The law doesn't give a damn about fathers

Some years ago, I was outside a pizza restaurant when a young woman turned up, pushing a stroller. She was preceded by a small boy who must have been about four years old. He stopped at the door, whereupon she said: ‘Well, open the f***ing door, you little s**t.’

I think my disillusionment with the idea that there was something sacred, sublime and beautiful about mothers and motherhood began on that day.

Shortly after, I spent some years working in a truancy center, where we tried to give a little general education to children who had missed years at school. In many cases, it was clear that the reason for these absences had been mothers who kept them at home either because the women were lonely or because they needed the children as babysitters.

Equal pressures: While there are many good mothers in the world, there are also many bad ones. However, family law continues to elevate them above fathers.

The point is that while there are many good mothers in the world, there are plenty of bad and often abusive mothers, too, yet we still have a Family Justice system that prizes mothers and motherhood, but devalues fathers.

It is not unusual to read opinion articles that are attacking absent fathers. However, the fact is that a very high proportion of fathers are absent because they are forced to be so by vindictive and possessive mothers, and the family (in)justice system that backs them up. Ever man who has young children, and he ought to consider what it might be like, if, God forbid, his marriage ever ended, to find that the courts are against him — and that any orders they made giving him access to his children were unenforceable.

He might win the right to have them for half the time, but if Samantha withheld access to the children, there would be absolutely nothing he could do about it, except apply for another order she could ignore.

EVOLUTION OF PHONY RIGHTS IN SOCIETY

Stages in which a phony "right" evolves in today's politically-correct American society:

Morally Repugnant Behavior
Morally Repugnant, but private behavior.
Morally Questionable, but private behavior.
Private Behavior, not spoken about in public.
Private Behavior, sometimes mentioned in public.
Private Behavior, mentioned frequently in public.
Public Behavior, but somewhat disrespected.
Public Behavior, demanding of respect.
Public Behavior, those who criticize are morally repugnant.
Public Behavior, a moral good.
Moral Good, must be recognized in law.
Moral Good, must not be restricted.
Moral Good, those who find it morally repugnant must be ostracized.
Moral Right.
Moral Right, must be subsidized by all.
Moral Right, must criminalize objection.
Moral Right, trumps other lesser rights (now just moral goods.)
A Right.

DO NOT GIVE IN TO UNJUST PRESSURE

Gay “marriage” is all about the legal justification for the crushing and suppression of Christian conscience. That’s what it exists for. It is a tool in the growing arsenal of tools by which radical and intolerantly militant homosexual hope to extirpate Christian conscience from the public square.

Resist.

An Iowa baker who politely declined to provide a wedding cake for two lesbians based on her Christian values may face legal action from the couple.

Same-sex “marriage” was legalized in Iowa in 2009 by the state Supreme Court, and a 2007 state civil rights act disallows discrimination on grounds of sexual orientation in matters of employment, education, housing, and public accommodation.

Victoria Childress

On Tuesday KCCI 8 Des Moines interviewed Trina Vodraska and Janelle Sievers, who said they were “shocked” when a local wedding cake business owner declined to provide the confection for their ceremony.

“It was degrading, you know, it was like she chastised us for wanting to do business with her,” said Vodraska.

Join a Facebook page to defend marriage here.

Victoria Childress, who runs the business from her home, said she told the couple that she was unable to give them a cake based on her Christian convictions. Both she and the couple say the conversation was cordial.

“I didn’t do the cake because of my convictions for their lifestyle. It is my right as a business owner. It is my right, and it’s not to discriminate against them,” said Childress.

“It’s not so much to do with them, as it’s to do with me, and my walk with God and what I will answer (to) him for,” she added.

“They thanked me for being honest with them. They were very pleasant. I did not belittle them, I did not speak rudely to them. There were no condescending remarks made, nothing.”

The news station reports that the couple is unsure whether to file a civil rights complaint with the state. However, the couple has since reportedly released a statement calling Childress a “bigot,” and the baker says she has been deluged with hate mail that she has stopped reading.

