselves in a new Moynihan Moment. We need a new prophet to sound the alarm about family breakdown in poor communities of all races, which threatens to perpetuate cycles of poverty and deepen the divide between socioeconomic classes. It’s time that America’s public and political elites alike acknowledge that the crisis of the American Dream is a result of the underlying crisis of the American family.

The American Family in Crisis

The work of Robert Putnam is helpful in analyzing and diagnosing the problems facing the American family, but the solutions he proposes are disappointing and likely to be ineffective. Putnam recognizes family breakdown as a core issue driving the opportunity gap: “More single parents means less upward mobility.” He shows that divorce, cohabitation, and nonmarital births are concentrated among poorly educated, low-income families. Putnam clearly sees that this “two-tier” family structure defines and perpetuates the class line, yet he is unwilling to the accept the common sense proposition that efforts to address socioeconomic problems should, per Moynihan, address “the fundamental problem . . . of family structure.”

To his credit, Putnam does suggest preserving and expanding existing tax credits for families with kids, making more day-care services available to struggling parents, and reforming criminal justice policies that disproportionately impact minority families. Still, Putnam’s main recommendation on the family aligns with those seeking to “limit the consequences of negative norms” by increasing access to effective, long-acting contraceptive devices to fully “delink sex from childbearing,” encouraging women to delay motherhood.

He draws heavily but selectively from the work of Sara McLanahan, a principal investigator for the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study. For instance, he avoids discussing her point that, “along with giving women the ability to control their fertility, the pill and legalized abortion made it easier for men to shirk their paternal responsibilities.” Why would Putnam’s proposal yield different results? How would it address the fact that fatherhood has become, in his wording, “optional”? Even granted that government-provided long-acting contraception could help a woman delay motherhood—until when? Presumably until she finds a stable partner willing and able to shoulder the responsibilities of a husband and father.

In the end, we are left with the same underlying problem: committed, stable marriages are increasingly rare commodities, especially in poor communities. Putnam’s proposals may help some families, but they are nowhere near adequate to addressing the larger problem of family inequality driving the opportunity gap.

The New Moynihan Moment

The debate continues to rage about the Moynihan Report’s applicability and implications for poor black communities. More critical is the realization that Moynihan’s warning is more relevant today, for more people, than it was in 1965 at the outset of the War on Poverty. We have to think like Moynihan. He based his warning on a fundamental insight about civic life that Putnam’s research confirms:

The role of the family in shaping character and ability is so pervasive as to be easily overlooked. The family is the basic social unit of American life; it is the basic socializing unit. By and large, adult conduct in society is learned as a child.

Moynihan fretted that 23.6 percent of births to black women were non-marital;the national figure for 2013 was 40.6 percent, a slight decline from the 2009 peak of 41 percent. The family deterioration Moynihan identified now describes a large segment of the country and spans racial divides. Our Moynihan Moment calls for the kind of “national effort” he proposed, a much more significant undertaking than increasing the availability of birth control. We must commit to a national—not purely governmental—effort to promote strong families.

To paraphrase Moynihan, such an effort would aim to bring all Americans to full and equal sharing in the responsibilities and rewards of citizenship. To achieve this end, all programs seeking to mitigate the opportunity gap should be designed to have the effect of enhancing the stability and resources of the American family.

The American Dream vs. the American Project

Moynihan proposed a national effort to combat family breakdown in black communities. Yet he also famously remarked: “If you think a government program can restore marriage, you know more about the government than I do.” At least one major Health and Human Services-sponsored programdesigned to encourage family formation for new parents helped in some cities but had the opposite impact in others. Clearly, government alone cannot restore a vibrant family culture.

An older view emphasizes the reverse: free society and government actually depend on strong families. Charles Murray makes this point in his 2012 bookComing Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010: “The founders took for granted that marriage was the bedrock institution of society.” Putnam is trying to save the American Dream; Murray wants to save the “American Project.” Not antithetical to the Dream’s egalitarianism, the Project is to build a society where each person has the greatest possible freedom to do as he or she wishes in life—and the responsibility to accept the consequences.

