Anglican Mainstream

By Alexander Lucie-Smith, Catholic Herald

by Albert Mohler

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By Alana S Newman, The Witherspoon Institute

Young women now have to defend themselves not only from stereotypical sexual predators, but also from older women and gay men who seek their eggs.

Value depends on scarcity. In the world of human reproduction, the most valuable entity is the fertile female—specifically, her eggs and her womb.

The fierce politics surrounding female fecundity and women’s reproductive rights rests not only on a woman’s ability to create new life, but also on the incredible amount of commitment and risk involved when her eggs and her womb are accessed for procreation. Since women are fertile for a shorter period than men, since gestation takes forty long weeks, and since labor and delivery pose life-threatening risks, young women always will face disproportionately high demands for access to their bodies. But those demands are rising in unexpected ways, and from unexpected people.

Historically, it was understood that sex created babies. Cultural scripts thus emerged that valued and preferred certain types of sex and male-female relations. The profession of prostitution has always been highly stigmatized for this reason. As we’ve learned the hard way, when female prostitutes engage with their clients, fatherless children can be born, and grow up distinctly disadvantaged.

By far, men have always been the main buyers of sexual access to fertile females. Women virtually never pay for sexual access to either gender. Women and girls make up the overwhelming majority of prostitutes and escorts, and men overwhelmingly make up the clientele. This is true for every human culture, in every period in history. And it has everything to do with reproduction and the scarcity of the fertile female.

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By John Bingham, Telegraph

Bankers and businessmen leave their sense of right and wrong at home when they go to work, according to the leader of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales.

Too many people in big business are living a divided life, ignoring the moral values that they uphold when with their families, the Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Reverend Vincent Nichols, will say today.

As a result, the business world is in danger of losing its sense of “common good”, putting the pursuit of profit before the interests of society, he will warn. He will suggest they learn from the example of Britain’s Olympic athletes: wanting to win but doing so with honour.

The plea comes as the Archbishop chairs a gathering of more than 100 financiers and business chiefs in London to discuss the lessons of the financial crisis and a series of business scandals.

The meeting, attended by executives from some of the biggest FTSE 100 companies, was organised after the Archbishop was approached by business chiefs concerned about a loss of public trust.

Aides said that the Archbishop's role would be to listen rather than to preach.

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By Peter Dominiczak, London Evening Standard

Company chiefs will today turn to the Church in a bid to repair business’s reputation following the financial crisis.

Bosses from firms including Tesco and Vodafone were joining the Archbishop of Westminster, the Most Rev Vincent Nichols, to discuss ways to put moral principles at the heart of business behaviour.

The move to focus on the good that big business can do in society has also won the support of the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, and the Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks.

It comes after a series of scandals involving banks, including the attempted manipulation of the Libor borrowing rate. About 200 other executives, from companies including Unilever, BAE Systems and Centrica, were joining today’s conference.

In an article for the Daily Telegraph’s website today Archbishop Nichols, the head of the Roman Catholic Church in England and Wales, said churches could help companies because they have “no political agenda”. He said: “We have detected a tendency for business people to feel they need to adopt a different set of values in business from those which they apply in the rest of their lives.”

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From The Christian Institute

David Cameron thinks that faith schools should not be allowed to teach that homosexuality is a sin, according to a quote unearthed by the Daily Mail.

The would-be Prime Minister made the inflammatory remark during an interview with a gay lifestyle magazine ahead of the last general election.

According to the Daily Mail’s Andrew Pierce, when Mr Cameron was asked if faith schools should stop teaching that homosexuality is a sin, he said: “Basically, yes, that’s the short answer to that, without getting into a long religious exegesis.

“I don’t want to get into an enormous row with the Archbishop here. But I think the Church has to do some of the things that the Conservative Party has been through — sorting this issue out and recognising that full equality is a bottom line.”

The news comes amidst concern over the Government’s plans to rewrite the definition of marriage.

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By Alexander Boot

[...]  For the time being, Boris has to restrict himself to supporting a marginally different declaration: “I now pronounce you man and man.” Don’t get me wrong, I don’t believe for a second that he indeed sees ‘absolutely no reason’ to find anything wrong with the idea, a bright lad like him.

For, when Boris was at Oxford, he didn’t just join his Bullingdon mates Dave and George in getting pissed, trashing restaurants and then paying for the damage. In his free time, he also read Classics. So he must know a society is on its last legs when it first condones and then welcomes decadence in general and sexual perversion in particular. Surely he must have read Gibbon, explaining why and how Rome declined and fell?

I don’t know if he also read a bit of political science, but any scholar worthy of the name could have explained to him that, unless a society is anchored by traditional institutions, it’ll be cast adrift. And in the West, no institution is as vital as marriage, defined as a consecrated union between a man and a woman (one of each).

Families are the cells out of which the body social is made, and they also provide the model for other close-knit groups patterned after them: village, parish, guild, local government, kinship. These became all-important when the West divested itself of the Hellenic notions of res publica and privatised the individual.

Ever since, family has been a natural competitor of the mighty central state, and only the tethers of Christian morality used to prevent the state from waging an all-out war. Such tethers have now been slipped, and the war is in full swing.

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By George Carey, Mailonline

You might think it ill-behoves a retired Archbishop to comment on economic matters about which I have no expertise, but the banking crisis is not merely a matter for the markets. The banking sector is an important part of the network of institutions which build a civil society.

