blogs:

I’ve been travelling a lot recently and in Anchorage (American Bar Association Family Law Section Meeting) I was on a panel with a doctor who does fertility work in southern California. He mentioned that it was now possible to give a gift certificate that allowed the recipient to have her own eggs frozen. It turns out to be a popular gift from parents to their daughters who are graduating from law school.

The idea here is that the eggs can be harvested when the daughter is young and in her (reproductive) prime and then they can be safely stored away until after she finds Mr. (or maybe Ms?) Right and/or gets her career up and running. It’s a way of stopping–at least for a while–the biological clock. Now, thanks to the wonders of technology and the generosity of her parents, the daughter has a choice.   Freezing her eggs lets her have it all.

more (and my own take is to throw this in the bulging pile of “Why Change the Workplace When We Can Just Change (Or Ignore) Women’s Biology?” stories….)

on his recent study, which seems relevant to several posts here in the past few months:

Studies on faith-based campuses are beginning to offer a glimpse into the real experience of sexual minority students in these unique settings. This study adds to this growing body of information by surveying 247 undergraduates, who describe themselves as sexual minorities at 19 Christian schools across the United States. They responded to questions related to attitudes regarding sexuality, sexual identity, religiosity, and sexual milestone events. The results from this sample suggst those who attend higher education at faith-based institutions are a distinct group within Western culture when it comes tot he development of religious/spiritual identity and sexual identity. Although diversity with regard to same-sex and opposite-sex attraction is present among those surveyed, common themes exist for this unique sample of undergraduates. Implications for mainstream culture and Christian educational institutions are discussed.

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India Ink blog:

After decades of fixing arranged marriages for their children, Indian parents are taking on a new challenge: trying to orchestrate their kids’ love marriages.

A new generation of young Indian professionals has refused to follow the arranged-marriage route, with its emphasis on caste, family ties, wealth and skin color – with the blessings of their parents.

But as these kids tread toward their 30s, some parents say they fear their offspring’s chances of finding a marriage partner are evaporating entirely. These parents, while trying to respect their children’s wishes, are trying other measures, like pushing their offspring to singles networks and online dating sites.

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in the Washington Post:

…It’s hard to overstate the breakdown of marriage and the rise of single-parent families. Consider out-of-wedlock births. In 1980, about 18 percent of births were to unmarried women; by 2009, the proportion was 41 percent. Among whites, the increase was from 11 percent to 36 percent; among African Americans, from 56 percent to 72 percent; among Hispanics, from 37 percent (1990) to 53 percent. Or look at the share of children living with two parents. Since 1970, that’s dropped from 82 percent to 63 percent. Among whites, the decline is from 87 percent to 73 percent; among African Americans, from 57 percent to 31 percent; among Hispanics, from 78 percent to 57 percent.

Just what caused these changes remains controversial. In his 2012 book “Coming Apart,” Charles Murray of the American Enterprise Institute cited shifts in cultural norms. Having a child out of wedlock became more common and acceptable; the sexual revolution enabled men to get sex without marriage. The waning power of religion undermined the importance of family. Feminism and expanding welfare programs made it easier for women to survive — through jobs or aid — on their own. Liberalized divorce led to more breakups.

But there’s also a more strictly economic case. In a paper for Third Way, a liberal think tank, economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attribute the decline of marriage — which, like Murray, they say is concentrated among the poorly educated — to the eroding economic heft of men compared with women. Women are more independent economically; men are weaker. Marriage has lost much of its pecuniary pull.

To this hypothesis, they bring much statistical evidence.

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at Forbes:

In the wake of a very good story about American day care by The New Republic‘s Jonathan Cohn, the liberal blogosphere is abuzz with ideas about improving day care for Americans. And as is required (I think it’s in the Constitution somewhere), any American left-of-center discussion of day care must be filled with encomiums to the French childcare system, with its wonderful public crèches (“crèche” just means “day care center”, but they must be called “crèche”) and other amenities. As both a conservative and an actual French parent, I find much of what I read about the French system to be simply fantastical.

