Free Republic

Pair dies less than 1 hour 30 minutes apart LAKE JACKSON, Texas - After nearly 62 years of marriage, Lake Jackson couple Tom and Delma Ledbetter left this world about two weeks ago. “Mama was from Nebraska, and daddy was from Arkansas,” said Donetta Nichols. Nichols is one of the Ledbetters' daughters. She tells us the couple first met in their early 20s through mutual friends. “He was stationed in Florida and my mother and her girlfriend had moved to Florida,” she said. Their first date of sorts happened when Tom had to “just move his car.” “They drove around...

Last year I presented a paper called "Will Millennials Ever Get Married?" at SciPy 2015. You can see video of the talk and download the paper here. I used data from the National Survey of Family Growth (NSFG) to estimate the age at first marriage for women in the U.S., broken down by decade of birth. I found evidence that women born in the 1980s and 90s were getting married later than previous cohorts, and I generated projections that suggest they are on track to stay unmarried at substantially higher rates. Yesterday the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) released...

Rosie O’Donnell’s reconciliation with daughter Chelsea didn’t last long. Chelsea, 19, accused Rosie, 55, of nearly attacking her with a wine bottle, noting that the former “View” host had the bottle handy “because she was drinking, as she did frequently.” “It was pretty late at night,” Chelsea told The Daily Mail in an interview released Wednesday. “A couple of weeks prior, I had gotten a tattoo. [Rosie] had spyware on my phone so she could see pretty much everything I did. She called me into her room and asked me about the tattoo. I denied it. She asked me to...

WASHINGTON, D.C, May 2, 2017 (LifeSiteNews) – President Trump will sign an executive order on Thursday protecting the religious liberty of the Little Sisters of the Poor and ordinary Americans who don't subscribe to gender ideology or believe in same-sex "marriage," two "senior administration officials" have confirmed to Politico. The Nation released a leaked copy of an executive order in February that prompted outrage from the left over its protections for Christians who believe marriage is the union of one man and one woman and who don't want to be forced to fund contraception. Politico says an "influential conservative who...

The 21st century is the age of living single. Today, the number of single adults in the U.S. — and many other nations around the world — is unprecedented. And the numbers don’t just say people are staying single longer before settling down. More are staying single for life. A 2014 Pew Report estimates that by the time today’s young adults reach the age of 50, about one in four of them will have never married. The ascendancy of single living has left some in a panic. U.S. News & World Report, for example, cautioned that Americans think the country’s...

A self-confessed 'diva' bride who got engaged after giving her boyfriend an ultimatum insisted on not one but two lavish ceremonies. Marketing manager Aysha Aziz, 24, and Royal Marine Tom Ellis, 27, who live in Bromley, South London, first met seven years ago when she was just 16, and celebrated their marriage at two separate weddings that set Aysha's father back £30,000.

Declining marriage rates among millenials are a matter of some unease in the conservative policy world, as can be seen in W. Bradford Wilcox’s recent article. This trend may be partly due to an increasing imbalance in the number of marriageable men and women at all levels of society. For example, women have attended and graduated from college at higher rates than men for some years now, and in 2010 women receiving doctoral degrees outnumbered men for the first time. The overall cultural sense is that women are gaining and men are falling behind, as Hanna Rosin argues in The...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rlvMAS_20K4

At this rate, the United States is going to need immigrants of all kinds to continue growth.A new Census Bureau study has just reported a sobering commentary on the current generation of young people.“There are now more young people living with their parents than in any other arrangement…What is more, almost 9 in 10 young people who were living in their parents’ home a year ago are still living there today, making it the most stable living arrangement.”It’s a factor largely of the economy, but also social mores and trends. The traditional lifetime pattern, you may recall, was for...

Texas is on the hook for more than $600,000 in fees associated with its unsuccessful fight to defend the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. Affirming a lower court ruling on the fees, the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals this week shot down Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton’s challenge to the award amount granted to two same-sex couples who had sued the state. A three-judge panel of the 5th Circuit ruled that the district court "acted will within its broad discretion" in awarding those legal fees. The fees stem from a lawsuit filed years ago by Cleopatra DeLeon and her...

A doctor at a fertility clinic in the Mississippi capital of Jackson has made a startling revelation concerning a couple who sought treatment at the center. The married pair, who cannot be named to due to patient confidentiality restrictions, had been struggling to conceive and came to the clinic to take part in the IVF program. “During the in vitro fertilization process, we take a DNA sample from both the male and female to get a profile of their genetic backgrounds,” the doctor involved told Mississippi Herald, whose name must also be suppressed to protect the identities of the patients....

