Cohabitation

I have become increasingly aware of the growing problem of cohabitation between unmarried young men and women lately. The Census Bureau reports that cohabitation has become the fastest growing family configuration over the past two decades, increasing at an astonishing rate of 700% since 1970.

The “sexual revolution,” brought on by the invention of the birth control pill, has uncoupled the triad of sex, marriage, and babies that has held the family together for thousands of years. Now, young people do not see the point of getting married in order to have sex. They see living together as a viable alternative to the way things were before. They see marriage as an encumbrance to their desired style of living—this attitude is especially prevalent in young men, who shy away from taking the responsibility of caring for a wife and child. Both men and women seek self-expression and fulfillment; and they see marriage and family as a roadblock to attaining those goals.

 Young adults have devised two different ways of rationalizing the use of cohabitation in their lives: They see a high road and a low road to justify breaking away from the old ways of the Bible and classical family structure.

The high road says, “Marriage is such an important thing in life that I do not want to make any mistakes by marrying the wrong person. So…I will make sure of our compatibility by living together for a time; if we prove to be compatible, we will certainly get married. If we do not like one another after living together, then we will just split; and nobody will be hurt by all the well-known pain of a divorce. It’s just as simple as that!”

People on the low road of rationalism say, “There is nothing about a piece of paper that should obligate us to stay together. If we love one another, then we will live together in just the same way as if we had been married in front of a church altar. Cohabitation will allow the warmth of love, not cold legalities to regulate our relationship to one another.”

There is a myth afoot that cohabitation before marriage decreases the divorce rate. Studies in Canada, Sweden, New Zealand, and the United States show that those who cohabit before marriage have substantially higher divorce rates than those who do not. In fact, the recorded differences range from 50-100% higher. Sociologists have found that cohabitation is associated with greater marital conflict and poorer communication. Their studies showed that the longer the premarital cohabitation, the more likely will divorce follow marriage. Studies at the University of Nebraska in a nationally representative sample found that “cohabitation is not related to marital happiness, but it is related to lower levels of marital interaction, higher levels of marital disagreement and marital instability.” In other words, cohabiters tend to fight a lot and do not frequently have a lasting relationship with one another.  A joint study conducted by three Canadian universities found that of all couples married less than ten years, 31% of those who cohabited before marriage divorced, compared to a divorce rate of 14% for those who did not cohabit before marriage. It has been observed that those who cohabited before marriage and later divorce are more likely to move back into a cohabitational situation after their marriage dissolves—nearly extinguishing their chances for a more successful subsequent relationship.

Many young women think that if they have sex with a boyfriend, he will marry them in the near future. Sadly, this is usually not true. Young men who can get sex from a woman without assuming the responsibility of marriage very often will not marry her.

Cohabitation flies in the face of biblical admonitions. Nothing is more clear in the Bible than the fact that having sex with a person to whom one is not married is adultery and punishable by loss of one’s eternal life in Christ. (Rev 21:8; Heb 13:4)

 

 

 

How Bad Is This Debt Crisis

You may be tired of hearing about the debt crisis; but I am increasingly scared to death about it. Right now, every family in America owes $139,000 to pay off the debt of our national government. We are going into debt at a rate of $6 billion every day; that is $4 million every hour. All that money is borrowed. For every dollar of revenue the federal government takes in, it spends $2.06. How long can that go on??!!

46% of our national debt is owned by foreigners; and the largest share is owned by China; the second largest owner is Japan. It is reported in the Wall Street Journal that China is quietly decreasing its intake of U.S. treasury bonds. That’s understandable; they can see that our nation will soon be unable to pay the interest on those bonds. Of course, a lot of the ownership of treasuries is with the Federal Reserve Board, which only has to print money in order to buy the “securities.” 

I would like to see any Democrat who reads this post respond by telling me how this can go on forever. Just how can we continue spending much, much, more than we take in and produce?

