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Archive for November 5, 2006

University Study: Divorce harms women’s health.

Imagine how much good this study could have done if the deterioration of men’s health after divorce had been investigated and studied as critically as that of women was.

AMES, Iowa — There’s a popular belief among spouses in bad marriages that divorce might relieve their stress and lead to a happier life. But divorce actually increased chronic stress and produced greater physical illness over a 10-year span, according to a study of 416 rural Iowa women by researchers from Iowa State University’s Institute for Social and Behavioral Research.

Fred Lorenz, K.A.S. Wickrama, Rand Conger and Glen Elder produced the latest paper on their research titled “The Short-Term and Decade-Long Effects of Divorce on Women’s Midlife Health,” which was published last summer in the Journal of Health and Social Behavior, a professional journal. (Full Story)

The study report gained wide-spread attention in the media throughout the world, even in China. Here is an example of media coverage: Divorced Women have more Illness.

Women as victims always draw the unquestioning crowds, even if in the manufacturing of concern for women it is obvious that one side of the argument glares by its absence.

So, at the danger of being considered to be a party pooper (as Sally Jacobs from the Boston Globe, for example, surely would see me to be), let me ask whether divorce doesn’t usually involve two parties, one of them being the husband, a man that is? Why was men’s plight after divorce not worthy of an equal amount of attention? (Even someone as old as I knows the answer to that one: “A study of divorced men would not have received any funding.”) However, is it truly wrong to garner some of the social capital and expend it on sympathy or a little bit of concern for men? Is that not the right thing to do, and is objective social research no longer the object of academic endeavours in our bravenew world?

Transforming the World by Subverting the Church

It’s been a long month. Between battling a heck of a cold I had to do a good amount of long overdue housecleaning at Fathers for Life. (For some of the results of that see: folc.ca , bruderheim.org , and bruderheim-rea.ca )

It is nice to be able to get back at trying to clear up the mounting backlog of mail.  Here is one of the things I found this morning:

Transforming the World by Subverting the Church

The Social Gospel of the early 20th century shifted the focus of many church leaders from God’s unchanging Truth to the world’s pliable ideals. Socialist seminary professors, pragmatic pastors, and deluded idealists validated their visions with hand-picked Bible verses that “fit” their social message. “Offensive” words like sin and redemption were redefined, contextualized or ignored. No need for the cross, since all people were considered essentially good…..
http://www.newswithviews.com/BeritKjos/kjos65.htm
by Berit Kjos

What Berit Kjos describes makes perfect sense, in a perverse way. If universal moral standards don’t work universally because some people can’t or won’t live up to them, then let’s wipe out those standards. After all, if some people can’t or won’t live up to and by those standards, then something must be wrong with those standards; so, let’s move the goal posts, right?

That way we’ll find neither excellence nor satisfaction nor salvation, although we will find mediocrity, underachievement, social chaos and worse.

It is amazing that those objectives were deliberately imposed on and implemented in the developed nations to cause their systematic deconstruction, but that was and still is the plan; and it is being made to work.

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