Religious men and women who married in their twenties without cohabiting first have the lowest odds of divorce in America today, according to a recently published study.

Sociology professor and National Marriage Project director W. Bradford Wilcox says his latest empirical study along with demographer Lyman Stone supports the traditional model of marriage.

Americans who cohabit before marriage are less likely to be happily married and more likely to break up.  Couples who cohabited were 15pc more likely to get divorced than those who did not, according to our research. A Stanford study cited other research finding that the link between cohabitation and divorce was especially strong for women who cohabited with someone besides their future husband, he said.

“The conventional wisdom holds that spending your twenties focusing on education, work and fun, and then marrying around 30 is the best path to maximize your odds of forging a strong and stable family life. But the research tells a different story, at least for religious couples. Saving cohabitation for marriage, and endowing your relationship with sacred significance, seems to maximize your odds of being stably and happily married,” he says.

The publication of a new curriculum that proposes to teach Junior Cert students about the influence of pornography has led one opposition TD to ask why the Government is teaching children about internet porn rather than stopping it.

The National Council for Curriculum and Assessment (NCCA) and Minister for Education Norma Foley yesterday launched a public consultation on the draft Social, Personal and Health Education curriculum which is due to be implemented in schools from 2023.

The proposed revamp of Relationships and Sexuality Education (RSE) for the Junior Cycle includes topics like healthy, unhealthy and abusive relationships, human sexuality and gender identity, consent, the importance of safer sexual activity and the influence of digital media including pornography and the sharing of digital images online.

In response, Aontú leader Peadar Tóibín TD, said the links between hardcore pornography being consumed by children as young as 10 years old and sexual violence and abuse is well known.

However, he said, “Instead of tackling the consumption by children of hardcore pornography at source the government are going to allow it to continue and try to teach young children to navigate their way through it. While there does not seem to be much detail provided as to how this will be delivered, no doubt many parents will be extremely concerned at this plan”.

Christina Ellingsen, a representative of feminist organszation Women’s Declaration International (WDI) is being investigated under hate crime charges for tweets she made between February 2021 and January 2022.

Ellingsen’s charges are centered around her questioning why a trans activist group promoted the belief that biological men who identify as women could be lesbians. While police are still investigating, if she is found guilty, Ellingsen could face a prison sentence of up to three years.

At the time, WDI Norway (formerly WHRC Norway) warned that the introduction of the concept into law would result in persecution of women for stating biological facts.

A Spanish High Court has ruled that “the exhibition of the rainbow flag violates the principle of ideological or political neutrality” and directed Government buildings to stop displaying it.

In 2020, the Spanish Supreme Court had banned non-official flags from official buildings and public spaces. However, in defiance of that ruling, LGBT flags were hung from public institution buildings in Valladolid in 2021 to mark Pride celebrations.

A Spanish Foundation of Christian Lawyers brought a case against the move and last week the Superior Court of Justice of Castilla y León said that “the rainbow flag is a symbol with sufficient ideological weight or significance that transcends the merely social, penetrating the political .”

“And so, the ideological burden of the banner cannot be denied , proceeding with its withdrawal,” it ruled.

“It cannot be denied that the current political parties, some moderately in favor, others actively in favor, others moderately against and others actively against” what was raised in the debates on the LGBT issue “denotes the non-political neutrality of the debate, for what the exhibition of the collective symbol violates the required neutrality”.

A £1.9 million funding package going exclusively to integrated schools in the North has been described as “bias” and disregards “the current emergency crisis within our education system”.

Aontú’s Gemma Brolly, who is a teacher based in Derry, said that while her party support integrated education as a choice for parents, they should not be prioritised for funding.

Mrs Brolly said the intent of the bill is to place integrated education “top of the pecking order”.

Before quitting as Northern Ireland Secretary of State last week, Brandon Lewis announced the integrated education funding package. He said that, “Seeing greater integration of education across Northern Ireland is an absolute priority for me” and “My hope is that integration will soon become the norm and not the exception in schools across Northern Ireland”.

Mrs Brolly said: “With undervalued staff on the brink of strike, underpay, endless damning reports, waiting lists and under resourced schools, surely the priority of the Secretary of State, every governing body and representative should be to repair our education system in its entirety?

“That is what we in Aontú will prioritise in education. We need inclusive and beneficial education for all. That is what we have worked for and what we will continue to work to achieve.”

A Massachusetts Senator has described the work of pro-life pregnancy centers as “torture.”

The centres providing counselling and practical help to women with unplanned pregnancies and mothers with new borns. They have been subject to numerous attacks and acts of vandalism in the wake of the United States Supreme Court’s ruling last month to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Senator Elizabeth Warren spoke with reporters last week about defending abortion rights and took aim at eliminating crisis pregnancy centers across the country.

