If you want to make America great again, you cannot afford to ignore the role stable marriage plays in motivating our labor force and in our nation’s economic growth as a whole.
Dear Mr. Trump,
The person who occupies the office of president stands as an example to Americans, and to the world, of our values and priorities. Indeed, the moral life and marital history of the president of the United States is very important to individuals, families, and the nation. This truth applies not only to the president’s public policies and speeches but also to the manner in which he or she exhibits honor, integrity, and commitment in family life. Most often the source of a healthy, happy family life is a stable, intact marriage.
While high-profile “conscious uncoupling” and supposedly happily-ever-afterdivorce may suggest that marriage vows no longer matter in America, this simply isn’t true. Young Americans need to know—now more than ever—that lifelong, faithful marriage is not only desirable, but possible. As a politician, you need to know that it’s also necessary for the future flourishing of our republic.
Mr. Trump, you have suggested your own marital infidelities are irrelevant to your campaign for the presidency. You have bragged about your extramarital exploits. In your book, The Art of the Deal, you write: “If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller.” Just this weekend The New York Times published an exposé detailing your sexualized treatment of women who worked with or performed for you.
But to the millions of victims of the Ashley Madison revelations of last summer, and to all who have experienced its effects, infidelity is no joke. Cheating destroys marriages, devastates children and families, and shatters lives. You have made reviving the economy a central issue of your campaign. But national marriage trends are not private matters to be set aside during presidential campaigns, as though unrelated to “more important” public matters like economic growth.
If you hope to Make America Great Again, you will need to understand the contributions marriage and family life made to our greatness in the first place. More urgently, you’ll need a firm grasp of the current state of marriage and the forces that threaten it. You then must use your aptly named bully pulpit to promote the truth that faithful marriage matters deeply to the flourishing of our republic.
The State of Marriage in Contemporary America
Marriage is in a fragile state, Mr. Trump, and in dire need of attention. Between 40 and 50 percent of all first marriages in the United States are projected to end in divorce. And while the divorce rate has stabilized among the college-educated, it is on the rise among baby boomers and high school graduates without four-year college degrees (the latter constituting a majority of the general population).
Evidence of the “gray divorce revolution” is particularly worrisome because older adults are role models for their children and grandchildren—precisely the cohorts who are choosing in rapidly increasing numbers to forgo, or delay, marriage in favor of cohabitation. Many of these young people are understandably cynical about the prospect of steadfast marriage because they haven’t witnessed it in their own families. This malformed view of marriage is further fueled by the “soul mate” model of relationships currently held by many young adults, in which emotional highs and lows prevail over commitment, and “love” exists only in the absence of discomfort or sacrifice. The marriage rate is the lowest ever recorded, unmarried cohabitation is rapidly becoming an acceptable alternative to marriage, and a full 40 percent of childrenare born outside the safe embrace of a married mother and father. Among numerous other negative associations, these trends have been linked to lower net worth and economic mobility, poverty, and dependence on state-provided welfare—for women and children, in particular.
Threats to Marriage
Mr. Trump, you need not look far for explanations of these trends. As a businessman, you know and appreciate the power of the legal contract. The “no fault” divorce regime, under which Americans have been living for almost five decades, made marriage the only legal contract that is literally unenforceable. All that is needed for a marriage to end—as you know well—is for one spouse to decide to move on (your own philosophy of “moving on,” while fascinating, didn’t quite meet the standard of decency required by this publication). As a result, many divorces take place against the will of a spouse who still has hope for the marriage. The ripple effect of “no fault” has been deep and wide, affecting even those whose primary role is to save marriages.
Someresearch suggests that marriage counseling is no longer a safe investment, as couples who seek marital therapy are more likely to divorce than couples who forgo it altogether.
Those who travel regularly for their jobs often find themselves faced with pornography in their hotel rooms because of the lucrative revenue stream it creates for proprietors. Among other distinctions, Mr. Trump, you would be the first US president to have posed on the cover of Playboy. But even Timemagazine (along with the state of Utah) has acknowledged what you seem to have missed: the widespread use and availability of pornography is a public health crisis.
