CNN plugging book that says fundies are best fathers.

[jdj]

They are running it as a study, as news, that Bradford Wilcox's new book "Soft Patriarchs" concludes that men who identify as evangelical Christians make the best fathers. Even for CNN this is beyond the pale. I'm still in shock. They ran this right after the Putin mea culpa story.

Unbelievable b.s. I have one of those fathers, and we just had a screaming match the other day about how he used to throw knives at me. My mother grew up in a house with an uncle who had about 30 years of perfect church attendance, ( with a pin for each year frame in velvet on the wall) and he sexually abused her.

This Bradford Wilcox is a propagandist, here are some snippets below, but CNN intro'd this as a news story coming out of scholarly study. The are even more beneath contempt than they ever have been.

[molly]

1. Most of my friends and myself were raised by pugs

that's why we are now DEM!!!!

[sniffa]

2. fundies have the highest divorce rates

so obviousLy they're the best fathers too.

[stopthegop]

19. do you have a source for that statistic? eom

[kimchi]

26. Here ya go:

http://www.religioustolerance.org/chr_dira.htm

Divorce rates among conservative Christians were much higher than for other faith groups

[stopthegop]

29. thank you...eom

[jdj]

3. Snippets from other Wilcox books:

Brad Wilcox argues that houses of worship "need to show men and women how marriage is a lifelong vocation of service to God, to spouse, and to the children that usually follow." This message needs to be made attractive to a culture which worships the individual. How? 

     "Programs run by lay couples with good marriages are particularly valuable, insofar as they are able to impart knowledge won in the school of ordinary life." He also notes that "More than 150 cities and towns in 39 states have established Community Marriage Policies that strengthen marriage norms by setting common standards for premarital preparation and marriage enrichment." His research of inner city congregations reveal that 60 percent of urban couples who have had a child out of wedlock "would be willing to attend a church-sponsored relationship class."
http://www.marriagesavers.org/Columns/C1068.htm Study Finds that Conservative
Protestant Parents are Not Abusive

Princeton, NJ - A new study reported in Social Forces (Vol. 79(1) September:265-290.) finds that conservative Protestant parents are less likely to report yelling at their children. The study, authored by W. Bradford Wilcox of the Center for Research on Child Wellbeing at Princeton University and John P. Bartkowski of the Sociology Department at Mississippi State University, casts doubts on previous assertions that conservative Protestant parents are abusive and authoritarian.

"We know that conservative Protestant parents value obedience from their children more than most parents and that they are more likely to spank their children," said Wilcox. "In the 1990s, a number of scholars took this pattern to mean that these parents were abusive and authoritarian. This study, however, adds to a growing body of evidence that suggests that conservative Protestant parents have a distinctive neotraditional style of parenting that combines a strict but controlled approach to discipline with a warm and expressive approach to everyday parent-child interaction."
http://people.biola.edu/faculty/paulp/wilcox.html

Finding: While the link between good fatherhood and religion was evident in all denominations, "conservative Protestant affiliation" exerted an "independent effect" on some aspects of fatherhood. "Conservative fathers are more likely to be involved with their children in personal activities such as personal talks than unaffiliated and mainline Protestant men." And they are more likely "to have dinner with their children and to participate in youth-related ...
W. Bradford Wilcox
Journal of Marriage and the Family
2002
Full Details
Finding: Church attendance made men better fathers. "Religion is related to paternal involvement in all three areas that we examined: one-on-one engagement, dinner with one's family, and volunteering for youth-related activities." In fact, "religion appears to make a unique contribution to paternal involvement above and beyond its status as a conventional activity. . . . The specific attention that religious institutions dedicate to family life ...
http://www.heritage.org/research/features/familydatabase/results.cfm?Key=228

[frylock]

4. i'd rather be raised by snake handlers..

no offense.

[gWbush is Mabus]

6. alot of those fundies ARE snake handlers

[GreenPartyVoter]

7. You could get the best of both worlds and be raised by

those wacked out snake-handling Holy Roller types. :eyes:

[GreenPartyVoter]

5. Uh, that'd be a big NO. They make their kids crazy.

Would Jesus love a liberal? You bet!
http://www.geocities.com/greenpartyvoter/liberalchristians.htm

[RoundRockD]

8. Anderson Cooper had the Left Behind people on yesterday.

I didn't watch it.

[jdj]

16. I can't stand it. It's making me crazy.

If I had a rock I would have thrown it through the TV.

