~ “there is evidence that use of oral contraceptives alters a woman’s baseline preferences for men such that Pill users prefer men who are relatively genetically similar to them in the loci of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC).”

Implicating the Pill, ie. oral contraceptives, in the violent deaths of women by their intimate partners will raise eyebrows and hackles no doubt.  That is why medical references are included in this post.  A large body of scientific literature supports just that: the reality that the Pill by altering a woman’s choice of intimate partners leads to a higher risk that she will die a violent death.  Look it up.  It’s sad but true.

A 1992 article in the Journal of Trauma reported that the most common cause of non fatal injury among women was violence by an intimate partner.  More disturbingly, intimate partner violence accounted for one third of the women murdered in the United States.

We have known since the 1980s that violence and accidents was the second leading cause of death among women who take the Pill.  In 2010, the Hannaford study published in the British Medical Journal that women on the Pill were more likely to die a violent death than those women not taking the Pill.  They also found that the longer a woman took the Pill the higher her risk of a violent death.

Although the authors of the study could not explain these findings, a letter to the editor published March 13, 2010 by S.Craig Roberts of the University at Liverpool  shed light as to the reason for this disturbing result.  He stated, “I suggest that recent evolutionary insights into human partner choice provide a clue.”  He stated that there is evidence that use of oral contraceptives alters a woman’s baseline preferences for men such that Pill users prefer men who are relatively genetically similar to them in the loci of the major histocompatibility complex (MHC). In other words, they prefer men who are genetically very similar to them.  These are the same genes tested to see if a person is similar enough to someone who needs them for a transplant.  They choose men who could be a very close relative.

The unions of MHC closely related couples were studied and it was found that the women rejected sexual advances from their partner more frequently than couples who were MHC dissimilar.  Another consequence of being partnered with relatively MHC-similar men is that women expressed lower sexual responsivity toward their partner compared to women in relatively MHC-dissimilar couples and they reported having more “extra-pair partners”. In other words, in their relationships they had fewer sexual encounters, wanted sex less and were more likely to engage in infidelity or adultery.  Less sex, bad sex and infidelity is a recipe for a bad relationship and conflict that could easily lead to even deadly violence.  It is not a surprise that the leading cause of death of pregnant women is homicidal violence.

Another stressor on these MHC similar unions is that they are less fertile and the children they have were found to have more health problems, just as is found in populations that marry close relatives.  Costly prolonged fertility treatments and the care of a sick child can also wreck havoc on relationships.

Conversely, other studies have shown that men find women who do not take the pill more attractive.  When asked to rate a woman’s attractiveness from pictures while experiencing the scent obtained from women on and off the Pill (using arm pads in open glass jars placed near them), men consistently rated the women more attractive if they were off the Pill.  That could explain why young women feel the need to dress more and more provocatively.  An intern remarked that now she had an explanation for a saying:  “I got on the Pill when I became sexually active.  Now I take the Pill and don’t have sex.”

According to the Center for Disease Control, 82% of women in the U.S .are taking or have taken the Pill.   This is a huge problem. Perhaps, the use of the Pill should be reconsidered.

____________________________

Kellermann AL, Mercy JA (1992) Men, women and murder: gender-specific differences in rates of fatal violence and victimization. Journal of Trauma 33: 1-5.

Ramcharan S et al J Reprod Med. 1980 Dec;25(6 Suppl):345-72 The Walnut Creek Contraceptive Drug Study. A prospective study of the side effects of oral contraceptives. Volume III, an interim report: A comparison of disease occurrence leading to hospitalization or death in users and nonusers of oral contraceptives.

Hannaford PC, Iversen L, Macfarlane TV, Elliott AM, AngusV, Lee AJ. 2010. Mortality among contraceptive pill users:cohort evidence from Royal College of General Practitioners’ Oral Contraception Study. British Medical Journal 340: c927

Roberts, S Craig, BMJ March 13, 2010 Rapid Responses available at: www.bmj.com/content/340/bmj.c927?page=1&tab=responses

Roberts SC, Gosling LM, Carter V & Petrie M (2008) MHC-correlated odour preferences in humans and the use of oralcontraceptives. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 275:2715-2722.

Alvergne A, Lummaa V (2010) Does the contraceptive pill alter mate choice in humans? Trends in Ecology & Evolution25: 171-179.

Garver-Apgar CE, Gangestad SW, Thornhill R, Miller RD & OlpJJ (2006) Major histocompatibility complex alleles, sexual responsivity, and unfaithfulness in romantic couples. Psychological Science 17: 830-835.

Havlicek J, Roberts SC (2009) The MHC and human matechoice: a review. Psychoneuroendocrinology 34: 497-512.

Kyriacou DM, Anglin D, Taliaferro E, Stone S, Tubb T,Linden JA, Muelleman R, Barton E, Kraus JF (1999) Risk factors for injury to women from domestic violence. New
England Journal of Medicine 341: 1892-1898.