Guns and Schools

The country is rightly very upset by the school shooting in Newtown, CT. It is more than a shame that parents in the United States cannot send their children to a public school without fearing that some maniac might shoot them dead in their classroom. But…that’s the situation these days.

We have seen these school and public-place shootings escalate in recent years. At Columbine High School in Colorado two students shot 12 others several years ago. Last year in Norway, a country with tight gun-control and licensing regulations, Anders Breivik methodically gunned down 69 people, mostly teenagers on the island of Utoya. This year, James Holmes shot 12 people in an Aurora, Colorado, movie theater. College-student Seung-Hui Cho shot and killed 32 people at Virginia Tech University.

These senseless killings look much like copycat acts. We are told on BBC World News that several persons have called the police claiming to be the gunman who killed all the people at Newtown. It seems that some people crave the notoriety of senselessly killing other people. With claims like this, it is likely that one or more of these false claimants to this horrible crime will someday try to repeat it in some other venue.

I think it is very understandable that many families across America are opting to educate their children at home rather than exposing them to gun violence in the public schools. To me, that seems like a very reasonable solution to the problem if there is facility at home for a home-school program.

The problem of gun violence depends on three factors, i.e., the gun, the perpetrator, and the societal influences which prepare violent people to do such things.

In America, we only hear talk about how to influence the incidence of gun-violence by dealing with the gun situation. This would seem difficult in a country that has 200 million guns in a population of 311 million persons. Furthermore, there is data from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives that point out the fact that in areas where firearm ownership is large, violent crime is less prevalent than in areas where there is a smaller ownership level of guns.

I think that gun-violence might be addressed more effectively by addressing the societal factors that encourage people to carry out violent acts with guns. Decreasing the portrayal of gun and other types of violence in TV and movies would seem to be fertile ground for addressing this problem.

 

An Open Letter to President Obama

Mr. President,

I understand from your public pronouncements that you will not tolerate any kind of fiscal deal with Congress unless that body agrees to waive its right to approve/disapprove any request by your office to raise the debt ceiling for the nation. I understand that you want to avoid such an argument that took place last summer over this issue and that threatened to shut down the government because of lack of ready cash.

I think it is self-evident that such a change in determining the debt limit would be extremely unwise. No responsible Congress would ever abdicate its right to determine the debt limit of the country to a President for his unilateral upgrade. A request like that from your office is totally out of line and smacks of a total takeover of the nation’s finances by the office of the President. What you are requesting is the right of a king, not of a President in a democratic republic, such as the United States.

If such a thing ever happened, especially during the administration of a President who is a profligate spender, inflation would go absolutely wild; and nobody in his right mind would every buy United States bonds—they would not be worth the paper on which they were written.

I think that with such a request to Congress, the time may have come for America to bite the fiscal bullet and undergo the kind of austerity exercise we see going on in Greece. The difference in America and Greece, however, is that America does not have anyone to bail us out of bad spending practices.

I, also, believe that your demand for the right to tax the upper income group in America is misguided. I am well aware of the fact that in our country, the rich among us are becoming richer; and the lower income class is suffering from decreasing economic power. That is a bad effect of our economy, but taking money away from the very group that has investment money to use in developing infrastructure and increasing production will not help. Your policy of spending money on stimulus programs that temporarily puts money into the lower income level population has proven ineffective in alleviating this recession.

PLEASE look at the Republican proposals for handling the “fiscal cliff” problem; I think they have the right ideas.

Thanks for considering my opinions.

                                                            Sincerely,

                                                            Edward Manring
                                                            Westlake, Ohio

What The Republicans Did Wrong

Multiple editorials have been written on the subject I have titled in this blog post; but I have not heard the one I intend to propose, now. Mostly, we have heard that the Republicans looked like the party of big government at a time when low-income people needed jobs—this misrepresentation lived because the Democrats portrayed them that way in their TV ads. Then, again, we heard that the demographics of the nation changed to a pattern that favored a Democrat voter majority. There may be some truth to that, as I mentioned in my last blog post on “Moral Demographics Change” on 19 November. Specifically, I noted that President Obama was elected by Hispanic, low-income, female, and young voters. I also noted that I think the moral stance of the Obama voters had an impact on the election outcome. Today, I want to continue with that theme by pointing out that the Republicans did not play to their traditional moral strong points in the election; and that may have had a major effect on the election’s outcome.

