Mary Cheney's Pregnancy Affects Us All

Mary Cheney’s pregnancy poses problems not just for her child, but also for all Americans. Her action repudiates traditional values and sets an appalling example for young people at a time when father absence is the most pressing social problem facing the nation. With 37 percent of American children born to fatherless families, Mary Cheney is contributing to a trend that is detrimental to all Americans who will live with the ramifications of millions of children whose anger and frustration at not knowing their father will be felt in the public schools and communities of our nation.

Mary Cheney is among that burgeoning group of adult women over age 20 that are driving the trend of women who don’t want a man in the picture, but want to have a baby. These older women are pushing out-of-wedlock birth statistics higher and higher. At a time when teen births and teen abortions are declining dramatically, older women are having more un-wed births and more abortions, including repeat abortions (indicating that they are using abortion as birth control).

Well-educated, professional Mary Cheney is flying in the face of the accumulated wisdom of the top experts who agree that the very best family structure for a child’s well-being is a married mom and dad family. Her child will have all the material advantages it will need, but it will still encounter the emotional devastation common to children without fathers.

One Georgia high school principal reported, “We have too many young men and women from single-mother families that don’t have the role models at home to teach them how to deal with adversity and handle responsibility. They’ve seen their mom work 60 hours a week just to put food on the table; they end up fending for themselves.”

When fatherless children get to be teens, the girls tend to start looking for love in all the wrong places and the boys tend to find as their role model the bad-boy celebrities of MTV, NFL and NBA.

As they grow older, fatherless children tend to have trouble dealing with male authority figures. Too often children in single-mother households end up angry at their absent fathers and resentful of the mother who has had to be a father figure, too. Typically, the boys who have a love-hate relationship with their mother end up hating all women. Numerous of them look for vulnerable women where they can act out their anger and be in control.

Mary Cheney’s action sets an example that is detrimental for mothers with less financial resources who will start down an irrevocable path into poverty that tends to be generational –– children in households without a father tend to themselves have unwed births later in life. Experts from both the left and the right cite a disastrous litany of negative outcomes that are predictable when a child grows up in a fatherless family. Such children tend to get involved in drugs, alcohol abuse, and delinquency; they tend to drop out of school and have teen pregnancies. An assistant principal in a Junior High School said that many of the behavioral problems that teachers face in the classroom stem from households without a father’s influence.

Mary’s pregnancy is an “in-your-face” action countering the Bush Administration’s pro-family, pro-marriage and pro-life policies. She continues to repudiate the work to which her father has devoted his life. Mary has repeatedly said that “studies” show that children only need a loving home. Her statement is incomplete because the experts agree that for the well-being of children, they desperately need a married father and a mother.

All those people who talk about doing what is best “for our children” need to get back to the basics: children need a married mom and dad. Children can do without a lot of the trimmings of childhood, but nothing can replace a home where the mother and dad love each other enough to commit for a lifetime and are absolutely crazy about their kids –– enough to be willing to sacrifice their own needs to see that their children get the very best.

Janice Shaw Crouse, Ph.D., Senior Fellow at the Beverly LaHaye Institute, a culturally conservative think tank for Concerned Women for America, is a recognized authority on domestic issues, the United Nations, cultural and women’s concerns.

Excuse me, that IS the point. If you're going to squawk about "better than being in a home where dad beats the crap out of mom," it's supremely ironic that what's "better" is a demographic (lesbian couples) that is clearly more prone to domestic violence than heterosexuals and male homosexuals.

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not for the government stepping in and telling women like Ms. Cheney "No!" What I am for is a social setting were WE are not COWED by political correctness into pretending we think it's normal and a peachy-keen alternative. "Married" homosexual relationships involving "offspring" are an aberration AND an abomination, and further, a very, very wise and proven guidebook, the Christian bible, warns against the cultural acceptance of homosexuality.

It's a fine point, but critical: the bible acknowledges that homosexuality is a part of the human condition -- there have always been homosexuals, and will always be homosexuals. To my mind, the most Christian and civilized way to deal with this in the best live-and-let-live tradition is through discreet mechanisms such as "being in the closet" (a supremely advanced way of politely screening rather than hiding homosexuals, as few people are ever surprised by the individual who comes "out of the closet" -- most people knew all along but figured it was none of their business) and looking the other way. I don't want to make the lives of discreet, minding-their-own business homosexuals miserable; I want to keep them from making MY life miserable, and when they expect adults and children to embrace their homosexuality as "a workable alternative'" they are setting the stage for misery in many places. An alcoholic (I am one) has the responsibility to adjust to society -- society does not have the responsiblity to adjust to the alcoholic. It's the same with homosexuality.