One frequent question I am asked as a newlywed is:

What are you going to do now that the wedding is over?

A reasonable question—after all, the wedding planning took a lot of time. And so a bride may wonder what she is going to spend her time on now. But that’s not all we mean when we ask this question.  We don’t want to know simply what the woman will do with her time.  We want to know what she will live for.  Behind such a question is a little bit of fear, concern, and pity that perhaps she doesn’t have as much to live for.  Indeed, this is the perennial fear we have of settling down.  That once in the happily ever after, things get boring.  Things get routine.  Things aren’t so happily ever after anymore.

And yet, even though we fear such an ending, we women aren’t very good at avoiding the fairy tale, and through the bitterest of hearts it continues to pierce.  So we fall in love, we marry, and then we brace ourselves for what we expect to be a downward spiral and a steady loss of the joy we had on our wedding day.  Why do we do this?  How is it that we could be so attracted to something and yet seemingly so disappointed by it?  And why do we keep coming back to it?

Perhaps it is because the whole process is engrained in us.  We need it.  We need the fairy tale.  But perhaps the problem is that we are more in love with the fairy tale itself than we are with the happily ever after.  Perhaps the problem is not that the happily ever after doesn’t come, but rather, that we don’t know how to properly accept it and build it and live it.

The thing is, weddings are all about hope, and women are very good at hoping.  They’re so good at it that they get drunk on it.  You can see women drunk on hope whenever you go into a bridal store, or even when you watch girls shopping for their prom dresses.  You see them drunk on hope when they plan parties.  When they wrap Christmas gifts for their children.  Hope intoxicates us.  Hope is a beautiful wonderful thing.  Hope presupposes happily-ever-after.  Hope presupposes Heaven.  And there is nothing quite as hopeful as a bride turning the corner to walk down the aisle to her groom. This presupposition lifts us to a high like nothing else.  And so naturally, when we come down from it, we may feel empty and confused.

The danger arises, though, when we allow that emptiness to frighten us and when we, in our fear, turn to fill it with something that shouldn’t be going there.  We may fill it by looking only to the past. We may fill it with enough new projects to distract ourselves.  We may fill it with our own self-indulgences.  Whatever we may fill it with, we will end up blocking out that which was supposed to come in its place.  In the process of blocking out, we become embittered and unable to see or recognize or accept the happily ever after that was intended for us.  In getting caught up so much in the joy of hope, we forget hope’s purpose.  We forget the reason we hope.  And so when love stands ready at the gates to flood into our hearts and our home, we stand closed off and turned around so that it cannot enter.  Too many times, we women get caught up in the excitement of hope and so when love is not exciting (as true and deep love usually is not,) we panic.  When the butterflies stop fluttering in our stomachs, we become sad, thinking they have left for good, when really, they lay resting because they have finally found the place to which they were flying.

A few years ago, I decided I needed to learn to love Christmas Day.  For years I had become depressed on that day for the same reason that so many women feel empty after their weddings.  Christmas had come.  The Eve had ended, and along with it, my hope.  But how silly I was!  For when my hope ended, it did so because I had found what I hoped for.  I had to relearn how to bask in the love and joy of Christmas Day.  For so long, I had been so upset about the hope ending that I missed everything else. I had to learn to love what I hoped for more than the hoping.  And it wasn’t until I could learn this that I began to fully love both Christmas Eve and Christmas Day.

And so it is with the bride.  A bride is full of hope.  But a wife is full of love. And although hope is exciting, love is, well, everything.  Love is the only reason hope is worth anything.  So when hope may not feel as exciting, or when we no longer have to hope, we cannot let that fact embitter us and shield us from love.  That would be a tragedy.  That is the only real way we can ruin our chances at a happily ever after.  For we determine how happy it is according to how much we choose to love.  But we can never choose to love until we learn to let our hopes be fulfilled.  It takes surrender.  It takes the willingness to be content.  It takes a willingness to be empty for a little bit in order to be filled up with something even more precious and joyous and wonderful.  But it is worth it.  After all, it is the whole reason we hoped in the first place.

So then, perhaps the answer to the question, what are you going to do now that the wedding is over, ought not be simply a list of projects or tasks but instead, 

Well, now that the wedding is over, I’m going to be a wife. And I’m going to live happily ever after.

Sometimes we may be afraid to say this.  We worry people won’t believe it. We worry that we don’t believe it.  But it can be as true as you choose to love just like a wedding can be as beautiful as you choose to hope or a home as happy as you choose to make it.  So do not be afraid.  Our hopes are not unfounded.  Love does satisfy.  Love does fulfill.  Love does save.  All we must do is allow it to.

