Today is Valentine’s Day. What follows is a poem I wrote to my wife, Frankie, when were dating in the mid-1980s. It is called “Elusive Valentine.” (The picture on the bottom right is from our wedding reception, atop the Dunes Hotel & Casino, July 11, 1987. The one on the top left was taken nearly 20 years a later at the party for my nephew Dean’s confirmation):

Elusive Valentine

I’m finally relaxed
After two weeks of being here
And my time is never taxed
Whenever she is near
She doesn’t wear a monagram
She’s got an independent mind
She admires Billy Graham
She’s an elusive valentine

There’s something ’bout this city
That always brings me back
It’s that woman who’s so pretty
That she gives me a heart attack
She’d look lovely in Paris
Sipping a glass of French wine
‘neath a moonlit glowing terrace
Like an elusive valentine

My words, not frivolous
Their meaning leaves no doubt
Her symmetry is marvelous
Her spirituality, devout
She stands up for her faith
In the Man from Palestine
In gold, she’s worth her weight
She’s an elusive valentine

Standing still, lavender clad,
Indeed, attractively stubborn
Her possibilities are myriad
By fools, she’ll not be governed
And yes, we’re a couple of mystics
Rationally inclined
She holds her own in linguistics
She’s an elusive valentine

Francis J. Beckwith
June 13, 1986
Las Vegas, Nevada

(Originally posted on the Return to Rome blog)

Mrs. Mule better hope this doesn’t pass here or she’s in for an ankle bracelet.

From the Daily Mail:

France will become the first country in the world to ban ‘psychological violence’ within marriage later this year.

The new law, which would also apply to co-habiting couples, would see people getting criminal records for insulting their loved ones during domestic arguments.

Electronic tagging would be used on repeat offenders, according to the country’s prime minister, Francois Fillon, who announced the law. . . .

Mr Fillon said: ‘It’s an important step forward as the creation of this offence will allow us to deal with the most insidious situations – situations that leave no visible scars, but which leave victims torn up inside.’

He added that his government would also be experimenting with electronic surveillance measures to ‘monitor the effectiveness of restraining orders against a violent spouse’.

Update:  HT to KLo in The Corner

Robert P. George, the McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University, published an op-ed piece in this morning’s Wall Street Journal. It concerns the issue of same-sex marriage and the courts. Here is an excerpt:
(more…)

Whenever freedom is lost, wherever tyranny is found, there are three accompanying factors: religious oppression, economic depression, and a culture of death.

Orwell’s 1984 provides a vivid example of this principle. Religion in Oceania has been wholly abolished, the people live in government-induced squalor, and the state routinely comes between children and their parents, and is working on preventing marriage altogether.

But there are ample historical examples as well. (more…)

Today, July 11, is the feast of St. Benedict. It also happens to be my 22nd wedding anniversary. In my book, Return to Rome: Confessions of An Evangelical Catholic, I briefly discuss the significance of this day in the life of my wife, Frankie, and me: “While in Vegas [during Spring Break, 1985] I became reacquainted with Frankie Dickerson (my future wife), the sister of my friend Lexi Weigand. Lexi’s husband Mark was instrumental in helping to lead Frankie to Christ at Calvary Chapel Costa Mesa on July 11, 1982. (Coincidentally or providentially, July 11 is our wedding anniversary as well as the feast day of St. Benedict, the namesake of the Pope under whose papacy Frankie joined, and I returned to, the Catholic Church).” (p. 56)

(Originally posted on Return To Rome blog)

A friend of mine (and future Priest) just emailed me this story:

Suspended Fresno priest turned gay activist Father Geoffrey Farrow has called for Catholic priests to retaliate against the Knights of Columbus for their support of Proposition 8.

Farrow was removed as pastor from the St. Paul Newman Center at Cal State Fresno in October 2008 for his outspoken defiance of church teaching over Proposition 8 and the issue of homosexuality.

In a post on his personal blog dated June 4, 2009 “Boycott the Knights of Columbus,” Farrow wrote:

“Many priests have E-mailed me and expressed their rage and anger over the hypocrisy of the Catholic hierarchy in supporting anti-marriage equality legislation…One of the organizations, which the bishops have effectively employed to do their dirty work, has been the Knights of Columbus.”

Farrow then asked “So, what can priests do to fight the anti-gay agenda of the bishops and the K of C?” His first suggestion:

“Borrow the full amount against your Knights of Columbus life insurance policy immediately. Take the check and invest the funds with an LGBT friendly fund. Do not pay back the loan.”

The blog post is here.  Shockingly comment moderation is on.  Can’t imagine why that would be.  It is amusing to read the comments from the sycophants who have absolutely no clue as to what the Knights of Columbus do.