A recent book by Jonathan Haidt, “The Righteous Mind,” points out in well-researched and repeatedly confirmed studies that people have six moral foundations from which they view the world. These foundations are liberty, care/harm, fairness, authority, loyalty, and sanctity.

Liberals and conservatives both consider all six of these foundations significant, but liberals are strongest on care/harm, fairness, and liberty (at least as it applies to personal civil rights). Many of them hardly consider authority, loyalty, and sanctity as being significant in their moral catalog. To a liberal, moral importance is attached to the question of “Is the proposed idea going to harm someone—especially, me (This is the care/harm foundation.)? Also, the liberal is concerned with the question, “Is this proposal fair?” As I pointed out above, liberals consider liberty mostly limited to the concerns of individuals; and that is where all the furor over civil rights for individuals comes from.

On the other hand, conservatives consider all six as being important in their thinking. But conservatives have a different bent on the question of liberty. Conservatives seem to be more concerned with the liberty of groups of people rather than with individuals. The conservative wants liberty for groups like the motivated, the hard working, the entrepreneur class, and, yes, the rich investor class. The conservative also wants liberty for the poor who are willing to work for rewards.

During the last election, Democrats sounded out strongly for the fairness and care/harm foundations, claiming that it is only fair for the rich to pay more taxes and that people are being hurt by the present health care situation in the nation. In other words, the Democrats appealed strongly to their moral foundation base.

On the Republican side, we heard a lot about the economy and joblessness. I think that that appeal was made primarily to neutralize the strong position the Democrats had in their fairness and care/harm message. But…the Republicans failed to capitalize on their much stronger position on loyalty to the nation. They failed to express the  appeal they could have made for more military and State Department authority in the Middle East where the government has largely failed to deal effectively with disorder there.  And, to compound their failures the Republicans failed to capitalize on an appeal to the Americans’ moral foundation in the matter of sanctity. For example, they failed to point out effectively the travesty against freedom of religion being made by the Democrats in implementing the Affordable Care Act.

Another area where the Republicans failed to stress their strong foundational point on authority was where they failed to emphasize the moral foundation of abiding with the law concerning immigration. They could have preached a policy of law abiding in border crossing that would have reinforced the authority of the law and at the same time would have benefited the Hispanic immigrant. Such a policy was described by me in my blog post dated 7 July 2010. (You may access that post in the left column of this blog by clicking on the date 7/04/10-7/11/10.)

Now…all that being said, how sure am I that these moral foundations had a large effect on the election—I’m not very sure. In the end, I think that the American electorate largely ignored their moral underpinnings and just voted according to naked self-interest.

 

Moral Demographics of America Change!

Juan Williams, writing in the Wall Street Journal on November 8, page A21, reported that there has been a demographic change in America that gave the recent presidential victory to President Obama. The essence of the change is that many more Hispanic, low-income, female, and young voters went to the polls to reelect Mr. Obama. GOP support is found mainly in older, white, voters mostly centered in the South and in small towns and rural communities. This demographic profile predicts bad things for the Republican Party in the future, because it seems to be a profile of voters that cling to governmental handouts and that will vote benefits for themselves predictably in the future.

I think there is a much more important and larger demographic change in American society than the things listed above. That is the demographic change in our moral belief systems. America has been losing moral fiber over the past several decades. As examples of this, consider the following: Prayer has been eliminated in schools; and mention of Christ in school is proscribed, because it offends atheists. No fault divorce has been instituted making it much easier to break up families. Pornography is all over the place in the name of freedom of speech. Abortion has killed 55million unborn children since 1973. Homosexuality has gained footing as a “normal expression of biological existence” in the minds of vast parts of our society. Same sex marriage and civil unions are commonplace. Some states are enacting euthanasia laws. And on and on….

