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Here's a fascinating chart that probably comports with what you're seeing in real life. The age at which people are first getting married is soaring. (Via John Podhoretz). The jump in the last decade is particularly notable. There are various theories for why people are getting married later, but one notion has to do with cultural attitudes towards marriage, and the growing perception that marriage is a "capstone" of life achievements, rather than a cornerstone.

If you happen to do anything other than sleep in a cave today, chances are you have Ada Lovelace to thank for it. She is responsible for the first ever computer program. And she came up with it long before the computer even existed. Today is the fifth annual Ada Lovelace Day, celebrating the achievement of a Victorian mother-of-three who would change the world. Let’s travel back through time for a moment. Before the ZX Spectrum and before the Atari 2600, there was a thing that historians like to call the 19th century. The computer may have existed as a...

Three-quarters of handprints in ancient cave art were left by women, study finds.Women made most of the oldest-known cave art paintings, suggests a new analysis of ancient handprints. Most scholars had assumed these ancient artists were predominantly men, so the finding overturns decades of archaeological dogma. Archaeologist Dean Snow of Pennsylvania State University analyzed hand stencils found in eight cave sites in France and Spain. By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, Snow determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female. "There has been a male bias in the literature for a long time," said Snow, whose research was...

QUEBEC CITY, October 2, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Three members of the radical feminist topless protest group Femen disrupted proceedings in the Quebec legislature on Tuesday. After shouting from the gallery and removing their shirts, the trio was quickly hustled away by security. The group said they were protesting the presence of the crucifix on the wall of the National Assembly in light of the Quebec government's proposed secular “charter of values,” which seeks to ban “overt and conspicuous” religious symbols in public institutions. The Femen protesters being detained after disrupting the Quebec legislature. One of the "Femen Quebec" members, Julie-Anne...

UKRAINE, September 10, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – If the topless protests organized by the radical feminist group Femen - typically featuring skinny, attractive women - have sometimes seemed like a dirty man’s dreams come true, there might be a good reason for that. According to a new documentary, the mastermind behind the group, members of which earlier this year assaulted a Belgian Catholic bishop for his views on homosexuality, was, until recently, a man with a penchant for pretty girls, and a habit of belittling the feminist warriors he led into battle. “It’s his movement and he hand-picked the girls,” filmmaker...

You’ve no doubt seen adaptations and derivations of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet many times, both on screen and on film. But you’ve probably never seen it done the way that Philadelphia’s Curio Theatre Company is set to do it: with Romeo and Juliet as lesbian lovers. Curio’s Romeo and Juliet opens on October 11th at Calvary United Methodist Church (those liberal Methodists!) in West Philadelphia. The show marks the kickoff to the company’s 2013-14 season, all of which explores ideas surrounding gender. “I had been thinking that it would be interesting to do Romeo and Juliet as a same-sex...

... A new study comes to a startling conclusion: Among primates, including perhaps humans, monogamy evolved because it protected infants from being killed by rival males. Living in pairs, what researchers call social monogamy, has repeatedly evolved among animals, although in widely varying proportions among different groups. Thus, about 90% of bird species are socially monogamous, probably because incubating eggs and feeding hatchlings is a full-time job that requires both parents. But in mammals, females carry the babies inside their bodies and are solely responsible for providing milk to young infants—and only about 5% of species are socially monogamous.

ARCADIA, CA, July 25, 2013 (LifeSiteNews.com) – The Obama administration’s Justice Department has pressured a California school district into allowing an incoming high school freshman who is anatomically female but identifies as a boy to use the restroom and changing facilities assigned to her preferred sex, rather than her biological sex. Her family filed a federal discrimination lawsuit after the school district twice refused to allow the girl to sleep in a room with boys without a chaperone. The Obama administration pressured the school district to allow the girl to use the boys' facilities, saying in a letter that...

French President Francois Hollande has chosen a controversial Ukrainian feminist known for her topless protests as the new incarnation of Marianne, one of France's national emblems, in a move that is drawing mixed reactions. Hollande chose July 14 -- Bastille Day, the country's most popular national holiday -- to unveil a new stamp inspired by Femen movement leader Inna Shevchenko. It is the first time a foreign woman has been picked to represent Marianne. One of the stamp's creators, French artist and gay-rights activist Oliver Ciappa, confirmed on Twitter that his Marianne was based chiefly on 23-year-old Shevchenko.... Shevchenko said...

