There are tentative moves in Ireland to change the law so that more than two people can be recognised as the legal parents of a child. The Law Reform Commission, for example, has made a recommendation to this effect. There are similar moves in the US to break ‘the rule of two’. The ‘rule of...
Freedom of religion used to be understood by one and all as the freedom to worship privately, and the freedom, within reason, to manifest that faith in the public square. It was taken for granted that one’s work should not compromise one’s deeply held religious convictions. In recent times, this notion of religious freedom has...
One of the best blogs around is the Public Discourse by the Witherspoon Institute in the US. Its latest entry deals with the often very murky world of surrogate motherhood. It cites the case of a couple who had commissioned a woman to have a child for them, but who divorced and then told the...
At this stage I have read quite a few books and innumerable articles about the same-sex marriage debate. One of the best of the books is a new one called simply, Debating Same-Sex Marriage. It is co-authored by John Corvino, a lecturer in philosophy at Wayne State University in America, and Maggie Gallagher of the...
The new poll by Gallup/Red C suggesting that Ireland is now less religious than Iceland certainly generated lots of headlines, but what did it really tell us about how religious we are? After all, as David Quinn pointed out in his Irish Independent analysis piece on the matter, roughly a third of Irish people still...
Robert Oscar Lopez has written a very heart-felt account of being raised by two mothers and no father and the consequences of this in his life. Obviously the account of one person is purely anecdotal and some of the unfortunate twists and turns that occurred in his life would not have happened to others who...
Is our Government as pro-child as it claims? Irish Independent reporter Thomas Molloy has dug up a few figures to suggest it might not be. He writes: “As a society, we have made a conscious decision to favour the elderly (who vote) and discriminate against children (who don’t). “There is no other country in Europe...
A row of sorts has broken out in The Irish Times between two of its contributors over the endlessly controversial question, ‘what do women want?’ It’s an immensely clichéd question, of course, but in respect of the proper balance between work and home, there is no one right answer, anymore than there is for men....
It is scarcely believable that there is a growing threat to the practice of religiously motivated male circumcision in Europe. A fierce debate has erupted over the practice, chiefly in Germany following a court decision there against it. However, curbs have also been placed on it in certain Swiss and Austrian hospitals. In addition, we...
A major new report on Britain’s most dysfunctional families commissioned by the British Government in the aftermath of last year’s riots makes for disturbing reading but much of it is depressingly familiar. Quite apart from the accounts of serial physical and sexual abuse, it’s the casual neglect of children and the failure of mothers to...