“It’s really hard to read things like that,” she told FOX News. “I’m a pretty quiet, soft-spoken person. But when I stand up for my convictions against things, I’m very strong when it comes to that.”

Christian businesses in America, including reception site owners and photographers declining to service homosexual couples, have routinely been targeted for lawsuits and harassment in states that have legalized same-sex “marriage” or civil unions. Often the complaints spread through media, particularly gay blogs, where gay rights supporters are encouraged to keep up pressure on the offenders.

HATRED IS EASY

Though hatred ferments within a person and prevents positive achievements, still, it seems to be on the rise. Doctor Paul C. Vitz, associate professor and senior scholar at the Institute for the Psychological Sciences, is asking why.

"Hatred sort of 'pickles' a person," he says, "filling them with resentment, bitterness, and even depression." But a glance at the news reveals that hatred is active in the world today.

Vitz is researching hatred and its role as a barrier to forgiveness. ZENIT spoke with him about his research and some of the underlying causes for hate.

ZENIT: You've been researching the topic of interpersonal hatred for some time. How did you first become interested and involved in this topic?

Vitz: I've been interested in forgiveness for many years, especially due to the relatively recent work of Bob Enright and Everett Worthington and others. From that, I got interested in the barriers to forgiveness by themselves. Why is it so hard to forgive? Certainly one of those barriers is hatred, especially hatred between people.

ZENIT: Why is this such an important topic today? Are there unintended and perhaps even long-term consequences of interpersonal hatred?

Vitz: All you have to do is read the newspaper to see how active hatred is in our world today. That's a "no brainer." That's why the issue is so important. And it is also possible that the increase in narcissism and feelings of self-entitlement, so common in our country today, has led to an increase in the experience of anger, frustration, resentment and even hatred. After all, if you are the "most important person in the whole world" and you subscribe to the Burger King philosophy of "Have it your way," any failure of others or the environment to satisfy you is cause for rage. Unfortunately, there are also many long-term consequences, and unending cycles of revenge are one of them. And for individuals, hatred sort of "pickles" a person, filling them with resentment, bitterness, and even depression. And of course it keeps people from doing anything positive with their life.

ZENIT: What does the psychology of hatred and forgiveness say to a planet increasingly marked by terrorism and by violent outbreaks in schools and other public places, such as last summer's tragedy in Norway?

Vitz: What it says is that we had better find out why hatred is so common, and how to remove it, or at least reduce it greatly. On the other hand, one of the reasons for the general awareness of violence and hatred is the media's love affair with it. Apparently most news is bad news, and certainly any report of violence and hatred seems to get into the media a thousand times faster than any report of love and forgiveness. Now perhaps the media is just pandering to a kind of universal human nature. But I suspect that there is something special about recent history in this country and in much of the world that shows an increased preoccupation with hatred and violence. It would be interesting to do a study on the proportion of violent news items in today's media, as compared to 100 or 150 years ago.

ZENIT: You speak of hatred as something that, in some way, people enjoy. How can this be? And how can it be overcome?

Vitz: People certainly enjoy hatred, or it wouldn't be so popular in the world's literature, and on television and in movies today. In a temporary way, hatred makes you feel morally superior and gives you energy and purpose, but at the price of long-term debilitation. In many ways, interpersonal hatred is a kind of defense mechanism protecting the ego or narcissism of the individual. And presumably, as Christians, we all know that this interpersonal hatred is wrong, and was explicitly rejected by Our Lord. We are called to love our enemies, not hate them, as difficult as this is. This is a complex topic that needs much more coverage, and I have spoken about this elsewhere, but one good way to start overcoming hatred for your enemies is to pray for them.

PORNOGRAPHY AND NATIONAL SECURITY

Captured caches of terrorist material often include pornography. Could pornography pose a risk to national security?

