Aggressive atheists like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, and their media enablers like to claim that religion is “dangerous”, that it spreads prejudice and leads to societal division. Religion can have these effects, as can other ideologies and philosophies, including atheism, but there is lots of evidence to knock down such claims. For example, a...
The Family Platform is an EU body with a brief to review and research the situation of the family across the EU and recommend policy. The other day, it issued a major new report called ‘Foresight Report: Facts and Precondition of Wellbeing of Families’. As might be expected, the document is shot through with politically...
The BBC reports today about two Brazilian women who each gave birth to a baby boy in the same hospital but were sent home with the wrong child. The BBC calls it “every mother’s nightmare”. The mistake came to light a year later and the women swapped their children following a court order. Obviously it...
The US State Department has rowed back on its controversial decision to remove the terms ‘mother’ and ‘father’ from passports and replace them with ‘Parent A’ and ‘Parent B’. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton (pictured) presumably ordered the pull back to avoid the political damage that would presumably have resulted. A number of pro-family groups...
Under the Civil Partnership Act, a civil registrar can go to prison for up to six months for refusing to officiate at a same-sex civil partnership ceremony on conscientious grounds. A court in Saskatchewan this week took a more nuanced approach than our Government. So did gay rights supporter, John Culhane. The court considered whether...
Iona Institute director, David Quinn, appeared on RTE’s The Spirit Level on Sunday to debate the ethics of surrogate motherhood and Assisted Human Reproduction more generally. The debate takes place near the beginning of the show and lasts about 15 minutes. Click here to download it.
What does a mother tell her child when she has conceived that child via donor sperm, that is, when she has deliberately decided to raise her child alone and without a father? Here is what one mother told Red (a women’s magazine), she would say: “I want my son to know he doesn’t have a...
Last March The Iona Institute hosted a talk by Dr Eric Kaufmann entitled “Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?” Based on his book of the same name, Dr Kaufmann’s thesis was that, as religious believers tend to have more children, the future of Europe, and the West generally, was likely to be more religious, not...
Taoiseach Brian Cowen made some warm remarks about the Pope’s message for World Day of Peace last week, echoing his call for the protection of religious freedom. Mr Cowen said that he welcomed “the focus of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI on the question of freedom of religion in his message for World Peace Day”....
In recent weeks the issue of the age of consent for sexual activity has twice come up in different guises. First it was the Irish Times lending its weight to proposals by the Law Reform Commission to reduce the age at which minors can access the Pill without parental knowledge or consent to 14. Now...