Thus evidence of corruption in our banks, and the resulting collapse of public trust in them, affects our very democracy.

It is not an exaggeration to say that the sort of widespread alienation we are now witnessing among the public towards these multi-billion-pound behemoths can lead to civil unrest.

And it is not just banks in which public confidence is at an all-time low. For over the past five years, we have witnessed an unprecedented public crisis in the great pillars of state: the banks, the police and Parliament.

Why? Because in more and more cases, naked greed seems to have been the driving force for many self-serving individuals in these institutions.

That said, the real crisis we are facing is not a financial but a moral one. And it is a direct result of the something-for-nothing culture which is poisoning our society.

The question we must all seek to address, then, is how we can restore public confidence in these tarnished institutions. Where the banks are concerned, the answer lies partly in simple finance — for they must do their part to help restore Britain to economic stability, having plunged us into such peril in the crash of 2008.

But the reparations that must be made go beyond balance sheets.

One of the key Christian concepts is the idea of repentance, and I firmly believe that this is not a matter merely of saying a begrudging ‘sorry’, or simply paying lip-service with no real change of heart. Repentance implies a complete turning around and making good.

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By Thaddeus Baklinski, LifeSite News

Moncton’s Crandall University, a Christian liberal arts school formerly known as Atlantic Baptist College, is in the crosshairs of homosexual rights activists who claim the school’s “Statement of Moral Standards” discriminates against homosexuals and is a violation of human rights.

By Tim Stanley, Telegraph

Hat Tip: Barbara Gauthier

David Virtue recalls that Francis Schaeffer predicted the collapse of secular morality over a generation ago.  By discarding Christian religion, contemporary secular liberals have also succeeded in destroying their own moral underpinnings:

By Julian Mann

[...]  It is truly frighterning that Mr Johnson is not prepared to leave Londoners themselves to make up their own minds on the question of gay conversion. Does he believe that his electors are incapable of deciding on whether they think that homosexuality is an innate condition or that sexual orientation is more fluid and can therefore be subjected to the exercise of moral choices.

Moreover, cannot Londoners decide for themselves that if homosexuality is an innate orientation with which some people are born, individuals can choose on religious grounds not to act on their sexual desires and remain celibate?

Does Mr Johnson wish to impose on everybody the permissive society's view that sexual activity is essential to leading a fulfilled life?

Voting in an election – and Mr Johnson is standing in one next month for the office of London Mayor – involves the exercise of independent judgement. It involves weighing up the merits of various arguments. It involves exercising moral choices.

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By QC

Imaginary conversation between myself & a friend [in italics]

by David Schaengold, Witherspoon Institute

By Ed West, Telegraph

By Carolyn Moynihan, MercatorNet

By Peter Saunders, CMF

The costs of sexual freedom and relationship breakdown to the taxpayer and wider economy total some £100 billion annually; about twice as much as alcohol abuse, smoking and obesity combined.

This is the astounding conclusion of the latest ‘Cambridge Paper’, ‘Free sex: Who pays? Moral hazard and sexual ethics’, by Jubilee Centre researcher Guy Brandon.

Rather than addressing fundamental moral issues around sexual freedom, Brandon employs a utilitarian approach and attempts to quantify its financial impact. He argues that sexual freedom ‘represents an enormous moral hazard and, as a result, unsustainable and unjust public expenditure’. Furthermore, these costs are imposed on society as a whole, rather than borne solely by the individuals most directly responsible.

He first surveys the ‘changing landscape of sexual freedom’. The average age of first intercourse has fallen from 21 in the 1950s to 16 now. The divorce rate has risen from 4.4 per 1,000 in 1970 to 11.1 people per 1,000 in 2010. Forty years ago 85 per cent of first unions were marriage but now 85 per cent are cohabitations. Sexually Transmitted Infections (STIs) in England rose 74 per cent between 1998 and 2009 and abortions increased from 54,819 in 1969 to 189,574 in 2010. 
  
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By George Conger, Get Religion

The front page of Wednesday’s Independent is devoted to a story that chronicles the collapse of public and private morality in Britain.

[...]  The bottom line … the Independent article presents a classic example of a religion ghost in a secular news story. The topic under review — public and private morality — is inherently connected with religion, yet no word about religion appears in the story.

Should the Independent have noted the absence of religion in the public morality report? Is religious belief intrinsic to morality? Can the two be separated? Given Prime Minister David Cameron’s widely publicized December speech about Christian Britain — how could the Independent not touch upon religion in its report on collapsing public and private morals.

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By Stanton L Jones, First Things

The social sciences cannot settle the moral status of homosexuality.

Many religious and social conservatives believe that homosexuality is a mental illness caused exclusively by psychological or spiritual factors and that all homosexual persons could change their orientation if they simply tried hard enough. This view is widely pilloried (and rightly so) as both wrong on the facts and harmful in effect. But few who attack it are willing to acknowledge that today a wholly different, far more influential, and no less harmful set of falsehoods—each attributed to the findings of “science”—dominates the research literature and political discourse.

We are told that homosexual persons are just as psychologically healthy as heterosexuals, that sexual orientation is biologically determined at birth, that sexual orientation cannot be changed and that the attempt to change it is necessarily harmful, that homosexual relationships are equivalent to heterosexual ones in all important characteristics, and that personal identity is properly and legitimately constituted around sexual orientation. These claims are as misguided as the ridiculed beliefs of some social conservatives, as they spring from distorted or incomplete representations of the best findings from the science of same-sex attraction.

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