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at Slate:

…It turns out I was not—am not—alone. A March 2012 Purdue University study suggests that between 18 and 26 percent of adoptive mothers struggle with post-adoption depression, brought on by extreme fatigue, unrealistic expectations of parenthood or a lack of community support.

In the course of interviewing some 300 women who’d adopted one or more children in the prior two years, Karen J. Foli, an assistant professor of nursing at Purdue, says that she and her team—including Susan South and Eunjung Lim—began examining societal assumptions about adoptive parents. Among them: the belief that the mother who doesn’t carry a child for nine months or doesn’t go through labor does not require as much help after the child comes home, does not need respite care, or someone to unload the dishwasher, or a few casseroles in the freezer.

I had certainly assumed as much. I didn’t take maternity leave, feeling at some deep level that I neither needed it nor earned it. I kept up with my reporting and writing assignments, underestimating the importance of just rolling around on the floor with our new baby, who likely was grieving the sudden absence of his beloved foster mom.  I didn’t feel that I “deserved” as much help as my friends who’d given birth had received. I found myself questioning my authenticity as Jake’s mother. I’d look at Jake and think: This child came from another woman’s body. Who am I to say I am his mother?

reports:

Children are going through puberty at an increasingly early age, and the changes to their bodies are also affecting their mental health, new research says.

Biological changes are happening earlier in children around the world – in 1860, the average age for European girls to develop breasts was 16.6 years. In 2010, the average age was 9.9 years, according to a United States study.

Other recent studies out of the US have found boys as young as 6 and girls as young as 8 showing the first signs of puberty.

An Australian study published yesterday has found that early puberty is associated with poorer mental health. It could also be why more people were suffering mental health problems later in life, Professor George Patton, of the Murdoch Children’s Research Institute in Melbourne, said.

The study also found that boys who started puberty before their ninth birthdays suffered from behavioural difficulties, but girls did not. …

The children who began puberty earlier also had poorer mental health when they were aged 4 or 5. Dr Mensah said this suggested the link between early puberty and poorer mental health was due to “developmental processes” that started early in life.

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reports:

Nearly one in five births to U.S. teens ages 15-19 is not a first child, says a federal report out today.

Of the 365,000 teens who gave birth in 2010, almost 67,000 (18.3%) have had at least one child before, according to the report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. That’s down from 19.5% in 2007. Most were the teen mom’s second child (86%).

But more teen moms are using birth control, the report says — almost 91% used some form of contraception after having had a baby. But just 22% of those used contraceptive methods considered to be “most effective” — tubal ligation, vasectomy, hormonal implant or intrauterine device (IUD). With those, the report says, the risk of becoming pregnant is less than one pregnancy in 100 users a year. The pill, injectables, the patch and the ring are considered “moderately effective.” …

Manlove says as recently as 1990, 25% of teen births were repeat births. “We have seen a steady gradual decline,” she says. “Maybe these long-acting methods are the way to go to reduce repeat teen births in the future.”

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this point about social and parental pressure is really important:

…In a word, alcohol is what protected me from growing up.

That seems like such an obvious insight, so simple it borders on the banal, but until that moment I’d never really grasped the idea that growth was something you could choose, that adulthood might be less a chronological state than an emotional one which you decide, through painful acts, to both enter and maintain. Like a lot of people I know (alcoholics and not), I’d spent most of my life waiting for maturity to hit me from the outside, as though I’d just wake up one morning and be done, like a roast in the oven.

–Drinking: A Love Story

crunches numbers:

…And if you dig into the footnotes in the Pew study linked by Frum’s column, which seems to show the percentage of fathers living with their children stabilizing in the 2000s, it looks like “father” is being defined to include any male adult whose live-in partner has a child. If, on the other hand, you focus on the percentage of children living with married two-parent families, then the 2000s suddenly look much worse.

