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The Iona Blog
Opinions contained in The Iona Blog are not necessarily those of The Iona Institute. The Iona Blog is open to anyone who broadly shares the views of The Iona Institute. If you wish to post a comment on a relevant topic please email 200 – 400 words to info@ionainstitute.ie and it will be considered for inclusion in the blog.
The growing marriage and religion gap
~Dr Brad Wilcox of Virginia University, (he spoke at an Iona Institute event last year), and Johns Hopkins sociologist Andrew Cherlin have a thought provoking column in the Wall Street Journal. The column points out that widening marriage and religion gap between the American working and middle classes and the hugely harmful effect of this on the working class. Read more...
The recession and marriage
~The latest unemployment figures confirm once again that two-thirds of the 450,000 people who are without a job in this country are men. The same phenomenon has been found in other countries. Basically, the recession has disproportionately hit construction and manufacturing, traditional male industries. This is why some commentators have called the recession a ‘mancession’. Read more...
Is race a relevant factor in adoption decisions?
~A story in the British press over the weekend relates how a couple were refused permission to adopt a black or Asian child because they are both white. The local authority in question objects to inter-racial adoption. The authority obviously believes that the race of a couple is a relevant factor in deciding which couples get to adopt what children. They obviously believe that it can have an adverse effect on a child’s life to be adopted out of his or her race. Read more...
Money scruples obscure real moral issue in AHR debate
~Box office figures from the US suggest that Jennifer Anistion's latest comedy, The Switch, which is about a forty-year-old single woman who wants a baby and chooses to be artificially inseminated has flopped, at least in its first week. Read more...
Britain’s failed teenage pregnancy strategy
~New numbers from the UK suggest that their teen pregnancy rate, already the highest in the EU, is on the rise again among under 16s after some years of remaining steady. This is despite the Labour Government spending 13 years and hundreds of millions of pounds in concerted effort to halve pregnancies among under-18s by this year. Read more...
Is Ireland really the most expensive for day-care?
~Is Ireland the most expensive place for child-care in the developed world? According to the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), the answer is yes. Taking a two-income couple with two young children in day-care as its mark, it finds that we are indeed the most expensive country, that such a couple will pay a whopping 45 percent of their net income towards day-care. In Poland the equivalent figure is only 5 percent. Read more...
Judge Walker vs the voters
~Judge Vaughan Walker's ruling overturning Proposition 8, the referendum passed in California in 2008 preserving traditional marriage, has provoked a firestorm of controversy, and not just for the obvious reasons. Read more...
Divorce from the point of view of fathers
~The Daily Telegraph ran a feature on Tuesday written by Tim Lott, a divorced dad about how lonely and bereft fathers can be when they are forcibly separated from their children. Read more...
Aniston's unhelpful remarks on family
~Kathryn Jean Lopez, writing on National Review Online, takes a stance in this article against remarks made by Friends actress Jennifer Aniston (pictured). Read more...
When divorce is not the answer
~Is divorce the answer? It probably depends on the question, but if the question is, will divorce make me happier, then the answer is, maybe not. A feature in yesterday’s Irish Independent dealt with the aftermath of divorce and quoted marriage counsellor, Sian Blore, who was an oasis of common sense. Read more...
Marriage and the ICCL’s straw-men
~In its latest newsletter, the Irish Council for Civil Liberties, and its director, Mark Kelly, take The Iona Institute to task over its position on the Civil Partnership Act. In the course of his attack on us, Kelly sets up a whole series of straw-men which he naturally has no difficulty in toppling over. Read more...
Catholic schools inclusive and successful-O'Brien
~Breda O'Brien's (pictured) Irish Times column on Saturday contained a useful analysis on the current state of the debate about school patronage. Read more...
Why children are in care
~There are more than 5,000 children in the care of the State. Official figures from 2007 list the reasons why they are in care. The majority are in care because of ‘family-centred problems’ rather than abuse or neglect indicating children can already be taken into care for a wide range of reasons without a change to the Constitution being necessary. Read more...
Why a conscience clause had a good constitutional claim
~This blog by a PhD student contains a useful legal analysis of the demand that a conscience clause be included in the Civil Partnership Act. The author, Eoin Daly, appears to be unsympathetic to such a demand, but he nonetheless believes that it might have a strong constitutional basis and he cannot understand why this possibility was so lightly dismissed by State lawyers and their political masters. Read more...
Crushing opposition to ‘sexual liberation’
~Here's a blog on the US website First Things highlighting an increasing trend on US campuses whereby those who believe in traditional sexual morality are being subjected to intimidation and direct sanction, including dismissal. Read more...
How radicals tried to sexually ‘liberate’ children
~Derek Scally has written a revealing article in today's Irish Times about what he calls "a little-known detour in the 1968 student revolution", a project to sexually "liberate" children. Incredibly, as late as 1980 the German Green Party debated a motion aiming to “liberalise sex between children and adults”. Read more...
Switched at birth, reunited as adults; how biology matters
~Family diversity advocates insist that it really makes no difference to a child whether or not they are raised by their own biological parents so long as they are raised by at least one loving parent, whether that parent figure is biologically related to the child or not. Among other things this view ignores the importance to identity to children. Adopted children often go in search of their biological parents because their biological parents are part of their identity. Read more...
Waters on children's referendum
~John Waters (pictured) has a provocative column on the proposed children's rights referendum in today's Irish Times. Read more...
Case shows Constitution not to blame for failure to help vulnerable children
~A new report on the death of a seven-year-old girl, Khyra Ishaq (pictured), due to months of abuse at the hands of her mother and her boyfriend Junaid suggests that social services in her home town of Birmingham could have prevented the tragedy. Read more...
Barnardos' confusing approach to the HSE and children's rights
~On Thursday, Norah Gibbons, Director of Advocacy for children's group Barnardos described the HSE as not fit for the purpose of looking after children's welfare. Read more...
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