A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.

Under Maryland law, a resident must show a “good and substantial reason” to obtain a permit to carry a handgun.

But the state has it exactly backward. The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution grants a citizen the right to own and carry guns, and the government shall not infringe on that right. The amendment restricts the government, not the people. And wouldn’t you know it? A court agrees with me.

From the AP (emphasis added):

States can channel the way their residents exercise their Second Amendment right to bear arms, but because Maryland’s goal was to minimize the number of firearms carried outside homes by limiting the privilege to those who could demonstrate “good reason,” it had turned into a rationing system, infringing upon residents’ rights, U.S. District Judge Benson Everett Legg wrote.

“A citizen may not be required to offer a ‘good and substantial reason’ why he should be permitted to exercise his rights,” he wrote. “The right’s existence is all the reason he needs.”

Plaintiff Raymond Woollard obtained a handgun permit after fighting with an intruder in his Hampstead home in 2002, but was denied a renewal in 2009 because he could not show he had been subject to “threats occurring beyond his residence.” Woollard appealed, but was rejected by the review board, which found he hadn’t demonstrated a “good and substantial reason” to carry a handgun as a reasonable precaution. The suit filed in 2010 claimed that Maryland didn’t have a reason to deny the renewal and wrongly put the burden on Woollard to show why he still needed to carry a gun.

Exercise your rights while you still can, people.

Marriage, a universal institution of divine origin, is the foundation on which to order society, build families, and raise children. The majority of juvenile delinquents and men in prison were raised in female-headed households. Children living in single-parent households are more likely to be poor, abuse alcohol and drugs, and have babies outside marriage.

Generally, married men and women are safer, healthier, happier, and financially better off than their single, separated, or divorced counterparts. Fathers married to the mother of their children are more emotionally and financially invested in their offspring.

Children living with their married, biological parents have greater academic achievement and fewer behavioral problems, and report higher levels of psychological well-being. Notwithstanding efforts to undermine, redefine, and mock marriage, children greatly benefit when their parents are committed to each other and to them.

Some believe marriage is only a “piece of paper,” and that living together without the piece of paper is less harmful to children than divorce. According to “Why Marriage Matters: Thirty Conclusions from the Social Sciences,” a new study cosponsored by the Center for Marriage and Families at the Institute for American Values and the National Marriage Project (NMP) at the University of Virginia, they’re wrong. Divorce no longer is the greatest threat to family stability and child well-being. Cohabitation (also known as shacking up) is “the largest unrecognized threat to the quality and stability of children’s family lives.”

The good news is the divorce rate is down since peaking in the early 1980s, but family instability is increasing. Children are much more likely to live in cohabiting households than divorced households. In these less stable and more dangerous unions, children are at least three times more likely to be physically, sexually, and emotionally abused than children in intact, married families. The researchers concluded that “cohabitation has emerged as a powerful alternative to and competitor with marriage.”

It seems counterintuitive. If children fare better living with two married parents than one, they’d fare the same or only slightly worse living with two unmarried parents. That’s not the case with abuse. According to the report, children in cohabitating homes are “markedly” more likely to suffer abuse than those in both intact, married families and single-parent families. However, children in cohabitating households fare better economically than children in single-parent households.

Sociologist and NMP director W. Bradford Wilcox said that unmarried couples living together are more likely to be unfaithful and to break up.

“But is cohabitation really the problem, or some deeper factor — like poverty or relationship troubles that predated the cohabitation?” Wilcox wrote on a New York Times blog. “The truth is that these other factors account for some of cohabitation’s negative impact but the best studies suggest that cohabitation also has an independent negative effect, precisely because it does not institutionalize commitment in a way that is easily understood and honored by romantic partners and their friends and family.”

The study also focused on “complex households,” where children and adults live with half-siblings, stepsiblings, stepparents, and stepchildren, and referred to “multiple-partner fertility,” in which parents have children with more than one partner. These children tend to have behavioral and health problems, perform poorly in school, and report poor relationships with their parents.

Family instability has always hit poor and working-class communities hardest. While family instability is prevalent in poor communities, research shows that it’s rising in lower middle-class communities. In contrast, marriage is becoming stronger among more educated and affluent communities.

Children live in a separate-and-unequal society not caused by racism or so-called bias. There is a marriage gap between more educated parents who married before having children and remain together raising the children, and less educated parents who don’t. Senior Manhattan Institute fellow Kay Hymowitz discussed the marriage gap between better educated mothers and less educated single mothers in Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age. Despite the so-called sexual revolution, which arguably benefited men more than women, better educated women continued to marry before having children.

