Daily Mail 22 August 2016 Family First Comment: “Assistant professor Dr Samuel Perry said: ‘Beginning pornography use between survey waves nearly doubled one’s likelihood of being divorced by the next survey period, from 6 per cent to 11 per cent, and nearly tripled it for women, from 6 per cent to 16 per cent. Our results suggest that viewing pornography, under certain social conditions, may have negative effects on marital stability.’”
Married couples who watch pornography almost double their risk of divorce, researchers said yesterday.
While it was once seen as the preserve of husbands, it now seems that wives are almost as keen on watching it as men.
But viewing adult films or images comes at a price, with the researchers saying that women who start looking at porn while married are almost three times more likely to want a divorce.
Their report comes after statistics last year showed that as many as one in three women watches adult content at least once a week, with the majority viewing it on their mobile phones.
In the latest research, sociologists from the University of Oklahoma interviewed thousands of married adults regularly over several years.
They found that porn negatively affects those in a happy marriage, the newly married or those from a non-religious home.
John Key: No need for conscience vote on Easter Sunday trading Stuff co.nz 22 August 2016 Family First Comment: Sad. National MPs being whipped to vote for Easter trading law changes.
Prime Minister John Key denies National MPs should be allowed a conscience vote on Easter Sunday trading, saying the current rules are “mad” and local councils should make the decisions.
Family First has joined former All Black Michael Jones in encouraging National MPs to buck their party’s line and vote down the Shop Trading Hours Amendment Bill, which would allow councils to decide whether or not shops could open on Easter Sunday.
Key said he did not think the proposed law should be treated as a conscience issue, as it was about allowing local councils to decide whether shops could open, rather than forcing a nationwide change.
“You’re never going to get a resolution to this through parliament…the only way you’re going to resolve it is for the local communities to be masters of their own destiny, and that is not a conscience matter.”
Current MPs Chester Borrows, Bill English, Sam Lotu-Iiga, Tim Macindoe and Jonathan Young all voted against McClay’s bill, which was defeated by 62 votes to 59.
Key claimed the bills were different, saying: “That was specifically for Easter trading, this is about the right of the community to decide that and councils to decide that.”
Key said many shops already defied the trading restrictions, which were already inconsistent in different parts of the country.
“Where the current laws are set is mad, because if you go down the road from, where I live, you want to turn left at the top of my street, you hit Newmarket and you can’t trade over [Easter]…you go right and you are, because you’re in Parnell and Parnell is deemed to be a tourism hub and Newmarket wasn’t.”
The proposed law was a chance to find a solution where previous attempts had failed, he said.
Family First national director Bob McCoskrie said National MPs should be allowed a conscience vote “in the interests of fairness”, given that had been the case in the past.
“We’re not sure why this conscience vote has been stripped from National MPs – perhaps it’s simply because they know the bill will be defeated, and it is a government bill and so that’s embarrassing.”
McCoskrie said Key had been “pummeled” with over 300 emails from those against Easter Sunday trading, after a Family First campaign.
“We’re trying to give some strength to the arm of those National MPs who believe it should be a conscience vote: we’re trying to say look, there is public support for you having the right to use your conscience.”
‘THEY’RE NOT SOLVING THE PROBLEM’ Economic concerns should not always take precedent over “family occasions” like Easter and Christmas, he said.
“We compare it to a public park: it’s a piece of land that could be much better used perhaps, you could argue, for housing developments, but we have those parks because they add to the quality of the community, and we’re saying that public holidays and traditions add to the quality of society.”
It was likely that employees who wanted the day off would come under pressure to work, while the bill would give “a hospital pass” to councils by leaving them in charge of the final decision.
Karl du Fresne BlogSpot 21 August 2016 Family First Comment: “Many of the reformers seem blind to much of the damage done by drug use. But Garry Evans saw it in his 18 years as a coroner. He told this newspaper on his retirement that the term ‘recreational drug’ was a misnomer; put a “w” in front of it, he said, and you’d be closer to the truth.” #wreckreationaldrugs
My generation has a lot to answer for. Recreational drugs, for example – or as former Wellington coroner Garry Evans preferred to call them, “wreckreational drugs”.