The Summer of 2013 officially began only last Friday, but already it has a good shot at achieving a dubious distinction in the annals of parental indulgence. This could be the summer that ice cream trucks for dogs go mainstream. Ever since the K99 ice cream truck set up shop in the parks of London during the summer of 2010–to the tune of the Scooby Doo theme song, no less–the trend of cruising trucks full of specially-made canine ice cream treats and cookies has been spreading and appears to be hitting its jaunty stride. Last summer, they started dropping by...

On Wednesday, Great Britain’s Girl Guides (their equivalent of U.S. Girl Scouts) and Brownies removed God from their 103-year-old oath. Instead of the passage where they used to promise to “love God,” they will now vow to be true to "myself" and develop "my beliefs." The organization said the move is intended to attract girls from secular families. Andrea Minichiello Williams, CEO of Christian Concern, condemned the move, saying, "These values have their roots in a Christian outlook. Taking ‘God’ out of the promise denies the history and foundations of the movement without offering anything in its place, with the...

Pew: Every TV News Outlet Had Coverage Supportive of Same-Sex Marriage By Alex Weprin on June 17, 2013 11:28 AM A new survey from Pew’s Project For Excellence in Journalism examines the coverage of gay marriage among the media. The big takeaway: almost every outlet presented more supportive statements in favor of gay marriage than opposing statements against gay marriage, including every TV news outlet. Pew looked at every segment on gay marriage from March 18-May 12, and classified every statement made on the issue as being supportive of gay marriage, opposed to gay marriage or neutral. As a whole,...

A Tennessee community college professor ordered her students to wear ribbons in support of gay rights and said those who supported the traditional definition of marriage are just “uneducated bigots” who “attack homosexuals with hate,” according to a legal firm representing several of the students in the class. Students in a general psychology class at Columbia State Community College were directed by their professor to wear “Rainbow Coalition” ribbons for an entire day and express their support for the homosexual community, said Travis Barham, an attorney with the Alliance Defending Freedom. Barham is calling for the college to punish Dr....

Marriage and religious freedom will stand or fall together.In recent essays here at Public Discourse, Mark Regnerus argued that same-sex marriage would harm marriage for everyone, and John Smoot argued that it would be bad for children in particular. Today I want to show the damage that redefining marriage does to religious freedom. At bottom, even the defense of religious liberty is a struggle over what is true and false about the meaning of marriage. Should the truth about marriage—that it unites men and women so that children will have fathers and mothers—be defied by the laws of the land,...

On this Father's Day, we celebrate a dying role. With all of the problems currently plaguing our culture -- crime, violence, promiscuity, poverty, divorce, drug abuse, and so on -- the one thing that we as a nation could do to remedy such things most quickly would be to return fathers to their families. You've almost certainly heard the sad statistics when it comes to fatherhood in America.

After NBA player Jason Collins broke that barrier this week, the National Football League is making sure it will be ready for any coming out party. Earlier this year, at least three college football players said they had been asked about their sexual orientation during NFL recruitment interviews, sparking calls for the NFL to do more to fight discrimination. Just hours before Collins' coming out statement was published by Sports Illustrated on Tuesday, the NFL - America's most popular sport, with $9 billion a year in revenue - released a ‘workplace conduct statement' regarding sexual orientation.

Domestic violence is not one-sided, Professor Murray Straus of the University of New Hampshire told Arutz Sheva on Monday. Straus participated at the two-day conference entitled "Violence, Conflicts and Unity in Family Context: A Reappraisal of Therapeutic and Judicial Doctrines." The conference is being held at the Ariel University. Video “The bottom line is that in domestic violence, about the same percentage of women assault their partners as men,” he said. “Women are more often injured, but that doesn’t change the fact that women attack as often as men.” Prof. Straus admitted that he’s been censored in the past for...

In the six weeks since Pope Francis' election, those who have followed him in the media have been treated to a series of tantalizing headlines about his promising views on women. The wave of excitement began during Holy Week, when Francis washed the feet of two women (and 10 men) and followed this tradition-breaking act a week later with a sermon that stressed the "special role" of women in the church. And earlier this week, the Francis-induced spiritual high continued to soar with the rumor that Francis would be handing women a record number of positions in the Holy See....