By Janice Shaw Crouse

If you put stock in the media hype, the hit TV show, “Glee,” is breaking new ground this week.

The game-changer in the controversial episode consists of two parallel sexual initiations — one a heterosexual teen couple and the other a homosexual teen couple. This may be new in the sense of it being even more corrupting than previous episodes or containing even more indecent material shoved in our faces, but it’s certainly not a positive new development. Such media promotion of early sexual activity — not to mention the promotion of gay behavior — flies in the face of what is best for teenagers and bucks the current, more positive trends that show teen sexual activity, teen abortions and teen births declining.

Anyone familiar with social-science research knows that abstinence is healthiest for teenagers. Teenage sexual activity routinely leads to emotional turmoil and psychological distress. Rather than increasing a teen’s self-confidence, engaging in sexual activity leads to empty relationships, feelings of self-contempt and a sense of worthlessness — typical precursors to depression. In fact, sexually active teens are more likely than those who are abstinent to attempt suicide (15 percent to 5 percent for girls, 6 percent to 1 percent for boys). Only 1/3 of girls who had early sexual activity describe themselves as “happy” as compared with more than half of those who waited. But the most telling fact is that the majority of teenagers who have engaged in sexual activity express regret over experimenting sexually and wish they had waited longer to have sex — 72 percent of girls and 55 percent of boys. The bottom line is that more than two-thirds of teens who become sexually active admit they wish they could go back to sexual innocence again and wish they had waited.

Concerned Women for America released a major study on sexually transmitted diseases in July that describes some 49 types of STDs, some curable, others not. Twenty percent of all AIDS cases are among college-aged young people. Having three or more sexual partners in a lifetime multiplies by 15 a woman’s odds of contracting cervical cancer. The shocking facts about the extent of STDs among young people are documented by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention — 19 million new cases a year, with half of those cases among 15- to 24-year-olds. These STDs are hidden by the glossy advertisements in the media that make them appear to be an insignificant health threat and suggest that all are cured or controlled without difficulty or complications (as anyone who has seen the TV ads for herpes medications can attest). Sadly, most of the young people with STDs will be dealing with the symptoms and consequences for the rest of their lives. In the United States, new cases of STDs are triple what they were just six years ago. Many of the STDs are incurable and others have persistent, significant symptoms requiring bothersome, expensive, lifelong treatment.

We have begun making headway with teen births. The latest birth data for 2009 show that the teenage birth rate fell 6 percent to 39.1 per 1,000 women. In addition, the number and rate of births to unmarried women declined, but the percentage of nonmarital births increased to 41 percent. These numbers indicate a glimmer of hope that some truths about sexual realities are breaking through in contemporary culture. The bottom line is this: The radical rhetoric of the past 40 years is not quite as in vogue as it used to be, but its ethic of sexual experimentation is widespread and firmly rooted in the popular culture — as evidenced by “Glee.”

The media have saturated our culture with the myth of sexual freedom and public schools, along with Planned Parenthood and theSexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, have implicitly condoned, if not actually promoted, sexual permissiveness via “comprehensive” sex education which sells the idea that casual, recreational sex is acceptable for singles as long as the persons involved are “responsible,” defined as using a condom.

But that isn’t true, particularly for teens. Early sexual activity means more sexual partners. If a girl begins sexual activity in her early teens, she is, on average, likely to have more than a dozen partners over her lifetime, and the “turnover” rate of partners is more than four times as high among those who begin sexual activity in their early 20s. Such girls are also more than twice as likely to become infected with STDs. And about 40 percent of teens who are sexually active eventually become pregnant out-of-wedlock.

The vast majority of young people — 92 percent — think marriage would make them happy and want to be married some day; most also want to have kids. The assault on teens — telling them casual sex is “no big deal” and has “no consequences” — will not be neutralized until those who know better find their voices and convince today’s “Glee” generation that only discipline and restraint will open the gateway to achieving dreams and ambitions. Our culture must change to cultivate the attitude that says, “I won’t mess up my tomorrows by fooling around today.”

Janice Crouse, Ph.D. Senior Fellow of the Beverly LaHaye Institute
Dr. Crouse is an author, writer, speaker and former Bush Presidential Speech Writer.

Concerned Women for America
1015 Fifteenth St. N.W., Suite 1100
Washington, D.C. 20005
Phone: (202) 488-7000
Fax: (202) 488-0806

By Phyllis Schlafly at Eagle Forum

USA TODAY published one of its colorful front pages last week detailing how America has not only grown dramatically in population over the last two decades, but has radically changed ethnically, geographically, and culturally. The most costly of the many changes is the fact that having children has become increasingly detached from marriage.