 A federal grand jury recently indicted Army soldier Naser Jason Abdo, age 21, on three charges related to a plot to attack soldiers near Fort Hood, Texas. When authorities arrested him, they found in his possession bomb-making materials, a gun, ammunition, and the article ”Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom,” from a recent issue of al-Qaeda’s English online journal Inspire. Initial questioning of Abdo indicates that his intended targets were U.S. military personnel.

Much of the attention on this case so far has focused on Abdo’s religion—Islam—and his refusal to deploy to Afghanistan. As Rep. John Carter, whose 31st District in Texas includes Fort Hood, announced, “We may well have averted a repeat of the tragic 2009 radical Islamic terror attack.”

Any effort to make sense of this troubled young man will need to include understanding how he chose to approach and interpret his religion, and perhaps most importantly, why he adopted the interpretation he did. Any effort to understand Abdo without considering this question would be profoundly incomplete.

Yet tucked away, often near the closing paragraph of the articles about this case, is mention of an issue that I believe warrants more attention than it has received in the past decade of terrorism studies: namely, pornography. And in Abdo’s case, child pornography.

In May, the Army charged Abdo with possession of child pornography found on a computer he used. Due to this charge, when Abdo was found to be “absent without leave” (AWOL) from his unit in Kentucky earlier this month, the Army was preparing an Article 32 hearing against him, which can lead to a general court martial.

Pornography is not a necessary cause of terrorism. The abolition of pornography would not lead to the cessation of terrorism in the world. Terrorism existed well before graphic pornography and its mass spread via the internet.

Likewise, pornography is not a sufficient cause for terrorism. There are pornography users, even addicts, who do not become terrorists. Given how widespread the viewing of pornography is today, if the direct result of each individual’s pornography use were terrorist violence, one could conceivably argue that pornography proliferation would pose a more widespread threat to human existence than nuclear proliferation.

Yet pornography now appears frequently in the possession of violent terrorists and their supporters, including Osama bin Laden. Regarding “smut” found on captured media, in 2010, a Department of Defense al-Qaeda analyst was quoted in The Atlantic: “We have terabytes of this stuff.” Terabytes. That’s a lot of “smut.”

I wonder whether the pornography of today—now ubiquitous and increasingly grotesque—is one of the influences warping the mentality of those who aspire to or who actually go on to engage in ever more grotesque public violence.

WHY IS ABORTION STILL LEGAL ?

The human mind can hold onto blatant contradictions, but in order to do so it must block out certain unpleasant truths. One such uncomfortable truth has now come knocking at the door in Philadelphia, where a "house of horrors" abortion clinic was discovered. At this clinic viable babies were outright murdered after their births had been induced and they had been fully delivered. Clinic staff have testified that on hundreds of occasions, second and third trimester babies that were breathing, moving and even crying were slaughtered by having their necks slit or their spines severed.

Almost everyone agrees that killing newborn babies constitutes murder.

And yet, late-term abortions, effectively right up to the moment of natural birth, are not illegal in many parts of the United States.

Given all that we know about the unborn human being, it is clear that force of will, rather than genuine ignorance, now seems to be the driving force behind abortion. Our society simply wants abortion to stay legal regardless of the facts. It is not that we don't know the truth; rather, that we don't want to be reminded. It's a strange madness, with teams of doctors struggling to keep premature infants alive in hospitals where just a floor away, babies are being killed and discarded.

The truth is a powerful thing; over time, throughout history, it has always won the moral battles, and there is no doubt that one day, abortion will be rejected and recognized as an unspeakable evil. Until that day comes the journey continues to require courage and sacrifice on the part of those who carry the responsibility of knowing the truth. It is up to us to awaken the conscience of our society, one person at a time.

SOROS MONEY AGAIN

The so-called leaderless Occupy movement was caught red-handed operating a nerve center staffed by professional agitators deeply tied to groups funded by billionaire activist George Soros.

The groups, most prominent among them being the Tides Center, was involved with Occupy since the anti-Wall Street movement's inception.

The radical connections were largely missed by the general public. CNN, the only news media outlet to receive exclusive access to Occupy's alleged headquarters, did not fully identify the activists found running them.