The Iona Blog

The Irish Times poll on sex and society

Yesterday The Irish Times published the results of a poll that show we are becoming ever more liberal in our attitudes towards sex and relationships. The results, which aren’t a bit surprising, will be greeted with much self-adulation by liberals because they mean we are becoming more tolerant. This is true. A society that places...

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The first Irish study of children with LGBT parents

Last week Marriage Equality, an organisation campaigning for same-sex marriage, published a report to considerable fanfare that deals with the experiences of children raised by same-sex couples. What was actually even more interesting than the report itself was who funded it and who turned up at the launch. It was funded by the Dutch government...

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Where men’s pay is falling behind women’s

We hear a lot about the pay gap between men and women. This is allegedly the result of sexism against women although it is really the result of the different choices men and women make about their work and home balance. Women tend to choose home over work if forced and that will obviously affect...

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The growing marriage and religion gap

Dr Brad Wilcox of Virginia University, (he spoke at an Iona Institute event last year), and Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin have a thought provoking column in the Wall Street Journal. The column draws attention to the widening marriage and religion gap between the American working and middle classes and the hugely harmful effect of...

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The recession and marriage

The latest unemployment figures confirm once again that two-thirds of the 450,000 people who are without a job in this country are men. The same phenomenon has been found in other countries. Basically, the recession has disproportionately hit construction and manufacturing, traditional male industries. This is why some commentators have called the recession a ‘mancession’....

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Is race a relevant factor in adoption decisions?

A story in the British press over the weekend relates how a couple were refused permission to adopt a black or  Asian child because they are both white. The local authority in question objects to inter-racial adoption. The authority obviously believes that the race of a couple is a relevant factor in deciding which couples...

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Money scruples obscure real moral issue in AHR debate

Box office figures from the US suggest that Jennifer Anistion’s latest comedy, The Switch, which is about a forty-  year-old single woman who wants a baby and chooses to be artificially inseminated has flopped, at least in its first week. According to this First Things blog, it took in only only $8.4 million on opening...

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Britain’s failed teenage pregnancy strategy

New numbers from the UK suggest that their teen pregnancy rate, already the highest in the EU, is on the rise again among under 16s after some years of remaining steady. This is despite the Labour Government spending 13 years and hundreds of millions of pounds in concerted effort to halve pregnancies among under-18s by...

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Is Ireland really the most expensive for day-care?

Is Ireland the most expensive place for child-care in the developed world? According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the answer is yes. Taking a two-income couple with two young children in day-care as its mark, it finds that we are indeed the most expensive country, that such a couple will pay...

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Judge Walker vs the voters

Judge Vaughan Walker’s ruling overturning Proposition 8, the referendum passed in California in 2008 preserving traditional marriage, has provoked a firestorm of controversy, and not just for the obvious reasons. Because apart from overturning the will of the majority of Californian voters, Judge Walker also attempted to assert that gay marriage has always been part...

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