Illegitimate births for all Americans have risen from 26 percent in 1990 to 41 percent today “and could be headed higher.” Among Hispanics, illegitimacy is 53 percent, among blacks it’s 73 percent, and among whites it has risen to a shocking 29 percent.

This extraordinary change is the primary reason that government budgets, both federal and state, are so bloated. Without fathers to provide for these millions of children, their mothers turn to Big Brother Government.

The economist Robert J. Samuelson recently concluded that “the welfare state is winning the budget war.” The bipartisan budget deal, which slashed our military budget but kept welfare-state handouts mostly off limits, turned out to be “a triumph of the welfare state over the Pentagon.”

The Heritage Foundation reports that 77 types of federal means-tested handouts already cost $522 billion per year before Obama took office. He increased this giant amount to $697 billion per year in the first half of his term, and now half of Americans depend for their living expenses in whole or in part on government handouts paid by the other half who pay income taxes.

That was exactly what Obama planned to do when he told Joe the Plumber he wanted to redistribute the wealth and told Chicago’s WBEZ-FM that his favorite Supreme Court Chief Justice, Earl Warren, wasn’t radical enough because the Warren Court “never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth.”

Estimates are that, over the next decade, the federal government will spend $7.5 trillion on means-tested welfare. That’s in addition to the nearly $200 billion a year doled out by the states.

In Ronald Reagan’s famous caveat, when you subsidize something you get more of it. So the subsidies to women who have no husbands in the house have promoted more and more children growing up without fathers.

The American public has been alerted to the effects of family breakup ever since Daniel Patrick Moynihan’s 1965 report called “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” We can now see clearly that giving cash and benefits to single moms, beginning with Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, destroyed families by making fathers unnecessary and even a barrier to the women receiving free money.

This common-sense analysis was confirmed by British commentator Melanie Phillips, who described the current London riots as the result of “the promotion of lone parenthood” and “the willed removal” of fathers from the family unit by the Welfare State and the “ultra-feminist wreckers” of the traditional family with its male breadwinner. She calls for removing “the incentives to girls and women to have babies outside marriage” and for dismantling “the concept of entitlement” from the Welfare State.

The religious Left has injected itself into the U.S. budget debate by corralling a list of leftwingers to sign a statement called “Circle of Protection” opposing any cuts to welfare-state spending. This group made a political splash running newspaper ads featuring the provocative question, “What would Jesus cut?”

I wouldn’t presume to try to read Jesus’s mind or announce His political opinions, but I think it’s hard to make the case that He would approve subsidizing, and thereby encouraging, illegitimate births. That’s exactly what the means-tested welfare handouts have been doing ever since Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty.

Michael Gerson defended the religious Left’s Circle of Protection in the Washington Post. He calls the billions of dollars of government spending on poverty “essentially irrelevant to America’s long-term debt.” I guess we now know why George W. Bush wasn’t more conservative: Michael Gerson was his speech writer.

Gerson is wrong. Welfare-state spending is a major cause of our debt, and it is also morally costly because it chases fathers out of the homes. The Heritage Foundation figures don’t even count the social and fiscal costs of the drugs, sex, suicide, school dropouts, runaways, and crime that come mostly from female-headed households.

Also, welfare spending is a failure; it doesn’t advance us toward any constructive goal, such as helping recipients to get on their feet economically. It merely increases dependence on government handouts and votes for leftwing politicians.

The Obama strategists know their political bread is buttered on the side of creating more and more women dependent on government. Republicans will lose the budget battle unless they face up to the fact that traditional husband-provider marriage is the mainspring of economic solvency, and Republicans will lose elections unless they stop the redistribution of money from taxpayers to dependents on government.

Phyllis Schlafly has been a national leader of the conservative movement since the publication of her best-selling 1964 book, A Choice Not An Echo. She has been a leader of the pro-family movement since 1972, when she started her national volunteer organization now called Eagle Forum.

By Trevor Thomas

Following Father’s Day, here is some sobering information concerning dads. According to the U.S. Census, one-third of American children are growing up without their biological fathers, while 40% of newborn babies in the U.S. are delivered to unmarried mothers. This percentage has increased about ten-fold since 1950.

Even more sobering: According to the CDC, over 72% of black children in the U.S. are born out-of-wedlock, along with over 52% of Hispanic children. Thus, while accounting for only about one quarter of the total U.S. population, blacks and Hispanics account for about 57% of the total number of out-of-wedlock births.