Contributed by Margaret Somerville

The basic questions raised in all cases where all the attributes of parenthood do not reside in the two biological parents are whether all children (except, perhaps, those who are naturally conceived and born into an opposite-sex marriage) have, first, a right to know who their biological parents are, and, second, where possible to have some reasonable contact with them. 

When reproductive technology was new on the scene and being described as “science fiction becoming science fact”, the New Yorker magazine published a cartoon.  It showed a line of adults (sketched in that magazine’s typically pear-shaped format – tiny heads with increasingly large bodies towards the legs) facing the reader, each holding a martini.

In front of the lineup, looking at them with their backs to the reader, a nurse is holding the hand of a very young boy and pointing at the adults.  The nurse says to the boy: ”This is your sperm-donor biological daddy; your egg-donor biological mummy; your gestational surrogate mother; your social mummy; your social daddy; your psychiatrist, to try to sort you out; and your lawyer.”

A current case in the town of Cochrane, Ontario, is one example of the dilemmas that can arise from such separation of the elements of parenthood.

Nicole Lavigne is a lesbian woman living with her partner of fifteen years, Selena Kazimierski.  Ms Lavigne inseminated herself with sperm donated by Rene de Blois, whom she’d known since elementary school.  Ms. Lavigne says that Mr de Blois agreed that he would play no role in the life of Tyler Lavigne, the child who resulted from the sperm donation.  After Tyler was born, Mr. de Blois changed his mind and has gone to court requesting to be recognized as Tyler’s father and given “general and liberal” access rights, accordingly.

Mr. de Blois seeks to have the agreement he signed not to seek such rights set aside, it seems on two bases: that Ms Lavigne “threatens or intimidates” him with the contract; and that she has failed to carry out “her part of their original bargain, by carrying a[nother] child for him”.

One line of analysis of this situation would be in the context of contract law.

Contracts in Ontario, and all other provinces except Quebec, require consideration — “payment” by each party, which can be in the form of a promise — to be binding.  Here that would be, “I’ll give you sperm/a uterus for ‘your’ child, if you’ll give me a uterus/sperm for ‘my’ child.”  Even if the promise were not fulfilled, it would suffice for consideration and, hence, a valid contract.

Coercion or duress to enter a contract can make it voidable.  But coercion or duress arising, as alleged here, from Ms. Lavigne’s relying on the contract would not do so.

Rather, the central question regarding the validity of the contract is whether it is contrary to public policy or public order and good morals, such that it is void.  But, even if the contract were valid, the more personal the performance of its provisions are, as here, the less likely a court is to enforce them.

I suggest, however, that many of us will have an intuitive reaction that there is something wrong in dealing with this situation as governed by a contract that two adults have entered and to which the person most affected, the child, was not a party.

In a 2007 case, Jane Doe v. Alberta, the Alberta Court of Appeal decided along those lines. (Permission to appeal to the Supreme Court of Canada was denied, which is an indirect affirmation of the judgment.)

A man and a woman were living together and the woman wanted to have a child and the man did not.  She decided to become pregnant through anonymous artificial insemination. They entered a contract that the man would not have any rights or responsibilities with respect to the child.  The court struck down the contract on the basis the adults could not contract away the child’s rights and the contract was not in the child’s “best interests”.  In the absence of any other “father” in the child’s life, it was in the best interests of the child that the mother’s male partner act as a father to the child.

The basic questions raised in all cases where all the attributes of parenthood do not reside in the two biological parents are whether all children (except, perhaps, those who are naturally conceived and born into an opposite-sex marriage) have, first, a right to know who their biological parents are, and, second, where possible to have some reasonable contact with them.  I propose that the response to both questions should be in the affirmative, unless that is clearly contrary to the “best interests” of a particular child, and that to decide otherwise is a breach of children’s fundamental human rights.

The vast majority of us want to know through whom life travelled to us and, at the least, to “put a face” to those people.  To intentionally destroy a person’s ability to know that – intentionally to make them “genetic orphans” and especially for society to be complicit in doing so – is ethically wrong.

There is enormous controversy over whether a child needs and has a right to a family structure that includes (although may not be limited to) both a mother and a father.  Here again the “best interests” of the child should prevail, not the preferences of adults which would contravene those interests.  In other words, we need child-centred decision-making, not adult-centred decision-making, in cases such as the Cochrane one.

Since reproductive technologies came on the scene, as both individuals and societies, we’ve faced issues unprecedented in human history with respect to children’s parentage and family structure.  On the whole, adult-centred decision-making has prevailed in this regard.  Using the ethical doctrine of “anticipated consent” might help to correct that bias. That doctrine requires us to ask what can we reasonably anticipate a child – for instance, Tyler Lavigne – would consent to if he or she were able to decide. Would he be likely to choose to have his biological father, Rene de Blois, in his life?

