The Iona Blog

Are Asian women really rejecting marriage?

The cover story of The Economist last week was called ‘Asia’s lonely hearts: Why Asian women are rejecting marriage and what that means’. The picture on the front was of a lovelorn Asian man, rose in hand, and a woman striding purposefully away from him. The story was really about East Asian women. It told...

Read more...

How we are depleting our moral capital

One of Britain’s most acute and insightful thinkers today is Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks (pictured). Dr Sacks has written about the UK looting and arson for a number of publications, including in this article from the Wall Street Journal. In it he makes the point that the West has been spending its moral capital as fast...

Read more...

Children’s conference has blind spot about marriage

The topic of this year’s Merriman Summer School in Co Clare is ‘Changing Irish Childhoods’. It ends on Sunday. So far it has been addressed by such people as Children’s Minister, Frances Fitzgerald (pictured), Norah Gibbons of Bernardos, and Mary O’Rourke. To judge from the reports of their speeches in The Irish Times, one very...

Read more...

Words of wisdom on fatherless children

David Cameron was the most prominent figure who suggested that fatherlessness and general moral breakdown were behind last week’s riots, but he wasn’t on his own. David Lammy (pictured), The Labour MP for the Tottenham area, where the riots started said that the lack of male role models in young men’s lives was one of...

Read more...

Time for Cameron to walk the talk on families

Monday’s speech by Prime Minister David Cameron used some of the strongest language heard from any politician anywhere in Britain or Ireland in a very long time to describe the extent of the moral collapse which led to the anarchy and looting in British cities last week. Mr Cameron spoke of “people showing indifference to...

Read more...

Why an obsession with GDP harms the family

A growing GDP is generally considered to be a very healthy and desirable thing for a country, but in fact as a measure of economic, much less social well-being, it is a very blunt instrument which for one thing ill-serves the family. Here is a useful article by Robert W. Patterson of the Family in...

Read more...

Collapse of traditional family one reason for the riots

The looting and arson in Britain have many causes, but who can seriously doubt that one of the causes is the collapse of traditional morality and the traditional family in large parts of Britain. Notably, Indians were not among the rioters. Why not? Almost certainly the chief reason is that they have not destroyed their...

Read more...

London riots: Absent fathers have a lot to answer for

Many factors are to blame for the riots in London and other English cities. One of them has to be the absence of a father-figure from the lives of so many of the rioters. There is a well established link between father-absence and juvenile delinquency. In her blog, British commentator, Christine Odone, makes the same...

Read more...

Behind the “pay gap” between men and women

Kay Hymowitz has a useful piece in the US website, City Journal explaining the phenomenon of the gap in income between men and women. Hymowitz acknowledges that the gap exists, but rejects the notion that it is because of policy failures on the part of government. Instead, she says that the main driver of the...

Read more...

Getting to the heart of the same-sex marriage debate

Some months ago Robert P George, Ryan T Anderson and Sherif Girgis wrote one of the best papers to date on the same-sex marriage issue. That paper has prompted an ongoing debate with various advocates of same-sex marriage critiquing it and the paper’s authors, chiefly Girgis responding. One of the most recent attacks on the...

Read more...