It's not just the assertion, it was how CNN handled it. It was the Asian woman reporter, she opened with something like "Who makes the best fathers? Well, a new study has shown that protestant men, particularly those that identify as evangelical (it's killing me even to repeat this) make the best fathers, according to the book "Soft Patriarchs" by sociologist Bradford Wilcox."

Then she went on to list the reasons. This is the epitomy of irresponsible journalism, I mean I know they suck, but they suck even worse than I thought they sucked, I mean, who'da thunk? An evangelical christian father writes a book that says that evangelical christians are the best fathers...and they don't question it in the least, and instead present it as reliable...I'm babbling, I must go now...

[GreenPartyVoter]

17. Well, there are left-leaning evangelical Protestants

but I am sure they were not taken into account for the purposes of that book. :eyes:

[ArkDem]

36. I hope I'm not detecting a bias against Asian women here.

[devinsgram]

9. That is totally laughable.

The kids that come from these homes can't wait to get away from them.

[NashVegas]

10. Sure, Just Ask Timothy McVeigh

..

[tnlefty]

20. Add Jeffrey Dahmer to that list, too....

I heard his dad on Larry King last night and he stated that he regretted not having spent enough time around Jeff after he and his wife divorced. He bought Jeff some creationist books and turned him against evolution while he was in prison and before he was murdered.

He made a bizarre comment that made it seem as though evolution had caused Jeff to murder, dismember, and consume some parts of his victims because Jeff wanted to examine the tissues, get down to the cellular level to see if it was really feasible for slime to form into a mammal form then into a human.

My head was spinning.

[Skittles]

31. he also took Jeff to a shrink to "cure" him of homosexuality

I'm sure that did wonders for Jeff's psyche.

[tnlefty]

34. I'm sure it did, too

Didn't his stepmother state that he was closeted. Then it seemed that shortly after they found this out that they took him for "the cure". Or did I misunderstand that part?

[Occulus]

42. It didn't work.

A friend of mine met Dahmer at a gay bar in Chicago. This was before Dahmer was caught.

[Occulus]

43. dupe

oops

[Francine Frensky]

23. Susan Smith's father was a big-time fundie. She drowned her kids

more: what about the woman who drowned her seven kids in the bathtub in Texas? her husband was a fundie, that did her kids a lot of good.

[Skittles]

30. Andrea Yates' husband Russell

f***ing asshole

[SharonAnn]

33. Her step-father(?) sexually abused her for years and was

a leading Republican in the state where they lived.

The sexual abuse had gone on from when she was a teenager, through her marriage, and even after the divorce.

[tnlefty]

11. A friend's father was a fundy preacher and he raped her from the time she

was about 6 and regularly beat the hell out of her and her brothers for the smallest 'infractions' and she still spouts the fundy line even though she's been admitted to mental hospitals twice for trying to commit suicide. She can't seem to reconcile her life and this brand of religion.

She now has 2 young kids and I've heard her threaten them with knives while talking with her on the phone. I just can't understand it.

[GreenPartyVoter]

18. Um, if she is threatening her kids with knives

you need to speak up.

We don't need another Andrea Yates situation.

[tnlefty]

25. I was her crisis go to person and I immediately called her psychiatrist

so I didn't just ignore it.

[GreenPartyVoter]

27. Glad to hear it!

Some people really wouldn't follow up on that. :(

[Hoping4Change]

12. Where oh where should I puke. Is stupidity some sort of

virus. Do no media whores read? Countless work has been done on authoritarian fathers and fascism, sexually perversity you name the dysfunstion. Gawd I hate gagging on bs.

[LittleApple81]

13. Sorry. My husband is an atheist AND HE IS THE BEST FATHER

I have ever seen in my life. I wish my father had been like him. These people are full of shit. And he also has better "real Christian" values than any fundie. Of course we are talking about the real Christ, not supply-side Jesus.

[Warpy]

14. Ha! Read the weasel words.

Fundie parents reportless abuse and yelling. You don't think people who claim to be superior to all others and who spend a great deal of their time sending the rest of us to hell are going to admit being sex abusing batterers!

These folks are miracles of self deception and hypocrisy. External studies have shown staggering rates of child abuse, divorce, teenage pregnancy, and all other indicators of dysfunction, far higher than in the general population.

CNN is obviosuly getting even worse than Faux at spreading lies.

[obnoxiousdrunk]

15. I was raised by

a fundie father and see what I turned out to be an "obnoxious drunk".