Margaret Somerville is Samuel Gale Professor of Law and Director of the McGill Centre for Medicine, Ethics & Law and is an international leader in the discussion of complex ethical questions in medicine.  This article is reprinted in full by permission from Mercatornet.

Contributed by Kathleen Sloan

Women’s health and human rights advocates are popping champagne corks all over the country today. Legislation that would have allowed commercial surrogacy in the state of New Jersey, without protections for women who serve as surrogates and no regulation of the fertility industry, was vetoed. Virtually written by surrogacy brokers, the blatant commercial exploitation of women contained in this legislation is staggering.

New Jersey is a bellwether of the surrogacy issue in many respects so this development is a positive portent for those who care about the exploitation of women and about safeguarding women’s health.

In 1988, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled unanimously in the famous Baby M case that surrogacy contracts were in violation of every statute and public policy of the state that dealt with the rights of mothers, the rights of children, and issues dealing with adoption and termination of a mother’s rights. That decision of the Supreme Court had an impact far beyond the borders of New Jersey, influencing not only other states but other countries. It continues to be taught in almost every law school in the country.

Following the New Jersey Supreme Court decision, the governor and the legislature asked the New Jersey Bioethics Commission to study the issue of whether laws should be changed to create a statute that would enable commercial surrogacy. The Commission, comprised of people from both political parties, psychologists, scientists, physicians, attorneys, healthcare providers, and those from other walks of life, held public hearings, created a task force to conduct research and field trips, and held public debates on the policy issues over an 18 month period. After this comprehensive process spanning 3 years, a 171-page report was issued.

The report strongly condemned all forms of surrogacy, including gestational surrogacy. It also noted that all the problems associated with surrogacy where the woman giving birth is genetically related to the child are present with gestational surrogacy in which the woman giving birth has no genetic relationship to the child. The report recommended that the legislature pass a law deterring the practice of surrogacy, including some quasi-criminal sanctions, and imposes rules specifically tailored for the award of custody in those limited instances when deterrence fails.

The legislation vetoed this week was an attempt to sneak under the radar and avoid public scrutiny of its contents. It was introduced and swiftly passed out of committee so that the citizens of New Jersey would not be likely to discover that the legislation went against nearly every recommendation of the Bioethics Commission’s report. This action was also the polar opposite of the careful, non-politicized, detailed review and analysis conducted by the Commission.

Fortunately, advocates for the health and well being of women and children became aware of these nefarious actions and responded immediately. They held a press conference at the state capitol calling on the legislature to defeat this bill, and they contacted all legislators to express their concerns.

Remarkable indeed was the coalition of organizations and individuals who came together in this effort, ranging from pro-choice feminist leaders to the head of New Jersey Right to Life and including a gestational surrogate who condemned the practice and deeply regretted her decision to serve as a surrogate. The coalition remained steadfast after the bill ultimately passed and landed on the governor’s desk, meeting with the governor’s counsels urging a veto.

The major issues associated with surrogacy could fill a book. Among them are:

• — the further commodification of women and their bodies beyond sexual commodification;
• — absence of regulation which turns seemingly private transactions into de facto abusive employment practices;
• — exploitation of poor, low income and financially vulnerable women;
• — the commercialization of reproduction;
• — an invitation to fraud by brokers and clinics without regulation;
• — exploitation of women’s poverty and subordinate status;
• — lack of studies and statistics on the size of the market, the demographic characteristics of surrogates, and the medical, legal and financial risks;
• — and an out of control profit-driven $6 billion fertility industry that preys upon women.

And these do not include the numerous and serious health risks!

Today’s victory is a stark and stunning example of what can be accomplished when politics and other differences are put aside in order to come together around what truly matters: women’s health, prevention of the commodification of women and their bodies, stopping exploitation of women, and recognizing that children’s human rights must be respected and their commodification be opposed.

 
Kathleen Sloan is a Consultant for the Center for Bioethics and Culture, a member of the Board of Directors of the National Organization for Women (NOW), a member of the Board of Directors of the International Coalition for Reproductive Justice, and the former Program Director at the Council for Responsible Genetics.

Children have no voice setting public policy.  They are legally, physically and emotionally dependent.   They cannot vote.  They cannot form non-profits, produce surveys or express their preferences.  Their rights are severely limited, by the law of the land and by the intimacy of family operations.  They live and die as charges of adults they did not choose – much like the old (and firmly rejected) status of women, indentured servants and men without property.

It was once the prerogative of women to be the voice for children in society.    “Women and children” were clumped in social policy discussion, with the women – the early feminists – battling for laws to protect children, their development and the stability of their families.  Women championed temperance in efforts to protect children, especially children living in poverty, from the devastation of alcoholism.  Women championed child labor laws, eliminating the commercial practice of exploiting children for near-slave labor.  Women championed charitable and governmental welfare so that mothers and children abandoned by men could survive and live.  The chronicle of women’s accomplishments on behalf of children made and shaped U.S. history and fodders a rightful criticism that patriarchal accounts of history are simply prejudiced against the role of women in modern life.