This brings Murray to the idea of virtue. In a reversal of Adam Smith’s claim that the poor tend to adopt stricter codes of religious practice and personal ethics than the wealthy, Murray argues that the solidifying class structure stems from disparate practice of what he calls “the founding virtues,” the first of which is marital fidelity. Putnam tends to deny the agency of those in the lowest socio-economic bracket, emphasizing impersonal “economic disparities” and “malign influences” that hold them back. By contrast, Murray argues that many communities have ceased to cultivate habits and practices that once helped poor families survive and advance: chiefly getting and staying married to provide stable homes for their kids.

The Economic Angle

Murray has predictably taken heat from both left and right for “blaming the victim,” and failing to disprove that family and community breakdown are results rather than causes of structural economic downturn.

No doubt, there is an economic angle here. Losses of manufacturing jobs and recessions, particularly in the 1970s and early 1980s, made marriage a difficult prospect for many low-wage earners. But Putnam notes that during the Great Depression, the worst economic downturn in American history, non-marital births remained negligible, even as marriage rates declined. Further, some evidence from the Fragile Families study shows that fathers who marry after a child’s birth—typically lower income than those already married—tend to earn higher incomes after marriage. This supports the view that, even from a purely economic angle, encouraging marriage and stable family formation is a best practice.

Structural economic factors alone do not explain the rise in nonmarital births and fragile families. A dramatic cultural shift in family structure beginning in the 1960s has proceeded steadily, independent of the boom-and-bust economic cycle, compounding low-income families’ economic woes. A cultural problem, albeit with an economic angle, demands a cultural response: to rebuild the American Dream, we need to rebuild a culture that celebrates the “founding virtues” of marriage and committed family life.

Cultural revivals have happened before and can happen again, if we are willing unabashedly to champion the virtues of marital fidelity and committed family life.

Restoring the Project and the Dream

Putnam has largely accomplished his goal of framing the opportunity gap as a bipartisan, “purple” issue. Family formation ought to be equally purple.

The focus of public policy should not be the chimerical goal of creating a world where fragmented or fragile families provide equal opportunities for kids. Instead, a common-sense approach will involve creative efforts to strengthen families. This not only includes some of Putnam’s suggestions, such as expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit and reforming the criminal justice system, but also tailored efforts like the ones the National Marriage Project andW. Bradford Wilcox and Robert I. Lerman have proposed. Leaders in government and civic institutions must make conscious efforts to remove marriage penalties from the welfare system, to help men become “marriageable” through apprenticeships and other opportunities, and to elevate marriage as a personal and social good.

In particular, we must change the way we teach sex education in public schools, especially those that serve low-income children. Right now, sex-ed is focused on avoiding teen pregnancy. That’s a worthy goal that may or may not be seeing some success, but it’s not holistic enough to communicate the way choices about family are related to economic and social success. The current approach is short-term, placing all responsibility on young women for delaying childbearing. It fails to fully awaken young people, especially young men, to the way family commitment—or lack thereof—will affect their lives and the lives of their children.

Schools should link sex with civic and family obligations, instead of merely spouting clinical information. We should give students the facts: married people tend to do better in terms of almost every measurable indicator and provide better homes for children. Your “sex life” is not only about your own plans, but also the well-being of your partner and the next generation. This is a very different message from what most students receive in public schools; yet if we’re serious about addressing the opportunity gap, it is the clear message we should send.

Like most prophets, Moynihan was ignored and attacked for pointing out the truth. If we ignore the problem, the two-tier family system will continue to plague poor Americans, obstructing opportunity and perpetuating the crisis of the American Dream. Let’s not ignore it—we’ve been warned.

Ben Peterson is a graduate student at the Pepperdine School of Public Policy. Follow him on Twitter at @ben_2_long.

Faith Driven Consumer, representing 41 million Christian consumers who spend two trillion dollars annually, has earned wide recognition for rating the faith compatibility of consumer and entertainment brands, as well as serving as a voice for its community. Yesterday, the group announced the first annual Faith Equality Index (FEI)-the only industry benchmark to measure compatibility with Faith Driven Consumers-as well as a rating of the top 7 brands.

