7QT

7QTs over at Conversion Diary

1.The New Birds and the Bees by Mark Regnerus

Meanwhile, the most organic citizens in our midst are portrayed as the most restrictive, misogynist, and backwards. Among all the ironies that greet us in the domain of human sexuality, this is one of the most profound. Our language about sexuality is dominated by public health, with its talk of risk, “protection,” health, choice, and rights. It’s not natural and productive. It’s mechanical and consumptive.

This explains so much why I rejected contraception, it makes sex mechanical and consumptive. Sex is unitive and procreative.

2. From the Marriage Foundation (United Kingdom)

Almost all intact couples with young teens are married, new research finds. 45 per cent of young teenagers (aged 13-15 years old) are not living with both parents. Half of all family breakdown takes place during the first two years. Amongst parents who remain intact, 93 per cent are married.

3. From Science Daily Marriage Patterns Drive Fertility Decline (2010)

In today´s society however, women do not start childbearing until an older age as marriage is often delayed, and casual or short-term relationships and divorce are more common. As a result, the natural selection maintaining young-age fertility might weaken and the relative strength of natural selection on old-age fertility could increase, something that could potentially lead to improvements in old-age fertility over many generations.

But older women are just using surrogates and younger women's eggs.

4. From Science Daily Good Marriage Can Buffer Effects of Dad's Depression On Young Children (May 2013)

5. From Science Daily Children of Married Parents Less Likely to Be Obese (May 2013)

6. Long Lost Sisters Reunite at Track Meet (ABC News May 14)

"After finding out she had a sister, Jordan said she has "a different outlook on life." "It's just one more person that I'm so close to, that I can tell everything to," she said. "She'll always be my friend, she'll always be there." While the two girls have only known each other for five months, Patrice Dickerson said the sisters have been in "the honeymoon stage." She said she anticipates the two transitioning to a "normal sister relationship." "They'll get into real sister issues, like borrowing clothes, and 'She can do it, why can't I?'" Dickerson's mother said. "I'm looking forward to that.""

7.

I will remember this one the next time my sons get to use the BB guns at Scout Camp.

No, That is not what they say...

Umm... it was Passover.

So much for cultural sensitivity or understanding. Many corrected it over at Failblog. Lately, I've been having a problem with humor. Humor isn't funny, just cruel. This isn't just a dig on Christianity, but also on homosexuals. People, who are gay, can be around other people of the same sex without someone questioning if the whole group is gay. Those are the bigots. It's rude and wrong to speculate on others.

"Dad takes one for the team"

This is only funny, if you understand men do not birth babies and women do.(Failblog)

"You know, one of the biggest challenges – I grew up without a father,” - President Obama

Obama invokes his fatherless childhood at stop in Baltimore

Best comment from the article from 'Connie. b.d'

"When Obama looks back on his Presidency, he may wish that he had spent more time trying to inspire young black men to be responsible fathers. He could have been a voice calling for stronger families, with a mother and father, working together, to raise their children. His voice in the black community would have meant so much.

It's sad that so many black women have come to emulate the stars in the entertainment industry who choose single motherhood - especially sad, since so many of those stars are affluent, usually selfish & self-centered woman, who can afford to raise children with a nanny instead of a father - and its sad that there isn't more realization that an intact family is the single most important indicator of a child's success, in school, and in life. He could have made such a difference"

She mentions the entertainment industry. I don't watch a lot of TV. I have enough in Lowell. Lowell isn't Hollywood, even though The Fighter was an accurate representation of Lowell. TV influences a lot. It passively suggests through humor or drama, what is the ideal. There is nothing wrong with entertainment, it's the idea that we should accept what is entertaining passively that is wrong.

Hollywood’s ‘Gay Culture’ Reshaping America: Almost 20% of Americans say TV has shifted their opinion in favor of the redefinition of marriage. -National Catholic Register

However, GLAAD has made known that not all homosexuals in Hollywood are welcome, especially when they step out of line with GLAAD’s agenda. Bret Easton Ellis, screenwriter and author of the book American Psycho, took to Twitter to claim that GLAAD had banned him from the awards ceremony over controversial tweets criticizing what he called the “politically correct gay agenda.”

