Benefits of Marriage; Women & Guns – American Family Association of Indiana

Benefits of Marriage;  Women & Guns

As the Year Draws to An End

The Staff and Board of the American Family Association of Indiana would like to thank you for reading these weekly emails and for your faithful support of this organization in 2022. (If you would like to donate to AFA-IN, you can do so here: https://www.afain.net/donation/ )

We want to wish everyone a very wonderful Christmas this weekend. We pray that this is a time of year when families can celebrate and grow their love for each other and worship the birth of our Savior.

“You’ll Shoot Your Eye Out, Kid”

This Christmas there may be many women in America who are a lot like Ralphie in The Christmas Story, who was hoping for a Red Ryder BB gun.

New polling from Gallup finds that one in five women now own a firearm. This is an all-time high recorded by the polling firm. Twenty-two percent of women in America own a firearm, up from 13% in 2008.

The poll found that the percentage of men who own a firearm has declined from 46% in 2007 to 43% today.

Last year, Harvard’s School of Public Health found that women accounted for about half of all gun purchases between 2019 and 2021. New gun owners are more likely to be female than male. Of all new gun buyers, 55% were white, 21% were Black, and 19% were Hispanic. Among women, 28% were Black. (Among existing firearms owners, who bought another firearm, 71% were male.)

Concerns over rising crime and civil unrest seem to be driving many of these changes in gun ownership.

The Safety of Marriage

There are many societal benefits of marriage that social scientists have noted for well over 50 years. One of those is the protective nature that marriage brings to women and children. Here are two more such studies.

Researchers at the University of Hong Kong recently released a study of medical records from the emergency department of two local public hospitals. They found that cohabiting women were twice as likely as married women to experience physical violence.

Similar studies in Latin America also found that married women had the lowest incidents of domestic violence. For nearly every one of the 47 types of intimate partner violence reported in the surveys, marriage was associated with a lower incidence of Intimate Partner Violence (IPV) suffered by women. In fact, marriage is not associated with more violence in any of those 47 categories.

Currently, marriage can mean anything. What about homosexual marriage? I have not seen violence studies of married same-sex couples compared to cohabiting same-sex couples, but several studies (even those conducted by homosexual activists) have found that domestic violence is much higher among homosexual couples than heterosexual couples.

According to a June report by the US Department of Justice, domestic violence among LGBT couples is between two and eight times higher (depending upon the type of incident, and what part of the LGBTQ alphabet of the victim) than heterosexual couples. A 2018 study by the University of Michigan and published in the American Journal of Men’s Health found that almost half of the homosexual men (46%) in the survey reported experiencing some form of intimate partner abuse. In 2015, the Centers for Disease Control conducted a survey which found that 37% of bisexual men, 44% of lesbians, and 61% of bisexual women experienced rape, physical violence, and/or stalking by an intimate partner at some point in their lives.

Do As I Say, Not as I Do

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg has often decried global warming and the standard environmental rhetoric about emissions. However, a report conducted by Americans for Public Trust found that Buttigieg has flown on taxpayer-funded private jets at least 18 times since taking the helm of the Department of Transportation.

Private jets are among the worst offenders when it comes to carbon emissions.

Here’s where this gets interesting. The number of private jet trips taken by Buttigieg is more than double that of his predecessor, Elaine Chao, during her first two years in office, yet she was criticized for them by the media. Sec. Buttigieg has gotten a pass from the media for his use of this kind of travel even though it supposedly goes against the “green” policies of the Biden Administration.

2023 Indiana General Assembly Begins Soon

The next legislative session is only a few weeks away. Much of the attention in 2023 will surround the new budget that is required to pass every odd-numbered year. If issues such as school funding, state employee salaries, and spending priorities of the Governor and legislative leadership interest you, the Associated Press has a good overview article of some things the key players in the budget are watching, where Indiana stands fiscally and key spending items from our previous budget.

You can read it here: https://apnews.com/article/indiana-indianapolis-4e3d968450c43169dab52433331f7900

In Their Own Words:

But when the fullness of the time came, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the Law, so that He might redeem those who were under the Law, that we might receive the adoption as sons and daughters. – Galatians 4:4-5

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FACEBOOK MEMORIES

A few days ago a Facebook picture I had posted in 2008 of a billboard campaign that we ran came up in the memories feature. Given the recent misguided Respect for Marriage Act, I thought it was a timely reminder. Here is a picture of one of those billboards that we ran in several areas of Indiana.