Commentary: Why Are Fewer Americans Celebrating Valentine’s Day?

Valentine's Day

Fewer Americans are planning to celebrate Valentine’s Day in 2024 than in years past.

America isn’t totally losing its love for the saccharine holiday, though. In fact, spending on Valentine’s Day gifts—for everyone from a significant other to one’s cat—has increased.

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Commentary: No, Ladies, We Cannot Have It All

Woman Stressed out at work

The phrase “having it all” came from the title of a 1982 book written by Helen Gurley Brown, then editor-in-chief of Cosmopolitan magazine. As Antoinette Lattouf, writing in The Guardian in early 2023, put it, this self-help book for women focused on “money, sex, diet, exercise, and appearance.” Notably, it made no mention of children or family.

Since then, of course, the phrase has come to take on an even broader meaning. Today, “having it all” is touted as a woman’s reaching her full potential by having an education, lucrative formal career, rewarding marriage, happy children, and an active social life. Of course, this ideal is vague at best and destructive at worst.

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Commentary: ‘To Have and to Hold’: Marrying Young and Making It Last

Marriage

Kate Z. works in childcare and as a part-time barista in my local coffee shop. She’s the oldest of 10 children, with seven brothers and two sisters. Home-educated during elementary school, Kate then entered Padre Pio Academy here in Front Royal, Virginia, a hybrid school which combines homeschooling with three days a week in the classroom. She graduated in 2021 and currently lives in an apartment.

Jesse R. is adopted and the youngest of three siblings. For the most part, he was homeschooled before entering Padre Pio. He also graduated in 2021 and works as a chef de partie in the restaurant of a retirement community. He shares a house with a friend.

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Commentary: The Bad Faith Arguments Against Marriage Defenders

It would be an interesting investigation to reverse the names of every major bill passed by Congress and signed into law by the president, and then see whether that does not better describe the result of the law, if not the intent of the lawmakers. Names, in our day, are advertisements, and advertisements, as we well know, appeal very rarely and only glancingly to reason, but mainly to passions, and among those usually to the most powerful prompts to hasty action, such as lust, fear, avarice, and vanity.

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Despite the Supreme Court’s Ruling on Gay Marriage, Almost Two-Thirds of States Define Marriage as Union of One Man, One Woman

The Supreme Court’s decision legalizing same-sex marriage across the nation is in the news again with the House’s passage last week of legislation codifying that 2015 ruling as part of U.S. law.

In the years before the high court ruled in the case known as Obergefell v. Hodges, 38 states defined marriage by law as an exclusive union between one man and one woman.

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Taliban Claims They’ve Changed, Declares Men Need Women’s Consent to Marry Them

Young Muslim Couple with Toddler at Masjid al-Haram

The Taliban banned forced marriages in a Friday decree, saying that women are free persons and not property.

“Both (women and men) should be equal,” the decree said, according to ABC News. “No one can force women to marry by coercion or pressure.”

The Taliban ordered courts to allow widows to seek the inheritance of their families and to choose who they marry after their husbands die rather than being forced to marry an in-law, ABC News reported. The Taliban reportedly seeks an end to the practice of forcing women into marriage for money or to settle disputes.

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