[alonso_quijano]

21. Haven't they heard of Phelps?

The head of the "God Hates Fags" crapfest is also an abusive psychopath! Maybe someone should send CNN the link to "Addicted to Hate":

http://blank.org/addict

I would, but I've already written CNN one nasty e-mail today....

[Ilsa]

22. Yeah, like the family that raised their son to be a killer.

After 18 years of religion and boy scouts, he killed both parents, his brother and the family dog and burned the house down around them in Victoria TX.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

24. Not from what I've seen

When I hear the horror stories from friends of mine who were raised by "hands on" fundamentalist fathers, I feel very fortunate that mine was merely kind of workaholic and absent.

[seabeyond]

28. these are the same fundie fathers teaching sons

to hate gays and liberals and feminists, and control women and seem them in a less way, to use prostitutes to hide sexual repression and to be hypocrits honoring only the testostrone driven male and not the sensitive of male. hm.............

my boy was in boyscouts for a year, by the end of the year and seeing what these fundie scouts are teaching as male, i am having a tough time allowing son back into the troop to embrace that male of teasing adn taunting adn making son less cause he doesnt pick fights and hurt others and spew hate

exaggerations here of course, lol lol

[LoZoccolo]

32. There's an evangelical Christian father I work with.

Should I go ask him if he rapes his kids and beats the shit out of them? :)

Should I? :)

[LoZoccolo]

35. Should I make this a poll question?

Should I? :)

[porphyrian]

37. Shame There's No Accurate Child Molestation Data

Not enough people come out and report, for various reasons. I'm sure this book won't mention abuse in the fundie population. Fear equals respect, you know.

[DiverDave]

38. He can just kiss

my agnostic ass.
I feel that I am a great Dad.
I just treat my kids 180 degrees different then my parents treated me.
Oh, and dont ask...

[Delano]

39. My ffamily never went to church

Dad is a Christian of sorts, I guess - he has not truck with churches or religious folks - guess he thinks it's personal.

I turned out an atheist with a Buddhist wife, and he's cool with that.

I'm very glad I didn't have a fundie nutjob for a dad.

[notadmblnd]

40. Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haHa ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha Ha ha Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha haha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha .......

[progressivebydesign]

41. Bullshit!

I'll say it. The few people that I have known that were later revealed to be sexually perverted to the point of molesting their own children, pornographically addicted in MAJOR ways, and a host of other socially unacceptable and often illegal ways... were ALL fundies!! I'm sure there are some lovely fathers who have evangelical leanings.. but the majority of those I've come in contact with have serious sexual and power issues with their children, and the children of others. There is something biologically wrong with trying to supress our natural sexual tendencies.. that's why, when the hard core relgious men crash and burn, they do it in a BIG BIG way!

[preciousdove]

44. This is a job for TruthIsAll

My memory fails me but the TX mother who had been diagnosed as psychotic and whose husbnd left her alone with the kids in TX was a fundie. Her family had tried to get him to call them in when he was gond and did stay there with her when he was at work. Dog's will don't you know.

I know that at least two mothers who killed their children in the last few years were daughters of fundie Dads but I remember hearing that scenario mentioned in a lot of other horrific cases.

I would do it but I have an Action alert going out about writing to Gov Pataki to sign the OMPC reform bill that is expected to pass both houses yet this year. It would go alon gway to stopping them from harrassing doctors for political resaons at the behest of drug and insurance corporations. This has been a grassroots campaign for the last four years and they have contacted, educated and lobbied each member of the NY Congress seperately and convince them to support this bill. It does not let guity doctors of the hook a claim the opposition to this bill has used.

Off topic:
There was a list of 17 clnical researchers into Lyme Disease. A defense to such charges costs over $250,000 plus time the doctor cannot see patients. Also because most people are unaware that this can happen they believe that the doctor must have done something wrong to be under investigation when actually anyone can make a annonomas complaint that has to be investigated whether it has any merit or not. Until the durg coctails became so effective it was more costly to treat a chornic Lyme paitent than an AIDS patient. So the insurance company "researched" the disease out of exisistance with the help of the CDC, NIH and FDA leaving thousands infected and without treatment. A recent study says that the debility for chornic Lyme is the same as for chronic heart failure and they were not looking into the havoc it creats in the brain mimicing almost any known neruological and phyciatric disease or syndrome.

[ladjf]

45. We've got to face the fact that America is

plunging headlong toward the path to Theocracy. I see no way they can be stopped. They are hell bent on imposing their lunacy on the rest of us and are working with the kind of zeal that only a religious nut can conjure up.