Child abuse is growing out of control here in America, and there’s a good reason why: the traditional family is coming apart at the seams.

According to reports made to state agencies, there were 900,000 incidents of child abuse in 2005 alone. These raw numbers give no clue just how much child abuse correlates with parents’ marital status or the make-up of the victim’s household, although these are vitally important factors in child abuse cases. The proof is in the news far too often.

Nothing is more important to child welfare than living within the bosom of a stable family, and nothing is more destructive to their well-being than being forced to live in a fatherless household where dad is replaced by the live-in boyfriend, or as is often the case, by a series of live-in boyfriends.

In almost all cases of horrific child abuse that is exactly the situation of the victim. Nobody is more at risk today than children living in fatherless homes where the mother’s boyfriend is sharing her bed while avoiding the commitment of marriage, or a new husband views her children as unwanted consequences of the new marriage.

You have young women who for one reason or another have not gotten the love of their child’s father, their former husband, who confuse sex with love, and give no thought to the consequences of bringing a man who has no emotional ties with their children into their homes and expect them to act as substitute dads.

In pursuit of maintaining their so-called relationship, many allow these men to beat their children, often as punishment for having disturbed the boyfriend in some way, such as crying or soiling their diapers.

It never occurs to them that in most cases the boyfriend views their child as an inconvenience to be put up with as a price for getting sex without commitment. Yet they do not hesitate to put their child in his care, especially if she is the breadwinner in the household while the often-jobless boyfriend stays home with their son or daughter and lives on her income.

We read about the deadly consequences children pay for being forced to live in these circumstances where they find themselves in a home where their real father is no longer present and a stranger is taking his place.

A tragic case in point involved two-year-old Riley Ann Sawyers whose body was found in Galveston Bay, in a plastic box, on Oct. 29. Riley’s mom and real dad were not married and had split up and gone their separate ways.

Her mother, 19-year-old Kimberly Dawn Trenor met Royce Clyde Zeigler II a couple of years ago while playing an online game, World of Warcraft, according to the Associated Press, which reports that she moved with her daughter from Ohio to Spring Texas and married Zeigler.

In a statement to police, first reported by Houston television station KTRK, Trenor said that she and Zeigler, 24, killed her daughter last July 24.

She said that the little girl was beaten with leather belts, had her head held underwater in a bathtub and then was thrown across a room, her head slamming into a tile floor, and added that they kept the body in a storage shed for one to two months before they put it in a plastic bin and dumped it into Galveston Bay.

Sadly, we read about this kind of outrage all the time. We are appalled that it happens but we are unwilling to look at the causes. Americans have said that they are willing to accept all these distortions of family life and they do not dare to define marriage as a lasting arrangement between a man and a woman. Nowadays, marriage is whatever aberration we say it is.

We don’t want to offend anybody, and while we are avoiding offending single mothers living with their current boyfriends, or men and women who treat their marriage vows as temporary arrangements without regard to the damaging effect divorce has on the kids, children are being beaten and children are dying.

And in the face of all of this, Massachusetts is worried about spanking.

Michael Reagan, the eldest son of Ronald Reagan, is heard daily by over 5 million listeners via his nationally syndicated talk radio program, “The Michael Reagan Show.”

"After several graded sessions with the committee, and having been convinced of their misguided vision, they renounced their erroneous ideologies, including the concept of driving out all infidels from the Arabian Peninsula," al-Nujaimi said, according to The Sun.

The 1,500 had been rounded up in crackdowns that began in 2003.

"A state appeals court on Wednesday refused to automatically bar alimony from spouses who kill a child...The decision was issued in the case of Linda Calbi, who is serving a three-year prison term after pleading guilty to beating her son, Matt, on Aug. 17, 2003, during a violent argument at their home. He died hours later from internal bleeding and cardiac arrest...

"Linda Calbi was originally charged with murder, but the charges were later downgraded to aggravated assault, based on expert reports that medical error contributed significantly to the boy's death. She was sentenced last year to three years in prison and won't be eligible for parole until November 2008.

"The Calbis were divorced in 2001 after 15 years of marriage. A few months after Matt's death, Chris Calbi fell behind on his alimony payments and filed papers in court seeking a reduction or termination of his payment obligations.

"'She took the life of her oldest son, scarred her younger son for the rest of his life, and tore the fabric of my soul from me,' Chris Calbi wrote in papers filed in Superior Court in Hackensack. 'To reward this evil and violent woman by allowing her ... to derive a financial benefit from the family she destroyed ... can only be described as a perversion of our justice system.'"

