Dear Marriage Supporter,
We want you to know about a positive campaign to help marriages. This week leading up to Valentine's Day is National Marriage Week USA (Feb. 7-14), which focuses solely on reducing divorce, promoting marriage over cohabitation, and promoting marriage prior to childbearing — for better outcomes of raising children, and to reduce poverty.
In just its fourth year, there are 1,000 marriage classes, conferences and events being mobilized across the country, with huge potential for growth each year. You may find an event near you or post (for free) any marriage education activity that you are hosting at any time of year at http://www.nationalmarriageweekusa.org/find-events-in-your-area.
Local stories include creative ideas, such as a group in Kankakee County, Illinois, which is setting up a booth in a shopping mall from February 7 to14, offering free marriage counseling services. A team in the Chicago area is mobilizing hundreds of Date Night events. A Louisiana group is seeking its state's top 10 longest married couples to be publicized as was last year's honoree couple, who were married for 81 years! A Sweetheart Dinner and Dance in Ohio will offer a renewal of vows ceremony. Marriage tips and more stories are also at www.NationalMarriageWeekUSA.org.
It has been long proven that children fare best at every level if they can grow up with both their father and mother. Since more than 40 percent of U.S. babies today are born out of wedlock (which is the greatest predictor of poverty for women and children), and we have an alarming drop in marriage rates — nearly 80% of all adults were married in 1970, only 52% today — the need is greater than ever for a positive effort to promote a vibrant marriage culture in America.
The Brookings Institution says that if the U.S. had the marriage rate today that it had in 1970, there would be a 25 percent drop in poverty. The Heritage Foundation says that marriage drops the probability of a child living in poverty by 82 percent.
National Marriage Week USA encourages citizens, organizations, and houses of worship to launch marriage education classes and events, to list them on the National Calendar at www.NationalMarriageWeekUSA.org, and encourages individuals to find an event near them to help their own marriage, or help others.
There is a Tool Kit with easy-to-use ideas for curricula, videos, links to the latest research, talking points, and media tools to help leaders or churches build a local marriage week campaign at www.NationalMarriageWeekUSA.org.
Please consider joining this helpful and hopeful national effort for a positive campaign to help marriages, reduce poverty, and to reach out and help others! To learn more during this year's event week, and to be kept informed leading into next year's efforts, please LIKE this project on Facebook or Register at www.NationalMarriageWeekUSA.org.
"The [Hawaii] state House Judiciary Committee has decided not to schedule a hearing for a bill that would legalize gay marriage, which means the issue is likely tabled for this legislative session.
Documents uncovered from a Freedom of Information Act request show the Obama administration's Department of Justice enjoys a close relationship with the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), an organization that brands principled opposition to homosexuality “hate.”
The legal watchdog Judicial Watch filed the request to see what effect SPLC's designation of “hate groups” had on the government. The two-dozen pages of e-mails it received reveal views of DOJ employees that border on adulation.
"The biggest losers [when marriage is redefined], though, are children, the pope argued. If children are simply a lifestyle choice in a “family” that is nothing other than a willed arrangement for mutual convenience, children lose their rightful place and their rightful dignity. Citing the chief rabbi of France, Gilles Bernheim, Benedict argued that children are, in this bizarre new world, no longer the subject of rights. Rather, “the child has become an object to which people have a right and which they have a right to obtain.” The freedom to be creative, which finds its most awesome expression in procreation, has been reduced to the freedom to create myself, however I imagine myself to be.
Former Government minister Tim Loughton was sacked because of his opposition to redefining marriage, according to reports.
Even if all the market reforms of the Washington think tanks, the Wall Street Journal, and Forbes Magazine were enacted, we’d still need to kiss the Great American Economy goodbye. Below the level of economic policy lies a society that is producing fewer people capable of hard work, especially married men with children. As the retreat from marriage continues apace, there are fewer and fewer of these men, resulting in a slowly, permanently decelerating economy.
The benefits of intact biological families were emphasized on a "Building a Marriage Culture" panel at the National Review Institute's 2013 Summit, "The Future of Conservatism." One of the panelists, Doug Mainwaring, spoke of his personal experience as a gay man who came to realize that his own children need both a mother and a father.
Now that anti-right, anti-hate SPLC is implicated in providing targets for a politically motivated mass shooter will the national media turn on the SPLC the way they did on Sarah Palin?"
