A sampler of today’s mail:

Beth writes:

Your blog is so anti-feminist and totally offensive. Are you a military member? From the prospective [sic] of a lawyer and military wife, you sound not like a person with a valid point, but a jealous housewife with nothing better to do than hate on women in the armed forces. Delete this blog. It makes you look so shallow. You are not only gross, but homophobic. I know a stellar young woman who aced the *MENS PT test for the Marines, is a law school graduate, and is in a long-term relationship with a great guy. She is only a threat to you because she achieves and you blog. In short, you are wrong. You are a step back for all women.

Laura writes:

No, I am not a military wife. And you are the first person to accuse me of shallowness.

Fred writes:

I became aware of your blog a few months ago when a Catholic girlyman was insisting to Louie Verrechio that he should not link to your blog. So right away, I knew you had some good opinions.

However, I tried to read some tonight but find that my IP is blacklisted. That would be because I use Tor, the anonymous relay system. I’m sure that you get tired of comments/attacks, etc. from homosexuals, liberals and other deviants — but I’m writing to say that they are not the only ones who use Tor.

Anyway, Mundabor is on semi-hiatus and I have some time to enggae in some resistance to Frankie, but I guess I’ll have to look elsewhere for now. Keep fighting the good fight.

Laura writes:

So right away, I knew you had some good opinions.

Ha!

Thanks, but you really shouldn’t judge someone by how much he is hated. : – )

A reader writes:

Please don’t publish my name or email address, or I will be fired and my wife and children will suffer horribly,.

I’m concerned because, as a Californian, my tax dollars are now paying for the mutilation of low-status men, who could not otherwise afford to embark on a dangerous and painful course of self-harm.

We live in a tiny place and work hard so that my wife can stay home with our children. Taxes are a huge burden for us.

It troubles me that this money is not being used to ease the suffering of people with immediate needs — or to help maintain legitimate public services and infrastructure — but to address a disorder that I strongly believe can best be addressed through counseling.

I worry we’ve gone past the point where our tax dollars have diminishing returns when applied to seemingly legitimate goals, that we’re now paying for perversity — an inversion of what is good and right — with tax dollars taken from people who need that money for basic necessities, like food and housing.

Laura writes:

I am sorry that you suppress your opinions out of legitimate fear for your family. Don’t ever give up.

While it seems premature to say that Obamacare is paying for transgender surgery, it does appear that some insurers, under the non-discrimination edict, are paying for part of it, which is shocking enough. It is, as you say, horrific mutilation. It will not cure anyone. Doctors who do this should be locked up. Your alarm and revulsion are entirely appropriate. You are a normal person in an abnormal world.

Our government should be helping men such as you support their families instead. But that is idle fantasy.

— Comments —

Christopher writes:

Laura writes:

Well, thank you.

It’s not possible to go on the offense without causing offense.

Mary writes:

“You are not only gross…You are a step back for all women.”

If Beth’s writing skills are on par with those of the average lawyer we are all in serious trouble.

“I know a stellar young woman who … is in a long-term relationship with a great guy.”

….i.e. he won’t marry her.

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes:

On “Beth’s” posting as a primer of ideological rhetoric:

Beth’s paragraph is a lesson in how liberalism argues.  Note that I do not write, how a liberal, Beth, for example, argues, but how liberalism argues.  Liberalism is an ideology.  That is to say, liberalism is a set of formulas for the selective perception and the selective description of reality.  The purpose of this set of formulas is to blinker the subject who subscribes to it so that she sees only a tiny slice of the full reality of things and sees them automatically in a stereotyped and prejudicial way.  Thus in Beth’s first sentence, she identifies, without providing any chain of reasoning, the adjective “anti-feminist” and the adjectival phrase, “totally offensive.”