Chris Calbi had been paying Linda $3,183 a month until her incarceration, and may be saddled with that amount when Linda is paroled. Chris is pictured with his deceased son Matthew and his surviving son Dean above. A few comments:

1) Chris Calbi claimed that Linda abused and assaulted him during their marriage, at times employing a kitchen knife and a hammer. The death of the son is discussed in Typical teen meets a tragic end (Bergen Record, 8/20/03), and Linda Calbi sounds like a real sweetheart:

"As [Christopher Calbi's] company - Robert Christopher Sales - grew, [Christopher] was increasingly away in Europe on business, Linda Calbi said in divorce papers. Though they shared fine dinners, and Christopher Calbi showered his wife with gifts, a physical and emotional distance developed between Matthew's parents, her papers say.

"Linda Calbi said in the papers that she felt like 'a highly paid slave.'

"Christopher Calbi countered that his wife subjected him to 'profanity-laced tirades and ridicule.'"

2) From the same article:

"The couple split in 1999 and - after 15 years of marriage - divorced in July 2001.

"Meanwhile, Matthew was having problems at school, said a woman who worked in the River Vale school system.

"When Matthew was in the special education program at Holdrum Middle School, he regularly came to class with bruises, said the woman, who declined to be identified. The teen always had an excuse for the marks - he was playing with his younger brother, or he fell, the woman said.

"But in April 2002, the woman noticed a strange bruise on Matthew's wrist, one she thought looked like a defensive wound. She asked Matt to explain, but he couldn't, she said, so she called DYFS to report the mark.

"As part of the special education program, Linda Calbi met routinely with educators to review her son's performance.

"But when Calbi showed up, she often smelled of booze, the woman said. 'You could light the air on fire, she smelled so badly,' the woman said.

"Linda could not understand why her son wasn't more successful in school.

"'She was very forceful when she spoke. Nothing was ever her fault, and of course she was at her wit's end,' the woman said."

3) The father now has to raise the surviving son, Dean, age 12, on his own. Is Linda being asked to pay child support? Isn't Chris' ability to provide for Dean negatively impacted by having to pay alimony to the noncustodial parent?

4) Chris also needs to save his money--Linda may be out of prison in less than a year and will be fighting for visitation rights to Dean. In July, 2006, a judge ordered a supervised visitation between Dean and his mother, contingent on the boy's acceptance.

5) Linda apparently received a lesser charge and sentence for her crime because supposedly there was medical bungling by the hospital after she assaulted her son which contributed to Matthew's death. How much of her light sentence is due to the alleged medical bungling and how much is just the standard female sentencing discount is unclear.

6) It's amazing some of the things that an attorney will say. Linda's attorney, Ian Hirsch, said:

"'Mr. Calbi is using his son's death to take away any obligations he has,' Hirsch said. 'I think he's trying to take advantage of a tragedy and turn it around to his economic benefit.'"

Yup--dad not wanting to pay money to the woman who killed his son is "taking advantage of a tragedy and turning it around to his economic benefit." Bad dad--how could he be so rotten?

7) Can you imagine a judge ordering a woman to pay alimony to the ex-husband who murdered her child? In fact, California has a recent law which created a presumption that a victim of domestic violence should not be required to pay support to a violent spouse.

8) Once again we see the link between family violence and substance abuse. Misguided feminists often downplay this link because it contradicts the feminist Duluth/"domestic violence is a function of the patriarchy" family violence model.

The new court decision by the Superior Court of New Jersey's Appellate Division can be seen here.

A recent CNN report on the case can be viewed here.

According to the court documents, Prouty entered the U.S. on a one-year, nonimmigrant visa. She lived in Taylor, Mich., with her sister when her visa ran out in 1990. That summer, she paid off an unemployed U.S. citizen, identified in court records as Chris Michael Deladurantaye, to marry her in a civil ceremony in Detroit. But the two never lived together and the marriage was never consummated sexually, according to the documents.

The Associated Press was unable Tuesday evening to contact Deladurantaye. There were no phone listings in the Detroit area, and a search of public records databases did not turn up a current address for Deladurantaye.

Over the next four years, Prouty claimed she was legally married and living with him as part of her application for U.S. citizenship. She was naturalized in 1994 and filed for divorce in 1995. In 1999, she was hired as a special agent in the FBI's field office in Washington, where she investigated crimes committed against U.S. residents while overseas. She was not part of investigations into Hezbollah, the Lebanese guerrilla group that the U.S. government has designated a foreign terrorist organization.

Prouty was not authorized to search the FBI database, in 2002, for her name and that of her sister and brother-in law. Her relatives were linked to Hezbollah two years later when they joined a senior Hezbollah official at a fundraiser in Lebanon, the documents show.