Today, the group reveals the 10 brands with the lowest ratings.

“The brands listed today fall far short of earning the business of Faith Driven Consumers, but also have a significant opportunity to get into the game and improve their positions relative to marketplace competitors,” said Chris Stone, Certified Brand Strategist and founder of Faith Driven Consumer. “With two trillion dollars to spend, the newest color of the diversity rainbow is a huge untapped and underserved market-70% of whom are actively looking for a brand home.”

FaithEqualityIndex.com offers a transparent tool to discover the degree to which each brand values Faith Driven Consumers, contrasted against scores the same brands have received from the groups they value most. Each brand rating contains the FEI score alongside:

• The Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index (CEI), rating LGBT equality
• The Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility’s Corporate Inclusion Index (CII), rating Hispanic inclusion
• Black Enterprise’s Best 40 list for African-American diversity
• Diversity Inc.’s Top 50 ranking for diversity

The Faith Equality Index annually rates, on a 100-point scale, how well brands acknowledge Faith Driven Consumers (FDCs) by welcoming, embracing, and celebrating them. The FEI is the benchmark tool FDCs use to make consumer choices-through the lens of their biblical worldview.

According to American Insights, 93% of Faith Driven Consumers see value in a resource that allows them to easily identify the faith compatibility of brands, 86% are more likely to do business with a brand that welcomes them and acknowledges their values, 77% would switch to a more compatible brand, and 70% are actively seeking brands. The FEI establishes the standard by which Corporate America demonstrates its commitment to equality, specifically inclusion of the Faith Driven Consumer market segment.

The 10 Lowest-Rated Companies

• Bank of America 11
• Unilever 11
• DirecTV 14
• Expedia 15
• Nationwide 16
• Pfizer 16
• Microsoft 17
• AT&T 17
• Apple 19
• T-Mobile 19

View the Faith Equality Index here: www.faithequalityindex.com.

By 2nd Vote

Again, the City of Houston is at the center of the liberal assault on religious liberty and traditional values.

Today, Houstonians head to the ballot box to vote on Proposition 1, also known as the Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO).

The latest article from The Daily Signal’s Kelsey Harkness highlighted the high stakes of today’s decision using 2nd Vote’s research:

[R]esidents aren’t the only ones having a say in the debate. According to groups supporting the measure, a number of big businesses have gotten behind the ballot initiative, urging voters to say “yes.” Seven of the biggest include:

1.     Apple
2.     BASF
3.     Dell
4.     Dow Co.
5.     General Electric
6.     Hewlett Packard
7.     United Airlines

HERO has been controversial since it was first implemented in 2014 and Houston area pastors leading the effort to recall the measure had their sermons subpoenaed by city attorneys. 2nd Vote stood with the Family Research Council and the Houston pastors just one year ago this week in support of religious liberty.

More on the HERO measure from The Heritage Foundation

Ryan T. Anderson, Senior Research Fellow:

Once again big business wants its freedom to operate according to its values, but wants to deny that freedom to others… In Houston they are advocating for the kind of policy that has elsewhere penalized family businesses of bakers, florists and photographers, as well as faith-based adoption agencies. This is cultural cronyism at its worst.

United Airlines Funds Advocacy for HERO

2nd Vote’s research team found political advertising paid for by the Business Coalition for Prop 1 in the weeks leading up to today’s vote. A newspaper ad signed by executives from JPMorgan Chase, UnitedHealthCare, Citi, HSBC Bank and others in support of the HERO measure ran in the Houston Chronicle.

The latest election finance reports shows a direct contribution of $10,000 made by United Airlines to this organization.

Does United Airlines align with your values? Tell their leadership why companies shouldn’t undermine religious liberties here or through the United Airlines Twitter page.

Thousands of parents in District 211, the largest high school district in Illinois, should be outraged. And anyone who rightly fears the ravenous appetite of the slavering dumb beast we call the federal government should be equally outraged. The beast’s minions in the laughingly called Office for Civil Rights (OCR), which is a gangrenous section of the cancerous federal Department of Education, has concluded its 2-year investigation of District 211’s actions with regard to a male student who wishes he were a girl. Through its minion the OCR, the Fed-Beast (FEAST), lusting after the bodies and brains of children, has concluded that District 211 has violated federal law.