Another interesting example of the decay of our moral stance is the open acceptance of former President Bill Clinton in the Democrat campaign for President Obama. Bill Clinton, the man who seduced the office girl on the floor of the oval office! That fact did not seem to deter voters on the Democrat side of the ballot. Nor did it even raise eyebrows on those who listened to him speak on TV for President Obama.

In contrast to the open acceptance of Bill Clinton, was the avoidance the media, the Republican Party, and the electorate gave to former President George W. Bush. He was presented to the American people as an unpopular president; and his record was lambasted repeatedly during the campaign—because he had spent too much money on Katrina and the gulf wars. Perhaps he and his FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) had spent too much money relocating New Orleans in its below-sea-level location; and I admit that that was a waste of many dollars. But…to criticize him for spending money the government did not have on the bail out and then electing Barack Obama is just a joke. Obama’s administration has spent more deficit money than any administration in history! The criticism of President Bush for the gulf wars was based on his claim that Iraq contained weapons of mass destruction; those weapons were never found. That criticism was legitimate; but the criticism fails to recognize that those two wars rid the world of Saddam Hussein, one of the worst murdering tyrants the world has seen in recent decades and set up the nation of Iraq as a fledgling constitutional republic.

I would posit that spending money that we do not have is also a moral offence; but, again, the American electorate does not seem to recognize that; and for that reason, it freely gave the Presidency back to Barack Obama.

To delineate the moral differences between The Democrat and Republican parties, I would invite you to look into the differences these two parties have on moral issues such as abortion, same-sex marriages, euthanasia laws, and incursion into religious views about contraception. In every one of these issues, the Democrats mostly come down on the side of immorality; and Republicans mostly come down on the side of morality.

It seems obvious to me that people who lack moral convictions will continue to vote Democrat ballots; and those who hope for a more morally intact nation will vote Republican. I know that that generalization will not always be true, but I think it is a fair estimate of how Americans will vote in the future. And that tendency does not bode well for the GOP.

 

 

On a Vote and a Prayer

After what feels like the longest campaign season on record, the US presidential election of 2012 is just next week. The rigors of the campaign are felt in particular by many Christians, not because they have deep sympathy in their hearts for the exhausted candidates, "feeling their pain" to take a cue from Bill Clinton, but precisely because they don't. The choices we are faced with are not auspicious. On the one hand, we have on the Democratic ticket the most committed left-wing ideologue since Delano Roosevelt, but with his ethics modified by the standards of the sexual/homosexual revolution, his economics modeled on the Bolshevik flavor of Marxism, his political principles founded on the Chicago model, and holding in his hands by virtue of the successful passage of the ObamaCare legislation, a power never conceived even in Hillary Clinton's 1993 attempted health care system take-over.

The Republicans, after a long primary struggle, present to us the moderate conservative and Mormon, Mitt Romney. While many of Mr. Romney's stated positions on issues facing our nation are laudable, e.g., energy independence for America and a significant spending reduction for the federal government,  many of them are compromise positions, consistent with his moderate conservative political background. For example, while he opposes gay marriage, he would still recognize so-called domestic partnerships. While he is generally pro-life, he and Paul Ryan, his Roman Catholic vice-presidential candidate, would not introduce legislation that protects unborn children in the cases of rape or incest.

When we ask, "What is at stake in this election?" the first answer that comes to mind for most Christians seems to be "the peace of my own conscience if I vote for Mitt Romney." It's a good answer, indicating the kind of serious reflection that the servant of Christ, the conscious subject of King Jesus, must engage in. For some, that is enough to throw them off voting for president in this election altogether. It is my experience in discussing this issue with fellow believers that they fall into three categories: 1) those who claim there is little to no difference between the candidates, 2) some few who, whether they see clear differences or not, believe that they may not vote for Romney because he is not a Christian, 3) those who see significant differences and will vote for Romney despite his moderate views on some of the issues.

