The Iona Blog

All families matter – but marriage still deserves special protection

The single parent support and campaign group, One Family, have released a new video called “All Families Matter.” Produced as part of their campaign to change the constitutional definition of the family, the video is pretty striking. It shows a single mother and her two children being denied a family ticket to the cinema because...

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Polygamy, same-sex marriage and children: the state of the evidence

In my last post on polygamy and same-sex marriage, I noted that Peter Ferguson and Colette Browne, in coming up with coherent arguments against polygamy, ended up acknowledging that marriage is to a certain extent about child welfare. I wondered how a consent-based view of marriage could be reconciled with this, and I’m still not sure...

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The clash between atheistic faith and science

An interesting new book has just come out called ‘Why Science Does Not Disprove God’. The author is Amir Azcel and in an article in The Wall Street Journal a few days ago he describes how many scientists initially resisted the Big Bang Theory, especially those predisposed towards atheism. As Azcel says, “it was a Catholic...

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The evidence that boys and girls really are different

In her new book, Gender Hurts, the radical feminist Professor of Sexual Politics at the University of Melbourne Sheila Jeffreys claims that gender disorders like “gender dysphoria” are only problems because we have gender at all.  So, while Facebook now offers 56 genders (sadly, still one less variety than Heinz beans, but give them time),...

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Further thoughts on whether polygamy should be legalised

A couple of weeks ago David Quinn blogged in response to news that three lesbians in the US have ‘married’ one another. He issued a challenge – asking if the essence of marriage is consent, then why shouldn’t this ‘throuple’ be allowed to get legally hitched? A couple of people took up the challenge, including...

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Why the fates of Donald Sterling and Brendan Eich cannot be compared

Much has recently been made of the effective sacking of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich (pictured) over his opposition to same-sex marriage, and rightly so. Even many SSM supporters blanched at the idea that the creator of Javascript could lose his job as head of a tech company simply because of his views on this question. A...

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Think Ireland has a stable, health marriage rates? Try reading history

The Journal.ie recently carried a story that the CSO has released census data going back to 1864. (The Central Statistics Office is a wonderful resource and its website a much under-used one).The press release from the CSO noted that marriage rates had remained remarkably stable since 1864. “There were 27,406 marriages entered into in 1864...

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The slide towards soft totalitarianism

While the timid West squeaks at Russia over the Ukraine crisis, how ironic that hardman Vladimir Putin now claims that his country is the new moral compass of the world, as political correctness and decadence rules the West with an iron fist. Consider what the late, former Soviet Union KGB subversive agent Yuri Bezmenov (aka...

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Fighting for the freedom to dissent from the new ideological conformity

The effective sacking of Mozilla CEO Brendan Eich for supporting traditional marriage continues to provoke reaction. The latest and most notable is a statement signed by supporters of same-sex marriage who believe that what happened to Eich is a step too far. The signatories believe that dissent from same-sex marriage must be permitted and the...

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Ireland’s marriage rate since 1864: consistently low (mostly)

The CSO has just made available its annual reports on births, deaths and marriages covering the years 1864-2000. Looking at the marriage figures only, they tell us that Ireland’s marriage rate has been remarkably consistent over the period, consistently low that is. In 1864, the marriage rate per 1,000 of the population was 4.8. In...

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