Mine was the generation that rebelled against the values of its parents. We were smug and spoilt, with plenty of time on our hands to reflect on how wrong our elders were about everything.
We rejected their dreary, conformist moral values. “If it feels good, do it” became the catch-cry of a generation.
And it did feel good – for a while. But then the casualties began to pile up. Drug abuse, serial relationship failures and, most tragically, emotionally damaged offspring are part of the price society has paid for idealistic 1960s liberalism.
Initially, drugs seemed very much a middle-class hippie thing. Most of the dope smokers and trippers I knew in the late 60s were arty types and intellectuals. Drugs were one way of rebelling against a society they found dull and stifling.
Stuff co.nz 22 August 2016 Family First Comment: A superb read. “The NZ Drug Foundation has steadily become a strident proponent for law reform, to the point that they now sound more like glorified pushers, campaigning for “the removal of criminal penalties for drug use, possession and social supply.”” Exactly!
If a referendum was held on legalising cannabis for personal use, would you support it? You’d have to be off your scone.
The New Zealand Drug Foundation (NZDF) has been crowing about the results of its self-selecting poll, indicating broad public support for decriminalising cannabis for personal use.
The NZDF has steadily become a strident proponent for law reform, to the point that they now sound more like glorified pushers, campaigning for “the removal of criminal penalties for drug use, possession and social supply.”
Prime John Key deserves credit for doubling down and refusing to budge.
Unsurprisingly, the Green Party, which has long been over-populated by potheads, is itching for grow-your-own personal supply to be legalised.
According to the United Nations, New Zealand has one of the highest rates of cannabis users in the world, with 9-14 per cent of Kiwis routinely getting wasted, four times the global average.
The NZDF argues it’s a complete waste of “hundreds of thousands of police hours” trying to enforce the law, criminalising and imprisoning Kiwis for low-level possession.
Just because tens of thousands of Kiwis choose to smoke dope in defiance of the law, is not a compelling reason to legitimatise their lifestyle. Forty-two per cent of front line police officer hours are consumed on dealing to family violence.
If you apply the extreme, absurd and self-serving logic of the legalise lobby, the police should surrender to family violence too, because so many Kiwis are indulging in this sick and twisted national sport.
Ditto for child abuse, tax evasion, drink-driving, shop-lifting, or any other social scourge you care to name.
Two per cent of Kiwis have graduated from the gateway drug of cannabis to become meth-heads. Should we adopt a similarly defeatist attitude to methamphetamine’s legal status too?
Clearly, more focus is rightly being placed on not just treating illicit drug use as a criminal issue, but a health issue.
The police have increasingly adopted are far pragmatic approach, deploying pre-charge warnings and diversion instead. But recidivist and unrepentant users are convicted. The police don’t actively target low-level cannabis users.
Being charged for possession generally only comes about as a consequence of being arrested for higher-level offending, like burglary.
The other great myth peddled by the legalisation lobby is that cannabis use is a victimless crime.
As the National Committee for Addiction Treatment points out, 55 per cent of our prison inmates are cannabis dependent. It fuels crime.
And we’re all paying the price for cannabis dependence through its devastating impact on mental health.
Is it really just a coincidence that Northland, our cannabis capital, also has one of the world’s highest rates of schizophrenia?
The insidious prevalence of cannabis-induced schizophrenia, psychosis, depression and anxiety is undeniable. As is slothfulness.
Of the 200,000 working-age and able bodied Kiwis drawing a benefit, what proportion would rather have a joint, than a job?
Never before, have we had more taxpayer-funded treatment service providers. But only the individual can summon the will to start transforming their life. They need to be vigorously encouraged to take those steps.
Globally, it’s been a long-established ploy by the likes of NORML (the National Organisation for the Reform of Marijuana Laws) to cynically hitch medical marijuana to the same wagon as recreational drug use, to soften up the public to complete capitulation.
