FamilyLife Culture Watch

Does Sexual Orientation Affect Parenting Quality?

By Bob Lepine

An article published recently in the Journal of Marriage and Family claims a review of research shows that children of same-sex couples do as well as those raised by traditional couples, and that sexual preference has no bearing on the quality of a person's parenting. As was reported in USA Today:

Sociologists Stacey and Timothy Biblarz of the University of Southern California, spent five years reviewing 81 studies of one- and two-parent families, including gay, lesbian and heterosexual couples. "No research supports the widely held conviction that the gender of parents matters for child well-being," they conclude.

"Children being raised by same-gender parents, on most all of the measures that we care about, self- esteem, school performance, social adjustment and so on, seem to be doing just fine and, in most cases, are statistically indistinguishable from kids raised by married moms and dads on these measures," Biblarz says.

So you could catch the subtle jockeying of the language in the last paragraph, I included italics.

Gender and roles today seem to be like choices in cafeteria line where you grab what fits your current tastes. That is not at the heart of the research, and definitely not in the media’s reporting of the study.

What the study doesn’t measure is gender confusion in the life of a child raised in a same sex parent setting. Of course, the study doesn’t acknowledge homosexual desire as gender confusion, so that’s not a factor to those doing the study nor those reporting it. It also doesn’t measure how little girls who grow up with two daddies function as wives and mothers in a marriage years later. Or little boys who grow up with two mommies and how they function as husbands and dads. Absent a model, where do they get their pattern? Inherent in their thinking is that husband/wife roles are gender neutral. Undiscerning Egalitarian thinking is not challenged at all.

I’d want to see a longitudinal study that looks at depression rates, substance abuse rates, whether kids who grow up in same sex parent homes are more likely to experience same sex attraction than children who grow up in the general population to be.

Tiger Steps Up

by Dave Boehi

I haven't been writing many posts lately because I've been buried helping Dennis Rainey put together a book on courageous manhood. The theme of the book is that men are called to make courageous choices to step up to their responsibilities as they go through different stages of life as men.

Today I was editing a chapter about men who actually step back instead of stepping up. They regress to adolescent behavior, following their lusts and desires, and wrapping themselves in a cocoon of self-absorption. And right in the middle of this work, a friend e-mailed me a link to watch Tiger Woods read a statement in which he took responsibility for his infidelity.

Tiger was a man who stepped back into adolescent behavior, and it was encouraging to see him apparently doing the right thing to step up and man up. His statement was full of powerful statements from a man who obviously is getting good advice about owning up to his mistakes:

"What I did is not acceptable, and I am the only person to blame..."

"I ran straight through the boundaries that a married couple should live by..."

"I thought I could do whatever I wanted to. I was wrong, I was foolish. I don’t get to play by different rules."

It's been interesting to read different media reactions to the statement. ABC News anchor George Stephanopoulos called it "one of the most remarkable public apologies ever by a public figure," while a public relations expert called it a "disaster." One media host tweeted, "Tiger's apology included some of the worst acting since Ishtar."

As for me, I saw a private man who was ashamed and nervous—who wouldn't be? And I agree with Stephanopoulos: I can't think of another statement that honest or remarkable from a public figure admitting his sin.

The State of Marriage

Since 1970, marriage has been on the decline. The number of people marrying each year has decreased by 50 percent as a portion of the population. While a lot of the decrease is because people aren't marrying at all, other factors are feeding the decline, like couples delaying marriage until their late 20s, the increase in cohabitation, and a slight decrease in the remarriage rate of divorcees.

Cohabitation has increased more than 12 times what it was in 1960. It's rapidly becoming the living arrangement of choice among those who haven't seen a good example of biblical marriage. Included are those who:

• Have been divorced
• Were raised in a divorce, fatherless, or discordant home
• Have lower educational levels
• Have lower income levels
• Are less religious than their peers

An interesting trend that is developing divides Americans into the haves and have-nots when it comes to marriage and family stability. College-age women are actually marrying in higher numbers than ever before, and their divorce numbers continue to drop. They're also more likely than any other group to consider their marriages "very happy." Add to that the fact that among women who delay marriage past age 30, college-educated women are the only group more likely to have children after marriage rather than before.

Now, the have-nots. Women without a college education are experiencing a sharp rise in out-of-wedlock childbearing. One study finds that more than half of these women are having children outside marriage. That compares with just seven percent of college-educated women. Not only that, they're much more likely to cohabit than their more educated peers.

If the marriage example is likely to repeat itself in the next generation, this fork in the marriage road looks to widen quickly over the coming years. Already, more than one-fourth of all children are raised in single-parent homes, and more than 40 percent of cohabiting homes contain children.

What Tiger Couldn't Control

By Dave Boehi

I don’t think I’m surprised anymore when a celebrity is “caught” in adultery. For the last 15 years Tiger Woods has been my favorite figure in sports, and I can’t even count how many tournaments I’ve watched him win on television. But I haven’t been surprised at what Tiger called his “transgressions”; unfortunately I’ve come to expect them with people who live in that world.

