Marriage & Family
This happens with most highly charged topics, but with the same-sex marriage debate, it seems especially common (making the debate particularly tedious after years of engaging in it): After a few steps setting the mutually understood context, the thread becomes lost in opponents’ eagerness to make their total case. To review the discussion thus far:…
After some brawl-in-the-schoolyard circling, commenter Pragmatist and I have started up another round of the same-sex marriage dialog on Anchor Rising, thus far in the form of a question and answer exchange. Thinking the exercise worthwhile (and curious to see how far we’ll get with it this time), I considered a post of its own…
How is it possible that people who ostensibly pay attention to the news and to the public dialog still make such arguments as Charles Bakst’s on behalf of same-sex marriage without addressing a response — stated in many public discussions for years, now — that is central to the opposing side’s worldview? Here’s Bakst: [Bishop…
Last week, the Warwick School Department sent our kids home with an opt-out letter from the city-wide Body Mass Index (BMI) measurement of all students. Of course, the actual “opt-out” portion was only mentioned after a longer legitimization of why the program was being implemented (PDF). The letter included dire warnings of the spread of…
Dale Carpenter writes (h/t): By 4-3, Maryland’s high court today rejected a claim for same-sex marriage under the state constitution. The opinion is more than 100 pages long and is studded with more citations to cases, law reviews and books (including, notably, William Eskridge’s Gaylaw), and sociological and scientific studies, than any case yet on…
I’ll admit that I was suckered into believing that yet another opinion writer had come to a faulty conclusion about sex ed: A SHORT ARTICLE in the Aug. 14 New York Times reported that, according to a survey of more than 15,000 young Americans, abstinence-only programs do not work for HIV prevention. The analysis was…
Julia Steiny wrote in the ProJo on Sunday: Over the course of this summer, I studied a whole range of troubled kids. Instead of seeing them from the outside as the upsetting little pains-in-the-tush they are, I tried to get a glimpse of their lives. I met kids recovering from sexual abuse, neglect, violence, drug…
One tires of the bad-faith rhetoric of modern feminists, social libertines, and vitriolic do-gooders: “We know there are some people out there who long for a return to the ‘idyllic’ 1950s when women knew their place was in the kitchen,” the groups wrote, “but we do not expect to hear echoes of it emanating from…
A quick online search didn’t lead to the actual documents, but based on the Providence Journal story about the various legal briefs filed in the case of Rhode Island’s granting a same-sex divorce, it appears that just about everybody argued predictably, mainly based on broader perspectives than the narrow question facing the court. The one…
I’ve always thought it too obvious to be a blindspot that opponents of abstinence education behave as if a quick course or two ought to do the trick if such an approach were going to work at all. As I’ve said before, the cultural movement of which such people are a part does not really…