Here I’d invite readers to examine figures 2, 3, 8, 12, 13 and 14 at the back of this year’s National Marriage Report, all of which tell a similar story: The marriage rate’s decline accelerated in the 2000s compared to the 1990s; so did the rise in the rate of out-of-wedlock births; and so did the rise in the rate of cohabitation, with and without children. (Interestingly, there’s also some evidence that the divorce rate stopped falling over the last decade, though this is complicated by problems with the data sources that I’m not competent to adjudicate.) Nor can these trends be chalked up to the shock of the Great Recession: Per the CDC, unmarried childbearing “resumed a steep climb since 2002,” and the cohabitation rate was also headed sharply upward before the financial crisis and its aftermath.

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at ABC:

When Philip Wiederspan began teaching first-grade at age 25, he was the only male, except for the gym teacher. His former New Jersey college friends would look at him in shock when they learned his profession: “How can you do that? You must have a lot of patience.”

“It requires a lot of patience,” he said. “They are babies when they come in, just out of kindergarten, and by the end of the year, they are independent and can work on something by themselves for 10 minutes. Then they come back in September and, my God, they’re babies, again.”

Today, at 51, Wiederspan has devoted more than half his life to the youngest students at Upper Freehold Regional Elementary School in Allentown, N.J.

“Word got out my first year of teaching,” he said. “Parents would call the office to come and visit my classroom to see if they wanted their kids in my class. I remember that distinctly … they just wanted to see.”

As a man, Wiederspan is a rarity in U.S. elementary-school education. And experts say that as boys continue to lag behind girls academically, schools could use more male teachers.

(Full disclosure: This reporter’s son, now 31, was a student in Wiederspan’s first-grade classroom and thrived having a male role model, later going into teaching himself.) …

Stereotypes about male teachers, and sometimes mistrust, persist.

“It’s very hard to change the suspicion of men who are going to elementary education when there are so few of them,” Thompson said. “Schools ask me to talk to men on their faculty and when I sit with them behind closed doors, they say the moms look at them like potential pedophiles.

“If they are too nurturing or a mother comes in and sees a teacher reading in a chair and the child is leaning against the teacher or cuddling him, they freak out,” he said. “Men tell me they only have to look in the mom’s face to know what they are thinking.”

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of “beyond marriage” fame, blogs:

Justice Roberts then brought up an issue I have consistently raised in these blog pages and elsewhere.  He called in an “internal inconsistency” that plaintiffs say children of same-sex couples are doing great and so there is no problem extending marriage to same-sex couples and they say that Prop 8 harms children because their parents can’t marry.  I have always found this problematic.  It is why we should not be arguing for marriage saying our children are harmed if we can’t marry.  We have said for decades now that children are not harmed being raised by gay and lesbian parents or same-sex couples.  We cite study after study that the children turn out fine, or at least not worse than their peers with heterosexual parents.  We say this constantly.  We cite many studies.  So, how, exactly can this be true if at the same time the children are worse off than their peers with heterosexual parents because those parents can marry?  It gives me no pleasure to have an obvious opponent of same-sex marriage raise this point from the bench.  It’s just an obvious point that advocates boxed themselves into when they decided to conflate the well-being of children with marriage.  Verrilli answered by saying marriage was stabilizing, but you see the problem.  If children needs that stabilizing factor (if it is even true for same-sex couples…), then you would expect some harm to them to be visible in the years of research about their well-being.  But there is no such evidence of harm.  So why do they need marriage?  The answer is…they don’t, unless you point to specific legal consequences.  But almost all of those flow from legal parentage, not marriage.  We never should have gone the route of justifying access to marriage based on the well-being of children. But here we are.

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at Slate:

Two cultural factors are also in play here. The rise of the “capstone” model of marriage is one such factor, as Cherlin has noted. All Americans, not just the college educated—watch the same TV shows and movies and pick up the idea that adults have to have all their ducks in a row—a middle-class lifestyle, a soul mate relationship—before they settle down.  This model sets a high bar for marriage and minimizes marriage’s classic connection to parenthood. So large numbers of less-educated twentysomethings who view the capstone model as unattainable end up having the child before the marriage.

