The Law Should Protect Children, Not Sexual Expressionism

Apr 7, 2018 by Jill

by Mark Regnerus, The Federalist:

When I began writing on matters of sexuality, household structure, and children’s outcomes—which yielded unpleasant experiences from which I’m still smarting—I had little sense or interest in family law. I realize some recalcitrant critics won’t believe it, but I didn’t really know until five years ago what exactly an amicus brief was, nor the difference between a U.S. circuit court and a district court.

But when I began writing what came to be the book Cheap Sex, I started probing distinctions in state family law—matters including divorce and age of consent—as well as familiarizing myself with the pathway by which artificial contraception came to be widely legalized and increasingly popular. Even now, though, I have to look up the names of the most consequential cases, and I couldn’t tell you which ones settled what, nor how.

George Mason University law school professor Helen Alvaré, on the other hand, knows all about it. Her new volume, Putting Children’s Interests First in U.S. Family Law and Policy: With Power Comes Responsibility, is a helpful tool for family law scholars, judges, attorneys, and people interested in understanding or fomenting legal and social change. It’s priced by Cambridge University Press out of reach of most readers, but I hope that doesn’t stop people from accessing it.

Alvaré takes readers on a tour of the history of family law. It’s what I like most about this book, and it is her unique strength. Hence the first chapter is the longest and most engaging, and the most helpful for legal neophytes. Her key claim is about the rise of what she calls “sexual expressionism,” our cultural—and now legal—penchant for valorizing the sexual decisions of adults, putting their wishes squarely and unapologetically in front of children’s needs.

Read here

See also: What is ‘gender ideology’?, by Stephen Baskerville, Jacobite

The thought police of the new revolution, by David Robertson, The Wee Flea