THE FRENCH Senate on Friday passed the Taubira law legalizing homosexual marriage and adoption, paving the way for a fresh wave of protests. Galliawatch reports, “The country is in an uproar. The bill now goes back to the National Assembly.”

Vast segments of the French population, much to their credit, will never embrace this law, which is expected to pass easily in the National Assembly, which already approved an earlier version. Opponents are now in open rebellion against their government. The New York Times goes so far as to speak of an “unexpectedly vocal campaign by conservative opponents.” Some French municipal officials have said they will refuse to marry homosexual couples. Below, police in Paris are lined up against protesters. In a previous demonstration, non-violent demonstrators, including children, were sprayed with tear gas and some were injured.

Also provided by Tiberge of Galliawatch, the video below shows a demonstration against homosexual marriage in the Luxembourg Gardens. Have you seen anything like this in America?

Le Jogging Pour Tous au Luxembourg by ktvideo1

(more…)

  AT VDARE, Vincent Chiarello compares Italian immigrants to Hispanics. Why were Americans never expected to wade through Italian in the course of doing everyday business? Chiarello writes: Italian-Americans were not coddled, but systematically pushed into assimilation. During the first half of the twentieth century, federal and state governments neither established nor funded anything like the bi-lingual education programs which have, if anything, slowed down the recent immigrant absorption. Historically, schools actually began the assimilation process: there was only one language of instruction,and only one flag visible in the classroom. Also, a reader interviews a Senegalese immigrant attending the pro-amnesty rally in Washington on April 10. The African says he would go back to his native country and run his business there if it were too expensive to achieve citizenship in this country.

SUSAN writes:

Doreen Kimura, aged 80, died on Feb. 27 of this year in Vancouver. There hasn’t been much in the media about the passing of this brilliant, politically incorrect neuropsychologist. Here’s a link to one of the obituaries I found from the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science.

Kimura’s Scientific American article, “Sex Differences in the Brain” (Sept. 1992), was a real classic. In 1992, she also helped found and headed the Society for Academic Freedom and Scholarship. (more…)

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Barry Rubin writes about the most recent of the never-ending Moslem attacks on Coptic Christians in Egypt. In some ways there is nothing new in this story. Copts, the Egyptians who descend from Pharaonic Egypt and were in the country for millennia before the Arabs invaded, have been subject to attack ever since Egypt’s subjugation to Islam in the Seventh Century. (more…)

JOHN LEHMAN was a 28-year-old with developmental disabilities who worked at a McDonald’s on West Market Street in Akron, Ohio when he was taking the trash out of the rear exit of the restaurant last Saturday night. A black male in an SUV drove up as he opened the door and gunned him down. Lehman was shot three times and died immediately, leaving his humble existence in a dramatic and gruesome way.

No one has been arrested in the shooting and it is probable that Lehman, who had worked at the McDonalds for ten years, did not know the man who killed him, except perhaps as a customer. Lehman was one of four whites in Akron murdered by blacks over the course of six days, according to the Council of Conservative Citizens. The victims include Jeffrey and Margaret Schobert, an Akron attorney and his wife who were beaten to death with a sledgehammer by the boyfriend of their adopted daughter. Their bodies were discovered in their bed by workers renovating their home. Mrs. Schobert had just returned from the hospital, where her adopted daughter was recovering from stab wounds inflicted by a black male at a party.

This wave of black violence is not uncommon, but you will find no uproar or indignation in the national news. While Trayvon Martin was a hero, John Lehman will probably be remembered by no one but his friends, family and the people who lived in the neighborhood. Are any of these crimes “hate crimes?” Well, let’s just say the assailants did not love their victims.