Bret Easton Ellis speaks up over at OUT, "In the Reign of the Gay Magical Elves"

For all the good it has done, many gays have seen it as a group that could be almost fascistically politically correct and in confused ways: an organization that preached tolerance but would also bitch-slap anyone who didn’t necessarily agree with their agenda. GLAAD was at the red-hot center of creating The Gay Man as Magical Elf in the culture and often awarded the stereotypes parading around in embarrassing queer movies and degrading retro sitcoms as simply “gay positive” because they were, um, gay, and conveniently disregarded the fact that there is a silent majority of gay men who actively loathe and resist the caricatures on display. And, no, GLAAD, these men don’t hate themselves.

The fact that PC gays often demand a candied fantasy that doesn’t really exist but, hey, represents our cause, rather than a sensitive and emotionally complicated movie written and directed by a gay man who is an artist, is a huge part of the disconnect within certain factions of the gay community. Even though Weekend was tossed a GLAAD award, that early criticism of my initial endorsement was indicative of this weird new bullshit: the Gay Suits demanding “gay positive” in the media versus the Gay Dudes who just want “gay reality” in the media no matter how painful and flawed that reality is.

OK, considering one of the characters grew up in foster care without either his mother or father, I really should watch Weekend. This is what real people want, they want characters to be representative of reality.

Wait, this was to about Obama talking about the issue of fatherless in his life. I mention Deval Patrick spoke with so much emotion about the problems of his mother and father not being together, as well a day or two ago. Yet, Deval Patrick characterizes redefining marriage as in the 'Magical Elf' ideal that Ellis rightfully is concern about, that marriage is that "adopting an Asian baby, planned their wedding over Mojitos at The Abbey, registered at Neiman-Marcus, and booked The Parker in Palm Springs for the nuptials". Life isn't like that, no matter who you are. We're all flawed as human beings, and this is how we are all ordinary.

7QT Punched in the Gut

More 7QTs over at Jen's Conversion Diary

1. Warning to Catholics this photo/Internet Meme is painful. The trap to respond emotionally is a common occurrence on our Facebook Feeds.

2. Yeah, a good punch in the gut. Wasn't it? (I didn't respond back) But when you make such remarks in regards to the horrible child abuse that occurred within the Catholic Church, you are not giving an arguments in favor of gay adoption. You are utilizing the child abuse scandal for your own personal means of attack, you're not making an argument. Just make the argument.

3.Tragedy can happen anywhere, in a Catholic Church or with a gay couple. I can find numerous variations of different people (even local), who abuse children and organizations/relatives that cover it up. Photos above do not help in discussing our differences and weighing the facts on the issue.

4. The Internet Meme I saw was on Facebook, it was 'liked' by someone. So it was fed into my news feed. I don't expect everyone to agree with my public policy views or my faith, but if you disagree with me then do it positively, without having to put anyone else down.

I didn't feel it was proper to personally respond to this, it was just something 'liked' in passing. I doubt the person meant any harm, probably just saw the immediate irony of the message. In fact the person and I agree how the breakdown of a relationship, breaks down the ability for a child to see his/her father.

5. And that's my struggle with discussing marriage, no matter how positive I make it. It gets back that somehow I'm creating a negative. I'm not. It is not a negative to say a child has a mother and father. Also I've made it very clear how 'non-adoption' I am, searching out for related kin as a proper home is a priority before seeking non-biological relatives. Biology matters in living creatures.

6. Mum and Dad Dinosaurs Shared the Work

A study into the brooding behaviour of birds has revealed their dinosaur ancestors shared the load when it came to incubation of eggs. Research into the incubation behaviour of birds suggests the type of parental care carried out by their long extinct ancestors.

We can research dinosaurs needing their mom and their dad, but I can't say human beings need their mom and dad. I can't say we should create public policy that specifically promotes a responsibility between a man and a woman for the needs of human beings to have both biological parents there to raise them.

7. OK, something that's funny. A Father's Journal / The real reasons why most men don't cheat on their wives Here are two... read the whole thing.

5. When he sees a bountiful woman, he imagines only seeing his kids every other weekend. 7. He has seen his friends go down the path. Not one of them met with success.

My Response to Deval Patrick

Governor Deval Patrick has an op-ed in the Washington Post, 'Gay marriage and the right to be ordinary'. I wrote a blog post six years ago addressing my concerns. No where in his op-ed does he address any public policy concerns regarding a relationship between both parents and children.

Massachusetts’ Governor on his parent’s broken marriage

Patrick shaped by father's absence By Sally Jacobs, Globe Staff | March 25, 2007 It was supposed to be Deval Patrick's day of triumph.