It's a dirty job, but good people have a responsibility to hold trends of "normalizing" homosexuality in disdain. That is not the same as prohibiting it by law, and it is not the same as holding homosexuals themselves in disdain.

If her father wasn't Dick Cheney there wouldn't be a bunch of two-faced posters saying it's nobody's business but her's.

Since I am one of the "two-faced posters" you refer to, allow me to inform you that you are up to your eyeballs on bovine excrement!

Would you pass some law deciding just which woman could become pregnant and how? This isn't gay marriage or gay adoption. It's a woman becoming pregnant who happens to be gay.

Just who would you demand not be allowed to be pregnant next?

Gay or straight, a male has to be involved with her being pregnant, even if by artificial insemination.

You claim "I like Cheney as much as anyone on FR, and I wish he could be our next president," yet can't see that since he doesn't have a problem with his daughter why should you?

Are you one of those that Kerry and Edwards were aiming their words at when they dropped the lesbian bomb a few times during the 2004 campaign?

Correct definition of the Constitution and the limitations upon the federal government is defined as stupidity. Gotcha.

Never said that Bill, what I stated was that folks who are under the mistaken impression that the Constitution in it's entirety, the DOI and every law passed by every legislature since the first in the US of A are not based on "moral concerns" are stupid. BTW, that was your word to begin with, I just went with the flow. Ignorant is perhaps a better choice of words but I'll go with your choice here.

Now I'd be happy to debate the BOR's and their applicability to indivduals if you'd like but first I want to right your ship on morality and the founding documents of the United States.

Lets hear from James Madison:

"Whenever there is an interest and power to do wrong," wrote Madison to Jefferson in 1788, "wrong will generally be done, and not less readily by a powerful and interested party than by a powerful and interested prince."

You getting the picture here Bill? Morality is not limited to your narrow definition of it. Morality "concerns" itself with right and wrong on the macro as well as the micro scale. Wrong would be a government of unlimited power with the ability to confiscate the weapons of it's citizenry absent due process and just cause, be that government a federal, state or local one.

"Well that social acceptability is pretty well entrenched now. Your condemnation of it - won't have much effect at all. Yours and others condemnation just confirms for a lot of voters that conservatives are punitive, intolerant types who want to control other people."

It's interesting that when my parents were growing up, children of divorced parents were such an exception in school that people perceived them with a great amount of sypmathy to the point of pity. Nowadays it's so commonplace that no one really cares how it's affecting the child. I wonder if gay parenting will reach that level of acceptance. Then, on the other hand, I wonder if gay parenting is nearly as dangerous as divorce.

Maybe the gay parents i've known were bad examples, or maybe I'm a religious whacko, but the whole gay parenting thing is just not sitting right in my heart.

You know, I wish I had the answers here. I've not known a lot of gay parents and the ones I do know where in heterosexual married relationships when they had children and where not out at the time. Needless to say, that creates a lot of problems in and of itself and in the end, the kids are about as messed up as the rest of us. I have also known A LOT of messed up people from traditional families, broken families and families with weird sexual issues. So I just don't know. This old world is really messed up by sin, there is no doubt in my mind.

Most of the gay folks I know are childless and prefer to keep it that way. They are not particularly militant and live quiet productive lives blending in with the rest of us. Everyone knows, their significant others are included as significant others, but we just don't talk about it much. We just behave like normal people. It's out, but it isn't really that important to any of us. It's there, but no one obsesses about it, or talks about it, or anything. It just is. A kid in the room in the 1950s probably wouldn't have had a clue until High School, and maybe not even then...although in this day and age with the gay agenda front and center in the msm and popular media, most kids would have a passing understanding by the time they were in second or third grade. Not of the specifics, but a general clue. It really irritates me that is the case.

As far as gay parenting goes, I understand. I have really mixed feelings, mostly based on the issues surrounding healthy development of sexual identity for the children. Frankly, I just haven't done any research on it simply because it doesn't affect me personally. I am a Christian, and take the Biblical admonitions seriously, although to be fair it's pretty easy for a straight person. Some of the other things are MUCH harder for me to comply with! : D Finally, I have SEVERE problems with gay adoptions for myriad reasons, but think it gets much less murky in situations when there is a biological parent.

What it comes down to for me is this. Society should hold up the traditional family as the ideal: Married Dad and Mom, then kids. The government should make policy that does not interfere with or weaken that institution...and may also do things that would strengthen it because we do know that the societies with the largest traditionally organized family structures are the healthiest.