Have women abandoned children?

Why are women so willingly advocating now for rights to terminate unborn children, rights that redefine parenthood to suit adult sexual orientation, rights redefining marriage as an adult-centric relationship, rights giving legal recognition to three or more adults over a single child, and even rights to genetically modify children to suit adult desires – all without a whimper of concern for the impact upon the children?  Children have literally no voice in the experimental social policies that are fundamentally altering the natural conditions under which children have been nurtured for centuries.  Today, redwood trees and gray wolves have more effective advocacy and protection from invasive changes to their natural environment than children do.

Let me say, first, that it is ludicrous to argue that children do not need a voice – that they are malleable creatures who will grow and thrive in whatever conditions adults thrust upon them.  Children, by common sense, have definite needs and they no more “adapt” to changes made without regard to these needs than do redwoods or wolves.  Culturally, we all seem to agree (so far) that children should not be the secret sexual objects of coaches or priests – but beyond that, dialogue on social policy issues seems to strategically avoid asking, “What is the impact upon children?”  We seem far more interested in what it takes to nurture a sapling or cub than we admit to knowing about how to nurture emotionally healthy human children.

Who will take up the voice of children – those little creatures locked into human configurations they did not choose, increasingly endowed with genetic history that will be hidden from them, expected to adjust their development and affections to an array of adults with legal demands and self-gratifying expectations upon them?

A major source of “voice” for these children is slowly – but steadily – emerging in the memoirs, articles and documentaries presenting to the public the reflections of children who grew up within experimental circumstances.  Three examples come immediately to mind:  Dawn Stefanowicz’s frank and generous account – Out From Under:  The Impact of Homosexual Parenting; Jennifer Lahl’s interview-based Anonymous Father’s Day; and, most recently, Robert Oscar Lopez’s article “Growing up with Two Moms:  The Untold Children’s View.”

Each of these focused, earnest pieces share with anyone willing to listen the reflections of adults who grew up in truly modern circumstances: Ms. Stefanowicz with a sexually active bi-gay father; Ms. Lahl’s interviewees as offspring of purchased or “donated” sperm and undisclosed fathers; Mr. Lopez without male adults of influence.    Each of these accounts offer insight into the world of the modern child – through the voice of an adult now developed, focused and readied to share the effects of the social experiment upon them.

These voices arise against the torrent of disapproval adults invested in the experiment can summon.  Like the Catholic Bishops and Penn State administration, adult investors in movements like marriage equality or commercial enterprises like reproductive technologies seem trigger ready to invalidate, discredit or denigrate the experience of these real people who suffered real harms as literal guinea pigs.  It is a terrible reality that Lopez, for example, could not find a shred of sympathy or validation for being cut off from male influences in his developing years – and what that came to mean in his life as a struggling teen and young adult – until making contact with an academic sociologist who published a widely circulated study about children raised in same-sex family settings (which, that too, the marriage equality investors would discredit and bury.)

These struggling brave voices need help, support and encouragement – just as the victims of clergy and coach abuse needed community validation and encouragement. These are the voices of the new “underdog” – the children abused, neglected, manipulated, lied to and deprived of claim to caring, child-centered environments in which they might have what they need – just like the struggling sapling and the vulnerable gray wolf cub.  That these voices seem threatening to policies or products that dominate adult agendas makes them cruelly vulnerable.  Like any underdog, they come from a position of no power, subject to social distain and public lynching.

It is a chilling reality, that their voices, the voices of children raised in social experiments, have become the new underdog.

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Contributed by Robert P. George and Shaykh Hamza Yusuf

A letter on pornography and business ethics written by two prominent public intellectuals—one a Christian, one a Muslim—sent to hotel industry executives July 9, 2012.

We write to ask you to stop offering pornographic movies in your company’s hotels. We make no proposal here to limit your legal freedom, nor do we threaten protests, boycotts, or anything of the sort. We simply ask you to do what is right as a matter of conscience.

We are, respectively, a Christian and a Muslim, but we appeal to you not on the basis of truths revealed in our scriptures but on the basis of a commitment that should be shared by all people of reason and goodwill: a commitment to human dignity and the common good. As teachers and as parents, we seek a society in which young people are encouraged to respect others and themselves—treating no one as an impersonal object or thing. We hope that you share our desire to build such a society.

Pornography is degrading, dehumanizing, and corrupting. It undermines self-respect and respect for others. It reduces persons—creatures bearing profound, inherent, and equal dignity—to the status of objects. It robs a central aspect of our humanity—our sexuality—of its dignity and beauty. It ensnares some in addiction. It deprives others of their sense of self-worth. It teaches our young people to settle for the cheap satisfactions of lust, rather than to do the hard, yet ultimately liberating and fulfilling, work of love.