Second, as Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas point out in Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage, many young adults have been scarred by the divorce revolution—which hit poor and middle American communities harder than upper- and middle-class communities—and have become gun-shy about marriage. They have seen too many friends and family divorce to have the trust required to move forward with a wedding. So, living amid a climate characterized by a trust deficit, they often choose, or drift “unintentionally” into, parenthood with partners who are not marriageable or who seem good but to whom they are not yet ready to marry.

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via basically my entire Twitter feed, for entirely understandable reasons:

RICHMOND — The girls ages 6 to 16 sit in order of size in the drab lobby of the Richmond City Jail, their glittery shoes swinging back and forth.

“I don’t like it here,” says Jhaniyika Morman, 6, who covers her eyes, smudging her blue eye shadow and pointing toward the jail’s visitation booths, where inmates are separated from their visitors by thick glass.

“I’m nervous. I hope he recognizes me,” mumbles Alexis Atkins, 9, who has her blond hair curled into long ringlets and keeps zipping and unzipping her hot-pink purse.

Down the hall, through several gates and inside a communal cell with thick blue bars, 12 inmates change from their frayed one-piece jumpsuits into formal attire. They pass belts and shirts of various sizes back and forth between the tight rows of steel bunk beds.

“Anyone know how to do up this here tie?” asks a jittery looking Andre Morman, 42, who has been in and out of jail on drug charges numerous times.

Then the inmates line up, too. They walk down a long hallway and wait in silence to get a glimpse of the girls: their daughters.

For a few hours on this Saturday afternoon, the incarcerated fathers will be allowed to take part in an American tradition, the father-daughter dance. “A Dance of Their Own,” thought to be the only event of its kind in the country, will be in the jail’s small, windowless multipurpose room. …

Only some of the inmates will be allowed to attend the dance. It’s open only to nonviolent offenders; interested fathers are interviewed by a jail deputy and have their criminal histories reviewed. They must also get permission from the child’s mother.

When the class begins, the men fall silent.

“How many of you are fathers?” asks Brian Gullins, a coordinator with the Richmond Family and Fatherhood Initiative.

Nearly every hand goes up in the room.

“What are your top three emotions about your own father?,” he asks.

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reports:

The decline of two-parent households may be a significant reason for the divergent fortunes of male workers, whose earnings generally declined in recent decades, and female workers, whose earnings generally increased, a prominent labor economist argues in a new survey of existing research.

David H. Autor, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says that the difference between men and women, at least in part, may have roots in childhood. Only 63 percent of children lived in a household with two parents in 2010, down from 82 percent in 1970. The single parents raising the rest of those children are predominantly female. And there is growing evidence that sons raised by single mothers “appear to fare particularly poorly,” Professor Autor wrote in an analysis for Third Way, a center-left policy research organization. …

“A vicious cycle may ensue,” wrote Professor Autor and his co-author, Melanie Wasserman, a graduate student, “with the poor economic prospects of less educated males creating differentially large disadvantages for their sons, thus potentially reinforcing the development of the gender gap in the next generation.”

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reports:

A couple for more than a decade, Maddison Spenrath and Kyle Eerbeek are, by all accounts, in it for the long haul. The two started dating in high school and, in 2008, moved from Calgary to Vancouver, settling into an apartment in the city’s Mount Pleasant neighbourhood. In 2011, they toured Hawaii’s Big Island, navigating mountains, beaches and tropical rainforests on their first big vacation together – an experience Ms. Spenrath recalls as “amazing.”

There has been passing talk of marriage, but both agree now is not the time.

“We don’t see a benefit of getting married [over] our own relationship,” said Ms. Spenrath, a graduate student at the University of British Columbia. “I wouldn’t rule it out entirely, but definitely not in the near future.”

But on Monday, Ms. Spenrath, 26, and Mr. Eerbeek, 28, will be married – in virtually every legal sense. That’s when B.C.’s new Family Law Act comes into effect, granting couples who have lived together for two or more years the same rights and regulations as married couples. So while no ink has hit a marriage certificate, one partner’s new car suddenly becomes “family property”; student debt accrued by the other during the course of the relationship becomes “family debt.”

more; and below the cut, more from a gay paper.