What has surprised me is how quickly a scandal like this catches fire in this age of blogging, social networking, and electronic communication. Tiger has always appeared to be a master of control—of his golf game, of his privacy, and of his public image. But because of a lack of control in his personal life, he seems to have lost control of the public relations battle. As I write these words, the firestorm rages on, with headlines like:

• “Woods ‘Throwing Money at Mistress, Wife’”
• “Tiger and Elin Undergoing Intensive Marriage Counseling”
• “Is Tiger Woods Paying for Silence?”
• “Alleged Tiger Woods Mistresses Need to Shoulder Some of the Blame”

I agree with Tiger when he said, in last week’s public statement, that “Personal sins should not require press releases and problems within a family shouldn’t have to mean public confessions.” But when you are as famous as he is, is that type of privacy ever going to be possible again?

One article I read last week used the Tiger incident as the platform to ask, “Why do men cheat?” It didn’t offer many answers, speaking vaguely about how men—and women—stray when they feel their needs for intimacy are not being met. I’ve seen other articles point to boredom, narcissism, and other causes for adultery. One blogger theorized that “public life leads some people to become desensitized to the consequences of their behavior.”

Of course, as a Christian my primary explanation would be that people commit adultery because they are sinners in need of a Savior. But let me expound on that a bit more.

We live in a world saturated with sexual images that are designed to appeal to our lust. Magazines and movies and television shows and songs celebrate sexuality and ridicule sexual restraint. Rarely are we encouraged in our culture to “flee from youthful lusts and pursue righteousness, faith, love and peace, with those who call on the Lord from a pure heart” (2 Timothy 2:22).

In fact, many people want the love and peace that Timothy describes, but they also they want the freedom to act upon their desires.

True freedom, however, comes when you admit and confess your human failing, your inability to please God and to live a righteous life through your own efforts, and embrace the forgiveness and salvation God offers through Christ. And then pursue a life of purity in the power of the Spirit.

In an interesting FamilyLife Today interview with Al Mohler, president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, he recently talked about controlling sexual desires:

The Bible’s point is that God has given us a gift that comes with an urge, with a desire, with all the energy that comes into showing God’s glory in the sexual gift—in marriage …

The reality is that lust is just what happens when sin intersects with the sex drive. That’s the world we live in! …

Historians Will and Ariel Durant, looking at the entire scope of human history, said that “civilization is only possible when lust is banked like the high banks of a river to keep it from flood stage.” Well, we are in a society … in which we have basically opened the dam. In terms of our entertainments, in terms of our consumer advertising, in terms of the songs that we hear, and the images that are put before us, lust is now the drumbeat of the society that we know.

Mohler went on to say that people need to be taught early on about the need to control this lust.

Lust is sexual desire directed toward the wrong object—period—that’s it! It’s directed toward the wrong object.

I would say to a 16-year-old boy, “God has given you this gift. It’s going to wake you up in the middle of the night. It’s going to shake you several times during the day, and it’s telling you—you are meant to be married. You need to grow up, be mature, and do whatever it takes for you to be able to make the kind of commitment you need to make to a young woman who is worthy of marriage. You need to be faithful to her. God’s going to give you the fulfillment of this gift and He’s not going to leave you alone until you get there.”

The problem is, in our society, we have people saying that there’s no reason to wait until marriage. Your focus should be on just whatever sexual pleasure you can find. So, they are basically being enticed into lust. The Christian dad has to say to his son, “Buddy, here’s the deal. Growing up means you have to figure out how to channel your energy in this part of life until you can get to where you say ‘I do’ to a woman who will be your bride.”

And growing up also means that after you say “I do,” you channel that sexual energy to your wife and to no other person. In this culture, that requires an extraordinary amount of self-control. Unfortunately for Tiger, that was perhaps the one type of self-control he was not able to master.

The Manhattan Declaration

by Dave Boehi

Today marks the release of a significant document that Charles Colson says is "one of the most important documents produced by the American church, at least in my lifetime." The Manhattan Declaration, he writes, is a "wake-up call—a call to conscience—for the church. It is also a crystal-clear message to civil authorities that we will not, under any circumstances, stand idly by as our religious freedom comes under assault."

The document, signed by 148 religious leaders, including Dennis Rainey, President of FamilyLife, is a strong, biblical statement that focuses on three issues: the sanctity of human life, the dignity of marriage as the conjugal union of husband and wife, and the rights of conscience and religious liberty. As the Manhattan Declaration website says:

Inasmuch as these truths are foundational to human dignity and the well-being of society, they are inviolable and non-negotiable. Because they are increasingly under assault from powerful forces in our culture, we are compelled today to speak out forcefully in their defense, and to commit ourselves to honoring them fully no matter what pressures are brought upon us and our institutions to abandon or compromise them. We make this commitment not as partisans of any political group but as followers of Jesus Christ, the crucified and risen Lord, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life. 

Another key statement, from the declaration itself:

". . . We will not comply with any edict that purports to compel our institutions to participate in abortions, embryo-destructive research, assisted suicide and euthanasia or any other anti-life act; nor will we bend to any rule purporting to force us to bless immoral sexual partnerships, treat them as marriage or the equivalent or refrain from proclaiming the truth, as we know it, about morality and immorality and marriage and the family."

It's worth reading the entire document, which includes strong sections on each of the three issues discussed. Click here to download The Manhattan Declaration.

It will be interesting to read the reaction over the next few days, because the Manhattan Declaration addresses some of the most controversial issues of our day.  My prediction: Plenty of name-calling, hysteric indignation and accusations that Christians are plotting to take away the liberties of everyone who disagrees with them.  As one person wrote in a comment on a Washington Post blog post by one of the Manhattan Declaration authors, "The Taliban are thriving here in America.  The 'Manhattan Declaration' is their war cry against the freedoms of everyone else."