More educated mothers tend to be dedicated to what Hymowitz calls The Mission, “the careful nurturing of their children’s cognitive, emotional, social development.” The goal is to produce children who do well in school, go to college, marry, and have children. She calls it common sense (backed up by research) that mothers with husbands have a greater chance of fulfilling The Mission.

The NMP report’s researchers acknowledge that marriage isn’t the cure-all for society’s problems, but they contend that marriage is “an issue of paramount importance” if we want to protect our most vulnerable citizens, “the working class, the poor, minorities, and children.”

Although attitudes about marriage have changed over the years, the importance of marriage to children and to society has not changed. The research is solid and mounting. Children are safer and more likely to thrive living with a mother and father married to each other. Regardless of how society tries to minimize or radically redefine marriage, it’s the best environment in which to raise healthy, happy, and law-abiding citizens.

…and attend a Fourth of July parade and get all patriotic! Hear that, Haaaaavad?

Happy Independence Day, Americans! I don’t know about you, but I thank God I was born and raised in this country, the greatest country on the planet.

…to celebrate, support, and protect.

(Hat tip: @GinaDalfonzo)

May the Lord richly bless you!

Now everybody’s talking about this
New decade
Like you say the magic numbers
Then just say goodbye to
The stupid mistakes you made
Oh my memory serves me far too well

Hope you’re having a safe night. Rest easy, everybody!

Marriage is a human universal and a core cultural institution that orders society and greatly benefits children. No matter how feminists and other liberals try to spin it, children are better off living with their own married parents.

For example, not only is a resident father more emotionally and financially invested in his children than a non-resident father, children living with their own married parents are less likely to be poor, do drugs, get pregnant outside marriage, or end up in jail. Children living with both their parents do better in school, have fewer behavior problems, and report higher levels of psychological well-being.

Despite these and other benefits of marriage to children, Middle America is turning its collective back on the institution. According to a new report from the National Marriage Project, the 58 percent of Americans with a high school diploma and possibly some college (the “moderately educated”) are increasingly having babies out of wedlock, reporting lower marriage quality, and getting divorced.

In fact, these moderately educated Americans are starting to resemble the poor, where childrearing and marriage typically are disconnected.

In contrast, reports “When Marriage Disappears: The Retreat from Marriage in Middle America,” (108 pages PDF), the 30 percent of Americans with at least a college degree (the “highly educated”) are more likely to embrace marriage, bear children only after marriage, and attend weekly church services.

Thirty years ago, only two percent of babies born to highly educated mothers were outside marriage; today it’s six percent. Thirty years ago, moderately educated mothers had babies out of wedlock at the rate of 13 percent. Today, 44 percent of their babies are born out of wedlock. Fifty-four percent of babies born to the least-educated mothers are outside marriage.

“The vast majority of American adults aspire to marriage,” said sociologist W. Bradford Wilcox and author of the lead essay in the report, “and children are much more likely to thrive if they are raised in a married hope with their own mother and father. Unfortunately, marriage has now fallen out of reach for millions of adults and children in Middle America.”

The marriage gap between the moderately educated and the highly educated has weighty implications for children. Senior Manhattan Institute fellow Kay Hymowitz discussed the marriage gap between better educated mothers and less educated single mothers in Marriage and Caste in America: Separate and Unequal Families in a Post-Marital Age. She described the differences in childrearing between the college-educated and uneducated. Despite the 1960s-era “free love” movement and a-woman-needs-a-man-like-a-fish-needs-a-bicycle-style feminism, better educated women continued to marry before having children.

Better educated mothers tend to be dedicated to what Hymowitz calls The Mission, “the careful nurturing of their children’s cognitive, emotional, social development,” with the goal of producing children with better life outcomes who do well in school, go to college, marry, and have children. She calls it common sense (backed up by research) that mothers have a better chance of fulfilling The Mission if they have a husband.

The marriage gap between whites and blacks has existed for a long time. Family instability arguably is the most important issue among blacks. More than 70 percent of black babies are born out-of-wedlock. A mere third of black children grow up living with their own married parents.

The link between marriage and successful life outcomes for children can’t be downplayed or ignored. “Marriage plays a central role in securing the American Dream for countless Americans,” Wilcox said.” Adults and children fortunate enough to live in an intact, married family are much more likely to succeed in school and the workplace, to acquire a home of their own, and to experience upward mobility.”