This is a prescribed reaction that kicks in on cue and short-circuits any opportunity for thinking.  It “blanks out” thinking, as the otherwise obnoxious Ayn Rand used usefully to observe.  We can indeed draw the diagnosis a bit further: The prefix “anti-” has been infamous since the French Revolution, getting a big boost from the Bolshevik Revolution of 120 years later.  It invariably describes anyone who has the temerity or simply the integrity to criticize the radical agenda.  The locution “totally offensive,” meanwhile, combines two traits of thoughtless contemporary parlance, linking the Valley-Girl interjection “totally” with the favorite epithet of those who call themselves progressives – the ubiquitous “offensive.”

(In the first half of the last century, there was a word for people who were incessantly offended – by beer-parlors, pool-halls, dancing, theatricals, and everything else.  The word was blue nose.  We should remember that usage when we think of what liberals nowadays like to call the Blue States.  Those would be the states where the voting majority is incessantly offended at something.)

In her next two sentences, Beth claims to be a lawyer.  I remind readers of Eric Voegelin’s notion of liberalism as a form of Gnosticism.  As St. Augustine pointed out and as Voegelin, picking up on St. Augustine also remarked, Gnostic societies are obsessed by credentials.  Beth’s seemingly offhand self-certification again typifies contemporary left-wing ideological discourse in embracing “credentialism” and supposing that possessing a credential trumps the need to call on evidence or construct a syllogism.

Modern liberals always claim that their critics are “jealous.”  This claim is what psychology identifies as a “projection.”  That is, the subject who makes the claim is the one who suffers from the condition; and she then tries to avoid cognizing her own deficiency by ascribing it to someone else.  Of what would Beth be jealous?  Possibly it would be your ability to write grammatical sentences and distinguish, among many other vocabulary items, the words perspective and prospective.

The phrase “delete this blog” is again representative.  Its verbal mode is the imperative.  It is, in other words, a command.  Contemporary liberal palaver is full of commands, orders, slogans, and passwords.

“Homophobic” is, like all the other “phobias” invoked by political correctness, the functional equivalent of “Witch!” in the Protestant North during the Reformation.  It operates at the same intellectual level as Beth’s first sentence, which means that it is not really intellectual at all.  It is merely an outburst.

Finally, there is the longish sentence about a woman, supposedly known to Beth, who scored highly on a military IQ test.  What is the purpose of this sentence in its context?  Its purpose, in which it fails, is to refute the generalizations on which The Thinking Housewife is founded, all of which, dissenting from popular contemporary opinion, have good argumentative grounding and have been explained by you scores of times.  Among these are that there are ontological differences between men and women that fit them for different roles in life.  Notice that this is a concept, a distillation, as it were, of a vast range of empirical observations.  Beth apparently believes that simply by pointing to a single exception, she can disestablish the generalization.  Of course, that is not how logic works, but then liberalism is not logical.  It is emotive.  It overrides persons and creates a mob.  Beth’s achievement, along with that of so many millions, is to have assimilated to the mob.

I do not doubt that Beth really is a lawyer.  The infantilism of her prose tells us much about the rigors of modern law-school education.

 Laura writes:

Oh, boy. At this rate, no one is going to feel free to write me hate mail.

Thank you anyway. Regarding your point about credentials: there are no credentials involved in being a housewife. Not that this vocation doesn’t benefit from knowledge and experience, not that it doesn’t involve learning or craftsmanship at its best, but no institutions are paid to train and certify a housewife. In other words, the housewife is beholden to no establishment, no diploma-granters. Without an establishment behind her, she doesn’t have powerful interests to protect. Housewives have been in Western society an important source of non-partisan, independent opinion.

Beth automatically assumes that a housewife would consider herself a loser and be jealous of those with high-powered careers. That assumption is proof of the importance of offensive, anti-feminist blogs such as this one.

Don Vincenzo writes:

I would embark on a fool’s errand were I to attempt to follow up Thomas Bertonneau’s splendid dissection of the ideology of liberalism, for I could add nothing. Any such effort would be, in comparison, at best third rate. But if I am not equally talented, perhaps our website’s mistress will allow two far more knowledgeable individuals than I to add some commentary to Thomas’s splendid post.

