Share the good news of marriage with your friends by forwarding this newsletter to them!

by Executive Director, Jamie Gruber

Check out what some of ITAF Student Conference alumni at John Paul the Great University are up to! Yellow Line Productions has recently created a webinar series that follows three women through unintended pregnancies. This interactive series allows viewers to participate through dialogue with others watching the show. Check it out now! http://bumptheshow.com/

Bump has also been featured on Fox News and in the Washington Post!

Tim Tebow's Superbowl Ad During this year's Superbowl, CBS is airing an ad featuring Tim Tebow, a Heisman trophy winner for college football. The ad is proving controversial because Tim thanks his mom for his life (she was facing a difficult pregnancy, and abortion was recommended). NOW and other pro-abortion groups are incensed that this point is being raised at the Superbowl. Dr. J takes some wind out of their sails. She opens the segment with a joke. (Click the POD icon.)

Lutheran Public Radio: Dr. J is usually on live on Tuesdays from 2-2:15 p.m. Pacific Time (Click the link to listen live or find a station near you.)

Feb 2: 7:00 p.m. Debate at Stanford on Christianity and Capitalism, co-sponsored by the Catholic Center and the Objectivist Club

Feb 8: noon. Interview/dialogue at King's College Manhattan

Feb 9: noon. Debate on same sex marriage, Columbia Law School, sponsored by the Federalist Society

Feb. 9: 6:45 p.m. Lecture: "Can we Talk? Why the Same Sex Marriage Debate has become so Toxic," for the Socrates in the City series at the Union League Club in Manhattan

Feb. 17: 6:30 p.m. Debate on same sex marriage, the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco

March 5-6: "Stand for the Family" Conference and essay contest, BYU.

April 16: "The Institution Formerly Known as Marriage: An Economist's Lament," University of Dallas

Do you need advice on how to improve your marriage or relationship, or on how to find the right person for you? Expert Dr. J is here for you. Click here to ask your question, which may be featured anonymously in this newsletter for the benefit of all.

Read past questions and answers here.

Need help with your marriage? You can also check out Dr. J's "101 Tips for a Happier Marriage!"

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A Message from the Ruth Institute President, Dr. Jennifer Roback Morse

The Ruth Institute’s mission is to promote lifelong married love to college students. We have a multi-pronged strategy. First, we find the students who share our views. Second, we support them with conferences, lectures, podcasts, newsletters and other materials. Then, we send them back to their campuses, so they can reach other young people.

The enthusiasm of the students from our first National Leadership Conference, It Takes a Family to Raise a Village, exceeded our wildest expectations. Our students from Brigham Young University are making plans to replicate our conference the weekend of March 5 and 6. Their conference will be jointly sponsored by the BYU Law School and the Stand for the Family student club. Ruth Institute speakers will be presenting at the conference, where we are expecting several hundred students. We will also be running Essay Contests, for law students, graduate students and undergraduate students. We have received over 150 entries for the Essay Contest. We expect to award over $6,000 in prizes. Won’t you send a contribution today, to help us support these students?

We have found that students at faith-based universities have a different set of problems than kids at secular universities. Students at places like BYU don’t have to worry about a “hook-up” culture in their dorms or anti-marriage propaganda in their classrooms. The BYU kids told us that their school has created a wholesome environment for students preparing for marriage. The down-side is that many of their classmates don’t necessarily feel motivated to defend marriage. After all, everyone they know already agrees with them. And when students leave the safe cocoon of their university, their problems really begin. They cannot explain what they believe and why to people in the “outside world.” They are vulnerable to anyone who sounds convincing.

This is one of the problems the students hope we will help them address at the conference. Give students the tools they need to defend natural marriage: communication skills, solid secular arguments and the motivation to engage in dialogue.

We have heard this exact same concern, almost word for word, from our students at other conservative and Christian colleges. We hope to send students from schools like Grove City College or John Paul Catholic University to the BYU conference, to learn how to activate their own campuses. Won’t you send a contribution today, to help us send these eager students to the BYU Stand for the Family conference? Some of them will come home from the conference ready to start clubs or conferences on their own campuses. That is the kind of multiplier effect the Marriage Movement needs!

You can be part of our efforts. Send your most generous contribution today!

by Helen M. Alvaré, J.D., Senior Fellow in Law

Every presidential administration in Washington DC does some things that appear stupid in hindsight. It gets caught up in the moment, pandering to this or that political constituency, or reacting too precipitously to some big or newsworthy event. In our 24-hour-news-cycle world, and especially if we’re sophisticated news consumers, we simply discount the importance of poor presidential decisions and move on, even as we might grow incrementally more cynical over time about government in general.

The banality, even inevitability of yet another misstep out of Washington, however, shouldn’t be allowed to stifle our sense of outrage when it’s warranted. Or our energy to pick up a pen or a phone and make a call to the White House to demand the restoration of sense and dignity and even “decency” to our federal government.

The events prompting me to write these words are the series of revelations emerging about the past work of President Obama’s “safe schoolsczar.” His formal title is: Assistant Deputy Secretary of the Office of Safe and Drug-Free Schools at the U.S. Department of Education. Czar Kevin Jennings was chosen by President Obama for this current position on the basis of Jennings’ past leadership of the Gay Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN). Previously, Jennings had come under some fire from the national media when the news leaked out of an admission from Jennings that during an earlier career as a school administrator, the only advice he offered a 15 or 16 year old boy who told him about an anonymous sexual encounter with a [likely older] man was to “use a condom.” There is also the continuing controversy over the books the GLSEN’s website recommends for adolescents. These present homosexual sexual encounters as anonymous, degrading, grotesque and sometimes violent. Many describe graphic sexual encounters involving young children.

Today, Jennings is again in the news because of accounts of sex education conferences in Massachusetts in 2000 and 2001 which he helped design while he was president of GLSEN, in cooperation with the Massachusetts Department of Education, the Safe Schools Program, and the Governor’s Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. According to the reports, hundreds of students ages 14-21 were instructed about and given “kits” pertaining to a common homosexual practice called “fisting.” Several details add to the full picture regarding Jennings. First, Jennings denied that he knew in advance what conference facilitators would present at the session entitled “What They Didn’t Tell You About Queer Sex and Sexuality in Health Class.” He said publicly: “We need to make our expectations and guidelines to outside facilitators much more clear. Because we are surprised and troubled by some of the accounts we’ve heard” (see students given fisting kits). Yet the woman who actually presented the session, and was later let go due to the ensuing scandal, claimed that GLSEN, headed by Jennings, knew in advance the content of the material to be presented.

Second, Jennings’ statement of regret implied that the problematic material would not be offered again. Yet the same session was offered, and the same “kits” handed out at the same conference the following year.

Read the rest of this article, first published at culture-of-life.org here.

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