Is Getting Married Rebellious?

Good morning!

Is getting married an act of rebellion? Given recent antimarriage trends in Britain, Annabel Denham in the Telegraph argues it may soon be “the most rebellious act of all.”

[BRIEF]

On Monday, Reform UK deputy leader Richard Tice announced a policy to overhaul social housing allocation: removing foreign nationals in favor of military veterans, young British-born workers and—gasp!—married couples with children.

• “Families are a good thing,” he said. “Having British children, British-born children, is a good thing. We need to encourage that.”

Stating such obvious truths is simply not permitted in today’s Britain. Critics pounced—including Labour figures, housing charities and domestic-abuse organizations—calling the plan discriminatory, divisive, “unserious and unworkable.” It would hurt single parents and same-sex couples, they cried. It would pressure people to stay in abusive relationships!

• Bridget Phillipson, minister for Women and Equalities and Labour Party chair, responded: “I grew up in a single-parent household. What matters is the love and care families provide, not their shape or size. Britain rejected these outdated views in the 1990s; we will do so again.”

“Outdated,” Phillipson calls encouraging marriage. Never mind that a government minister who looks at the facts about women and equalities rather than an ideological agenda would be intimately familiar with the many studies showing that marriage is the greatest single predictor of individual prosperity and happiness, flourishing for children, national stability and other positive outcomes.

• Case in point: A new report from the Institute for Family Studies concluded that “family structure is a more powerful predictor of school problems, academic performance and depression than are race and poverty.”

A government that truly cared for its people, and for itself, would do all it could to encourage more and stronger marriages and families.

• Instead, because of their leaders’ own broken lives and broken thinking, they view it as an irrelevant relic—or even a threat. They promote antifamily ideology and policy proven to destabilize relationships, suppress birthrates, increase vulnerabilities for children, and expand government dependency.

Thanks in large part to such antifamily, antihuman governance, marriage rates have collapsed.

• The Telegraph notes: “In 1970, the marriage rate in England and Wales was approaching 80 marriages for every 1,000 men. Today, it is 18. For centuries, people tended to tie the knot in their early-20s; the median age at which men now enter their first legal partnership is around 33.”
• In America, the number of households headed by a married couple has dropped from nearly 80 percent in 1947 to 47 percent in 2024. The trend is accelerating fastest among younger people. In 1980, 90 percent of 35-year-old men had married; today it’s about 60 percent. Today’s young adults have about eight more years of unmarried life compared to their 1956 peers.

Refraining from marriage means more children born out of wedlock (fewer than 1 in 11 in 1960, now 1 in 4). It also makes people considerably poorer (in Britain’s poorest 20 percent, only 1 in 5 children has married parents; among the richest 20 percent, it’s 4.3 in 5). The “women and equalities” experts should know this. In fact, they almost certainly do.

Why such hostility to marriage? Denham comments incisively:

Our culture is increasingly organized around self-actualization. Find yourself, prioritize yourself, live your best life. Marriage offers something almost cringe-inducingly contrary: that sometimes the good life involves putting someone else’s interests and needs before your own.

There’s a reason we’ve never devised a better alternative to “traditional” marriage. Turns out, God knows what He is doing. He gave it to us as a wonderful gift, and if we follow His laws, we reap unparalleled blessings.

Herbert W. Armstrong explained the dazzling significance of this timeless institution that endures, despite all efforts to snuff it out, in his inspiring little booklet Why Marriage—Soon Obsolete?

Why Are These Women Cheering a Murderer?

Outside a Massachusetts courthouse this month, a crowd gathered—not to demand justice, not to mourn three dead children, but to cheer the woman on trial for killing them.

Lindsay Clancy strangled her three young children—Cora, Dawson and 8-month-old Callan—in the family’s home while her husband was out picking up food. Her lawyers acknowledge that she killed them but argue that she isn’t to blame.

Something is deeply wrong with a society that can watch this and applaud.