(more…)

Yahoo News: “In Sickness, Marriage May Not Boost Health”:

Marriage is good for the health, but it isn’t so beneficial “in sickness,” new research finds.

Previous studies have consistently found that people who are married report better health than people who aren’t. But marriage may not do much to help people who are seriously ill, the study finds. On top of that, married people overestimate how healthy they are. …

Married people don’t rate their health as poor until they’ve developed more severe health problems than unmarried people, the researchers found. So someone who is married and says they’re in poor health may actually be worse off than a singleton in poor health. The difference could help explain why the benefit of marriage seems to vanish in the poor-health category.

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NYT Motherlode blog: “Pregnant Without a Policy in Graduate School”:

Pregnancy during graduate school could make sense for many women, and, if studies correlating a variety of increased risks with maternal (and paternal) age are correct, encouraging couples to have children younger could have broad benefits. Women in graduate school also have decreased responsibilities to clients, employers or patients. If a pregnant medical or graduate student is “not a bad idea,” then should graduate schools better support pregnant women — and how?

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Zach Stafford at the Huffington Post: “‘Monogamish’: Two Is Company, But Is Three Really a Crowd?”:

Dr. Jeffrey T. Parsons, director of Hunter College’s Center for HIV Educational Studies and Training (CHEST), worked with a team of researchers to investigate a relatively unexplored area of social research: monogamy and commitment among gay and bisexual men. After surveying over 800 gay and bisexual men in the New York City area, Dr. Parsons and his team found that “the diversity in types of non-monogamous relationships was interesting…. Typically gay men have been categorized as monogamous or not, and our data show that it is not so black and white.” CHEST explains on its website:

CHEST’s survey indicated that about 60% were single. Of those partnered, about 58% were in monogamous relationships. Of those that were non-monogamous, 53% were in open relationships, and 47% were in “monogamish” relationships (i.e., couples that have sex with others as a couple such as “threeways” or group sex).These findings are not unique, and New York City’s gay and bi men aren’t the only ones engaging in these behaviors. In 2010 researchers at San Francisco State University carried out a similar study that revealed just how common open relationships are among partnered gay men and lesbians in the Bay Area. As The New York Times reported, “The Gay Couples Study … followed 556 male couples for three years — about 50 percent of those surveyed have sex outside their relationships, with the knowledge and approval of their partners.” That figure is remarkably similar to what CHEST found. …

Dr. Parsons added, “Our findings suggest that certain types of non-monogamous relationships — especially ‘monogamish‘ ones — are actually beneficial to gay men, contrary to assumptions that monogamous relationships are always somehow inherently better.”

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at Slate:

In response to Jesus’ piece, a woman wrote into the Times‘ parenting blog Motherlode about how she made a similar choice and was appalled by people’s lack of support. Even in a place where they were training obstetricians and midwives, the woman’s “program viewed my pregnancy as a personal issue I was having (I might say, ‘caused’ for myself) and that I shouldn’t expect any special accommodations.”

Let’s get out of the way that the lack of support for pregnant women in the United States is appalling (as I’ve gone on about before). And also let’s make the disclaimer that when you decide to have a child is deeply idiosyncratic, and there are so many factors that go into it—economic, romantic, emotional—not to mention the fact that you can’t just schedule in a baby like you schedule a vacation. No matter how old you are, you can’t assume you will conceive like clockwork.

All that said, I do think there’s something to Jesus’ argument that perhaps ambitious women in their 20s who also want kids should consider having them sooner rather than later.

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blogs at Christianity Today:

I read Owen Strachan’s recent rant against a Sesame Street episode in which “Baby Bear” is told it’s OK for boys to play with dolls on the same day my six-year-old son took his Matey Anchors doll to school for show and tell. Maybe my reaction would have been different at a different time. …

When we say baby dolls are for girls, that only girls should cuddle and coo dolls, we claim that babies are women’s domains, that only mothers should rock and coo and play with their children. What a horrible thing to teach our kids (though it’s a common enough claim in our culture). It’s a view shared by the “my body/my choice” crowd as well TV writers who malign sitcom dads as doofuses. Strachan probably never imagined he had so much in common with these folks.