That is why I am vehemently anti-gay marriage. It reduces marriage to sex, which is frankly ridiculous and seriously messed up. Issues of homosexuality, divorce, remarriage, single and/or out of wedlock parenthood, adultery, promiscuity and other cohabitation/sexual situations are all issues of choice and resulting consequences and must be tolerated in the name of Liberty, but not celebrated as "just the same and as good as." traditional marriage and family.

"Jeez, some people have a lot of trouble with anyone who is different than they are. They cannot grasp the idea that all people have 100% value. And so if they are men - they believe they are *better than* women because women are different than them and they don't know how to deal with that. And they think that those of a different color than they are are *lesser than* because they don't know how to deal with difference. Same with homosexuals. Homosexuals are different and therefore - they want to destroy them or shame them or call them all kinds of names and blame them for problems that they have nothing to do with."

As usual, SS, you are promoting leftist sexual ethics and immorality, as so many others are on this and other like threads.

You're comparing homosexuality with race, again, which is not only comparing apples and, say, cotter pins, but is demeaning and insulting to people of "other" races (everyone is a member of "another" race!). I have several bi-racial couples as friends, and every one of them is disgusted by being compared to homosexuals.

Race is a benign characteristic that is immutable. Homosexuality is (a) not inborn, (b) mutable and (c) far from benign.

Your adolescent spewing of 60s rhetoric is merely an "amen" chorus to all the other pro-homosexualists on Fr. It has to truth, no facts, and is based on nothing but pure sentiment.

Here's the elephant in the living room:

Homosexuality is either perfectly fine, normal, natural, healthy, and anyone who protests it being culturally equated with normal sexual relationships is a sick, hateful bigot with emotional problems and likely attracted to homosexuality themselves.

OR

Homosexuality is an emotional sickness, unnatural, immoral and unhealthy, and should be discouraged, not promoted, and those suffering from it should be offered treatment, not support in their behavior.

Which is true? Everyone needs to pick a side.

And if anyone wants to choose the first side, the burden is on you to prove that same sex behavior is natural, healthy and poses no moral risks to those who practice it and those around them (such as adolescents). I and many others have over the years posted numerous studies and articles replete with overwhelming evidence - much of it compiled by homosexuals and homosexual promoting groups - that incontestably proves the second point.

Let's see your studies proving that homosexuals are just as monogamous as normal people, do not molest children or adolescents in any larger numbers, are not more prone to drug or alcohol addiction, domestic violence, suicide, or life threatening diseases. Show us your facts, emtionally driven platitudes and personal attacks and name calling mean squat.

It's interesting that when my parents were growing up, children of divorced parents were such an exception in school that people perceived them with a great amount of sypmathy to the point of pity. Nowadays it's so commonplace that no one really cares how it's affecting the child. I wonder if gay parenting will reach that level of acceptance. Then, on the other hand, I wonder if gay parenting is nearly as dangerous as divorce.

Well there's a whole discussion and then some in that paragraph :-) There's that saying: "Change is the only thing that's permanent". Change happens - sometimes it's good - sometime's it's not. My view is that the more we move toward freedom, self-determination, love, kindess and personal responsiblity - the more I am ok with the changes.

Well contrary to the revisionists of history the DOI was nothing more than a secessionist document, a list of reasons that the separate and sovereign states gave for leaving the British Empire. It holds no legal basis for rule. So you can toss whatever that means to you right out. The only document controlling these United States is the Constitution of these United States and the Bill of Rights

but first I want to right your ship on morality and the founding documents of the United States. Lets hear from James Madison:

Interesting. At no point do I see from those words an advocation for the general government to become involved in moral concerns of the citizens of the respective states. I have no doubt these men advocated morality, called for morality, and even wished for morality of all the citizens of the states but my point was at no point did they advocate usage of the federal government's powers to legislate morality. That was left to the states. And since you use Madison, let's see what Madison had to say in arguing for the Constitution shall we?

The powers reserved to the several States will extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the State. The operations of the federal government will be most extensive and important in times of war and danger; those of the State governments, in times of peace and security. As the former periods will probably bear a small proportion to the latter, the State governments will here enjoy another advantage over the federal government. The more adequate, indeed, the federal powers may be rendered to the national defense, the less frequent will be those scenes of danger which might favor their ascendancy over the governments of the particular States.--Federalist 45

Where did Madison say that power lay again? Oh yes, the states. Not Congress, not SCOTUS, not the Executive, but the states.

