Baby Aliza Turns Our Family Upside Down! What Fun!

Blogging has been light the past few days and will be light for the next few days. Sleep has been scarce and I have laid down for a nap the past two afternoons when Issac has been sleeping. (That is normally when I have time to read, blog, etc.)

Bonnie and I are spending a few weeks in Alberta with our daughter Beth and her husband Chris helping with their 22 month old Isaac as they welcome their new baby into the breathing world.

Aliza Emmanuelle was born at 10:16 pm (Alberta time) on July 12. She was 7 lb., 7 oz. and 20 inches long. She is beautiful and perfectly healthy. At the top is her is her first picture taken in the delivery room 12 minutes after she was born.

What a joy and privilege it is to be a grandparent! We are thrilled to be here and to help, but more than that to be a part of an extended family that depends on each other. Bonnie and Chris were in the delivery room and took part in the whole process while I stayed home and took care of Isaac.

Issac is an active, bright and extremely happy little boy and it takes a large amount of energy to keep up with him, let alone help him learn and grow. He is fascinated by Dr. Seuss books right now and is starting to learn his ABC's and numbers. He already knows his colors and shapes and helps me read many of his books. He also likes playing soccer in the huge living/family room here and having tickling matches. His favorite Bible stories are Daniel in the lion's den and Zacchaeus. He already loves to hold his baby sister and can pronounce her name perfectly. He is learning to be gentle and how to be a good big brother.

Today's families are too often fragmented, but the Divine plan for families is for them to be an inter-generational institution for the forming of Christian disciples. It is our privilege to participate in our family long after our children have grown into adulthood. Thank God for placing us in families.

Who Wants Universal Day Care?

Brigitte Pelerin, over at ProWoman Prolife summarizes an article in the Daily Mail on a study of what women really want with regard to work and family. (Her comments are in green.)

Ha!

More than a third of working mothers want to quit their jobs to look after their children, research suggests.

A further six in ten would like to reduce their hours to spend more time with their young ones, the Government-backed study found.

Less than a fifth said they would choose to increase their hours if there was good affordable childcare available.

The findings fly in the face of Government claims that women would want to go back to work if they could find decent childcare.

Tsk, tsk, tsk. Mothers disagree with politicians and child-care activists. How annoying for the child-care activists. I am positively loving it.

Here in Ontario, the government wants to integrate full-day care into the school system so children can be in "school" all day (from as early as 7 am) from age four onward. It is portrayed as a women's issue even though the horrendus cost will come out of the pockets of those trying to raise their children as stay-at-home moms. This is "choice" all right, just not the choice most women would make. It is someone else's choice being imposed on them.

Why will the government not try to support, rather than penalize (through the income tax code), the choice of women to stay at home with young children? Why are big corporations in search of cheap labour so supportive of universal, government-sponsored day care? Could it be capitalism destroying families in search of cheaper labour costs and higher profits? Could it be that talk of day care prevents any need to talk about the moral imperative for employers to pay a "living wage" for men supporting families?

Who gets to make these choices?

The End of Marriage?

In a debate between Robert George and Doug Kmiec, Kemic has called for the state to "withdraw from 'the marriage business' and do licensing 'under a different name' to satisfy government interests for purposes of taxation and property. Then "marriage" would be left to the churches and other religious groups to handle as they see fit. This idea has been floated before as a way of preventing religious bodies from being forced to marry same-sex couples.

Robert George calls it a "terrible idea." He says of marriage:

“It’s a pre-political institution,” he said. “It exists even apart from religion, even apart from polities. It’s the coming together of a husband and wife, creating the institution of family in which children are nurtured.”

“The family is the original and best Department of Health, Education and Welfare,” he continued, saying that governments, economies and legal systems all rely on the family to produce “basically honest, decent law abiding people of goodwill – citizens – who can take their rightful place in society.”

“Family is built on marriage, and government--the state--has a profound interest in the integrity and well-being of marriage, and to write it off as if it were a purely a religiously significant action and not an institution and action that has a profound public significance, would be a terrible mistake,” George told CNSNews.com."

George is right. Marriage was not invented by Christianity; nor was it created by the State.