We recognize that we are asking you to abandon a profitable aspect of your business, but we hope that you will muster the conviction and strength of will to make that sacrifice and to explain it to your stockholders. We urge you to do away with pornography in your hotels because it is morally wrong to seek to profit from the suffering, degradation, or corruption of others. Some might say that you are simply honoring the free choices of your customers. However, you are doing much more than that. You are placing temptation in their path—temptation for the sake of profit. That is unjust. Moreover, the fact that something is chosen freely does not make it right; nor does it ensure that the choice will not be damaging to those who make it or to the larger community where degrading practices and materials flourish.

We beg you to consider the young woman who is depicted as a sexual object in these movies, as nothing but a bundle of raw animal appetites whose sex organs are displayed to the voyeurs of the world and whose body is used in loveless and utterly depersonalized sex acts. Surely we should regard that young woman as we would regard a sister, daughter, or mother. She is a precious member of the human family. You may say that she freely chooses to compromise her dignity in this way, and in some cases that would be true, but that gives you no right to avail yourself of her self-degradation for the sake of financial gain. Would you be willing to profit from her self-degradation if she were your sister? Would you be willing to profit from her self-degradation if she were your own beloved daughter?

Furthermore, we trust that you need no reminding of the fact that something’s being legal does not make it right. For example, denying black men and women and their families access to hotel rooms—and tables in restaurants, as well as other amenities and opportunities—was, for countless shameful years, perfectly legal. In some circumstances, it even made financial sense for hotel owners and operators in racist cultures to engage in segregationist practices even when not compelled by law to do so. However, this was deeply morally wrong. Shame on those who denied their brothers and sisters of color the equal treatment to which they were morally entitled. Shame on you if you hide behind legality to peddle immorality in the pursuit of money.

Our purpose is not to condemn you and your company but to call you to your highest and best self. We have no desire to hurt your business. On the contrary, we want you and your business to succeed financially—for your sake; for the sake of your stockholders, employees, and contract partners; and for the sake of the communities that your hotels serve. We believe that the properly regulated market economy serves the good of all by providing products and services at reasonable prices and by generating prosperity and social mobility. But the market itself cannot provide the moral values that make it a truly humane and just institution. We—owners, managers, employees, customers—must bring those values to the market. There are some things—inhuman things, unjust things, de-humanizing things—that should not be sold. There must be some things that, for the sake of human dignity and the common good, we must refuse to sell—even it if means forgoing profit.

Robert P. George is McCormick Professor of Jurisprudence at Princeton University. Shaykh Hamza Yusuf is co-founder and a member of the faculty of Zaytuna College. Affiliations are provided for identification purposes and do not imply institutional endorsements.

This article originally appeared in Public Discourse: Ethics, Law, and the Common Good, the online journal of the Witherspoon Institute of Princeton, NJ and is reprinted with permission.  Receive Public Discourse by email, become a fan of Public Discourse on Facebook, follow Public Discourse on Twitter, and sign up for the Public Discourse RSS feed.  Support the work of Public Discourse by making a secure donation to The Witherspoon Institute.

Copyright 2012 the Witherspoon Institute. All rights reserved.

Keep your friendships in repair.

– Ralph Waldo Emerson

I love Facebook.  But after a full year of socializing through FB, I have taken a summer pause to evaluate my “Facebook friendships,” relationships which are not all traditional or non-virtual but which can as easily become dysfunctional.  Reviewing and cleaning up my FB network took both time and reflection – but all worthy relationships require diligence, purpose and care.  Facebook relationships are no exception.

Let me emphasize that I love Facebook.  Like people who use several rolls of aluminum foil a month, I am a “heavy wrapper” when it comes to Facebook:  I like to share photos, status, articles, funny stuff, news, family matters and posts from this blog and others, often several times a day.  I like to read where others are and what they find of interest.  I don’t mind the deluge of posts from heavy wrappers like Elizabeth Scalia or Leticia Velasquez – neither of whom I’ve met but both are bloggers who share posts and links on Facebook everyday, all day.  I enjoy light wrappers, too – friends or family members who only occasionally post a tidbit, peak or comment, made precious by its rarity.

I’ve met some wonderful New Feminists and new friends on Facebook, connecting through mutual friends or “cold calling” to be friends because they wrote something interesting, provocative or memorable.  I’ve joined the community support for heroes like Travis Mills and followed interests ranging from Snowshoe Magazine to Beauty and the Beast to New Feminism.  I have FB friends who post recipes, tattoos, prayers, military videos, political quotes, vacation photos, cute puppies, health alerts, and pleas to add one more “like” or one more donation to a favorite cause.