You getting the picture here Bill?

You getting the picture here jwalsh? Except for the explicit issues laid out in the BOR that were intended to limit the federal government only, issues such as homosexuality, marriage, abortion, etc. were intended to be dealt with by the states. Mucking around with the Constitution or the federal legislative branch to enforce your views would be, as I said originally, a foreign idea to the Framers of the Constitution

I just posted this reply to sunsong, a 60s era (at least in ideology) leftist who consistently spews leftist nonsense with each and every post:

(sunsong, spewing the usual leftist propaganda) "Jeez, some people have a lot of trouble with anyone who is different than they are. They cannot grasp the idea that all people have 100% value. And so if they are men - they believe they are *better than* women because women are different than them and they don't know how to deal with that. And they think that those of a different color than they are are *lesser than* because they don't know how to deal with difference. Same with homosexuals. Homosexuals are different and therefore - they want to destroy them or shame them or call them all kinds of names and blame them for problems that they have nothing to do with."

As usual, SS, you are promoting leftist sexual ethics and immorality, as so many others are on this and other like threads.

You're comparing homosexuality with race, again, which is not only comparing apples and, say, cotter pins, but is demeaning and insulting to people of "other" races (everyone is a member of "another" race!). I have several bi-racial couples as friends, and every one of them is disgusted by being compared to homosexuals.

Race is a benign characteristic that is immutable. Homosexuality is (a) not inborn, (b) mutable and (c) far from benign.

Your adolescent spewing of 60s rhetoric is merely an "amen" chorus to all the other pro-homosexualists on Fr. It has to truth, no facts, and is based on nothing but pure sentiment.

Here's the elephant in the living room:

Homosexuality is either perfectly fine, normal, natural, healthy, and anyone who protests it being culturally equated with normal sexual relationships is a sick, hateful bigot with emotional problems and likely attracted to homosexuality themselves.

OR

Homosexuality is an emotional sickness, unnatural, immoral and unhealthy, and should be discouraged, not promoted, and those suffering from it should be offered treatment, not support in their behavior.

Which is true? Everyone needs to pick a side.

And if anyone wants to choose the first side, the burden is on you to prove that same sex behavior is natural, healthy and poses no moral risks to those who practice it and those around them (such as adolescents). I and many others have over the years posted numerous studies and articles replete with overwhelming evidence - much of it compiled by homosexuals and homosexual promoting groups - that incontestably proves the second point.

Let's see your studies proving that homosexuals are just as monogamous as normal people, do not molest children or adolescents in any larger numbers, are not more prone to drug or alcohol addiction, domestic violence, suicide, or life threatening diseases. Show us your facts, emtionally driven platitudes and personal attacks and name calling mean squat.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/news/1750811/posts?q=1&&page=650#650

So you see nothing amiss with people who demand to be identified by their sexual proclivities, demand that society change to embrace those sexual proclivities even though the same are associated to mental disorders (and that lead the 'enlightened' to change the definitions of mental disorders to accommodate the degeneracies, much the way slick willy chnaged the definition of sex to exclude oral sexual stimulation because he wanted that from a cadre of 'providers'). You're not alone it appears, after reading the spittle on this thread. But then I'm in the camp that believes sexual degeneracy in women is not at all the same animal as that in frenzied degenerate men. Lesbians seem capable of loving and caring despite their sexual deviancy whereas the overwhelming number of degenerate men are too consumed with their sexual lust to actually care for any length of time about anything but themselves.

Well contrary to the revisionists of history the DOI was nothing more than a secessionist document, a list of reasons that the separate and sovereign states gave for leaving the British Empire. It holds no legal basis for rule. So you can toss whatever that means to you right out. The only document controlling these United States is the Constitution of these United States and the Bill of Rights.

OK Bill I've had enough. Before we proceed I'd like you apologise for your behavior. Your abiltiy to construct strawdogs is only exceeded by your ability to make false assertions. IOW's you lie at your leisure.

So here is where we are Bill. You can either find a quote by me stating that the DOI has a "legal basis for rule", you can admit to an error in judgement or you can simply state that what you write has no basis in reality and you forgot to take your meds. Any of those will do.

You can't seem to grasp the the American Revolution as expressed in the DOI was based on the moral concern that men were endowed with certain rights and that when governments abrogated those rights the moral thing to do was to abolish that immoral government.

The Constitution was drawn to protect the rights of "the people" because that was the moral thing to do in the eyes of the founders. Kabeesh?

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