Free Republic

Last week I delivered a guest lecture at a Christian liberal arts college entitled “Each Day Dies With Sleep: Literary and Theological Reflections upon Mortality.” As I thought through the topic over the previous weeks, two superficially disparate questions puzzled me. Why is it that the people most vocally committed to causes connected to death (abortion, assisted suicide, euthanasia) are often the same who are committed to progressive sexual causes? And why do abortion advocates frequently see it not as a necessary evil but as a positive good? As to the first question, that the same people often, though not...

A new report released by the Family Research Council’s Marriage and Religion Research Institute (MARRI) says that only 16 percent of 15- to 17-year-old teens in Baltimore have been raised in an intact, married family. The report, released Wednesday and compiled in light of the recent Baltimore riots, cites Census Bureau statistics showing that, in terms of family units, Baltimore is “one of the five least intact counties of America,” along with Cuyahoga, Ohio; the Bronx, N.Y.; the District of Columbia; and Shelby County, Tenn. The report cites studies indicating that children who grow up in intact, married families are...

A couple gave their teenage daughters cocaine and marijuana if they went to school and did household chores, authorities said. Chad and Joey Mudd, of Largo, a suburb in the Tampa-St. Petersburg area, gave their daughters, ages 13 and 14, drugs as a “bargaining tool” for school attendance and doing chores, Pinellas County Sheriff’s detectives said. They were arrested Monday. According to an affidavit, the mother said she smoked pot with her daughters five times and the father snorted cocaine with the teens and one of his daughter’s boyfriends in his truck. …

Ready For The Marriage Apocalypse? By Carol Costello, April 7, 2015 Carol Costello-Profile-Image Carol Costello: Talk to any millennial and you can envision an America virtually marriage-free In countries like Sweden or Denmark, people don't feel pressured to marry even if they have kids together (CNN)The marriage apocalypse may be coming. Talk to any millennial and you can envision an America virtually marriage-free, with everyone happily single. I did. And I do. Recently, I talked about marriage with a group of journalism students from my alma mater, Kent State University. They came to me for career advice, which I gave...

Living with roommates is practically a rite of passage in New York City. It often begins with far too many people sharing too little space and ends with a move into an apartment of one’s own, or with that special someone. But with rents reaching new highs, single 20-somethings are not the only ones looking for someone with whom to share the rent. Couples are living with roommates even after they’ve tied the knot.

After six years in office, there are few things that President Obama does that surprises me. Notwithstanding this, I was still shocked to hear his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. Using some misguided moral equivalency, President Obama reached back over almost a thousand years to compare a group of Christians then to current day radical Islamists killing innocents in the name of Allah, telling Christians not to get on their “high horse”. (Not to mention, he conveniently omitted the context of the Crusades, a response to Islamic conquest). At times during the speech, it appeared the President was taking...

Less than half (46%) of U.S. kids younger than 18 years of age are living in a home with two married heterosexual parents in their first marriage. This is a marked change from 1960, when 73% of children fit this description, and 1980, when 61% did, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of recently-released American Community Survey (ACS) and Decennial Census data. Rapid changes in American family structure have altered the image of who’s gathering for the holidays. While the old “ideal” involved couples marrying young, then starting a family, and staying married till “death do they part”, the...

Rashana Jackman isn’t old enough to vote in an election, but she could soon have a vote on a city-appointed board that takes influential stands on neighborhood issues. At 17, the Brooklyn high school junior is considering applying to serve on her community board, under a new state law that lets 16- and 17-year-olds join the panels that function as front lines of local government in the nation’s biggest city. The advisory but oft-heeded groups opine on zoning changes and liquor license applications, consult on city budgeting for local projects and serve as conduits for community concerns. “It’s a great...

New York, NY (CFAM) — There are more young people in the world now than ever before. According to the United Nations Population Fund’s latest report, this represents an unprecedented opportunity for progress, but only if future generations are smaller. UNFPA’s prescription to ensure a “demographic dividend” includes freely available abortion for adolescents, removing age of consent, drug and prostitution laws, and reduced parental involvement in the sexual formation of their children. “[Y]oung people require a wide range of sexual and reproductive health services, including . . . safe abortion care,” says the 2014 State of World Population, released Tuesday....