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at the Huffington Post:

Stephanie slips the brown paper sleeve off a Starbucks drink and starts tearing it artfully. A small hut emerges. “My vacation home,” she says wistfully. Stephanie could use a vacation. Her last one was a weekend trip with her ex-boyfriend to the caves in Ohio’s Hocking Hills — which consisted of fighting in a tiny cabin and ended in their break-up. At age nineteen, Stephanie gave birth to her son and for years raised him alone. When he was four, she met and got pregnant with her current boyfriend, with whom she has a toddler. She and her boyfriend live together in a public housing duplex in small town, southwestern Ohio. Between the two of them, they have worked in just about every restaurant in town.

When asked what she thinks about marriage, Stephanie, whose own parents divorced several times, has a lot to say: “I believe you only get married once. So if I get married, I don’t want to be divorced.” Now that she and her boyfriend feel like family, she thinks it would be good to get married.

She says that marriage is more “binding” and “final,” and better for children. But for Stephanie, marriage poses a terrible choice: “If we got married,” she frowns, “what’s going to happen with my food stamps? How am I going to take care of my kids if those get taken from me?”

Stephanie is right to be worried. Experts estimate that, for most couples receiving public assistance, getting married will reduce their benefits by 10 percent to 20 percent of their total income. For people already living at the margins and often mired in debt (Stephanie herself has no college degree, but does owe $10,000 in school loans), that possibility is enough to make them think twice about marriage. And yet, Stephanie is also right that marriage on average is far more stable for children than just living together. By age 12, children born to cohabiting couples are 170 percent more likely to see their parents split up, compared to children born to married couples.

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in the New York Times:

…Eleven years after her husband went to prison, Ms. Hamilton followed his advice to divorce, but she didn’t remarry. Like other women in communities with high rates of incarceration, she faced a shortage of potential mates. Because more than 90 percent of prisoners are men, their absence skews the gender ratio. In some neighborhoods in Washington, there are 6 men for every 10 women.

“With so many men locked up, the ones left think they can do whatever they want,” Ms. Hamilton said. “A man will have three mistresses, and they’ll each put up with it because there are no other men around.”

Epidemiologists have found that when the incarceration rate rises in a county, there tends to be a subsequent increase in the rates of sexually transmitted diseases and teenage pregnancy, possibly because women have less power to require their partners to practice protected sex or remain monogamous.

When researchers try to explain why AIDS is much more prevalent among blacks than whites, they point to the consequences of incarceration, which disrupts steady relationships and can lead to high-risk sexual behavior. When sociologists look for causes of child poverty and juvenile delinquency, they link these problems to the incarceration of parents and the resulting economic and emotional strains on families.

Some families, of course, benefit after an abusive parent or spouse is locked up. But Christopher Wildeman, a Yale sociologist, has found that children are generally more likely to suffer academically and socially after the incarceration of a parent. Boys left fatherless become more physically aggressive. Spouses of prisoners become more prone to depression and other mental and physical problems. …

Before the era of mass incarceration, there was already evidence linking problems in poor neighborhoods to the high number of single-parent households and also to the high rate of mobility: the continual turnover on many blocks as transients moved in and out.

Now those trends have been amplified by the prison boom’s “coercive mobility,” as it is termed by Todd R. Clear, the dean of the School of Criminal Justice at Rutgers University. In some low-income neighborhoods, he notes, virtually everyone has at least one relative currently or recently behind bars, so families and communities are continually disrupted by people going in and out of prison.

