Morality, Religion & Philosophy: December 2008 Archives
Wealth creates freedom, and freedom creates the opportunity to do wrong. The divorce rate is dropping along with the economy.
The recession and economic turmoil is creating a new class of casualties: Married couples who can't afford to get divorced. In these tough times many people are finding it's cheaper to stay together, even when they can't stand each other.
Aww, poor babies, they can't stand each other! No mention of their vows or the children who are potentially prevented from becoming "casualties" of their parents' selfishness.
A major factor in the divorce downturn, Booden [a family law and divorce attorney] said, is divorced couples have to establish two separate households with current funds -- a prohibitive factor when you're looking at divorce in tough economic times.Booden said one out of every two clients is seeking consultations because they can't afford to get divorced. They want to know what other options they might have.
"I tell them about the process, about the cost, and what a reasonable outcome might be. And once they hear the cost, and especially how you have to duplicate two households on the same money that currently funds one household, they try to think about some other options," she said.
I guess greed is good! People who just can't stand each other and are willing to break their vows for their own selfish reasons reconsider when their standard of living is on the line. Maybe this does something to undermine the common assertion by divorcees that splitting up was better for the kids than staying together would have been? Except in cases of abuse divorce is rarely about the good of the children, it's about the whims and lusts of the parents.
So, there's nothing wrong with wealth and there's nothing wrong with freedom; but it's much easier to do the right thing when you've got no other choice.
(HT: RD.)
Nicholas Kristof issues a generosity call-to-action for liberals who are quick to favor the use of government power to help the needy but aren't eager to open their own wallets.
This holiday season is a time to examine who’s been naughty and who’s been nice, but I’m unhappy with my findings. The problem is this: We liberals are personally stingy.Liberals show tremendous compassion in pushing for generous government spending to help the neediest people at home and abroad. Yet when it comes to individual contributions to charitable causes, liberals are cheapskates.
Arthur Brooks, the author of a book on donors to charity, “Who Really Cares,” cites data that households headed by conservatives give 30 percent more to charity than households headed by liberals. A study by Google found an even greater disproportion: average annual contributions reported by conservatives were almost double those of liberals.
As others have noted, being generous with Other People's Money isn't generosity at all.
Hard to imagine a worse PR move than Planned Parenthood offering abortion gift certificates for Christmas.
The official explained the group offers a range of services that can be purchased with the gift cards including pap smears, breast exams, birth control prescriptions and abortions. The organization performs about 5,000 abortions a year, according to one published figure, out of 92,000 patients treated.Indiana's health commissioner, Judy Monroe, ignores the mounting political denunciations and calls the idea "really a meaningful gift."
Indiana's Right to Life president, Mike Fichter, concisely frames reality.
But Fichter is unpersuaded. "The tragedy is that almost 6,000 fewer children will be celebrating a first Christmas this year," he said, "because they were aborted in Planned Parenthood's Indiana clinics."
It's hard to imagine anything more ghoulish than slaughtering babies for profit.
(HT: DeoDuce.)