Contrary to the myth that it will spice things up in a stale marriage, a growing body of research suggests that regular use of internet pornography is fraught with risk for marriages. A 2014 study showed that those who had watched pornography in the past year were more likely to be divorced, more likely to have had an extramarital affair, and less likely to report being happy with their marriage, or happy in general. Further, the negative association between pornography use and marital well-being was found to have grown stronger over time as pornography has become more readily available and its content more explicit. Not surprisingly, and as described in Time, men who use pornography regularly have trouble meeting the physical requirements for normal sexual relations with real, human women.
Visits to strip clubs—like the ones you have in your hotel, Mr. Trump—have been normalized through the help of television shows like “How I Met Your Mother.” Far from providing the light-hearted fun the purveyors of the “boys will be boys” mentality would have us believe, these seedy locales undermine marital relationships and degrade both those in the audience and their loved ones at home, all while profiting from the subjugation of abused and trafficked women.
Apps like Tinder are training entire generations in the belief that human beings are to be used and then discarded like trash. Many times, it is women who are on the receiving end of this cycle of use and abuse. And while you claim to “love women,” your own rhetoric on women—including a rather distasteful remark about your own daughter—suggests to these two women (and mothers) that you have a long way to go in your understanding of where our true value lies.
Ben Sasse Decries Russian Attacks on Religious Liberty "It will be illegal for Christians to share their faith outside of a church building, as if faith is constrained by the four walls of a structure and belief to a single day of the week."
https://youtu.be/tnpiuoHIhmM
Russia’s parliament has approved so-called anti-terrorism legislation that criminalizes free speech and that attacks religious liberty. If President Putin signs this into law, it will be illegal for Christians to share their faith outside of a church. As if faith is constrained by the four walls of a building and belief to a single day of the week.
In some ways, this isn’t a surprise. There’s a lot wrong with Russia -- we are witnessing a rising authoritarianism in a declining state.
This law would be an affront to free people everywhere. Washington must be sober and clear eyed about Russia and its hostilities. This Russian legislation is emblematic of a growing nationalism and of a thirst for power that cannot be ignored. Read more: dailysignal.com
L’ambassadeur de Russie, Son Excellence Alexandre Orlov, a étonné les frères du Grand Orient avec un discours critique sur la laïcité à la française. Le diplomate était l’invité de la Loge Intersection pour une Tenue Blanche Fermée (TBF, réunion rituelle réservée aux francs-maçons avec un invité profane) le mardi 15 juin, au siège du GODF, Rue Cadet à Paris, pour plancher sur le thème: «Donner du sens aux relations franco-russes».
«Votre laïcité n’est pas la nôtre… la laïcité française est agressive… et cette agressivité peut expliquer certaines réactions violentes.»
Manifestement, les frères et les sœurs présentes n’en ont pas cru leurs oreilles… surtout lorsque le diplomate a ajouté, en substance:
" 150 years actually is not all that long in political time, as you already have noticed in my mention of the Pilgrims and the Founders. It’s the interval as well between Luther and Cromwell, more or less, or between the French Revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union, or between the Founders themselves and the New Deal. "
Sitting at my desk in Louisiana the other week, where it was already as hot as it gets in Boston on the summer’s hottest day, my title, “Is the Civil War Long Gone and Far Away?,” seemed the way to pose the question I wanted to address on what I anticipated, correctly, would be a cool evening in the shadow of the Olympics, by the shore of the Puget Sound—though I had told the conference organizers that, had I been invited instead to speak in Richmond in August, I’d have prepared the same talk under the title, “Won’t the Civil War Ever Go Away?” My aim is to raise some questions, at the close of four-and-a-half years commemorating the 150th anniversary of the Civil War, about what the experience of that war has to tell us today: Whether the war still haunts us and our politics as it did for at least a century, whether it forms our national identity—or more precisely, because it was a civil war, our identities—and most especially whether there are any lessons to be remembered from it, derived perhaps in spite of those hauntings and identities, that ought to guide our political thinking and acting in the world we face.