It was certainly improved and promoted by Christianity. Under Christian influence marriage was strengthened and given preferential status over rival ways of organizing human sexual relationships. And that is precisely what is being undone in the current process of institutionalizing the promiscuity ethic of the sexual revolution. Same-sex "marriage" is just the culmination of a four decade long process of increasing social acceptance of the separation of sex from procreation and family. Pre-marital sex, cohabitation, no-fault divorce and remarriage, and same-sex "marriage" are just points on a continuum and the direction is away from monogamy, parents raising their children together, and the family as the primary agent of socialization. The next logical point on the line is to do away with marriage altogether. After that, there will be the inevitable increase in State intervention to fill the gap created by the destruction of the family.

If you think that pro same-sex "marriage" activists (most of whom are not homosexuals) will be content to allow married heterosexual couples to have one privilege or one label that same-sex couples don't have, you do not understand the psychology of inferiority, which is driving this debate. For 20 centuries, our culture has tried to shame and blame people who refuse to be faithful to their marriage vows and raise their own children by sacrificial service. This has been done in order to preserve, defend and build up the institution of marriage in the belief that everyone benefits from this way of life. It has been done out of a shared social consensus that marriage is the best way to organize the raising of children.

In the last 40 years, there has been a rebellion against this social order and individuals have developed ideological justifications for the pursuit of their own personal pleasure and self-fulfillment instead of entering into permanent marriage covenants and submerging their own self-interest in the service of the next generation and society as a whole. This rebellion creates tremendous guilt feelings on the part of those who choose it and they are therefore determined to eradicate any trace of social preference for the older ethic. The family itself is a rebuke to individualism, hedonism and sex without reproduction.

What this is about is the reorganization of society in such a way as to ensure that selfish adults can pursue their "lifestyle options" without guilt. It is not a coincidence that the separation of sex from procreation and family is occurring at precisely the same moment as the refusal of an increasing number of people to reproduce themselves. About 20% of the baby boomer generation did not have children. Even allowing for those couples struggling with infertility, surely no further proof of the pathological condition of our society is required. When a society is too selfish to have children, it is on the brink of collapse.

The Promiscuity Ethic versus the Chastity Ethic

The battle today over the shape of marriage and family in the Western world is not really between pro- and anti-same sex marriage. It is actually between advocates of two mutually exclusive and competing versions of sexual ethics: the promiscuity ethic and the chastity ethic.

The chastity ethic is the traditional and Christian view that holds that sex is for marriage and marriage is an inter-generational institution for the raising of children and the disciplining of immature and selfish individuals toward the goals of maturity and mutual service. As such this vision of marriage forms the foundation for a society of free people who do not require support, indoctrination and heavy-handed direction in the details of life from the government and a class of professional planners and social engineers.

The promiscuity ethic is a 20th century phenomenon that holds that people should have sexual relations freely with anyone at all as desire dictates, rather than being constrained by the limits imposed by life-long, exclusive marriage relationships. The promiscuity ethic views all requirements for sexual self-discipline as "repression," which is basically the myth that you will die without sex. This ethic produces people who live in a perpetual state of adolescence and who are incapable of restraining their appetites and governing themselves. So accompanying the extreme hedonistic individualism of this ethic is an openness to the "nanny state" or "welfare state," which encroaches on the natural rights and responsibilities of the family in order to bring order into the chaos produced by permissiveness and personal irresponsibility. So the state begins to support children financially, determine how they will be educated, lay down detailed rules for how they will be entertained, indoctrinated and disciplined (or more likely not disciplined).

Now, there have been times in Western civilization when family life and sexual morality have broken down in ways similar to the present time, as for example in 18th century England or revolutionary France. But the novelty of our time is that such family breakdown, increased petty vices and crime, high suicide rates, public indecency and indolence is heralded by the deep thinkers of our intellectual and chattering classes as "progressivism in action."

The promiscuity ethic is seen in two main effects: no-fault, casual divorce and same sex marriage. Behind these two major social revolutions lie a view of sexuality as a trivial thing that we share in common with the animals. Young people are assumed to become sexually active at puberty and remain sexually active throughout their lives regardless of marital status. Sex is seen as being "like taking a drink of water," that is, as a natural function no more personal than eating or defecating.