The absence of dad is devastating for children in a wide variety of ways. Children from single-parent homes are twice as likely to be suspended or expelled from school and are more than twice as likely to be arrested for a juvenile crime. According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 85% of children with behavioral disorders don’t have a father at home.

Children living without dad are much more likely to abuse drugs, commit suicide, and run away from home. They are more likely to have lower academic achievement along with lower self-esteem. Children born to unwed mothers are about seven times more likely to live in poverty than children with fathers in the home. The correlation between fatherless homes and the negative effects on the family is irrefutable.

With statistics like these, which have been trending in this negative direction for decades, one would think that no matter a person’s religion, political persuasions, etc., it would be clear to most that it benefits our culture to support traditional marriage.

Yet, in spite of all this, the left continues its march towards the destruction of the family. Led by the homosexual movement and its war on marriage, like-minded liberals in the media, the aiding and abetting by Democrats in Washington, and Feministas like Gloria Steinem (who once declared, “A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.”) and NY Times columnist Maureen Dowd, author of “Are Men Necessary?” (which has been described as “the manifesto of the man-hating movement”), the varied attacks on the family are well funded, coordinated, and unrelenting.

For example, recently in the U.S. House, a bill introduced by Democrat Pete Stark (CA), called the Every Child Deserves a Family Act, would, according to World magazine, “force any group that receives federal aid to place kids in foster families and adoptive families without regard to the sexual orientation, gender identity or marital status of the prospective parents.”

Stark’s bill currently has 52 co-sponsors in the House (all but one are Democrats). Not to be left out, Democrat Sen. Kristin Gillibrand (NY) plans to introduce similar legislation in the Senate.

Then there’s the case of the Redwood Heights Elementary School in Oakland, California. According to the Oakland Tribune, last month “children learned more about what gender means, how it’s been expressed in different cultures throughout human history, and that it’s possible to be both genders — or neither.”

Recently MSNBC (surprise!) proudly profiled Andrew Viveros as the “first transgender student in the United States to be crowned prom queen at a public school.” Despite being born a boy and having male reproductive organs, Viveros wants to be a girl—thus MSNBC treated him as a girl and permitted no voice in opposition to such behavior on their show. Echoing one of the great lies of the secular left, Andrew said, “it’s OK to be who you are, it’s OK to do what you want to do.”

Whether we are talking about divorce, out-of-wedlock births, redefining marriage, or disappearing dads, there are profound consequences for everyone in our culture anytime we deviate from the traditional family model. It is amazing that such has to be said in these “enlightened” times—as Mark Alexander wrote in 2006, “What cadre of nescient dolts does not already know (such things)?”

Adoption, education, legal issues such as custody, wills, inheritances and estates, matters concerning health care and retirement benefits—all of these are affected by how a society—and its government—view marriage. President Reagan summed it up well when he noted, “The family has always been the cornerstone of American society…in the family we learn our first lessons of God and man, love and discipline, rights and responsibilities…the strength of our families is vital to the strength of our nation.”

At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.

www.trevorgrantthomas.com

By Tony Perkins at CNN.com

EXCERPTS:

Did they use their influence to advance ideas of limited government, ordered liberty (or freedom limited by the need for order in society), and personal responsibility? If not, why not? Is there a credible explanation for their political change of heart?

But history shows that candidates on the right win when they’re actually conservative.

The successful candidate will give equal emphasis to the concerns of what has been described as the Reagan coalition of fiscal, social and foreign policy conservatives.

In the meantime, expect the passion of conservatives to grow as they search for a suitor who can rescue a nation that is in distress internationally, economically and morally.

FULL ARTICLE

by Steven Ertelt at LifeNews.com

EXCERPTS:

During the hearing today, Kline made it clear that the actual wrongdoers are working at Planned Parenthood. Like LifeNews.com, pro-life blogger Jill Stanek has been following the Kline hearings and she noted comments Kline made today in court:

In an ethics trial that is seeking to determine in part whether Kline acted too aggressively to enforce Kansas child rape laws in his capacity as Attorney General or Johnson Co. District Attorney, Kline just revealed to the court under oath that he found 166 instances during a specific time period when girls younger than 14 years old got abortions at clinics owned either by late-term abortionist George Tiller or Planned Parenthood of Overland Park.

But during that same time period, Kline testified, Planned Parenthood reported only one case of child rape, and Tiller reported only one case of child rape.

This means there were 164 instances when girls 13-years-old and younger had abortions at one of those abortion clinics, and the clinics failed to report the abortions to authorities.

The news is not surprising for those who have followed the Planned Parenthood abortion business.