I want to say at the outset that I think America is less haunted by the Civil War now than it was when the centennial was celebrated back when I was a young boy in the 1960s. I grew up in Maryland, near Washington, D.C., in a sense right in the middle of where the conflict had taken place, and though none of my ancestors had fought on either side, the war seemed all around me. We played in the woods on dirt mounds left from the forts ringing the capital; I had a sixth grade teacher who told us that when she was our age, near the beginning of the century, the old men at the hardware store in her hometown of Fredericksburg, Virginia, were still telling stories about the battle that took place there in their youth; my piano teacher used to say her father had been born in a farmhouse at Gettysburg during the battle. But of course what really cast a shadow then was that the work of the war, so to speak, was just then being completed, as the Civil Rights Movement persuaded the country finally to honor the letter and the spirit of the constitutional amendments passed in the war’s aftermath, to complete in aSecond Reconstruction the work that wasn’t accomplished in the first. Today perhaps we live more in the shadow of the 1960s, which ended up involving much more than Civil Rights, than we do in the shadow of the Civil War itself.
In a sense, then, the Civil War is indeed long gone and far away. Certainly it is only textbook history in a place like the state of Washington, barely settled at the time and to my knowledge not the scene of any skirmish. Indeed, the settlement of the country this far west and the emergence of the West Coast as the catalyst of technological innovation and economic development, not to mention trade across the Pacific, have played a role in burying the old conflicts back East deep in the past. Moreover, dramatic changes in the population of America since the Civil War and then again since its 100th anniversary make the war recede in American memory. Many, if not most, Americans can trace a substantial proportion of their ancestors to peoples who immigrated only after that war, and for them the Civil War is hardly part of their own family history. If those Americans who lived through the Civil War can be said, as historian James McPherson puts it, to have been stamped with one of three identities—white Southerner, white Northerner, or African-American—and if these identities remained pretty stable for the century afterwards, in the half-century since the 1960s things have changed pretty decisively. African-Americans, emerging only fifty years ago from the segregated existence that was imposed after Reconstruction failed, now exercise a distinctive influence in American culture, participate extensively (if still imperfectly) in mainstream economic and political life, and increasingly belong to families where African and European blood are mixed. White Northerners and Southerners have experienced increased mobility since the Second World War, mingling in the West and now moving back and forth from North to South back East, or at least often having family in both regions. Northern Virginia, Atlanta, Florida, Texas, probably even lots of places in North Carolina and Tennessee have as many New Yorkers and Midwesterners as natives, so to speak, and if the television feels a need to put subtitles on shows that depict and mock the rural South, the mood is comedy, not menace. To be sure, old wounds still show from time to time, for example when untoward behavior at a Southern fraternity goes viral on You-Tube, and serious issues concerning the place of religion in public life often carry an overtone of old North-South divisions. Still, I think it is hard to deny that in many respects the country has “moved on” from the old Civil War, now as far away in time from us as the landing of the Pilgrims was to the Founding Fathers.
Despite waging a brutal terrorist war on the people of Colombia that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives over 50 years, the Marxist narco-terrorist group known as the FARC is making out like bandits in an Obama-backed “peace” deal with the Colombian government.
Under the controversial plan, negotiated in Communist Cuba with help from the pro-FARC dictatorship there, FARC terrorists and their leaders will receive what amounts to amnesty for the atrocities they perpetrated — everything from mass murder and war crimes to kidnapping, torture, robbery, and rape. The war criminals and terrorists will also be allowed to enter the government. Critics, though, including the former Colombian president, are blasting the agreement as a farce and a capitulation to communist terrorists just as the barbarians were set to be destroyed militarily.
There is no such thing as a secular society. My claim is a brutal and paradoxical one: The question about the possibility of a secular society resolves itself, or rather it dissolves itself.
To defend this claim I would like to submit two-and-a-half theses. First, a purely secular society simply cannot survive in the long run. As a consequence, leaving behind secularism is a necessary move, indeed a vital one. Second, the term secular society is tautological, because the ideal of secularity is latent with the modern use of the term society. Third is the half thesis, which I won’t develop here: Whatever comes after secularism, it won’t be a “society” any longer but rather another way for us to think about and give political form to the being-together of human beings.
The use of the term secularism in English began in the middle of the nineteenth century. George Jacob Holyoake (1817–1906) may have coined the word as early as 1846,and one of his main works, published in 1870, bears the title The Principles of Secularism. In 1859, the philosopher John Stuart Mill was still treating the word as a neologism. In On Liberty, after mentioning the religious principles that can motivate human action, he speaks of “secular standards (as for want of a better name they may be called).”