• Hundreds gathered outside the courthouse to support her on August 20.
• Over 164,000 videos have been posted on TikTok tagged with #clancy. Some are condemning the trend, but many show women holding their own kids, crying and saying, “Same, Lindsay.”
• A GoFundMe page for Clancy’s parents, the murdered children’s grandparents, has raised over $1 million from 31,000 donors. GoFundMe bans fundraising for the defense of someone accused of a violent crime. This isn’t money raised in sympathy for grieving grandparents: It is an attempt to get around that rule and support the murderer.

“Every one of us women believe that could be any one of us,” said Renee Kimball, one of the organizers of the demonstrations. That reflects profound sickness: Women who see someone who murdered her own kids and say, That could easily have been me!

Some Bible prophecies about the end time are so horrifying they’re almost unimaginable.

• 2 Timothy 3:1-5 warn of “perilous times” in which people would be “without natural affection.” What happened to the normal, natural love of mothers for their children? Clancy lost it, and so have her many supporters.
• Far worse times are coming. In fact, The Bible says that the society-wide destruction coming upon our sinning nations will get so bad that many women, in their desperate starvation, will eat their own children.

Such unthinkable scenarios become less so when you see the steep moral decline in the nations descended from ancient Israel. Scripture shows the loving God will allow such depravity in order to bring our hard-headed people to repentance.

These prophetic warnings must not be ignored. Look squarely at our nations’ moral state and believe the prophecies showing the nightmares it is leading to.

CIA Director and Vatican Foreign Minister Visit Moscow

Two high-profile visits to Moscow yesterday are seen by some as a sign of hope for peaceful solutions to current conflicts. However, historic precedents and Bible prophecy reveal that those hopes are misplaced.

• The first was by cia Director John Ratcliffe, who arrived on a C-17 military transport plane and left eight hours later.
• The second was Archbishop Paul Gallagher, the Vatican’s de facto foreign minister; he met with Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov.

Gallagher and former cia Director William Burns were in Moscow in November 2021. Three months later, Russia started its full invasion of Ukraine. Neither Gallagher nor a cia director had been back—until now.

The U.S. is alarmed: U.S. intelligence earlier this year revealed Russian plans for testing nato’s resolve with a limited incursion. Some fear nuclear escalation in Ukraine. The Wall Street Journal wrote:

Analysts said Ratcliffe could meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin to deliver a warning. “It could be to say, ‘We know what you are thinking about doing, and you better not,’” said Beth Sanner, a former U.S. deputy director of national intelligence for mission integration. “It could also be about the Iran ceasefire and putting someone else in the discussion,” she said, adding Ratcliffe might also touch upon the Kremlin’s support for Iran following a new U.S. sanctions campaign against the regime.

• Other potential topics include Russia’s ties to Cuba.

CIA and Vatican collaboration? While there is no public confirmation of coordination, the cia and the Vatican have cooperated in the past: for example, supposedly fighting communism by helping Nazis escape trials.

Part of a trend? The two conspicuous visits come after revelations of a secret meeting between former German and Russian officials in July. But none of these meetings are a sign of peace.

• American leaders may sincerely believe they can talk Putin out of escalating the conflict. However, Bible prophecy reveals that Germany and the Vatican are working together—against the U.S.

In Matthew 24:6-7, Jesus Christ warns that “wars and rumours of wars” will increase, leading to “great tribulation” right before His Second Coming (verses 21-22). Russia will be a key player in these events, as proved in Russia and China in Prophecy.

IN OTHER NEWS

Iran struck an oil tanker the night of August 24 to 25 as it was transiting the Strait of Hormuz near the Omani coastline. The crew is reportedly safe. The United States previously promised to protect merchant shipping in the strait, yet it apparently has not yet responded or retaliated.

Flash flood in Nepal leaves hundreds missing: At least 31 people are dead, and nearly 400 are missing after flash floods tore through valleys of Nepal today. Horrifying footage from a border-crossing facility on the China-Nepal border shows a wall of water, apparently triggered by a mudslide, crashing upon tourists and submerging entire buildings. The scope of the damage is “beyond imagination,” a local authority told the BBC, and the catastrophe is believed to be Nepal’s deadliest natural disaster since the 2015 earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people. To understand the biblical answers about why such tragedies happen, read Why ‘Natural’ Disasters?