Of course, anyone who points out these crimes as racial crimes and acts of hatred is inevitably labeled as angry and psychologically sick. Whereas anyone who remembers those blacks lynched by whites many years ago is considered a noble advocate of justice. In reality, those who refuse to decry or even acknowledge these modern-day black crimes are the ones who are psychologically deformed, rejecting at a deep inner level the humane and civilized aversion to depravity and cruelty. We are a nation that routinely overlooks disgusting acts of extreme and barbaric human cruelty. As Lawrence Auster wrote in a 1998 essay, “Multiculturalism and the Demotion of Man,” Americans must participate in a form of “self-hypnosis” to maintain this denial:

This, at its Orwellian core, is the mindset that enables contemporary whites never to entertain a negative conclusion about blacks, while always making whites themselves responsible for blacks’ moral and intellectual failings. This (in Joseph Sobran’s useful coinage) is alienism: “a prejudice in favor of the alien, the marginal, the dispossessed, the eccentric, reaching an extreme in the attempt to ‘build a new society’ by destroying the basic institutions of the native.” This is the intellectual and spiritual environment which, combined with racial diversification, has turned America into the opposite of itself – into the anti-white, anti-Christian, anti-rational, anti-American anti-nation that is Multicultural America.

(more…)

WILL G. writes:

  THE head of the Russian Orthodox Church, Patriarch Vladimir Kirill, is quoted by Interfax News Agency as saying yesterday: I consider this phenomenon called feminism very dangerous, because feminist organisations proclaim the pseudo-freedom of women, which, in the first place, must appear outside of marriage and outside of the family. Man has his gaze turned outward – he must work, make money – and woman must be focused inwards, where her children are, where her home is. If this incredibly important function of women is destroyed then everything will be destroyed – the family and, if you wish, the motherland. It's not for nothing that we call Russia the motherland.

ANIBETH writes:

Your writings have had a profound impact on me during the eight months or so I have been visiting your site. I am a traditionalist, married mother. But I have not been confident in this role. I have berated myself for years for not being a “successful” career woman, all the while being an “I-am-my-kid’s-mom” mother. I shuddered at the thought of dumping my child with someone else while I pursued my dream. I loved my child with an intensity that truly did hurt. I protected the innocence which our world tries so hard to steal away. I’ve homeschooled.

Through all this there was always the underlying yearning to be the full me. To do that thing I was meant to do if I could only find the time in the evening, early morning or when it was my off week at homeschool co-op. (more…)

AS THE U.S. Supreme Court ponders Hollingsworth v. Perry and whether states have the authority to prohibit same-sex unions, it’s important to remember that, whatever the outcome of this decision, there is a marriage crisis in this country that will not be resolved by a Supreme Court decision upholding California’s Proposition 8. The states already actively discourage marriage and encourage immense damage to it. Divorce is a full-blown government industry.

Civil marriage has devolved into an individualistic, cruel and oppressive free-for-all. The solution is not better divorce laws. The solution is to return to an older model, in which marriage is a vow upheld before the non-governmental authorities of God, family, community and church. George Washington didn’t have a state marriage license, and you don’t need one either.

See Jeremy Morris’s excellent and persuasive defense of ecclesiastical marriage in this previous entry. He wrote:

I submit to you that God, and the families of origin for both parties have the only real influence and jurisdiction [over marriage.] If their influence in a particular case is insufficient, no true remedy will be had, at least not immediately. The state is notorious for causing minor problems to escalate. When an offended party cries to the state for help the result is the creation of wedge between husband and wife that in most cases can never be removed. Sole custody and child support are not true remedies. Whereas following God’s plan, conscience and family justice ultimately rule the day, whether it be sooner or later.

As for my wife and I, we have chosen the pure form of ecclesiastical marriage, if anyone considers it a “risk” I simply say to them, “You do not have to take the risk.” (more…)

  WRITING in Slate, Lionel Shriver says that Margaret Thatcher was a model feminist. British feminist commenters also say, in so many words, "Well, she was a powerful woman so she was one of us." Liberals can't conceive of a powerful woman who wasn't a political narcissist so they rush to say she was really one of them. The truth is, Thatcher did not see women as her favorite interest group and did not believe in restructuring British society so that women could attain power. She was comfortable with men in charge. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who made women her priority as Secretary of State, and unlike Christine LaGarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund who attributed the financial crisis of recent years to too much testosterone, Thatcher rejected the institutionalized enforced equality that is feminism. Thatcher is quoted as saying: ‘The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.’ Not only was Margaret Thatcher not feminist in her policies, but her demeanor was manly. She behaved by the standards of a male dominated world, not a world where the likes of Barbara Walters and Nancy Pelosi are in charge. As such, she was not a role model for most women because most women don't want to be men. Little girls will never long for Margaret Thatcher dolls.