This petty call for vengeance is shameful and disgusting to be sure, but I also imagine that the Supreme Council is not exactly sweating too much.  Still, it’s always a tragedy when someone who has taken a vow before God spits in the Lord’s face.

(Cross-posted at CrankyCon)

According to the LA Times, Solicitor General Extraordinaire, Republican, Conservative, and Federalist legal heart-throb, Theodore Olson is going to be part of the legal team mounting a federal challenge to the proposition 8 ruling. Say it ain’t so, Ted!

Well, in a stunning 6-1 majority, the California Supreme Court has decided to uphold the will of the people and not hang the democratic majority by the noose of technicality. So, what’s next? (more…)

The Boy Scouts are being sued again, and the Ninth Circuit has invited everybody to play:

The City of San Diego leases portions of Balboa Park and Fiesta Island to the San Diego Boy Scouts, which use the land to operate a camp and aquatic center. The Boy Scouts use the leased areas for their own events but otherwise keep them open to the general public — and have spent millions of dollars to improve and maintain facilities on the properties, eliminating the need for taxpayer funding. While the Boy Scouts’ membership policies exclude homosexuals and agnostics, the Scouts have not erected any religious symbols and do not discriminate in any way in administering the leased parklands. (more…)

I’ve not been following closely the actions of the Connecticut Legislature to attempt to accommodate Same-Sex Marriage through a protection of Religious Liberty, but Andrew Sullivan has and he is looking favorably on it(surprise, surprise…). I wonder if such a law is successful, then have the opponents of SSM mistakingly attempted to use religious liberty concerns to achieve their goal, which is namely to block SSM? (more…)

If you’re looking for a good balance between a layman and lawyer’s understanding of the Iowa Same Sex Marriage Case, Varnum v. O’Brien, you can’t get a better summary than Helen Alvare’s take on it.

Maggie Gallagher is writing at length about gay marriage and the power of culture in a series over at The Corner.  She’s making an argument as to why the public meaning of marriage matters, drawing extensively on the earlier case of unilateral (no-fault) divorce.  Gallagher is always worth reading, and (if we’re lucky) Stanley Kurtz will pop in to sound the alarm about polygamy once again (just kidding, Mr. Kurtz–keep up the good work).

Doug Kmiec continues to mystify.  Now he has come out in opposition to Proposition 8 in California.  As has been the case with abortion, Kmiec couches his position in supposedly religious reasoning, but all he does is show a continued “lawyerly” bent to twist words beyond all sense. (more…)

Happy Feast Day of Saint Valentine Saints Cyril and Methodius!! Just in time for your calorie-craving, amorous-aphrodisiac, delightful-dates, new research shows that married people (wait for it, wait for it…) gain weight when they’re married and that when people divorce, they lose weight!. Other interesting findings: people who are in a dating relationship gain less weight than those cohabiting who in turn gain less than your average married couple. While offering multiple explanations (changes in life style, increased consumption due to happiness, kids…) the predominant theory remains that, well, since you no longer have to attract a mate, you blissfully let yourself go. The most interesting nugget comes at the end, however: the researchers conclude that government policies combating obesity would likely have a negative effect on marriage, increasing divorce rates. 

Whoever thought Supersizing would be the way to save the family!

h/t: Tyler Cowen

I am not a Catholic.  I was raised heavily in the Southern Baptist faith, but I would refer to myself these days as “irreligious.”  My views on religion have made it an unimportant grounding point for my personal beliefs in economics, philosophy, or politics, and it can be difficult to engage in debate at times with people who do have strong religious beliefs and who apply those beliefs to the secular world because we are playing by different rules.  There are those on the irreligious side of the wall who don’t understand that divide between themselves and the faithful and are frightened of it.  I’ve been on both sides at certain times in my life, so I think I understand what’s going through the minds of all parties to some degree or another.  Unfortunately, that hasn’t stopped me from forgetting the differences. (more…)

In an MTV interview, Senator Barack Obama said he is against same-sex marriage though he is also against California’s Proposition 8 that would recognize only male-female marriage. To make it even more confusing, when he ran for state senate in 1996, he said he was for same-sex marriage in an answer he gave in response to a candidate’s questionnaire. So, Senator Obama was for gay marriage before he was both against gay marriage and against being against gay marriage.  What an intellectual flim-flam man.

I’m having a Gollum-like internal struggle over the polygamy raid in Texas.  On the one hand, I’m a firm believer in the rule of law and protecting the innocent, so I can get behind the idea of saving all the children from general religious craziness.  I’m also not overly religious, so I have no sympathy in their “moral” defense.  And yet . . . isn’t there something inherently disturbing about law enforcement and child protective services storming the bigamist beaches, as it were, ripping dozens of children from the breasts of their mothers and fathers on nothing more that the fact that they all live in a town where a couple of people have been accused of rape?