FULL ARTICLE

By Pete Farmer

According to an Associated Press story by Dave Carpenter (click here to read it) “baby boomers near 65 with retirements in jeopardy” – the first wave of “Boomers” – will turn 65 years of age in January and thereby begin collecting social security benefits for the first time. The same story notes that these individuals face an uncertain future with “retirement security” in doubt. The worst economy since the Great Depression has done nothing to ease these fears, nor has an administration whose outlook is – to be charitable – slanted against the needs of the elderly and middle-aged. These factors have placed Boomers in a position to which they are unaccustomed – one of scarcity and hardship.

What is the crux of the problem? Why are the baby boomers and their counterparts abroad in such dire straights? A single word sums up the problem: demography. The huge generational cohort born in the prosperous aftermath of World War Two – now entering late middle and early old age and raised upon a steady diet of environmentalism, the benefits (real or imagined) of zero population growth, and feminist post-modernism – has declined to replace itself in self-sustaining numbers. In consequence, they are about to relearn a great truth – that demographics do indeed matter. Phrased differently and quite aptly by Mark Steyn, the future belongs to those who show up. The decision not to have children, or to have fewer of them may mean a more pleasant and less-demanding lifestyle in the short term, but across a society or a civilization, if enough people remain childless, it must eventually have dire consequences in the longer term. One of those consequences is that there will be proportionately fewer younger workers to support and care for their aging predecessors.

U.S. citizens are not the only ones affected by the unfolding problems of demography. The coming age wave has yet to break full-force upon the developing world, but it is drawing nearer, and its effects are already being felt in places as disparate as Russia, Portugal, and Japan. Policy-makers are belatedly waking up to the link between the problems of aging and population replacement rates. Vladimir Putin, alarmed at Russia’s declining birth rate, has instituted a bonus of 250,000 rubles (approximately $9,200 USD) for women who elect to have a second child. Portuguese Prime Minister José Sócrates, whose nation also faces a declining birth rate and looming pension reform, has tied future pension benefits to the number of children a worker bears. In Japan, the situation is worrisome, as that nation’s people have life expectancies among the highest in the world, and a precipitously falling rate of birth. Faced with a potential shortage of caregivers for a graying population, Japanese technologists have invented Wakamaru, the world’s first robotic elder-care companion. Marvelous, yes, but also sad that such a device is necessary.

In addition to inadequate population replacement and increasing numbers of gray-haired citizens, many nations of the developed world have enacted social benefits programs that cannot be sustained by current demographic trends. This is particularly true in Europe and Japan, whose nations have benefited from a half century of living under the defensive umbrella of the United States and thereby grown accustomed to lavish cradle-to-grave social welfare programs which are now bankrupting their governments. The recent Greek solvency crisis is one example of such a scenario, but there will be others.

Although U.S. birthrates are better than many of their foreign counterparts, America will soon face many of the same problems other developed nations do: inadequate population replacement, inadequate economic growth to sustain promised social welfare benefits, and disproportionate numbers of elderly or middle-aged people. The unfolding entitlements crisis is just now beginning to hit in selected areas of the U.S., as local and state governments search in vain for the means to make good on their economic promises but increasingly come up empty. The author’s home state of Illinois has run up $89 billion in unfunded pension liabilities; some experts put the real figure closer to $200 billion. How can the state possibly make good on these promises, without killing the goose which lays the golden egg – namely the private sector? And as the screws of economic hardship tighten, couples of childbearing age are even less likely to have offspring. A vicious negative feedback loop ensues.

Clearly, a massive readjustment of expectations is in order – from how we view everything from work and retirement to public spending and finance, and much more. But it is also essential that we rediscover the virtues of more children and larger families, and enact policies that favor them. For most of human history, it was axiomatic that large families were a good thing; not all children survived to adulthood, and since offspring were needed to help out on the farm and in the home, that meant siring large families. Post-modern America would do well to rediscover the virtues of children, while there is still time to do so. That means revisiting contentious questions on divorce, family law, feminism, the nature of community and family, and a host of other topics. Rediscovering the importance of children will also require reawakening a sense of self-reliance and lessening our dependence upon government as a de facto parent and caregiver. We could also do worse than to rekindle the idea of having children as a necessary social good – an unselfish act that perpetuates our civilization.

Reviving the idea of having large families will have many beneficial second- and third-order benefits. Among these will be the rebalancing of the number of younger versus older workers, as well as increasing the number of young people who will be present to ease the aches and pains which invariably attend the process of aging. Promoting larger families and more children will also lessen the economic drain imposed by the elderly and aging on medical and social services and put a larger cohort of taxpayers in the pipeline. Perhaps it is too much to hope that the old model of the multigenerational family will return in this day-and-age, but if some variant of it comes back, it would do much to ease the coming crisis in eldercare we will soon face. And few of us would argue that growing old in a warehouse for the elderly is preferable to being at home, among loved ones.

