Family Values

Though lighthearted, this brief piece makes a good point, that the fundamentalist ideology driving many social issues that are covers for amassing political power are wildly contradictory; just what you would suspect and why they are called hidden agendas.

And it further leads to the conclusion that the theology, or what lies behind the ideology of elected politicians or political advocates, is crucial.

In that sense a strong stand for human freedom and dignity gives us a clue to political positions, and advocating for free choice means killing babies, while those standing for life stand on the firmest ground of all.

Theodore Dalrymple
Separation Anxiety
Divorcees are bad for the environment. Do environmentalists care?
27 December 2007

A small item in the British Medical Journal recently caught my eye. It was a brief digest of a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on the environmental impact of divorce. Researchers from Michigan found that people in divorced households spent 46 and 56 percent more on electricity and water, respectively, than did people in married households. This outcome is not all that surprising: marriage involves (among many other things, of course) economies of scale.

One of the interesting questions that this little piece of research poses is whether the environmentalist lobby will now throw itself behind the cause of family values.