Come election day, what is a Christian to do? I'd like to talk about these three positions in brief, and share with you my own view.

I. The claim that both candidates are essentially the same

This depends on what color your glasses are. If you are filtering out all the light except for that which would show both candidates to be Evangelical Christians, or fully consistent defenders of unborn life, or thorough-going principled conservatives, a case can be made for this position. Neither candidate is any of these, and they would both fall into the same wide bin labeled "Not Ideal." But I hope it's evident that we have to use more data than that in order to distinguish them. The Apostle Paul does. When he tells us to pray for our civil government, the goal he sets for our prayers is less ambitious than that of many of the exclusive categories we might care to use as filters. He says that we may consider our prayers answered if we are granted by our civil government the opportunity "to lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence" (1 Tim 2:2). That's not to say there isn't value in the ideals we hold. It is to say that there is also value in a ruler who will not force us to pay for abortions and promote them in third world countries through our tax dollars, and who won't foster the euthanization of the elderly or disabled, as distinct from a ruler who will do all of those things, and who, furthermore, begins to define away our freedom to serve God in every sphere of life by calling our freedom of religion, rather, "freedom of worship," confining us and our faith within the walls of our churches.

Last week I received an e-mail from a friend of mine with a link to an article by historian Stephen McDowell of the Providence Foundation containing a valuable summary of the differences between President Obama and Mitt Romney on issues of concern to Christian voters. I encourage you to take a look at it if you are unsure of how much difference exists between the candidates.

http://providencefoundation.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/06/PP-Sept-2012-election-final.pdf

II. Can we vote for a non-Christian?

It's plain from Scripture that we don't have to have a Christian governor in order for us to submit to him, but can we vote for a non-Christian?

Democracy is a bit of an odd bird in the panorama of political systems that have prevailed throughout history, and while the Bible has much to say on the topic of the Christian and government, it doesn't explicitly address the question of voting for candidates for civil office. As a result, most of us have formed instinctive ideas of what casting a vote for a civil ruler means. Speaking for myself, and perhaps many of you, the paradigm I often used in the past is that of an imaginary, sovereign officer selector. "If I had the power to put in office anyone whom I chose, whom would it be, were I to behave as God requires?" is the question lurking behind the ethics of voting that many of us hold. "Then I must vote for that sort of person," comes the answer. The problem with this paradigm is that we are not sovereign officer selectors, and our choices are much more limited than that. The question we should be asking is, what is our duty given a very narrow range of options?

There is no doubt that there is advantage to living under the rule of wise, godly leaders (Pr 29:2). We should support such, and seek to propel them into office. But we don't always have that opportunity. It is arguable that very few of our Presidents have been genuine Christians, though many of them have claimed to be so, including our current President, Barak Obama, and former President Bill Clinton. Which leads to the matter of verification. Since few of us personally know the men we vote for, we rely on such things as denominational affiliation, policy standards, and public scandal, or lack thereof, to give us some indication of the authenticity of their professions of faith. While these criteria may be useful in disqualifying them in our eyes, given the dilapidated state of church discipline and membership qualification these days, none of them provide much positive evidence that a man is, in fact, a Christian.

This leaves those holding the view that they may not vote for a non-Christian with a very narrow range of options indeed, or it should. Many of our friends with this perspective will often abandon the political process altogether; whether they do or not, their influence on most elections will be minimal and their position may fairly be called Christian political isolationism. The natural course of isolationism is ultimately to establish secularism, or worse, rather than Christianity as the prevailing worldview of the government, achieving rather the opposite goal than what is evidently intended by voting only for Christians. This leaves the church open to persecution, and the society guided by principles of men "that wax worse and worse" (2 Tim 3:13). For some, this is exactly what they expect of the government, and their hope is that it all ends in a giant cataclysm upon the ruins of which, perhaps, may be erected a Christian society. I say that it's one thing for God to bring about such a visitation of judgment, and quite another for us, with our limited ideas and knowledge, to promote these ends by our inaction.

