John Stonestreet – Page 45

The Divorce Risk by Marital “Age”

Aug 22, 2022John StonestreetMarriageDivorce, Marriage

A recent article in Fatherly summed up the risk of divorce by married years. Years 1 to 2 are “high risk.” Years 9 to 15 go down to “low.” By years 15 to 20, the risk rises again to “average.”

“Newlyweds and old married couples,” concluded the article, “can never get too comfortable.” 

The numbers don’t lie, but the danger of studies like this is portraying divorce as something that just happens because of “falling out of love” or something like that. The truth about marriage is, thankfully, more complicated.

Couples committed enough to fight for their marriage stand a good chance of making it. Eighty percent of couples who participated in Focus on the Family’s Hope Restored Marriage Intensive are still together two years later.

It also matters what we believe about marriage. As of 2019, divorce in America had reached a 50-year low, but that’s because fewer Americans are getting married at all. So, the ones who marry tend to believe there’s something to it.

And there is, which is why when it comes to marriage and the health of our society, none of us should be comfortable.

U.K. Transgender Clinic Forced to Close

Aug 17, 2022John StonestreetTransgenderTransgender

According to the BBC, the U.K.’s “only dedicated gender identity clinic” for youth has been ordered to shut down. The reason is not a lack of demand. In fact, referrals for “treatment” are 20 times higher than 10 years ago. 

Rather, the clinic has received wide criticism from an independent report of their practices. Former patient Kiera Bell, now 25, was prescribed puberty blockers at age 16. She underwent a double mastectomy at age 20. She has now changed her mind about the procedures and says that doctors “should have challenged” her thinking, especially at such a young age. 

A former consultant psychiatrist to the center agrees: “Some children have got the double problem of living with the wrong treatment, and the original problems weren’t addressed—with complex problems like trauma, depression, large instances of autism.”

While countries like the U.K. are questioning these wrongly named “gender affirmation” treatments, clinics, academics, and the executive branch of the government in the U.S. have only doubled down. We should stop now. The rising tide of those who are expressing regret is quickly becoming an ocean. 

Massachusetts Attorney General Deflects Blame in the Wrong Direction

Aug 12, 2022John StonestreetAbortionAbortion, Jane's Revenge, Life, Pro-life, Sanctity of Human Life

Recently, two separate crisis pregnancy centers in Worcester, Massachusetts, were vandalized on the same night. Next to broken glass and spilled paint were the words “Jane’s Revenge,” the name of a group behind a number of similar attacks in recent months. 

Earlier that same week, Massachusetts Attorney General Maura Healey warned the public of a group using “deceptive and coercive tactics,” but she wasn’t referring to the pro-abortion extremists threatening violence. She was warning of the crisis pregnancy centers themselves. Though her office has since condemned the violence, the bulk of its attention is still in all the wrong places: not the vandals, but the clinics offering help to women in crisis. 

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that “violence cannot conceal itself behind anything except lies, and lies have nothing to maintain them save violence.”

In this case, the attorney general’s lie about pregnancy resource centers covers up the violence of abortion… and those using violence are allowing the attorney general to maintain the lie. 

Let’s pray that, by some miracle, Attorney General Healey focuses her office’s attention where it needs to be.