She joined the CIA in 2003. CIA spokesman Mark Mansfield described Prouty as a "midlevel employee" who violated immigration laws long before she was hired by the government.

The CIA is cooperating with the investigation, Mansfield said.

Prouty faces six to nine months in prison as part of the plea, U.S. Attorney's office spokeswoman Gina Balaya said. Her citizenship has been revoked as part of her plea and she could be ordered to leave the U.S., according to court documents.

And get this: The FBI and U.S. Attorney Stephen Murphy (and before him, U.S. Attorneys Craig Morford and Jeffrey Collins) knew Prouty was a spy for Hezbollah back in 2003, but they allowed her to work for the FBI and CIA for over FOUR Years! They did not remove her from the job until the end of this past September--1.5 years after her brother-in-law was indicted for financing Hezbollah!!!!!!

And I was right on another thing. She will do no or almost no jail time. Read the plea agreement, ... As reader Tim points out:

Nada Nadim Prouty is facing less than 12 months of jail time, or no jailtime at all, and three years of supervised probation and a fine totaling $2,225 under the plea agreement.

For infiltrating the FBI and CIA and spying for Hezbollah.

I'm not sure why everyone is so surprised with today's prosecution of Nada Nadim Prouty, an American Arab FBI agent and CIA analyst, for spying for Hezbollah and passing information on to the terrorist group. Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, and other Islamic terrorist groups have long said they'd infiltrate the FBI and other American law enforcement organizations and they did.

That's no surprise. In fact, what is surprising is that this woman is among the first they've caught. She's a drop in the bucket. As long as we continue to hire Muslims to be translators and analysts, as long as we continue to give money to Arabic and Muslim schools to teach their kids Arabic instead of non-Muslim, non-Arab Americans, as long as the FBI (and ICE) continues to turn down Sephardic Jews and Maronite Lebanese Christians who speak Arabic and who've applied for jobs in favor of extremist Muslims, that's the result we will get. Spies, spies, and more spies.

Morally upstanding people are the do-gooders of society, right? Actually, a new study finds that a sense of moral superiority can lead to unethical acts, such as cheating. In fact, some of the best do-gooders can become the worst cheats.

Stop us if this sounds familiar.

When asked to describe themselves, most people typically will rattle off a list of physical features and activities (for example, "I do yoga" or "I'm a paralegal"). But some people have what scientists call a moral identity, in which the answer to the question would include phrases like "I am honest" and "I am a caring person."

Past research has suggested that people who describe themselves with words such as honest and generous are also more likely to engage in volunteer work and other socially responsible acts.

But often in life, the line between right and wrong becomes blurry, particularly when it comes to cheating on a test or in the workplace. For example, somebody could rationalize cheating on a test as a way of achieving their dream of becoming a doctor and helping people.

In the new study, detailed in the November issue of the Journal of Applied Psychology, researchers find that when this line between right and wrong is ambiguous among people who think of themselves as having high moral standards, the do-gooders can become the worst of cheaters.

The results recall the seeming disconnect between the words and actions of folks like televangelist and fraud convict Jim Bakker or admitted meth-buyer Ted Haggard, former president of the National Evangelical Association, an umbrella group representing some 45,000 churches.

"The principle we uncovered is that when faced with a moral decision, those with a strong moral identity choose their fate (for good or for bad) and then the moral identity drives them to pursue that fate to the extreme," said researcher Scott Reynolds of the University of Washington Business School in Seattle. "So it makes sense that this principle would help explain what makes the greatest of saints and the foulest of hypocrites."

Why cheat? Why not?

Why would a person who thinks of himself as honest cheat? The researchers suggest an "ethical person" could view cheating as an OK thing to do, justifying the act as a means to a moral end.

As Reynolds put it: "If I cheat, then I'll get into graduate school, and if I get into graduate school, then I can become a doctor and think about all the people I'm going to help when I'm a doctor."

A competitive playing field, whether at a university or business, can also motivate cheating behaviors.

"Cheating is a way to get ahead in a competitive environment where there are rewards for winning or getting ahead of others," said Daniel Kruger, an evolutionary psychologist at the University of Michigan, who was not involved in the current study. "It seems like there is an increasing desire and expectation in our society to 'be the best.'"

Even if a person doesn't justify his unethical behaviors, "cheating can save lots of time and energy and take advantage of the knowledge and reasoning of others who are more adept, but could be disastrous if one is caught," Kruger said. He added, "I am not surprised that some of the extreme examples of cheating—ripping the relevant pages out of library books so other students cannot see them—happen in intensely competitive environments, law school in this example [of ripping out book pages]."

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