I believe in statutory laws, to some extent (I have problems with the application more than anything else).  I understand that polygamy is, at least, a statutory no-no.  But this one is not passing the smell test for me.  I don’t want 13-year olds forced into marriage with 50-year olds.  I don’t want children brainwashed into some sort of mindless, communal servitude.  But I also think that parents should, within bounds, be able to raise their children as they wish.  And I certainly don’t think that the police should be able to take my kids away solely based on the fact that one of my neighbors raped a girl and we just happen to go to the same church. 

If the authorities had arrested just the specific alleged offenders and taken them to jail, I’d be all for it.  But to sweep through an entire town on the accusations of a few people is a bit much for my conservative anti-authoritarian streak. 

So, what say you, dear reader?  Is this just a visceral response to polygamy?  Do you think the State acted appropriately here, and, if so, do you really think the children, as a group, are better off now?

When I was with Georgia Family Council in the first years of the millennium, we spent a lot of time trying to show people the value of marriage and the intact family as social institutions. In other words, marriage is better than divorce. Marriage is better than living together. Having children with both parents present is superior to the alternatives. There is a strong statistical case to be made for all of the above.

I’m happy to report that more influential persons seem to be picking up the case in Georgia. Check out this excerpt from a Washington Post column by Georgia Chief Justice Leah Ward Sears:

Why are state judges such as myself so concerned about strengthening marriage? Start with the basics: Fragmenting families are flooding our court dockets. Since I became a trial judge in 1989, the percentage of domestic relations cases has risen sharply; they now account for 65 percent of all cases in Georgia at the Superior Court level. Last year more than 14,000 children were in the care of the Georgia Division of Family and Children Services, and nearly 24,000 were admitted to a youth detention center. One out of every four Georgia children under 18 has a case with the Office of Child Support Enforcement.

These figures are typical of what is happening in every state. For judges, they represent a difficult workload. For families, they represent an astonishing level of necessary but intrusive government oversight. For government, they represent a mountain of resources that could be used for other purposes. For children, they are a tragedy.

As a judge I am often frustrated that I must work within a system designed only to pick up the pieces after families have already fallen apart or failed to come together. We must work to prevent family fragmentation, because the consequences for children and society are severe.

If we look for solutions, we will find them. What we do not yet know how to accomplish, we can learn. Americans believe that problems, no matter how difficult, should be addressed and not merely endured. Whether it is racism, crime or poverty, Americans believe that we can find ways to make a difference. Accepting the decline of marriage as inevitable means giving up on far too many of our children. They deserve better than that.

Will Baude is a smart fellow – smarter than I am, no doubt.  (Though I haven’t seen him mention what is easily the best ice cream place in DC – Max’s Best Ice Cream – and so we might already think his judgment suspect).  But here he takes Emily Yoffe, the Prudence columnist for Slate to task telling in no uncertain terms a woman that she ought to rethink her decision not to have children, and then using that occasion to write a bit more broadly about the folks we used to call yuppies and their sometimes chosen childlessness.

Will’s complaint seems to be two-fold: first, he complains that Prudie’s column was somehow “invasive” because it was an essay and not an answer in an advice column; and, second, he thinks that Prudie treads across what should be separate – the domains of “manners” and “morals.”  These are really puzzling claims, I think.

First, on the invasiveness claim.  If you write a letter to an advice columnist, I shouldn’t think you would have an “expectation of privacy.”  Now, I’ve often wondered who it is that writes into these columns (and suspect that some good proportion of them are just fakes), but one thing seems certain: you only write into an advice columnist because, at some level, you hope to see your letter in the newspaper (or on-line, as it were).  You are a publicity-seeker.  No doubt Prudie gave the woman more than she expected, but that’s the chance you take.  If you don’t want your life to be the subject of “public” speculation, maybe, just maybe, you ought not write into a nationally recognized advice columnist.

As for the “separate domains” claim, I guess I just don’t see it.  Manners are shot through with moral claims – they are all about how we ought to treat one another.  Indeed, one way of thinking about manners is as formalized rituals where we put moral claims into practice and simply make them habitual.  When children are taught “yes, sir” and “yes, ma’am” (an increasingly uncommon occurrence outside the South, alas), they are being taught a qualified deference to their elders.  The increasing informality of our culture is in some part a breaking up of hierarchical and in some sense unjust social patterns, but it is also in part a product of our de-moralization.  When the young woman who wrote into Prudie was asking about how to answer her friends who wanted to know why she didn’t have kids, what she was looking for was a way to validate her decisions not to have children.  She was looking for validation for her decision to live life in a certain way, validation for certain kinds of *moral* choices.  Maybe Prudie didn’t give her good answers – that’s a different question – but the idea that you could even have a manners or advice column without treading on the domains of “morals” strikes me as very, very strange.