A revolutionary idea: children are treasured human beings!

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry writes at The Week,

We have forgotten just how deep a cultural revolution Christianity wrought. In fact, we forget about it precisely because of how deep it was: There are many ideas that we simply take for granted as natural and obvious, when in fact they didn't exist until the arrival of Christianity changed things completely. Take, for instance, the idea of children.

Today, it is simply taken for granted that the innocence and vulnerability of children makes them beings of particular value, and entitled to particular care. We also romanticize children — their beauty, their joy, their liveliness. Our culture encourages us to let ourselves fall prey to our gooey feelings whenever we look at baby pictures. What could be more natural?

In fact, this view of children is a historical oddity. If you disagree, just go back to the view of children that prevailed in Europe's ancient pagan world.

As the historian O.M. Bakke points out in his invaluable book When Children Became People, in ancient Greece and Rome, children were considered nonpersons.

...But really, Christianity's invention of children — that is, its invention of the cultural idea of children as treasured human beings — was really an outgrowth of its most stupendous and revolutionary idea: the radical equality, and the infinite value, of every single human being as a beloved child of God. If the God who made heaven and Earth chose to reveal himself, not as an emperor, but as a slave punished on the cross, then no one could claim higher dignity than anyone else on the basis of earthly status.

That was indeed a revolutionary idea, and it changed our culture so much that we no longer even recognize it.

Read more here.

Do children need mothers and fathers?

Michael Bauman believes that

mothers and fathers are fundamentally important to the development of children, and therefore to the future of the nation, which depends upon the development and maturation of the next generation.

Bauman points

to a recent groundbreaking study by University of Texas scholar Mark Regnerus,

which shows how children of homosexual parents fare in later life, compared to students of heterosexual parents. He lists lots of bad consequences.

Bauman:

No matter what you might think about same sex marriage, we know this: Any child raised under a same sex union faces a tremendous loss—either no Mommy or no Daddy. In a union where two men or two women are involved, that’s always the outcome. When Mommy picks a woman or Daddy picks a man as a life partner, the children always lose something enormously valuable and irreplaceable: a mother or a father.