A major new report, published today in the journal The New Atlantis, challenges the leading narratives that have been pushed in New Zealand regarding sexual orientation and gender identity – messages which are being pushed in our schools and our media in NZ.
Here is a brief summary of this latest report prepared by Dr Ryan Anderson who was a speaker at our conference last year.
Co-authored by two of the nation’s leading scholars on mental health and sexuality, the 143-page report released today discusses over 200 peer-reviewed studies in the biological, psychological, and social sciences, painstakingly documenting what scientific research shows and does not show about sexuality and gender.
The major takeaway, as the editor of the journal explains, is that “some of the most frequently heard claims about sexuality and gender are not supported by scientific evidence.”
Here are four of the report’s most important conclusions:
The belief that sexual orientation is an innate, biologically fixed human property—that people are ‘born that way’—is not supported by scientific evidence.
Likewise, the belief that gender identity is an innate, fixed human property independent of biological sex—so that a person might be a ‘man trapped in a woman’s body’ or ‘a woman trapped in a man’s body’—is not supported by scientific evidence.
Only a minority of children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood. There is no evidence that all such children should be encouraged to become transgender, much less subjected to hormone treatments or surgery.
Non-heterosexual and transgender people have higher rates of mental health problems (anxiety, depression, suicide), as well as behavioral and social problems (substance abuse, intimate partner violence), than the general population. Discrimination alone does not account for the entire disparity.
The report, “Sexuality and Gender: Findings from the Biological, Psychological, and Social Sciences,” is co-authored by Dr. Lawrence Mayer and Dr. Paul McHugh. Mayer is a scholar-in-residence in the Department of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins University and a professor of statistics and biostatistics at Arizona State University. McHugh, whom the editor of The New Atlantis describes as “arguably the most important American psychiatrist of the last half-century,” is a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine and was for 25 years the psychiatrist-in-chief at the Johns Hopkins Hospital. It was during his tenure as psychiatrist-in-chief at Johns Hopkins that he put an end to sex reassignment surgery there, after a study launched at Hopkins revealed that it didn’t have the benefits for which doctors and patients had long hoped.
GENDER IDENTITY
One of the consistent themes of the report is that science does not support the claim that “gender identity” is a fixed property independent of biological sex, but rather that a combination of biological, environmental, and experiential factors likely shape how individuals experience and express themselves when it comes to sex and gender.
The report reviews rigorous research showing that “only a minority of children who experience cross-gender identification will continue to do so into adolescence or adulthood.” Policymakers should be concerned with how misguided school policies (such as the InsideOut programme shown right) might encourage students to identify as girls when they are boys, and vice versa, and might result in prolonged difficulties. As the report notes, “There is no evidence that all children who express gender-atypical thoughts or behavior should be encouraged to become transgender.”
They continue: “We are concerned by the increasing tendency toward encouraging children with gender identity issues to transition to their preferred gender through medical and then surgical procedures.” But as they note, “There is little scientific evidence for the therapeutic value of interventions that delay puberty or modify the secondary sex characteristics of adolescents.”
The report also highlights that people who identify as LGBT face higher risks of adverse physical and mental health outcomes, such as “depression, anxiety, substance abuse, and most alarmingly, suicide.”
What accounts for these tragic outcomes? Mayer and McHugh investigate the leading theory—the “social stress model”—which proposes that “stressors like stigma and prejudice account for much of the additional suffering observed in these subpopulations.” But they argue that the evidence suggests that this theory “does not seem to offer a complete explanation for the disparities in the outcomes.” It appears that social stigma and stress alone cannot account for the poor physical and mental health outcomes that LGBT-identified people face.
CONCLUSION
Mayer and McHugh observe that much about sexuality and gender remains unknown. They call for honest, rigorous, and dispassionate research to help better inform public discourse and, more importantly, sound medical practice.
As Mayer and McHugh note, “Everyone—scientists and physicians, parents and teachers, lawmakers and activists—deserves access to accurate information about sexual orientation and gender identity.”
Please take the time to read this important report – based on science and medicine, not political ideology and agendas.
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