Hymowitz goes even further to say the founders saw marriage as necessary to the republic. American marriage, different from the arranged marriage of old Europe, would reflect the principles of liberty and self-government. But self-government also meant self-reliance, and children need to be socialized and educated to function in the new political order.

Among the report’s recommendations to narrow the marriage gap between the moderately educated and the highly educated are to pursue public policies that reconnect marriage to childrearing and “strengthen religious and civic institutions that lend our lives meaning, direction, and a measure of regard for our neighbors—not to mention our spouses.”

While politicians tend to pit the Haves against the Have-Nots, stirring class envy doesn’t improve children’s lives. The research is mounting, and the results are solid. Family instability is correlated with poverty and all kind of social pathologies. Marriage isn’t obsolete, and neither is what’s best for children of any race or any income level.

**Typos? Will fix later!

That is, writing a novel. I’m excited one minute, and despondent the next. The only thing I know for sure is I can’t not write. I may not be blogging or writing articles, but I’m writing…something. This thing that keeps growing and shifting and changing colors before my eyes. Will it be worth it? It may be my “trunk” novel, the one I write for practice. It may be the real deal. At this point, I can’t say. Just plugging away!

And how are things with you?

Note: As a Facebook friend said, the Constitution extends to us the right to bear arms. The Supreme Court clarified the issue.
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In 1976, the Council of the District of Columbia passed gun control laws in a hugely unsuccessful attempt to curb the violent crime rate in the city.

Residents who owned handguns before 1976 could keep them, but only in the home. While the laws banned handgun ownership, residents were permitted to own and keep registered rifles and shotguns inside the home – unloaded and disassembled or trigger-locked.

A group of DC residents file suit challenging the District’s ban on handguns. The U.S. District Court ruled against the group, but the D.C. Circuit reversed the ruling. A three-judge panel declared DC’s ban on handguns unconstitutional and refused to rehear the case. The district appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court, and the court ruled 5-4 last year that DC’s ban on handguns is unconstitutional.

The Second Amendment grants individuals the right to own guns, the court contended. The ruling applied to the federal government.

Today, the court extended (5-4, which means four justices don’t believe the Second Amendment gives individuals the right to bear arms) federally protected Second Amendment rights to all states.

Addendum: I heard the majority opinion mentions gun control’s racist roots. Yes, indeed: the Black Codes.

Download the 214-page opinion (PDF).

Click photos for larger view.

Ronald Reagan’s grave:

Part of the Berlin Wall:

Air Force One:

F-14 Tomcat:

“Warning: natural habitat for rattlesnakes”:

A couple weeks ago while browsing in the public library, I wandered into the section about World War II.

I’ve read dozens and own several books about that war. The whole country rallied for the cause, offering up sons, brothers, husbands, uncles, cousins, and friends to stop Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan. (Unfortunately, the former Soviet Union ended up enslaving eastern Europe after the war through Communism.)

There was something about WWII that holds my fascination. Watching men in landing craft headed to Omaha Beach, for example, with their heads bowed—some praying, some surely crying, or both, I knew they knew many would die. They were sitting ducks, as most of what was planned didn’t come off as planned. Just that snippet from a documentary, before the Germans started mowing them down, spoke volumes about what was a stake, whether or not those young Americans understood it at the time.

Throughout human history is a thread of sacrifice of self for family and country–weaving and winding its way through millennia, leaving indelible marks through the centuries, as empires rose and fell. Men fought and died motivated by everything from the purest evil to the highest good of which fallen man is capable.

The idea of giving your life for your country sometimes rings hollow to us in 2010, as we well-fed, free-for-now Americans enjoy what those men and women died for. We owe a debt of gratitude to every man and woman who died to preserve American liberty from the country’s inception to now, this very day.

Our freedom is enviable and worth dying for in any era. Always. We may take our freedom for granted, because most of us have never lived any other way. America is unique. Special. Take a moment to imagine what it would be like to face fines or prison or death for bad-mouthing the government or for sharing the Gospel. What if we were forced to worship in secret and hide our Bibles?

May we never forget that our freedom isn’t free. It costs something. It must be defended. It must be fought for. I don’t know about you, but I’m more than convinced it’s worth the fight. I support our military’s commitment to keeping America safe and free.

May God bless you all.