So, if you and yours are worried about the graying of America or the unfolding fiscal and financial crises in the news, here is a modest proposal: promote children and the families that raise them. The community – and civilization – you save might very well be your own.

Pete Farmer is a scientist with a BS and MS in biochemistry, and is also a registered nurse. Please email your comments to forum@centerforajustsociety.org.

The CJS Forum seeks to promote an open exchange of ideas about the relationship between faith, culture, law and public policy. While all the articles are original and written especially for the CJS Forum, they do not necessarily reflect the views of the Center for a Just Society.

By Pete Farmer | Posted in CJS Forum, Featured Post | Dec-29-2010

By Steve McCann at American Thinker

EXCERPTS:

These increasingly agnostic and secular societies have chosen to ignore the existence of God and have instead placed more and more trust in man. The consequence of this misguided reliance and the reality of God’s outstretched helping hand is embodied in the story of a young boy from the streets of a nameless city in an unknown country.

World War II has ended and somewhere in central Europe, a solitary figure, his clothes in tatters, carefully walks around the piles of rubble and broken glass on the streets of a once-bustling city now lying in ruins. The few still-upright walls, their windows and doors blown out, appear as skeletons framed against the blue sky. No one knows this boy’s age, name or to whom he was born. After the death of a woman he had lived with and did not know if he was related to, he was on his own.

His daytime hours were spent in the never-ending pursuit of surviving for another day. The search for food was his constant companion, whether begging from the locals or foreign soldiers stationed nearby or rummaging through the garbage cans outside of military mess halls.

FULL ARTICLE

By Penny Nance and Mario Diaz

The constitutionality of a law regulating the sale of extremely violent video games to minors is being challenged in the Supreme Court. The California law in question prohibits the sale of violent video games to minors and imposes up to $1,000 in fines.

The law defines “violent video games” as games “in which the range of options available to a player includes killing, maiming, dismembering or sexually assaulting an image of a human being, if those acts are depicted in the game in a manner that … appeals to a deviant or morbid interest for minors … is patently offensive to prevailing standards in the community … and it causes the game, as a whole, to lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value for minors,” or games in which the violence is “especially heinous, cruel or depraved in that it involves torture or serious physical abuse to the victim.”

This law seems reasonable to any parent who has taken a look at some of the more violent games available to children today. Games like Resident Evil and Grand Theft Auto include some of the most heinous crimes imaginable, including murder, theft, torture and even serious sexual assault. The treatment of women should be especially troubling as we see real cases of abuse pour on our society like torrential rain. In Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, the child’s character can recover health by visiting prostitutes, beating them to death and taking back the character’s money.

That’s the type of “free speech” opponents of the law are defending.

Yet the law, despite being labeled a “ban” on speech by its detractors, is no ban on speech at all. If a parent has no problem with the harm this type of content has on children, he can go ahead and purchase the game for them. This law puts parents back in control.

There is no question that playing violent video games has an adverse effect on our children. Parents know this intuitively, and the research confirms it. It ranks right up there with gang membership as the No. 1 sign for propensity to commit crimes of violence. Among the risk factors for aggressive or violent behavior, it is three times greater than substance abuse and two times greater than a record of prior violence.

The research in this area is so clear that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends pediatricians “assess their patients’ level of media exposure and intervene on media-related health risks.” The academy’s official policy states, “The American Academy of Pediatrics recognizes exposure to violence in media, including television, movies, music and video games, as a significant risk to the health of children and adolescents.”

The Supreme Court has seen the wisdom in this type of argument when it comes to obscenity, but in oral arguments, it seemed reluctant to extend the same level of deference to the issue of violence. Can the justices not see the harmful effects we as parents can see of this type of exposure to violence, just as the court was able to see it in the case of obscene materials?

Video games are especially troubling because children are not just exposed to this garbage, they are, in fact, asked to “participate” in it. These are “role-playing” games in which game developers offer our children the “thrill” of engaging in murder, sexual assault, etc. The desensitization cannot possibly be ignored by any reasonable person.

These “games” are so “real” that the same technology is used by the military, NASA and other professional groups to train in their respective fields.

Just as the Constitution allows states to regulate minors’ access to pornography and gambling, it allows states to empower parents to have more control over their children’s access to extremely violent video games.

Parents can see that. We just hope the Supreme Court can.