It always was Christianity that has held a high view of sexuality, viewing it as something personal and human, something not reducible to a mere bodily function. Christians believe that sex reveals something of the nature of God when it is practiced with chastity and self-control. The total giving of the self to another and the union of two persons in matrimony is seen as imaging the Triune God, as Genesis 1 teaches. Any society that holds a high view of marriage will attain a level of humanistic values that other societies never can attain. The Christian influence on society in this regard is extremely valuable.

The chastity ethic holds that sexual self-control is possible because persons are created in God's image as rational and moral creatures capable of making choices. The virtue of chastity allows the person to make a gift of the self to the other in such a way as to join the other in a joint pursuit of a common good, that is, children and family. The virtue of chastity is necessary all through life because to be committed to one's husband or wife in the project of marriage, including child-rearing, will mean giving up sexual gratification for varying periods of time due to the exingencies of life.

The virtue of chastity makes sexual union a personal union, rather than a mutual use of one another's bodies for gratification. Such a personal union is not closed in upon itself, but is open to the transmission of life, which means more than we usually think of as procreation. It means the raising, education and nurture of children in the faith so that they come to a personal, mature, Christian faith of their own and eventually marry and establish Christian families of their own. This is a life-long, inter-generational project and not something fleeting, temporary or reversible. Immersion in such a project is a school of character and an aid to sanctification. It is also a witness to the reality and nature of God.

Divorce destroys the permanence necessary to marriage as an inter-generational project. Same sex marriage is inherently non-procreative. Both are ordered to the fulfillment of the desires of the individual, rather than to procreation. Therefore both ultimately destroy marriage in the traditional sense and trivialize sexuality. Promiscuity is essentially the trivialization of sex. The sexual revolution of the last 40 years is doomed to self-destruct eventually, just as certainly as was the Soviet Union, and for similar reasons; both are built on a flawed anthropology. Human beings were made for better and the human spirit will eventually rebel against trivialization and de-personalization.

Christianity has few gifts more precious, beneficial and profoundly humanizing to offer the wider society. For the Church to conform to the increasingly nihilistic, hedonistic, individualism of the late modern West, instead of maintaining this counter-cultural witness, is tragic. It is nothing less than a failure to be salt and light in the world and a failure to seek the peace of the city in which we are exiled. The task of the Church is conservative insofar as we are speaking about conserving the family as the bedrock of society and the institution that civilizes citizens and humanizes life in the world. For those who pay close attention to the witness of the Church in this area, the Gospel of Jesus Christ will appear clearly as Christians live the Christian life out in the context of sex, marriage, children, and family. "You are the light of the world." (Matt. 5:14)

The Social Goals of Those Promoting Same Sex Marriage

The website, BeyondMarriage.org, has a vision statement crafted by leftist social activists, which serves as a strategy piece for those promoting same sex marriage today, a manifesto for heating up the culture wars. (The names of the signatories are given on the site and they include many well-known academics, lawyers, activists etc.)

The document is called "Beyond Same-Sex Marriage: A New Strategic Vision" and I reproduce here the Executive Summary with my comments. The quotes are in regular text; my comments are in [bold and square brackets].

"The time has come to reframe the narrow terms of the marriage debate in the United States.
Conservatives are seeking to enshrine discrimination in the U.S. Constitution through the Federal Marriage Amendment. [Note, the website name itself makes it clear that the issue for these people is not including same sex couples in the existing institution called "marriage," but rather moving beyond marriage altogether. This will become clear as we go along.] But their opposition to same-sex marriage is only one part of a broader pro-marriage, “family values” agenda that includes abstinence-only sex education, stringent divorce laws, coercive marriage promotion policies directed toward women on welfare, and attacks on reproductive freedom. [The concern of this movment is not merely with a single issue, SSM, but with the whole family values agenda, which they oppose.] Moreover, a thirty-year political assault on the social safety net has left households with more burdens and constraints and fewer resources. [Integral to their vision is the expansion of the welfare state, which is needed to replace the family in supporting children.]