I especially love comments – that tell-me-what-you-really-think space where a post becomes a connection, maturing into a discussion with FB friends and strangers.   I get a buzz from the occasional snarky comments I receive from people who experience something I’ve posted emotionally, even personally, as though I posted specifically to aggravate them.  I appreciate these comments – and doubtless, I make them myself.  This is the buzz of engagement, an intentional sparring of differences, where we are invited to another point of view and “like” can mean, “I hear you,” not “I agree with you.”  I value what I learn in these exchanges and how relationships – based on blood, shared experiences or simple fascination – prevail and no one defriends each other, at least, not for long.

This is the healthy side of Facebook, I’ve concluded, well worth preserving and sharing – and protecting.

To protect the health of my FB network, I have decided to set boundaries on my network.  I have implemented two criteria for defriending family or friends on Facebook.

1.  Abusive language.  Call me sensitive – many people do – but when snarky becomes abusive, it’s time to part company.  I recognize that posts or comments with pointed insults, name-calling or cursing are truly “just words” on FB and, often, reflect a user’s passing mood, alcohol level or frustrated passion, but I am not an “idiot” and my opinions are not “asinine” and if a “friend” thinks otherwise, that person is not a friend – real or virtual.  Even on Facebook – perhaps especially on Facebook and other social networks – word choice recognizes and honors the dignity of the other person, or not.  I have no interest in comments and posts that invalidate, denigrate or verbally assault groups or individuals, perpetuating online personal dysfunctions.  To remain FB friends with such users enables behavior that destroys and dismantles – not nurtures and builds – community.  All human communities will have multiple differences, even disputes – but they are guaranteed to escalate in hostility when we turn the other into an opponent, combatant or object for defeat.

2.  One-sidedness.   Lopsided friendships are always suspect, typically characterized by boundary issues that leave one person anxious to please another who is needy and without personal resource.  We’ve all seen or known these situations: where one person never seems able to say “no” just as the other person can’t resist asking one more favor – or where one person works pathetically to win affection that is withheld but not foreclosed.  FB, I discovered in my summer review, can foster a similar “one-sidedness” that I almost did not notice:  FB friends who never post, never comment, never share but amply consume information about other people.  There may well be situations where lack of mutuality is relatively harmless – but I decided to give focused consideration whether the FB eavesdroppers upon my life are people who I really ought to be having real relationships with.  Defriending FB friends because the friendship is not mutual, I hope, will define the reality because, without virtual contact, we will either reach out for face time, or we won’t.

I am only half way through summer.  Facebook – how it connects me, how I use and misuse it – remains in my near sights.  Possibly, I’ve just begun to wrench this social tool, and when to defriend friends, into proper position.

Many of you may have seen pictures like this one floating around on Facebook or through email threads.   Often, these vintage ads are contrasted with unflattering pictures of rail-thin models or celebrities of our current generation.  There will then be some sort of caption like:

Wow. How times have changed!

The post will usually get thousands of “likes” and comments about how wrong of a turn we have taken and how right they had it back then.  There will be bashing of thin women, some quite nasty, (e.g. a woman without curves is not a REAL WOMAN) and all of it will be considered entirely appropriate.  After all, if you are thin, you must either have an eating disorder or you’re a stuck up model or celebrity who deserves the criticism anyway.

It makes sense why such feelings have developed.  Too many of us have watched our friends, our daughters, our mothers, our sisters beaten down by the pressure to be thin.  We’ve heard horror stories.  We may have even lived them.  We’ve seen beautiful women give up everything, even sometimes that which made them so beautiful, because they have been pushed into an insecurity about their weight.

When we’ve seen this happen or had it happen to us, when we know what it’s like to be told that a number defines your worth (whether through peers or through the daily assault of the media, or the subconscious push of a chemical imbalance) we naturally want to put up our defenses.  We want to do whatever we can to stop such a lie.   And so we may rejoice in ads such as these because they are the extreme opposite! And it would seem that the extreme opposite of a lie would be the truth.

The problem is, glorifying an ad like this does not end the lie.  It merely perpetuates it.

I’m sure we do it in good faith, without thinking that anyone could be offended.  After all, the idea that there might be some women out there who are thin and insecure– women who may be skinny but feel way “too skinny” and are unable to do anything about that–seems crazy!  We don’t think that a girl like the one in this ad exists.  We may not think that it’s even possible to be unable to gain weight.  And we don’t truly believe that a thin woman could feel ugly, un-feminine, or un-sexy.  So we think it’s okay to tell her that she should feel that way– okay to bash her in the hopes that that bashing might build up the women who are not skinny.  It’s the same thing that plays out with the “popular girl” in a school.  Regardless of how nice or mean she may be, regardless of how insecure or confident she may be, she is going to be bashed because people think she can handle it for the sake of the girls who are unpopular. We do this with big football teams when they play smaller teams– we root for the underdog and figure that because the other guy is not the underdog, we can boo him all we want.