Mill used the term because he was eager to avoid atheistic, which is the more fitting term to describe the opposite of religious. But atheism was hardly the thing in Victorian Britain, and the word was felt to be rude. In the same intellectual atmosphere, the biologist T. E. Huxley, Darwin’s famous bulldog, coinedagnosticism during a memorable discussion that took place at the Metaphysical Society in 1869. In present-day Britain, a third word, humanism, is often used with the same meaning and with the same intention: to evoke the possibility of a nonreligious basis for a morally animated society.
The debate for which the word secularism was coined is a false one. Advocates of secularism assume they are proposing a novel possibility, which is that moral precepts can be known without any particular revelation by God. Yet this is precisely what Christianity has taught, explicitly since Paul’s Epistle to the Romans and, implicitly, since Jesus himself. This was lost sight of in the modern era, when many Christians defended religion against skeptical and rationalist attacks by arguing that it is necessary for ensuring the moral basis of society. Men without religion, it was argued, could not be trusted to behave in an upright fashion. So advocates of secularism were drawn into the false debate.
Ironically, and perhaps inevitably, the words that are meant to express secularization are themselves Christian words that have been secularized. One prominent premodern use of secular was to distinguish between “religious” priests, who were members of mendicant or monastic orders, and diocesan clergy, or “secular” priests. These terms continue to be used, often confusing those unfamiliar with the Church’s particular language: a secular priest?
Another example is the French adjective for secularity, laïc, or the Italian equivalent, laico. Both are derived from the Greek adjective that designates a member of a people or nation. But not just any people or nation: The Septuagint translated the Hebrew `am—the people of God, the holy nation—with laos, the Greek source of both adjectives. Thus even the advocates of secularism are unable to escape the biblical sources of so much of Western culture.
The root of secular, secularism, and secularity is saeculum. From this Latin word the Romance languages derived their words for century : siècle, secolo, siglo. It receives from Christianity a particular shade of meaning. In the vocabulary of the Church Fathers, saeculum designates the world as Christianity conceives of it. They were profoundly influenced by the Hebrew word ‘olam and the Greek aion, which is often used to render it. These terms stress the transitory, provisional character of the present state of the world. Saeculum is thereby diametrically opposed to the Greek kosmos, the beautiful world order that was believed to be everlasting.
The word also came to designate a century, one hundred years. This semantic evolution did not happen by chance, for one hundred years is not just any length of time.
The sum of seventy plus thirty, it was understood in a symbolic way as the average length of a generation, a bit longer than the traditional human lifespan according to the Psalms: “The years of our life are threescore and ten.”
This use of the term was not uniquely Christian. In ancient Rome, the herald who announced the secular games, ludi saeculares, proclaimed with great solemnity that “nobody who witnessed them saw them already or would see them one more time.” The formula is quoted by Suetonius in a highly ironical context: ludos, quos nec spectasset quisquam nec spectaturus esset. Another historian, Herodian, wrote: “People then called these games ‘secular’ because they had heard that they were celebrated only after three generations had elapsed. Heralds would go all over Rome and Italy, inviting people to come and see a spectacle that nobody ever saw and nobody would see again.”
The ancient usage draws on the fact that a saeculum, a century, is the temporal limit of living memory. It is the halo of possible experience that surrounds the life of the individual. I can keep a remembrance of my grandparents and, more seldom, of my great-grandparents. What my grandfather told me I can tell my grandchildren. I can reach back two generations and forward two, but rarely more, to a period spanning what amounts to a century.
One century is also the limit of the concrete care we can give. I very well can, nay, should think about the future situation of my children, of my grandchildren, possibly of my great-grandchildren. But I can’t care in anything but a highly abstract way about the generations that will come after them. If by some miracle our remote forebears came back to life, or if our remote posterity were now called to life, they wouldn’t mean a great deal to us.
Vladimir Boukovski, écrivain et ancien dissident soviétique : « J’ai vécu dans votre avenir et ça n’a pas marché ! »
Vladimir Boukovsky est un ancien dissident soviétique qui a passé douze ans de sa vie emprisonné (camp Perm-36, prison, hôpital psychiatrique). Il est le premier à dénoncer l'utilisation de l'emprisonnement psychiatrique contre les prisonniers politiques en URSS.