“In Massachusetts right now, those crisis pregnancy centers, that are there to fool people who are looking for pregnancy termination help, outnumber true abortion clinics by three to one,” Warren said. “We need to shut them down here in Massachusetts, and we need to shut them down all around the country. You should not be able to torture a pregnant person like that.”

She introduced the “Stop Anti-Abortion Disinformation Act” to combat what she calls “false advertising” from crisis pregnancy centers (CPCs).

This is part of a sweeping effort by Congressional House Democrats to reinstate a top-down abortion policy that would bar all 50 states from punishing abortionists. The House has scheduled votes on a proposed bill to strike down nearly all state pro-life protections until birth.

https://decisionmagazine.com/sen-elizabeth-warren-accuses-crisis-pregnancy-centers-of-torture/

The censorship of pro-life bus advertisements amounts to discrimination, according to the national Slovenian equality body.

A pro-life NGO had contracted a state-owned bus company, who had agreed to display their ads for a couple of months. However, the municipal authorities had deemed the messages “We love Life!”, “You are not alone”, “Step out of Silence” and “I mourn my child”, accompanied by pictures of a happy family, a grieving mother and a woman holding a pregnancy test to be “intolerant”. They subsequently instructed the bus company to remove them after just over one week.

However, the Advocate of the Principle of Equality, has ruled the municipal authorities were wrong.

The pro-life NGO welcomed the decision: “Every life is valuable. We want to stand by women in crisis, especially those facing unplanned pregnancies or the loss of a child. Our bus ad was meant to show them that they are not alone. We are glad that the state equality body agreed that our ad should not have been removed. Whether you agree or disagree with the work of Zavod ŽIV!M, everyone should be able to agree that it is wrong for the state to simply censor messages with which it disagrees. We seek to offer hope and support to many in difficult situations,” said Darja Pečnik, the director of Zavod ŽIV!M.

A call has been made for an ‘urgent debate’ as a report shows GPs made financial claims for prescribing drugs for 6,700 chemical abortions last year.

The figure is included in the third annual report on the provision of abortion in Ireland, published on Wednesday by Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly.

The number is slightly up on previous years. There were 6,577 notified abortions in 2020 and 6,666 in 2019.

There were also 64 surgical abortions conducted in hospitals last year.

Unusually, the report showed a discrepancy with the number of official notifications of abortions, at 4,513.

The report said this was likely due to difficulties associated with the covid19 pandemic and the HSE cyber-attack.

In response to the report, the Pro-Life Campaign noted that almost 20,000 abortions have taken place in Ireland over the three year period since the law changed in 2018.

A spokesperson said it shows it has led to a 70% increase in the annual number of abortions.

Eilís Mulroy said: “Following today’s devastating news that 19,943 abortions have occurred in Ireland since the new law came into effect, we need an urgent public debate to look for ways to dramatically reduce these numbers.

A referendum on the constitutional clause protecting mothers from being forced to work outside the home should be held next year, a new Oireachtas report has recommended. Marriage should also have its special constitutional protection removed.

It follows a recommendation of the Citizens’ Assembly on Gender Equality. The Assembly believes all families should be treated equally and sees no reason to give marriage special status despite evidence showing that children tend to fare best when raised by a married mother and father.

In its interim report, the Joint Oireachtas Committee on Gender Equality recommended that the Government proceed with “necessary preparatory work” and that a decision should be made on the wording for a referendum to be put to the public in 2023. It proposed a number of “appropriate wordings” that could be used.

Article 41.2 should be “deleted and replaced with language that is not gender specific” and which “obliges the State to take reasonable measures to support care within the home and wider community”, the assembly said.

People with Down’s syndrome and their families rallied outside the UK Court of Appeal on Wednesday in support of a case against the UK Government that the current law that allows abortion up to birth for Down’s syndrome and other disabilities, but not for healthy babies, is discriminatory.

Heidi Crowter, a 27-year-old woman from Coventry who has Down’s syndrome, together with Máire Lea-Wilson from Brentford, West London, whose three-year-old son Aidan has Down’s syndrome, are challenging the UK Government over a disability clause in the current abortion law.

Heidi addressed a large rally of supporters who had travelled from around the country and said:

“When I tell people about the court case they say that it’s not fair. I am hopeful that the judges will see that it is not fair.

If the law said that all girl babies could be aborted up to birth everyone would say that is discrimination. So why does the law say that it is ok to terminate disabled babies right up to birth?

In 2022 we live in a society where disabled people are valued equally after birth but not in the womb. I hope that the judges will agree with me that this law is discrimination and needs to be changed.”