Republican House candidates bested Democratic House candidates 58 percent to 40 percent among voters who are married and have children, according to the national exit poll published by CNN. Similarly, Republican House candidates bested Democratic House candidates 58 percent to 41 percent among all married voters, according to the exit poll. The exit poll indicated that Democratic candidates had a stronger appeal to voters who are not married—particularly unmarried women. …

The October surprises just keep on coming, courtesy of President Obama. According to The Weekly Standard, “during a speech in Rhode Island today, President Obama called for more taxpayer-spending on pre-school in order to “make sure that women are full and equal participants in our economy.” I can respect that. But then the President followed those remarks by saying (emphasis added): And sometimes someone, usually mom, leaves the workplace to stay at home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of her life as a result. That’s not a choice we want Americans...

Hillary Rodham Clinton says voters should turn pay inequity and women’s financial security into a political movement this fall. Clinton says issues like raising the minimum wage, equal pay and providing affordable child care need to be “in the lifeblood” of the upcoming elections. …

A team of researchers at North Carolina State University published a study challenging the idea that home-cooked meals are ultimately “better” for the family as a whole. […] Their time spent accompanying parents shuttling children to checkups, grocery shopping, and, of course, preparing food, led the team to a set of real world conclusions at odds with stereotypical parenting wisdom. For all of the health benefits associated with food prepared at home, the task presented parents, particularly mothers, with a slew of economic and interpersonal stressors. “One could say that home-cooked meals have become the hallmark of good mothering, stable...

The cost of a product that half the world’s population needs multiple times a day, every month for approximately 30 years, is simply too much.When I got my first period, I was in the most embarrassing place my then-11-year-old self could have imagined: my grandparents’ house. I wasn’t sure what to do, so I just put on extra pairs of underwear and threw them away one-by-one, scrunched at the bottom of the bathroom trash bin, as I bled through them. Finally, with nary a pair of panties in sight, I was forced to tell my mother. I have never been...

The terms “husband” and “wife” have been deleted from California’s marriage law under a bill signed into law Monday by Gov. Jerry Brown. The terms will be replaced with “spouse” to accommodate same-sex marriage, which became legal in the state last year after the Supreme Court struck down a voter-approved ban on it. SB1306, the bill signed Monday by Brown, takes effect Jan. 1 and reflects the legality of gay marriage after a decade of litigation. The law also removes limits on recognizing same-sex marriages performed out of state.

President Barack Obama brought forward a new administration effort Monday to place quality teachers in schools that need them the most. Obama said the U.S. education system has “a problem” in that students who would benefit the most from having skilled or experienced teachers in their classrooms are least likely to get them, including black and Hispanic students. Obama credits education and good teachers for helping him get to the White House. He said he wants to make sure that every child has the same access to good teachers that he had. …

AFTER spending two years studying services for domestic violence survivors, I was surprised to realize that one of the most common barriers to women’s safety was something I had never considered before: the high value our culture places on two-parent families.

Paid maternity leave and sick days, a higher minimum wage, and pay equity legislation could address a range of women’s economic issues, panelists told a Senate committee during a hearing last week. The Senate Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee held its second hearing in a month last week to discuss legislative proposals to help women succeed in the workplace. Committee Chairman Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) noted in his opening remarks that the United States is the only industrialized nation without a federal law providing workers access to paid maternity leave. He said the U.S. must strive to provide paid maternity...

With a little tax planning -- or even divorce -- wealthy Americans can easily bilk Obamacare out of tens of thousands of dollars in taxpayer subsidies to cover their insurance costs, according to a “how-to” written by a well-known financial advisor. David John Marotta, of Marotta Wealth Management in Charlottesville, Va., said just a few lifestyle changes would enable a family that owns a business providing income of $140,000 to legally win enough subsidies to cover all but $600 of a $10,825 Obamacare silver plan policy. “In trying to make Obamacare a middle-class entitlement, the legislation encourages even wealthy people...

Isaac Barnett took a bold step last year: He told teachers and classmates at his Kansas high school that the student they had known as a girl now wanted to be accepted as a boy. His close childhood friend, who also identified as transgender, was ready to reveal his secret, too. […] With children rejecting the birth gender at younger ages and the transgender rights movement gaining momentum, schools in districts large and small, conservative and liberal, are working to help transitioning youth fit in without a fuss. California this year became the first state with a law spelling out...