A day after North Carolina lawmakers introduced legislation that would outlaw same-sex marriage and defy a landmark U.S. Supreme Court ruling, a top Republican there said Wednesday that the bill is dead on arrival. North Carolina House Speaker Tim Moore released a curt statement Wednesday shooting down the bill known as the “Uphold Historical Marriage Act.” Moore said lawmakers would not hear the bill, which prompted a new round of criticism this week for a state already drawing negative attention for its transgender bathroom law.

It seems that Jordan A. Maney is not as committed to “diversity” and “love” as she would have us believe. Recently, Ms. Maney, the black owner of a San Antonio event planning business, “All The Days Event Co.,” got a bit upset when she was asked to plan the wedding for a couple whose chosen venue contained the word “plantation.” ... As ATTN also notes, Maney also told the inquiring customer on the receiving end of her discrimination, “You’re having a wedding at a grave-site essentially. How are you going to laugh and celebrate on so many people’s blood, and...

Although the Catholic Church has taught since its inception that marriage is between one man and one woman for life, the new superior of the worldwide Jesuit religious order, Fr. Arturo Sosa Abascal, claims that despite Jesus Christ's words about marriage (Matthew 19: 3-9), "no one had a recorder to take down his words," which must be "contextualized," and that doctrine implies a "hardness" like "stone" while "human reality is much more nuanced" and "never black and white." Fr. Absacal, from Venezuela, was elected superior of the Jesuits, the Society of Jesus, in October. The Catholic religious order for men...

EXCLUSIVE: Francis bans marriages for 50 days An explosive story is out today, from a new publication out of Rome. We bring you the English language exclusive. So much to unpack in future posts and analysis. For now, we simply reprint the two articles. What a way to kick off April. (Note: Our agreement with the author was that we post this not before Midnight. Since we're on Coordinated Universal Time, our readers in the United States get an early look, technically before April begins at 12a.m.): All may repost, but you must site Rorate Caeli as the source: Happy...

RICHMOND, Va. — The Democratic governor of Virginia has vetoed a religious freedom bill which would have prohibited the government from punishing those who believe in biblical marriage and conduct their public lives in accordance with that conviction. “Although couched as a ‘religious freedom’ bill, this legislation is nothing more than an attempt to stigmatize,” Gov. Terry McAuliffe asserted in a statement on Thursday in rejecting S.B. 2314 and H.B. 2025. “No person shall be required to participate in the solemnization of any marriage, or subject to any penalty by the Commonwealth, or its political subdivisions or representatives or agents,...

Gov. Gary Herbert on Tuesday signed a bill that keeps polygamy a felony in Utah and increases the penalties for polygamists convicted of committing frauds and abuses. Herbert's approval of HB99 affirms the position Utah has held since statehood — that polygamy is against the law. Yet it's unclear how much of the bill will ever be used. Polygamists and some sympathetic attorneys have said HB99 will be unconstitutional if it's applied to consenting adults who choose to live as such a family. Joe Darger, who has three wives and was the most vocal opponent of the bill, has dared...

As chief bridesmaid at her best friend’s wedding, Claire Duke knew a certain amount of responsibility and planning would fall to her. What she didn’t imagine was that it would cost her so much money to attend the lavish ceremony that her debt would last longer than her friend’s marriage. Claire’s friend, Siobhan, chose a Caribbean beach setting for her big day four years ago. Claire, 33, a chef from the Isle of Man, says: ‘They wanted us to be there no matter what.’

From 10-11 March 2017, the Bringing America Back to Life Convention was held in Cleveland, Ohio. The convention was a gathering of nearly 1,500 defenders of life from different religious backgrounds and from all parts of the United States. This gathering, which included the courageous former Planned Parenthood nurse Abby Johnson, also featured many Catholic speakers such as Michael Hichborn (Lepanto Institute), John Smeaton (Society for the Protection of Unborn Children), Gabriele Kuby (Catholic German author), as well as John-Henry Westen (LifeSiteNews). It was John-Henry Westen who proposed a larger topic that would have an impact on all pro-life work....

Marriage and Family at the Time of Jesus Msgr. Charles Pope • March 26, 2017 • N.B.: I am in the Holy Land at this time. As my travel schedule is heavy, I am republishing some articles about life in Jesus’ day. I hope you will enjoy reading (or re-reading) them as much as I did.The word family had a wider meaning both in Aramaic and in Hebrew than it does in English. The Hebrew, ah, and the Aramaic, aha, could be used to refer to brothers, sisters, half-brothers, half-sisters, cousins, and even other near relations. Extended family networks...