The Patient Body: Choosing Childlessness
“The Patient Body” is a monthly column by Ann Neumann about issues at the intersection of religion and medicine. Continue Reading →
Tag: family values
Single Mother Advantage
Rick Santorum to Family Research Council president Tony Perkins on the radio yesterday, about how single mothers are the government-dependent Democratic Party base:
Look at the political base of the Democratic Party: it is single mothers who run a household. Why? Because it’s so tough economically that they look to the government for help and therefore they’re going to vote. So if you want to reduce the Democratic advantage, what you want to do is build two parent families, you eliminate that desire for government.
As Goes Iowa: Asking Presidential Candidates the Right Religion Questions
by Andy Kopsa
Every four years the national political eye shifts to Iowa’s first-in-the-nation caucuses. With the 2012 presidential election only 15 months away, the campaign frenzy in Iowa has already begun. Local and national media are eagerly following Republican presidential hopefuls as they glad-hand farmers, eat local delicacies and stump, flanked by American flags, through soybean fields.
In February next year, Iowans will head to their local caucus to give a traditionally coveted victory to one Republican who could go on to face President Obama in the general election. That Republican – be it Michele Bachmann, Ron Paul or Newt Gingrich – will need to secure the blessing of the radical religious-political group The Family Leader.
Bob Vander Plaats, the outspoken head of The Family Leader (TFL), is the man The Atlantic has called a Republican political “kingmaker” in Iowa – and the man who The Hill just ranked as having the ability to give one of the top 10 “endorsements the presidential candidates covet most.”
The media has documented his – and the TFL’s – statements about homosexuality (worse than second hand smoke) and women’s role in society (producing lots of babies). Last week TFL made national news again with its Marriage Pledge – already signed by Bachmann and Rick Santorum, the former senator from Pennsylvania – touting the benefits of slavery to African American families (after vocal push-back, TFL has since removed this from the pledge). None of Vander Plaats’ work would be half as interesting a story if The Family Leader, a Focus on the Family affiliate, hadn’t been built with over $3 million in federal funds. Continue Reading →
In Support of Mythical Families
David Nolan of Catholics for Choice gives us a run-down of the agenda for the upcoming World Congress of Families Regional Congress, an event to be held during the UK’s “National Family Week.” You can guess what kind of families organizers and speakers are — in some cases, literally — lobbying for. (Not yours nor mine, most likely. Indeed, the agenda gives the impression that there once was a God-blessed mythical family, a foundational community building block that, if reestablished, would end a host of social ills that, um, secular government can’t; it’s a notion that historical and contemporary data in both the US and the UK refutes. But let’s not much up a fine story.) Nolan writes: Continue Reading →