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blogs:

In my latest working paper, co-authored with Oliver Richards, we argue that recent fertility increases in developed countries may only be the beginning. From the abstract:

We propose that the recent rise in the fertility rate in developed countries is the beginning of a broad-based increase in fertility towards above-replacement levels. Environmental shocks that reduced fertility over the past 200 years changed the composition of fertility-related traits in the population and temporarily raised fertility heritability. As those with higher fertility are selected for, the “high-fertility” genotypes are expected to come to dominate the population, causing the fertility rate to return to its pre-shock level. We show that even with relatively low levels of genetically based variation in fertility, there can be a rapid return to a high-fertility state, with recovery to above-replacement levels usually occurring within a few generations. In the longer term, this implies that the proportion of elderly in the population will be lower than projected, reducing the fiscal burden of ageing on developed world governments. However, the rise in the fertility rate increases the population size and proportion of dependent young, presenting other fiscal and policy challenges.

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reports:

While you vowed to stick together for richer and poorer, what happens day to day in between these two extremes is probably what matters most. And your employment status may be the most telling harbinger of divorce.

Research conducted at the University of Ohio and published by the American Journal of Sociology indicates a woman’s employment status has no effect on whether her husband will stay or go. And an employed woman is only more likely to initiate divorce than an unemployed woman if she reports being highly unsatisfied with the marriage.

It’s different for guys. They are more likely to leave a marriage, and they are more likely to be left if they are unemployed.

Researchers involved with the study suspect this speaks to the fact that women working has become acceptable, but men not working does not sit as well.

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“Pope: Easy Annulments Undercut the Value of Marriage,” USA Today:

Pope Benedict XVI says granting annulments too easily is undercutting the value of lifelong marriage.

In a speech Saturday, he asked the Vatican’s highest appeals court to consider reviewing church rules on marriage annulments.

He told to the members of the tribunal of the Roman Rota, that “lack of faith” on the part of the spouses can affect the validity of a marriage, according to Religion News Service. …

According to canon law, the validity of a marriage requires that both the man and woman freely and publicly consent to the union and that they have the psychological capacity to assume the obligations of marriage.

But “Immaturity or psychic weakness,” the most frequently cited reasons for seeking an annulment, are not good enough reasons, Pope Benedict said, according to the Catholic News Service report.

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“Lebanon’s Top Cleric Issues Fatwa Against Civil Marriage,” AFP:

Lebanon’s top Sunni Muslim authority on Monday issued a fatwa against moves to legalize civil marriages inside the country, where couples of different faiths have to travel abroad to tie the knot.

The religious edict came a day after President Michel Sleiman tweeted that he would remain steadfast in supporting such unions, while Prime Minister Najib Mikati wrote on his Twitter account that a consensus was required to address the issue.

Grand Mufti Sheikh Mohammed Rashid Qabbani issued the fatwa branding as an apostate any Muslim politician who approves civil marriage legislation.

“Any Muslim with legal or executive authority in Lebanon who supports the legalization of civil marriage is an apostate and outside the religion of Islam,” he said on the website of Dar al-Fatwa, the official institution for fatwas. …

Sleiman, a Christian, tweeted that he would “respond to the evolution and aspirations of the people and prepare the appropriate laws for the issue of civil marriage.”

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“Television’s Changing View of Marriage,” Alyssa Rosenberg:

In a recent discussion of sitcoms in the New York Review of Books, inspired by both “The Mindy Project” and two new volumes on TV history, Elaine Blair writes that:

“Mindy might love watching ‘When Harry Met Sally,’ but she is a character in a television sitcom, not a Hollywood romantic comedy, so we can be pretty sure that her own romantic life is going to be different from Sally Albright’s: Mindy is going to be unlucky in love. Not just in the pilot episode or during the first season, but probably for years, or as long as the show is renewed.”

But Blair is wrong: This is actually a terrific moment for televised marriage. While the travails of single girls remain a subject of television comedy, no longer is tormenting spinsters for viewers’ amusement the dominant trope. In fact, exploring what happens after the white dress and the honeymoon is increasingly one of network television’s advantages over cable, which has made full use of its license to deploy sex and violence, but spends less time on the triumphs and tragedies of everyday life.

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