Question: I'm a male teacher at a public high school. A female teacher is pregnant from a not-too-meaningful, already-terminated relationship.
We teachers met informally over lunch to discuss whether to throw a baby shower. The only other male teacher said nothing. The women all thought it was the right thing to do so as not to hurt her feelings.I stood up to say this was the wrong message to send to our students - this is a time of shame, not celebration.
I'm married, with two adopted children. Did I do the right thing?
Dr. Laura: In my opinion, you absolutely did the right thing.
I'm so tired of this "don't hurt someone's feelings" concept being misused.
It's the pregnant woman who's hurting someone - her child. She obviously had unprotected sex in a noncommitted relationship with a poor choice in the former companion's character.
Now she's obligated the child to a life without a dad, and to a lifelong rejection of the dad and his extended family.
To tell our teenage children that this is a tragedy for a child and then to celebrate it is just stupid.
I see the "village" as the institution to nag the individual to take responsibility.
This is an occasion for the village to dole out shame, not gifts. It so obviously sends the wrong message to the children, as does the introduction of day-care centers into high schools.
Question: I am 31, and was raised a Baptist. I accepted Christ as my savior when I was 16.
For the last five years, I've been seeing a girl from a Seventh-Day Adventist background. Because of her faith's strictures, she grew resentful and skeptical of faith in general.
Is it Christian/appropriate/fair of me to ask her to accept Christ as her savior as a condition of marriage? Is marrying my girlfriend a formula for divorce?
Dr. Laura: The point isn't religion - it's a common-sense understanding that religion is a very important part of family structure and function.
You can't expect that love and a common address are going to fix the problem of divergent religious persuasions.
Two religions in a family don't provide the glue that one mutually embraced religion does. It is typical for children in two-religion homes to take neither one seriously.
How do you expect a child to make a choice? Based on what? Which parent he or she likes better, or which religious institution offers more fun and snacks?
You can't blackmail her to "convert" in order to marry - what she doesn't embrace freely is false and meaningless.
I don't think you ought to consider marrying someone outside your faith when it's clearly so important to you how you wish your family to worship.
Question: My husband's brother abandoned his wife and children for another woman. We took in his wife and children to help them out.
My husband told his brother that what he did was wrong in our eyes and in the eyes of God, and we told him that we'd never have anything to do with him again.
Believe it or not, last Sunday he came back to his family. We still don't want to be around him, but my husband is concerned that, by disowning his brother, he's teaching our three kids to be unforgiving.
Do you have any wisdom about this?
Dr. Laura: I frankly admire what you did. You shunned the brother and embraced his family.
Shunning can influence somebody who's off track. Perhaps your shunning helped.
Your children need to know there is a way back from wrongdoing, a way back that includes forgiveness. But forgiveness needs to be earned.
I'd forgive a person who accepts and acknowledges responsibility for what he or she has done, without excuses or rationalizations, regrets his or her actions and the pain caused, and takes care to repair the hurt and damage, and to ensure no repetition of the offense.