AS THE press reacts to the death of Margaret Thatcher, a leader of exceptional talents who stands out among powerful women of the 20th century for her rejection of feminism, which she called “poison,” we will find her identified — and demonized — as an arch conservative. Here are interesting comments to the contrary by Peter Hitchens and Lawrence Auster in 2007.

Hitchens wrote a review in The American Conservative of John O’Sullivan’s celebratory book about Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World. In that review, Hitchens stated:

What did Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan do for the institution of marriage, rigor in education, adult authority, or the idea that people are responsible for their own actions? Far too little.

What did they do for the idea of national sovereignty without which no proper conservative positions can be defended? Well, Reagan was less to blame in this matter, but Thatcher repeatedly compromised with the European Union’s aggrandizement, which is actually one of the major instances of real great-power aggression in our age. She began the betrayal—now almost complete—of Britain’s own people in Northern Ireland, and even became involved in the campaign for liberal intervention in Yugoslavia, a foreign-policy impulse that led directly to the Iraq fiasco. (more…)

SEXUAL predators used to have to go to the trouble of luring children in off the streets. Now all they have to do is marry each other and legally adopt children. George Harasz and Douglas Wirth allegedly did just that in Connecticut. The men adopted three sets of male siblings. They are now facing charges of sexual assault, after they withdrew their initial no-contest pleas to lesser charges in a hearing on Friday. According to the New York Daily News:

One of the victims who spoke during the court hearing said sexual assault began when he was 6. (more…)

ALTHOUGH I have read several of her husband’s books, I am embarrassed to say I have never read the works of Edith Schaeffer, wife of Francis Schaeffer, the Evangelical Christian thinker who had a gift for deflating philosophical materialism. Mrs. Schaeffer, who died in Switzerland last week at the age of 98, helped her husband run L’Abri, their famous intellectual hostel in Switzerland. She wrote more than two dozen books and ardently defended the role of women at home. She wrote in The Hidden Art of Homemaking:

If you stop putting off homemaking until your hope of marriage develops into a reality, and start to develop an interesting home right now, it seems to me two things will happen: first, you will develop into the person you could be as you surround yourself with things that express your own tastes and ideas; and second, as you relax and become interested in areas of creativity, you will develop into a more interesting person to be with.

Mrs. Schaeffer apparently understood that domesticity is a state of being, not just a state of doing.

Here are some other quotes (page numbers omitted) from the book: (more…)

Before us lies eternity: our souls
are love, and a continual farewell.

— “Ephemera,” W.B. Yeats

LAWRENCE AUSTER, traditionalist writer and culture critic, was buried by friends and family on Tuesday, April 2 in Pennsylvania.

His body was carried at 11:30 a.m. into the vestibule of the Holy Cross Catholic Church in Mount Airy in a simple oak coffin made by Trappist monks in Iowa, a fitting enclosure for a man who lived as austerely as a monk, without many of the basics of modern life, such as cell phone, car or cable television. The church was just two miles from the summer home of one of Mr. Auster’s fondest heroes, George Washington, a figure who always inspired him.

In the foyer, his remains were blessed for the first time. Accompanied by a quiet reverence —  a decision was made to forgo music —  the coffin was taken by his friends to the front of the stone Gothic church. Easter lilies decorated the main marble altar.  Large baskets of snapdragons, white chrysanthemums and other flowers flanked the casket.  Artificial illumination of the altar and the sunlight that filtered through the stained-glass windows evoked the significance of the great feast that gives the Church its meaning. The stone walls and wooden beams, dramatically carved with the faces of angels and their wings, enhanced the prayerful atmosphere.

(more…)