The very troubled boy—and he is a boy—at the center of this phantasmagorical tale wishes to remain anonymous, so hereafter he will be referred to as “Lola.” Lola has been seeking unrestricted access to the girls’ locker room—yes, you heard that right. Lola—an actual, factual boy, complete, one presumes, with the requisite anatomical parts—wants unrestricted access to the girls’ locker room, which would, of course, include the shower.

Plot summary

What District 211 has already agreed to:

In acts of contortionist-worthy back-bending and misguided charity, the district has agreed to have all school records identify gender-dysphoric students by their new names, identify them as the sex they are not, and refer to them by opposite-sex pronouns (which is to say that the district is lying on school records). In addition, gender-rejecting students are allowed to use opposite-sex bathrooms and are allowed to play on opposite-sex sports teams.

But that’s not all, folks, oh no, that’s not all. According to the Chicago Tribune, the district has also “installed four privacy curtains in unused areas of the locker room and another one around the shower.” This means a boy may, if he wishes, walk through the locker room to the shower area, where presumably girls are showering, to use these private changing areas.

But, even that leaves the beast, its minions, and its allies slavering for more.

What beast-ally John Knight demands:

John Knight, Lola’s ACLU-attorney and FEAST’s ally, vehemently opposes the district’s excessive accommodation of Lola, bleating that requiring Lola to use private dressing areas is unacceptable:

It’s not voluntary, it’s mandatory for her [sic]….It’s one thing to say to all the girls, ‘You can choose if you want some extra privacy,’ but it’s another thing to say, ‘You, and you alone, must use them.’ That sends a pretty strong signal to her [sic] that she’s [sic] not accepted and the district does not see her [sic] as girl.

Word to Knight, neither the “the district” nor any student has a moral obligation to “see her [sic] as a girl,” because he isn’t a girl.

What the beast-minion OCR has decided:

Student A has not only received an unequal opportunity to benefit from the District’s educational program, but has also experienced an ongoing sense of isolation and ostracism throughout her high school enrollment at the school….All students deserve the opportunity to participate equally in school programs and activities—this is a basic civil right….Unfortunately, Township High School District 211 is not following the law because the district continues to deny a female student the right to use the girls’ locker room.

So, now it’s a civil right for boys to use girls’ restrooms, changing areas, and showers.

By “law” the OCR is referring to Title IX, the federal law that prohibits discrimination based on “sex,” which the unelected minions in the OCR have unilaterally decided includes “gender identity” and “gender expression.” When the law was written, “sex” meant objective biological sex, and the law has not changed. The school policy changes that the beast-minion OCR is demanding would require that if gender-rejecting humans with male DNA and penises want to change clothes and shower with girls, they must be allowed to do so—and girls must comply or change in private areas. Not wanting to shower with boys is now seen as an act of bigotry and hatred.

What bothers Lola:

According to the Chicago Tribune, “the student, who plays for the school on a girls’ sports team, said she [sic] broke down in tears after her [sic] coaches reprimanded her [sic] for using the locker room to change. The coach told her [sic] some students felt uncomfortable dressing in front of her [sic].”

Think about what that means. It means Lola—a boy—is offended that girls don’t want to change clothes in front of him. Lola is essentially demanding that everyone accept his delusion that he is in reality a girl.

What Superintendent Daniel Cates rightly and courageously said about this arrogant and preposterous decision:

“The policy that OCR seeks to impose on District 211  is a serious overreach with precedent-setting implications….The students in our schools are teenagers, not adults, and one’s gender is not the same as one’s anatomy….Boys and girls are in separate locker rooms—where there are open changing areas and open shower facilities—for a reason.”

Conclusion

It’s not tax rates or immigration policy or ISIS that most gravely injures and weakens America. It’s the bloodthirsty devouring of the hearts, minds, and bodies of our children; the dismantling of marriage and family; and the erosion of the First Amendment. Deception and depravity are consuming our children, often by nibbles that barely register and at other times by huge chunks. The father of lies conceals his deceit under a cloak of compassion. Christians should not be so easily deceived or so easily cowed.

