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...
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...
Last week the Law Reform Commission (LRC) published a report, Children and the Law: Medical Treatment, which said that teens as young as 16, and in some cases younger, should be able to access contraception without their parents approving or even knowing. This is in spite of the fact that age of legal consent for...
Those who argue against same-sex marriage sometimes argue that to legalise it would be to fundamentally redefine marriage. Legalise same-sex marriage, they argue, and you may as well legalise polygamy. If marriage shouldn’t be confined to a man and a woman, why should it be confined to just two people? Why not one man and...
Speaking at the Glenties Summer School at the weekend, Taoiseach Enda Kenny said it was the aim of his Government “to create the environment where the innocence of children can develop naturally through their formative years.” If he is serious about this, then the number one thing his Government needs to do is promote and...
A new study by the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) indicates that children raised by cohabiting couples do no worse on average than children raised by married couples once socio-economic background is taken into account, and therefore there is no good reason on the part of the State to encourage marriage. To put it another...
W. Brad Wilcox, a US sociologist who researches in area of marriage, had a piece in The Washington Post last week, attacking the idea, which appears to be gaining ground, that marriage be sexually exclusive is passé. Wilcox points out that there are a range of problems with marital infidelity; out-of-wedlock births, increased risk of...
In a prominently featured book extract entitled ‘The Divorce Generation’ published in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, author Susan Gregory-Thomas discusses the impact of divorce on her generation, Generation X. Unfortunately, since it is part of a memoir, Gregory Thomas’s article provides a rather narrow account of the issue. Those belonging to Generation X (defined...
Ireland goes before the UN Human Rights Council in October to report on how well it is doing in conforming to the various UN human rights conventions and treaties the Irish State has signed. The Irish submission is now publicly available. It is very heavily biased towards a particular interpretation of human rights. For example,...
Ross Douthat in the New York Times has a useful piece on exactly why same-sex marriage damages the institution of marriage. His piece is a response to the argument that says that same-sex marriage will have no impact on the health of the institution. There are those who argue, Douthat points out, that same-sex marriage,...