He was 18 years old and his family was gathered in the crowded Milton Academy gymnasium on a rainy summer morning in 1974 to watch him graduate. Suddenly, his father, who had largely abandoned the family 15 years earlier and had seen his son rarely, showed up unexpectedly. Deval was not happy to see him.

Patrick's family -- his mother, grandparents, and sister -- sat though the ceremony rigid with tension, angrily eyeing Pat Patrick at the end of the row. And then as they all drove in his grandfather's Buick toward a restaurant to celebrate, his parents began to fight. They screamed at each other, and curses flew. Patrick senior, an emotional man who had opposed his son's attending the elite private school, broke into tears.

Through it all, Deval sat quietly in the front seat. When the car stopped at a light he got out, slammed the door, and stamped back to his dorm.

"It was a disaster," the governor recalled in an interview in his State House office. "I am thinking, this is supposed to be my day. . . . I just bailed."

Patrick was funded heavily by the neutered marriage lobby in his early candidacy in the Democratic primary. I questioned back on my blog last year, when I was making a decision on who to vote for in that primary. Before he was even sworn in a few months ago, he attempted to lobby the legislature to close the session before having a vote on the marriage amendment. One of the arguments for neutered marriage is that mom and dads don't matter at all, clearly it does even for Deval.

I wrote this on my (old) blog back in August 2006 during the democratic primary about Deval Patrick.

"He should be proud that he is a husband and father. His family made sacrifices for his career, so we could enjoy the fruit of his legal and corporate accomplishments. His wife, who I believe is also a lawyer, indeed probably has her own career but I'm sure her career took a back seat so he could work with President Clinton or on the multiple seats as Board of Director on major corporations.

I shouldn't have to down play the fact I'm wife or mother, to be anything I want outside of home. Of course with young children, I can't be at two places at once and such endeavors will have to wait until I'm middle aged and the kids older. But here is Deval's greatest accomplishment, his marriage with his wife and daughters, when his mother had no husband and he had no father. Instead of embracing this, he denies them for political correctness.

Massachusetts is a sad state, where politicians have to deny being a very decent man to his family, because it might offend those who want to redefine marriage into a mere legal status of rights and not a institution of society for a man and woman in which the needs protection and acknowledgement within our civil laws. "

"What do the children say?"

"What do the children say?" - Robert Oscar Lopez via Mercatornet

I support same-sex civil unions and foster care, but I have always resisted the idea that government should encourage same-sex couples to imagine that their partnerships are indistinguishable from actual marriages. Such a self-definition for gays would be based on a lie, and anything based on a lie will backfire.

The richest and most successful same-sex couple still cannot provide a child something that the poorest and most struggling spouses can provide: a mom and a dad. Having spent forty years immersed in the gay community, I have seen how that reality triggers anger and vicious recrimination from same-sex couples, who are often tempted to bad-mouth so-called “dysfunctional” or “trashy” straight couples in order to say, “We deserve to have kids more than they do!”

But I am here to say no, having a mom and a dad is a precious value in its own right and not something that can be overridden, even if a gay couple has lots of money, can send a kid to the best schools, and raises the kid to be an Eagle Scout.

It’s disturbingly classist and elitist for gay men to think they can love their children unreservedly after treating their surrogate mother like an incubator, or for lesbians to think they can love their children unconditionally after treating their sperm-donor father like a tube of toothpaste.

This is where the degree of law and reasoning could come to an agreement. In Lowell, there are no rich benefactors for children. Well, there is. It is call the Commonwealth of Massachusetts Money can only go so far for these children. At Department of Children & Families, we have 'million dollar babies', in which the tax payer pays out for the needs of children without families. They need these services, but they wouldn't need these services if their parents had the ability to parent.

I also would like to point out Lopez's different between foster care and 'third party procreation', which commercializes the child for family creation, rather then helping a child who loss his/her family. In foster care, the focus is on the child's needs and not on the adult's rights. Biological parents and their rights are protected. If terminated, it is done through a legal process and with notice.Services, when appropriate, are always offered before the termination process.

In Massachusetts same-sex couples/single people can foster, the Department places what will be the best fit for child and family. Foster parents, unlike couples who are trying to prove their parenting abilities, will admit when they need help. In fact, as a biological mother married to the biological father of my children, I even need to ask for help! So when a female same-sex couple raises a male young teenager in foster care, states the child needs a male role model. Guess what? No one is offended. The foster parents are not admitting defeat in their same-sex parenting, they are acknowledging the child's needs over their pride and that is what parenting is all about.