But booing the other guy isn’t how you win.  It’s not how you gain your own confidence and it’s definitely not how you promote theirs.

For the past thirty or so years, skinny has been “in.”  So has being tan.  So have countless other trends and fads.  So naturally, those who are not skinny, those who are not tan, those who are not blonde or brunette or highlighted or curly-headed or rich or poor or whatever the current trend may be, are the underdog.  They start out being criticizied and put down.  Eventually, there are enough of them and enough people hear their plea that they develop a group of people who will stick up for them and defend them.  Eventually, rooting for the underdog will become standard and a trend, itself.  Now, the trend regarding weight is shifting again.  “Curvy” is becoming “in.”  Skinny, as can be seen by these Facebook postings, is out.  One day, it might circle back around just like it did a few generations ago.  In the end, these trends are silly, frivolous and should be rather irrelevant.  The reason they are relevant to us is because we are insecure.  And female insecurity is no passing trend.  It is a terrible reality.

But these sorts of ads– this “mean girls” support of the underdog will not end it.

Female insecurity will not end until we stop bashing the people on the other end of the spectrum.  We will not feel comfortable with our own weight until we are comfortable with everyone else’s.  We will not feel comfortable being brunette until we are okay with all the blondes being blonde.  And we will not feel comfortable with our own beauty until we can see the beauty in other people and be happy for it.

I don’t claim to know much about eating disorders.  But I consider myself to be fairly knowledgable about what it feels like to be a girl.  When I see someone say that whatever it is that I am is ugly or un-sexy it hurts me deeply.  I know that women are supposed to be beautiful, so when I see an ad where a girl that looks like me is called ugly, my womanhood is wounded.  I don’t feel like “a real woman.”  And we’ve all felt like this.  And when we feel like this it makes us feel better to put down someone else.

But I challenge women to be more courageous.

When I was in elementary school, I was jealous of the short girls.  I was tall, often taller than the boys, and so in class pictures, I had to stand in the back while the rest of the girls sat all cute in the front.  I know that back then I didn’t want those girls to look cute.  But I could have at least tried.  If I had tried to let go of my inner anger towards them I think I would have developed a lot more confidence and had a healthier opinion of myself.  But instead I learned the game of women.  I quickly learned how to be mean, even if only interiorly.

But the truth is, even if the game produces a quick self-esteem boost, it will not last. The insecurity will only come back all the more harshly.  And it certainly doesn’t make us any more beautiful.  In fact, when we rejoice that another woman is any less beautiful, we literally make ourselves less beautiful.  Because we taint our hearts.  And the heart is the most beautiful thing we have.

I know that some people may post such an ad to promote girls being healthy as “back then they had a better view of what was a healthy weight.”  But regardless of which generation was healthier, these ads miss the point.  They aren’t about health, just like most weight-loss ads today aren’t.

They’re about reaching the trendy number.  Playing off women’s insecurities.  Defining women by how sexy a man may find them to be.  We know women are more than numbers and more than sex appeal so let’s stop playing that game of which woman, skinny or curvy, is the “real” one.  Ideally, all women should strive for a healthy weight, but the ease of that task differs on all ends of the spectrum.  And before we can even get into what a healthy weight is, we must first discern what a healthy heart is.  A healthy heart is not jealous and a healthy heart is not vengeful.  A healthy heart takes what it is given and rejoices in the beautiful and the good, even if it is not its own. 

The following New Feminism Mission Statement for the recently created New Feminism Facebook Community was released today.  I participated in the drafting of this statement which brings together a wide variety of faces and approaches to the work of New Feminism.  You can join this community at Facebook by searching “New Feminism” and clicking on “New Feminism, Cause.”

We, the women of the New Feminism Movement, come together on this site/page to unite our cause upon the following principles.

1.  We come together to liberate woman, in her naturally designed femininity, not only from masculinization, but also from denigration as sexual object, commercial commodity or disfavored gender.

2.  We believe that women have a unique voice and role in protecting the dignity of the human person and creating a culture that values the life of every person, regardless of race, age, gender, physical ability, faith or any other category invoked to dominate or marginalize.

3.  We reject the imitation of masculine models of success and domination and acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of society.

4.  We embrace a wide variety of projects that seek to achieve true equality and incorporation of the feminine throughout society.

5.   We seek to introduce a new paradigm of feminism, whereby woman and the female virtues (i.e. Empathy, Interpersonal Relations, Emotive Capacity, Subjectivity, Communication, Intuition, & Personalization) are valued as fundamental to the health and sustainability of the human family.

We acknowledge there are many faces, many approaches within this movement including philosophical, secular, religious, moral, economic, medical, business, familial, and other perspectives whereby a woman expresses and becomes most fully herself.   In this forum, we all come together to share and be united in the cause of New Feminism.