“When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone,
“it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.”

“The question is,” said Alice, “whether you can make words mean so many different things.” “The question is,” said Humpty Dumpty, “which is to be master—that’s all.”
~Through the Looking Glass, Lewis Carroll~

Boldly standing for the truth.  Is truth a priority for you?

By Bill Bumpas

A pro-family organization says it was surprised to learn that “American Girl Magazine” has decided to step into the culture war in favor of homosexuality.

“American Girl,” owned by toy manufacturer Mattel, featured a picture of a family with two dads in an article about adoption.

One Million Moms, a ministry of the American Family Association, says it supports adoption but “glorifying sin” is not how to bring attention to it.

By praising the homosexuals’ adoption, says OMM director Monica Cole, Mattel has decided it will force a conversation between parents and children, even though that’s a topic that “parents may not feel that their child is ready to have yet.”

The website for “American Girl” states that the bi-monthly magazine reaches more than 400,000 girls. The magazine is targeted at girls ages eight and up.

On its website, OMM features a photo of the magazine story on its website, describing how “Daddy” and “Dada” adopted children from foster care.

The picture was published in the magazine’s November/December issue, which could end up affecting Mattel’s bottom line.

“I believe the retailer is shooting themselves in the foot,” says Cole, “because conservative and traditional families will not be able to purchase their products in good conscience this Christmas season.”

One Million Moms is asking its members and others who are concerned to contact “American Girl” and Mattel, and urge the company to remain neutral in the culture war. Contact information is on the OMM website.

This article was originally posted here

Jonah Goldberg

It’s been a good month for champions of the traditional family, but don’t expect the family wars to be ending any time soon.

In recent weeks, a barrage of new evidence has come to light demonstrating what was once common sense. “Family structure matters” (in the words of my American Enterprise Institute colleague Brad Wilcox, who is also the director of the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia).

And Princeton University and the left-of-center Brookings Institution released a study that reported “most scholars now agree that children raised by two biological parents in a stable marriage do better than children in other family forms across a wide range of outcomes.” Why this is so is still hotly contested.

Another study, coauthored by Wilcox, found that states with more married parents do better on a broad range of economic indicators, including upward mobility for poor children and lower rates of child poverty. On most economic indicators, the Washington Post summarized, “the share of parents who are married in a state is a better predictor of that state’s economic health than the racial composition and educational attainment of the state’s residents.”

Boys in particular do much better when raised in a more traditional family environment, according to a new report from MIT. This is further corroboration of Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s famous 1965 warning: “From the wild Irish slums of the 19th century Eastern seaboard, to the riot-torn suburbs of Los Angeles, there is one unmistakable lesson in American history; a community that allows a large number of men to grow up in broken families, dominated by women, never acquiring any stable relationship to male authority, never acquiring any set of rational expectations about the future — that community asks for and gets chaos.”

Perhaps most intriguing — and dismaying — a new study by Nicholas Zill of the Institute of Family Studies found that adopted children have a harder time at school than kids raised by their biological parents. What makes this so dismaying is that adoptive parents tend to be better off financially and are just as willing as traditional parents, if not more so, to put in the time and effort of raising kids.

Zill’s finding highlights the problem with traditional family triumphalism. Adoption is a wonderful thing, and just because there are challenges that come with adoption, no one would ever argue that the problems adopted kids face make the alternatives to adoption better. Kids left in orphanages or trapped in abusive homes do even worse.

In other words, every sweeping statement that the traditional family is best must come with a slew of caveats, chief among them: “Compared to what?” A little girl in a Chinese or Russian orphanage is undoubtedly better off with two loving gay or lesbian parents in America. A kid raised by two biological parents who are in a nasty and loveless marriage will likely benefit from her parents getting divorced.

“In general,” writes St. Lawrence University professor Steven Horwitz, “comparisons of different types of family structures must avoid the ‘Nirvana Fallacy’ by not comparing an idealized vision of married parenthood with a more realistic perspective on single parenthood. The choices facing couples in the real world are always about comparing imperfect alternatives.”