Of course, we all know that the Lord can change the proportion of Christians running for office, and we pray that he will do so one day. What is our duty in the mean time? Ought we to be praying that we might obtain a quiet and peaceable life, all the while denying ourselves every opportunity to do so?

III. Voting for non-ideal candidates

This approach is sometimes characterized as voting for the lesser of two evils. Those of us who hold the legitimacy of generally acting according to this principle should not be afraid to admit it. What is the alternative? Is it not the greater of two evils?

Let's not be sidetracked by what seem to be third and fourth options, viz., not voting at all, or voting for a candidate who will receive less than 5% of the vote. These are, under the present state of things, purely symbolic gestures and have the same practical effect as casting half a vote for either of the two candidates in the real election. I don't use the word "symbolic" pejoratively, because political symbolism has great value under certain circumstances. But when there is a significant difference between the two major party candidates, placing undue emphasis on symbolism circumvents the duty we have toward God, our fellow citizens, and our children yet unborn to choose policies which accord most closely with the biblical model of civil government.

Proceeding according to this principle will not result in the immediate establishment of a Massachusetts Bay Colony style theocracy, but I believe it gives us the best chance, in the end, of reforming our society bit by bit, until one day, under the blessing of God, the church and nation are revived under the preaching of the gospel, and candidates start appearing that differ less and less from the ideals we cherish in our hearts of what godly rulers should be. We will have no difference with our vote-for-Christians-only brethren then. The Constitution can be gradually amended until it conforms to what God approves. This is the model that prizes reform over cataclysm. It is the model that says I vote as I pray, according to 1 Tim 2:2, in order that God's people might "lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence."

Ballot in Hand

Standing on the sidewalk outside an abortion clinic in Indianapolis this past Saturday morning, I encountered a gentleman who embraces positions 1) and 2) as outlined above. He stopped his car to ask us where we came down on the issue of whether to vote for Romney. He was a gracious man, with evident convictions, but he could not be brought to see the significance of the fact that the number of babies we were trying to save at that abortion clinic would be many times more under the policies of President Obama and Joe Biden than under those of Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan. I challenged him, if he were so concerned about the 2% of babies that Romney's policy leaves out, to join us on the sidewalk in front of the clinic. That far he would not go.

This is the unfortunate problem with the thinking of some of our brothers and sisters in Christ. We have lost sight of the fact that these babies are just that, babies; and we tend to think about unborn children as statistics. If we're not there to see the mothers arriving at the killing centers in their cars, followed shortly thereafter by the grim-faced abortionist, it's easy to forget that these children might have names if a Romney were President instead of an Obama--an Obama who will veto any prolife legislation that makes it to his desk, and who will be appointing perhaps two Supreme Court justices during his next term, if he gets one.

I could go on with laying out the consequences of another Obama presidency, gay marriage (the Roe v Wade of our generation) being enshrined in our laws, our church institutions forced to pay for contraception, our health care system being destroyed and made a tool of the state under ObamaCare, European style socialism our economic policy, we and our children being driven into insurmountable debt, our borders being compromised, the UN monitoring our elections, and our courts being populated with leftists to maintain all of this, and more, ad infinitum into the future. But I won't.

I don't claim to have answered all the questions in the space that will command most people's attention. Suffice it to say that I've answered enough of them to satisfy my own conscience. We're moments away from the most significant presidential election in the history of our country. I'm going to vote as I pray, for a candidate that allows God's people the best opportunity to lead a quiet and peaceable life in all godliness and reverence. With God's enabling I'll put my feet on the sidewalk, praying for God's mercy, and may the Lord God graciously reform our nation in his good time.

 

The above note is from our son, Ben Manring.