Meanwhile, the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) movement has recently
focused on marriage equality as a stand-alone issue. While this strategy may secure rights and
benefits for some LGBT families, it has left us isolated and vulnerable to a virulent backlash. We
must respond to the full scope of the conservative marriage agenda by building alliances across
issues and constituencies. Our strategies must be visionary, creative, and practical to
counter the right's powerful and effective use of marriage as a “wedge” issue that pits one
group against another. The struggle for marriage rights should be part of a larger effort to
strengthen the stability and security of diverse households and families. [Note how this document seeks to place the current political issue in the context of the broader agenda. When conservatives talk about this broader agenda, the friends of this leftist agenda in the main-stream media always accuse the conservatives of "alarmism" and of using "slippery slope arguments." But here we get the real story.] To that end, we advocate:

Ø Legal recognition for a wide range of relationships, households and families – regardless
of kinship or conjugal status. [Not just SSM, but presumeably polygamy, incestuous relationships, group marriage etc. No limits are specified.]

Ø Access for all, regardless of marital or citizenship status, to vital government support
programs including but not limited to health care, housing, Social Security and pension
plans, disaster recovery assistance, unemployment insurance and welfare assistance.

Ø Separation of church and state in all matters, including regulation and recognition of
relationships, households and families. [This is code for overturning morality which religious people advocate for and atheists do not. Atheist morality, however, may be imposed without any problem. Strictly speaking, marriage law is not about religion. Marriage existed before Christianity started.]

Ø Freedom from state regulation of our sexual lives and gender choices, identities and
expression. [Interestingly, no conflict is perceived between saying the government should fund my sexual preferences but have no say in my sexual choices whatsoever, even if a compelling state intrests exists, eg. children.]
Marriage is not the only worthy form of family or relationship, and it should not be legally and
economically privileged above all others. [Here we come to the heart of the matter. All the laws privileging and encouraging marriage have their roots in precisely this conviction: that marriage is the best institution for raising children and unique becaue it is rooted not in social convention or law, but in nature, and thus precedes the state.] A majority of people – whatever their sexual and gender identities – do not live in traditional nuclear families. [This statement was not true 50 years ago, but it is today. Here we see that SSM is just another step in the degneration of marriage and family in the late modern West. First there had to be widespread acceptance for contraception, abortion, companionate marriage, no-fault divorce, extending the benefits of marriage to cohabiting couples, and child-less marriage. Then and only then SSM makes sense as the next logical step in the destruction of marriage altogether.] They stand to gain from alternative forms of household recognition beyond one-size-fits-all marriage. [These trends toward individualism and the separation of reproduction from sex are accepted as unquestionable goods and as inevitable. Of course, there is another option. Rather than continuing further down this road, we could instead try to reverse the negative trends of the sexual revolution, strengthen marriages and acknowledge the natural goodness of the link between procreation and mutuality in marriage. But this would mean calling into question the hedonism and individualism of contemporary consumerist culture.] For example:

· Single parent households
· Senior citizens living together and serving as each other’s caregivers (think Golden Girls)
· Blended and extended families
· Children being raised in multiple households or by unmarried parents
· Adult children living with and caring for their parents
· Senior citizens who are the primary caregivers to their grandchildren or other relatives
· Close friends or siblings living in non-conjugal relationships and serving as each other’s
primary support and caregivers
· Households in which there is more than one conjugal partner
· Care-giving relationships that provide support to those living with extended illness such
as HIV/AIDS. [I guess this list covers just about everybody except those living alone. So the ultimate goal here is that marriage means anybody living with anybody, even in non-congugal relationships. Under this scenario, the singling out of marriage, i.e. parents raising their natural children together, for special protection and support, would have ended. This is the end goal of this movement.]

The current debate over marriage, same-sex and otherwise, ignores the needs and desires of so many in a nation where household diversity is the demographic norm. We seek to reframe this debate. Our call speaks to the widespread hunger for authentic and just community in ways that are both pragmatic and visionary. It follows in the best tradition of the progressive LGBT movement, which invented alternative legal statuses such as domestic partnership and reciprocal beneficiary. We seek to build on these historic accomplishments by continuing to diversify and democratize partnership and household recognition. We advocate the expansion of existing legal statuses, social services and benefits to support the needs of all our households." [In the end, it the vague notion of "households" that replace marriages. It is good to know the enemy and his plans. But make no mistake, the SSM debate is not about same sex couples wanting "into" marriage, it is about moving beyond marriage.]