#1 is an English Jesuit priest who has resided in Japan for 60 years: Rev. Peter Milward. In a recently published collection of essays, entitled, Jousting for Justice, Fr. Milward has some interesting views on the subject. He writes: “Already, of course, there had been a resurgence of women students gathered into women’s colleges at the traditional universities from the Victoria age…But now in the post-war world there appeared the further movement of feminism, led by such outstanding females a Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and Germaine Greer. (Methinks the Padre jests.) According to them, women were no longer to be restricted, as they had been from the time of Eve, to the “slavery” of the home…In making such assertions they laid themselves open to the good-natured banter from their men-folk, as when G. K. Chesterton remarked that such feminists, marching under the slogan of, “We will not be dictated to,” would settle down to the secretarial task of typing in offices.”

#2 William Shakespeare, an author known to most.

Fr. Milward then switches gears and using his encyclopedic knowledge of Shakespeare, informs his reading audience of how The Bard approached this subject, for females at that time sat not only on the throne of England, but in France, there was a powerful queen-mother, Catherine de Medici; and in Rome, Lucrezia Borgia had a very influential position under Pope Alexander VI, her father!

Fr. Milward claims Shakespeare “…stood for the traditional order of things and the traditional relationship between men and women. That point was the moment of marriage, according to the definition proposed by Chaucer in The Canterbury Tales: that man should be to the woman as a “servant in love and lord in marriage.” In Chapter III of Genesis, God decrees that woman “should obey their husband,” but also in the First Epistle of Peter, where “he tells wives to be duly subject to their husbands, an to rely on no other adornment than “a meek and quiet spirits which is of great price in the sight of God.”

I suspect that none of this means anything to our ideologically driven Beth. Still, I would remind her of an Italian proverb, which is relevant here: Whoever forsakes the old way for the new knows what she is losing, but not what she will find.

Patrick O’Brien writes:

If Beth is going to attack you with stupid slogans, it is time for me to thank you for your very interesting blog. I have been following you for a few months. Always interesting, insightful, so varied in topics, faithful to the Church and to common sense. I have recommended your blog to many others.

Laura writes:

Thank you very much.

Jo writes:

I am hugely disappointed at your (almost) dismissal of Thomas Bertonneau’s brilliant response to Beth! He is exactly on target! He should have been thanked and praised by you.

Oh, well.

Thanks for your blog.

Laura writes:

But I was joking! Anyway, I thought its excellence spoke for itself. To gush is sometimes to diminish the obvious.

And it’s true — No one will write hate mail to me if they think they are going to be analyzed by a brilliant English professor.

By the way, I would like to say something in defense of Beth’s writing skills. I thought, “Delete this blog,” was quite powerful.

Anti-Globalist Expatriate writes:

Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword.

For I am come to set a man at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law.

And a man’s foes shall be they of his own household.

Matthew 10:33-36

Laura writes:

Most people today have been so overwhelmed by lessons of forgiveness and charity that they believe militance is incompatible with Christianity.

Not only did Joan of Arc, to take just one example of a militant Christian, offend people, she oversaw the deaths of her opponents (which is something I do not intend.) St. Joan was a military commander. Obviously, she did not relish killing — and she wept after her victories for those who had died. But she believed in warfare.

Sage McLaughlin writes:

Dr. Bertonneau’s critique of Beth is so mean and totally stupid.  It’s probably the most insensitive thing ever written in history, and I would know because I have a degree in History (Indiana University, with High Distinction).  If somebody like that is going to be “grading” my emails to you from now on (LOL!!!), then I’m not going to write you anymore.  It’s probably a blessing in the sky, though, because it’s such a waste of my time to talk to somebody so totally threatened by my degrees.  It’s sad that you probably haven’t even sat through one DoD PowerPoint presentation.

August 31, 2014

Pan Dora writes:

Thomas F. Bertonneau writes: Finally, there is the longish sentence about a woman, supposedly known to Beth, who scored highly on a military IQ test.

Beth wrote about a woman who allegedly aced the men’s PT test for the Marine Corps. She is referring to the physical fitness test, I believe. It is called the PFT test.

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