Update: Arizona starts a legal defense fund to help pay for lawsuits against its common sense law.
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I knew it was too good to be true. The National Guard troops President Barack Obama plans to send to the Texas-Mexico border won’t be there to enforce U.S. immigration law. Anybody with the guts to try to jump an American border in the presence of American troops will have little to worry about.

The powers that be and the “stakeholders” have decided it’s in their best interests to maintain a class of cheap labor. To Americans who voted for Obama thinking he’d stimulate economic growth and help you get jobs, consider this: if that were his intention, he’d try to stop the flow of illegal aliens. No working class person, liberal or otherwise, should favor open borders or vote for politicians who do.

Why do we have borders at all or immigration enforcement sections in the U.S. code? Why do we selectively enforce the immigration laws?

Have you heard the latest? They’re building a mosque near Ground Zero, the site of the September 11, 2001, Islamic terrorist attack. Odd, isn’t it? It’s like a perverse homage to the thugs who planned and killed Americans in the name of Allah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you know some Muslims who’re okay, and not all are inclined to murdering people and killing themselves for their faith. But surely you perceive the insensitivity. Why build a mosque there, of all places? I can think of no greater insult to the families of Americans murdered there than to allow a mosque to stand on that ground.

The late great United States–this country was screwed up long before I got here. Western civilization in general was, is, and will remain under attack. As the factors that made this country the best on the planet decrease, that which dilutes those factors increase. The effects are everywhere and impossible to ignore. Enjoy it while it lasts, because its end is approaching, though you may not care, as you’ll be long dead by then.

Not even 250 years into the Great American Experiment, and it’s on a steady decline. Tell you what, it’s not going to bring me down. Not this weekend, at least. Rest easy, everybody.

Yeah, you’re cute and all, but it’s time for you people peeps to be going. Too much chirping (especially when you eat), and too much poop! It’s been real…interesting…watching the care-taking habits of mother and father House Finches up close.

Children, this is how it works. The babies started out like this:

And became this:

And this:

Now fly away, fellas. Fly away!

Recap: A House Finch built a nest and laid eggs on the front door wreath.

For toddlers among the readership who’re enjoying this bird-made-nest-on-front-door-wreath series, this is for you. I think I interrupted their feeding. Sorry, birdies!

(What’s this all about? See Bird Brain I)

Mama bird doesn’t appreciate when I snap photos of her babies. She gives me the stink eye, then flutters to a nearby branch. (She made her nest on the front door wreath.)

There’s the red-headed papa bird. He brings mama and babies wiggly goodies. He really doesn’t like me.

The eggs hatched the day before yesterday, I think.

In 1965, Democrat Daniel Patrick Moynihan, then assistant secretary of Labor, sounded an alarm about the rising rates of illegitimacy in the black community (about 24 percent at the time) in a report titled, The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (dubbed the Moynihan Report).

The collapse of the black family, he contended, would have devastating social consequences. Branded a racist for merely stating facts, Moynihan was drummed into silence.

As we all know, Moynihan was vindicated. Today, only a third of black children are born to married parents. Over 70 percent are born outside wedlock. Children born into illegitimacy face higher risks of all sorts of social pathologies, including delinquency, drug use, criminality, and unwed pregnancy.

Some assume racism and poverty cause illegitimacy. But do they? At the height of Jim Crow, poverty among blacks was 87 percent, and about 85 percent of black children were born to married parents. As poverty among blacks and government-mandated segregation fell, illegitimacy among blacks rose.

Rich Lowery wrote about the Moynihan Report in his latest column. An excerpt:

“The report sparked a furor of continuing relevance, as James T. Patterson recounts in his new book, Freedom Is Not Enough: The Moynihan Report and America’s Struggle Over Black Families from LBJ to Obama.

“The late Moynihan, whose father abandoned his family, believed that ‘the richest inheritance any child can have is a stable, loving, disciplined family life.’ He wanted to create a sense of urgency about the fact that black children were disproportionately denied this inheritance.

“Eventually elected to the Senate from New York, Moynihan became a voice in the wilderness on the most important social trend in our time. By 1970, the out-of-wedlock birth rate had climbed to 38 percent among blacks, and was rising across all groups. ‘Young, lower-class black women in the 1960s,’ Patterson writes, ‘had formed the leading edge of broad-based, long-term changes in family formation.’”

I’ve stated many times that family breakdown among blacks, not poverty or racism (“institutional” or otherwise), is the most urgent problem. But there’s no money or perks in looking into a mirror. It’s much more lucrative and newsworthy (and easier on the ego) to point to and demand action from third parties.

But what do I know?