FamilyLife Culture Watch

Steak or Hamburger?

"I have steak at home, why go out for hamburger?"

— Paul Newman, when asked in a Playboy interview if he ever considered straying from his wife, Joanne Woodward. Newman, who died last week, married Woodward in 1958.

Heavyweight Dad

"Being a loving, fully-present father takes courage. You have to stand strong and secure in the face of opposition."

"Raising children is hard. You've got to connect with love at all times. If love dies, nothing else is important. But if love is there, you've got something."

—Former Heavyweight champion boxer and father of 10, George Foreman

Missing Fathers

"A house without a father is a challenge. A neighborhood without fathers is a catastrophe."

—Bill Cosby

Trying to Undo What We've Done

We’re now struggling here trying to come up with contracts to deal with the problem of children. A lot of the things that are happening in family law are an attempt to manage by contract what had been managed by the common entity or the common union of the marriage that was a stable lifelong commitment for a common project. We’re now trying to manage our way out of a problem that we’ve created by the dissolution of marriage.

— Jennifer Roback Morse in an address to the Acton Institute

Marriage: It's No Contract

Sometimes people say that you should go into marriage with the idea that it should be a 50/50 partnership—you do half of it, I do half of it. That’s the old feminist model. And I want you to understand that it’s basically a political model. It says we’re going to be fair about all this. That model doesn’t work.

The model that works is 100% / 100%. I do all I can for you, you do all you can for me. That’s what works. When you go into it with that attitude, you see there’s a whole different orientation, there’s a whole different mentality you have about that. It helps you to be generous. You’re not carefully orchestrating an exchange to make sure nobody gets ripped off. You’re thinking “I’m going to do all I can for you.” You have it in your mind that what you’re there for is to help the other person and do what’s good for them.

— Jennifer Roback Morse, in an address to the Acton Institute about why it doesn't work to consider marriage as a contract