A READER writes:
I’m not married, but if I ever have children, I am NOT letting them watch Disney Channel. Disney was so much cleaner when I was young 17 years ago. I’m sad at how far gone it is. Here’s news about a Disney show that will feature a “married” lesbian couple.
KIDIST P. ASRAT writes:
I read your post on Jessica Rey, the former television actress and current swimsuit retailer, and I didn’t buy her “modesty” angle. I think she just found a niche which would include her diluted Catholic beliefs, her pretensions at being a designer, and a way to make money.
A business, however small, takes up a lot of time. She has an infant and is according to some sites expecting another baby. So how is she a dutiful wife, mother to infants and a homemaker when she’s got her own full-fledged career going? This is no home-based business working out of a kitchen. Plus, what is she giving us? Nothing that Sears, or even Walmart, can’t give us. Except her items are four times as expensive.
HENRY McCULLOCH writes:
If you are pro-life, as I am, you may want to have a sick-bag ready before you read this New York Times op-ed. Taking a brief break from its hell-bent advocacy of the Schumer-Rubio Gang of Eight’s illegal-alien amnesty (might the bailout of the Times by Carlos Slim Helú, Mexico’s – and currently the world’s – richest man, have something to do with that?), the Times offers us a sweetly soothing velvet version of pro-abortion propaganda, as a mother who decided to abort – at 23 weeks – a son with serious medical problems tells us this:
BETTY SMITH is a very Plain-Jane kind of name and in many ways the woman I knew who bore that name was perfect for it. She was a person of obvious simplicity. She radiated simplicity. But if simplicity can be complex, Betty Smith’s simplicity was complex.
CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY was once a bastion of civility and high learning. Now, its gothic buildings tower over vast fields of mental debris.
LIFE NEWS reports:
From the stage at the recent Women Deliver conference, former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s daughter Chelsea revealed that her much-admired maternal grandmother was the child of unwed teenage parents who “did not have access to services that are so crucial that Planned Parenthood helps provide.”
Chelsea’s grandmother was born of an unintended pregnancy. And new research shows that her family is not alone in treasuring a person who – if Planned Parenthood had been successful – would not have been born.
A FRENCH court has sentenced a non-violent protester against homosexual "marriage" to jail for four months. Galliawatch has the story, which you probably won't read about anywhere else.
THE witty swimsuit retailer Jessica Rey does a nice job of describing the history of the bikini and explaining why immodesty is degrading, not liberating. Rey’s swimsuits are attractive though I wouldn’t call them modest, except by today’s aggressively revealing standards.
Feminists often say that the business world is pitted against them. Rubbish. As this graphic from a human resources outfit illustrates, corporations in general are happy to accommodate the working mother.
The underlying assumption in this graphic and the study it cites is that motherhood is not necessary or important. Replace the words “stay-at-home mom” and “motherhood” with “soldier” and “service in the military” and you can easily see what I mean. The trapped feelings of a soldier are not decisive in whether he performs his duties and defends his country. The feelings of a mother are decisive because maternal care is considered inessential.
It is not surprising that some women newly at home report feeling trapped, as if an office cubicle and long commute are not confining. That’s perfectly understandable given they are ill-prepared and have learned since early childhood that motherhood is a lesser occupation and that it is weak and risky to depend on a man. As for the “resentment” they reportedly feel toward “spouse and/or baby,” human resources departments would not cheerfully report such ugly feelings with regard to men and their family responsibilities. That’s because they do not have to persuade men to work. They do have to persuade women, and it’s good for the bottom line when they do.
The modern corporation, like the Communist state, is more than happy to collectivize motherhood. The assumptions of this human resources graphic are similar to the beliefs of Soviet bureaucrats. If it was true, however, that women by nature felt trapped and resentful when caring for their children and homes, the human race would have ceased to exist a long time ago.
DANIEL S. writes: In a recent appearance in Northern Ireland Obama made a statement which could be interpreted as a call for an end to Catholic and other private religious schools in Northern Ireland: “If towns remain divided,” said the U.S. President, “if Catholics have their schools and buildings and Protestants have theirs, if we can’t see ourselves in one another and fear or resentment are allowed to harden—that too encourages division and discourages cooperation.” So in other words, Catholics and Protestants should cease being those things, as religious beliefs are divisive, and presumably submit to some sort of secular, unitary state. Obama is clearly a man who despises the Catholic Church, and yet leading American Catholic bishops still treat him with deference and act as if Obama is a man who acts in good faith.
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FEMINISM is totalitarian by nature. Sex differences exist, therefore they must be repressed. When it comes to women in the military, this means the male service member becomes the enemy.
Elizabeth Harrington of CNS News reports:
In a memo sent on June 13, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus ordered that all sailors, Marines, cadets and civilian employees have their workplaces searched by June 28.
The “comprehensive visual inspections” of the workspaces conducted by commanding officers will “ensure they are free from materials that create a degrading, hostile, or offensive work environment.” (more…)
THIS question becomes more pressing by the day. Among the latest evidence that Pope Francis is not Catholic is his private criticism of a group of Catholics who presented him with rosaries. At Ars Orandi, David Werling reflects on the meaning of the Pope's criticism.
THE logical inconsistencies in the argument for same-sex marriage, including the contradiction between the idea that sexual “orientation” is innate and the notion that it is fluid (as in transgenderism), have been discussed here before. Dale O’Leary at Aleteia does a particularly good job of summarizing them. She writes: (more…)
BUCK writes in response to my post about flowers in the trash:
I should love flowers, but I don’t. I certainly should know a good bit about them, but I don’t, except for the annual rose that blooms on its own just outside my front door every spring and the surrounding trees and bushes that do whatever they do.
Ironically, my dad was a florist. However, neither of my parents grew anything. They had no intellectual interests, there was no music or art and there was little conversation. The only thing we had in common was the advent of TV. Mom read pulp fiction. Dad read Playboy. But there were always flowers. They were just there. It seems odd and almost dishonest that they were there, as if they were intruding or defying the natural order.
I HAVE been hard at work in recent months on two new organizations, the American Traditionalist Society and the Lawrence Auster Society. The websites for both organizations should be up and running soon. In the meantime, I am asking for your support for the continued existence of this site, The Thinking Housewife. It has been nine months since my last fundraiser. If you value this commercial-free site and would miss it if it were to end, please consider donating. Thank you for your support.
I WENT for a walk in our suburban neighborhood the other evening, a golden hour when the intoxicating scent of roses and honeysuckle vines drifted upward. Since I needed some exercise, I headed up a hill that once belonged to a large estate, many years ago, and is now a street of fastidious, expensive colonials, with parked cars and manicured turf. Pick-up trucks visit each outdoor carpet once a week and, with their arsenal of mowers, blowers and trimmers, landscape workers obliterate every trace of botanical insubordination.