Of course, that point can be made about almost every human endeavor, because we live in a flawed world. And just because we don’t — and can’t — live in perfect consistency with our ideals, that is not an argument against the ideals themselves.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that family structure is so controversial. The family, far more than government or schools, is the institution we draw the most meaning from. From the day we are born, it gives us our identity, our language and our expectations about how the world should work. Before we become individuals or citizens or voters, we are first and foremost part of a family. That is why social engineers throughout the ages see it as a competitor to, or problem for, the state.

And the family wars will never end, because family matters — a lot.

This article was originally posted at the Los Angles Times.

By Rachel Sheffield

Is there a connection between strong families and a thriving economy? A new study, “Strong Families, Prosperous States,” takes a step toward answering the question.

“Despite the clear economic gains associated with strong families at the individual level, economists across the ideological spectrum have failed to investigate whether strong families increase economic growth,” co-authors Brad Wilcox, Joseph Price, and Robert Lerman write in the report from the American Enterprise Institute and the Institute for Family Studies.

Some of the main findings:

• States with the highest share of married-parent families are better off than states with the lowest share of such families. They have $1,451 more in per capita GDP, 10.5 percent more upward mobility for low-income children, a 13.2-percent decrease in child poverty, and $3,654 more in median family income. (The researchers controlled for factors such as education, a state’s racial composition, tax policies, and education spending.)

• The proportion of married parents in a state is a top indicator for economic outcomes. The share of married parents, the researchers note, “is generally a stronger predictor of economic mobility, child poverty, and median family income … than are the educational, racial, and age compositions of the states.”

• Violent crime is far lower in states with a greater share of married-parent families. On average, the rate of violent crime is 343 crimes per 100,000 population in states with the highest quintile of married-parent families, compared to an average rate of 563 crimes per 100,000 in states with the lowest quintile of married-parent families.

But why do strong families contribute to a thriving economy?

“Studies reveal that married men work about 400 hours more and make about $16,000 more per year than their otherwise similar single peers, and they are less likely to quit a job without lining up a new one,” the authors write.

The report includes this chart on marital status and income:

***

Although motherhood is linked with a decrease in work and income for women, the gains for married men in these areas tend to offset those decreases.

Marriage provides many other economic benefits, the report says, including income pooling and economies of scale. Married couples also accumulate more wealth than those in other household types, have more assets, and enjoy higher levels of income—and are thus less likely to be poor.

Also, the study says, children from married-parent households are more likely to receive human capital to help them thrive in the world. They have access to greater levels of income and parental attention and are less likely to be abused or neglected.

Finally, strong families reduce the likelihood that youth will participate in delinquent behavior, thus contributing to a lower crime rate.

Wilcox and his colleagues explain that children raised in intact families, particularly boys, are less likely to act out aggressively and that young men from single-mother families are roughly two times as likely to spend time in jail. They note that youth from single-parent homes also are more likely to be victims of crime.

Communities with higher numbers of single-parent homes have greater levels of crime than those with larger numbers of two-parent families. Crime hurts economic prosperity, the authors note, and so stronger families contribute to protecting communities from that economic drag.

A related chart:

***

Tragically, family breakdown is common in the United States. The rate of unwed childbearing is high, at over 40 percent nationwide.

Divorce rates are at historically high levels, although divorces have leveled off somewhat since the 1980s. Fewer than half of America’s children will be raised by married biological parents for their entire childhood.

These trends will be difficult to change overnight, and there is plenty of work to be done. The authors provide a few recommendations:

• Reduce marriage penalties in means-tested welfare programs.
• Reform divorce laws to help couples avoid breakup when it isn’t necessary.
• Strengthen marriage and encourage a reduction in unwed childbearing with a public service ad campaign focused on “the success sequence”: education, work, marriage, and parenthood, in that order.
• Identify ways to expand career opportunities for lower-income men and women with apprenticeship programs and other innovations.

The well-being of the family and the economy go hand in hand. America can thrive only if its most vital institution, the family, is strong.

***

Read more about the link between family and the economy in The Heritage Foundation’s 2015 Index of Culture and Opportunity.

This article was originally posted here