Survey About Relationships In America; Women and the Myth of Marriage Declining... more

WH mum on possible Israel sanctions   White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest on Friday would not discuss whether the Obama administration is considering sanctions against Israel for ongoing settlement construction in East Jerusalem.

"I'm not going to talk about any internal deliberations," Earnest said during a press briefing after he was pressed about discussions on sanctions against the U.S. ally.

While Earnest reaffirmed the strong bond between the two nations, he called the settlements "illegitimate" and said the U.S. was deeply concerned about the settlement activity...

'Unauthorized' Aliens With Jobs Outnumber Non-College-Grad Adults Seeking Jobs    Aliens illegally holding jobs in the United States outnumber all unemployed people who are not in management, professional or related occupations as well as all unemployed who are 25 and older and who do not have a college degree, according to an estimate of "unauthorized workers" published by the Chief Actuary of Social Security Administration and employment data published by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The BLS only counts as "unemployed" people who have actively looked for a job in the past four weeks.

“We estimate that the number of unauthorized workers grew from 4.8 million in 2000 to 8.0 million in 2007, the peak of the last business cycle,” the Office of the Chief Actuary of Social Security said in an analysis published in April 2013....

Will the Sexual License Mandate Destroy Christian Educational Institutions?  The predicament of individual Christians faced with legal or organizational requirements to acquiesce in the sexual revolution and provide goods or services that contribute to sin, reviewed in a recent article by the present author, is mirrored in a similar requirement being made on Christian institutions. The difference is that whereas individuals are threatened with loss of job, fines, or imprisonment, organizations are threatened with loss of existence if they do not conform.

The drama of institutions struggling to maintain their Christian identity in a hostile legal and social environment is now being played out by two excellent Christian collegiate institutions in markedly liberal jurisdictions, Gordon College in Massachusetts, and Trinity Western University, in British Columbia.

Not content with dismantling laws and policies which made Judeo-Christian morality the moral framework of society at large, social liberals now seek to deny traditional Christians the right to maintain their own private, voluntary institutions in which Christian sexual morality is enforced... 

Good News About Relationships in America: Findings from a New, Large, Nationwide Survey  A new and very large nationally representative survey of Americans is shedding much light on the religious and relationship lives, behaviors, and attitudes of adults. It’s called the Relationships in America study, and a report on it was released earlier this week from the Austin Institute. I’m a senior fellow of the Institute, and had a hand in the survey’s design and construction—approved by the University of Texas—and in editing the report whose key findings I’m about to describe.

As an early reader noted, the report is like a train wreck—it’s horrifying and fascinating at the same time. Take a look for yourself. While there’s more bad news than good, in this essay I want to dwell on the positive...

Women and the Myth of Marriage Declining ...With 50 years of experience behind us, what are the facts? What do the data show about women and marriage? About women and their need for men?

Ironically, while women are, in fact, not marrying as early and the decline in marriage is a reality, digging deep into the data shows that by the time women are in their 30s, about 70 percent of them are married (that’s only around 5 percent less than in the past)...