LEONORA writes:

Your post “Suffering and Purity of Heart” from January 20^th caught my attention. A friend showed it to me on the day I had to go back to school after my winter break, and I have been experiencing the deep truth of those words first hand since then. I want to share some of that with you because it might be of interest to you.

I am a 25-year-old woman, studying and teaching language and literature on graduate level at a liberal state university in the Midwest. I would describe myself and my religious as well as political views as conservative for the most part. I am not married or in a relationship, and thus working and studying at the University, though I would be happy to give up my pursuit of a career for having a family and being a housewife with a good husband by my side any time. I will always be thinking about issues, reading, trying to stay informed and keeping my mind going, yet I realize more and more and feel strongly what women were really created for, and that is not to toughen up, be like men and pursue great careers as a primary goal.

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DANIEL S. writes:

Several American bishops have expressed their willingness to oppose Obama’s HHS mandate, even to the point of going to jail. I truly hope the bishops are sincere in this, and I pray they remain strong and steadfast in the facing the malevolent, secularist tyranny of Obama and the American government. (more…)

AN ANONYMOUS correspondent of a reader writes:

CNN and MSNBC and even FOX have become adept at finding cute little lasses who identify themselves as conservative. Their function is to discredit or undermine conservative ideas with weak defense, no defense or outright hostility. Of course, they’re so absorbed with their own celebrity that they don’t know this and aren’t aware of their role as useful idiots. Most of all they want to show off their hipness and cool. Like Sally Field, they just want to be loved. They want to proclaim to the world, “Hey, I’m a Conservative, but I’m cool!”

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A MALE READER writes:

I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea of women in combat. It horrifies and saddens me no end that a nation has decided to send women to the front lines of combat. Women are the procreators and help carry civilization forward with children who will become upstanding, law-abiding and contributing citizens to the country. Why on earth has this decision been taken to further masculinize and dehumanize women when there is enough manpower to fill those positions?

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MICHAEL MATT, of The Remnant, responds to the recent widely-reported statement by Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi in favor of Obama’s gun control proposals. He says Lombardi’s remarks did serious damage to the Vatican’s reputation among American conservatives and displayed ignorance of the fundamental threat to civil rights and privacy. “I’m sorry, Father Lombardi, you’re wrong on this one. If you don’t understand the intricacies … don’t interject yourself,” Matt says.

However, he also notes that the international press wildly exaggerated the authority of Lombardi’s statement.

Matt’s appearance before skulls in the Catacombs is somewhat distracting, but he makes important arguments.

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DON VINCENZO writes:

In Spring a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love. On the first Sunday in February a huge number of citizens of this country turn their thoughts to the Super Bowl, the most widely viewed sporting event in the world.

Professional football is a national religion. Many, if not most, of our citizenry will remain at home to observe its rituals today. Hence, the stores will be virtually empty; the streets deserted. Well, not quite. From hither, thither and yon, delivery trucks will crisscross our cities delivering the victual that has now become synonymous with the Super Bowl: pizza.

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IN RESPONSE to the young woman who wrote in about her marriage, Matthew H. writes:

The first year or two of marriage is always difficult. My wife and I married when I was 30, and the first year of our marriage was an ordeal, frankly. The wedding day was difficult, the honeymoon was difficult, most everything was difficult. We fought constantly, my wife gave me the cold shoulder more often than not, and I yelled at her far too much. But our marriage has gotten better ever since then. We will have been married for 12 years this month, and we are both far happier now than we were 11 years ago.

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TEXANNE writes:

Now that homosexuality is to be considered as a “battlefield multiplier,” and the military will be integrating women into combat units, being a soldier will be less attractive as a manly pursuit. Now that the Boy Scouts are signaling a compromise on homosexuality, scouting will lose it’s appeal and identity as challenging adventure for boys devoted to forming a manly character.

It’s interesting to think about how the Catholic priesthood might be one of the few (the only?) vocations restricted to manly males. (more…)

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

Thank you for your post about Constantinople. The story of the city’s siege and fall to the Turks on May 29, 1453 is an heroic and tragic one, one Christians should never forget.  It is also an object lesson in Moslem savagery we do well to remember, as well as a reminder of the high price of Western division in the face of Moslem aggression.

Sadly both Daniel S. and James Kirkpatrick are right: Westerners, even the ones who still are Christians, have largely forgotten this history.  And if they do remember it they do not grasp its dread significance, nor do most consider it in any way their history.  For a long time, I did not.  (more…)

LAURA D. writes:

I am a 23-year-old woman and newly married. I was raised by a mother and father who are still together, and my mother was a housewife. However, growing up under her influence and in this culture, I absorbed the lesson that being a housewife was an extremely degrading lot in life.

I observed the happy marriage between my father and my mother and thought that I wanted to grow up to have that, despite my mother’s protestations and insistence that I work on my own for many years before marrying and delay marriage and children, and also that marriage itself was not at all important compared to career and worldly achievements. (more…)

EVEN the unusually war-like women of Germanic history and myth did not participate in battle as the fellow combatants of men. The Valkyrie of Norse myth chose heroes from the battlefield, designating who would live or die, and carried their slain bodies to Valhalla. The Valkyries honored heroes, they didn’t become heroes themselves.

In 98 A.D., the Roman historian Tacitus wrote of the real women of Germania’s tribes who accompanied men to the battlefield. They were there to encourage men, not to fight with them, an idea which would presumably have seemed preposterous given that women were much more desirable as hostages and could be easily overpowered. From Tacitus’s Germania:

A specially powerful incitement to valor is that the squadrons and divisions are not made up at random by the mustering of chance-comers, but are each composed of men of one family or clan. Close by them, too, are their nearest and dearest, so that they can hear the shrieks of their women-folk and the wailing of their children. These are the witnesses whom each man reverences most highly, whose praise he most desires. It is to their mothers and wives that they go to have their wounds treated, and the women are not afraid to count and compare the gashes. They also carry supplies of food to the combatants and encourage them. (more…)

IF YOU’RE wondering why the Boy Scouts of America may soon lift its historic ban on homosexual scout leaders, look no further than the pressure the organization has received from major corporations. That’s America, a country where big-name companies insist that little boys be exposed to sexual perversion.

Goodbye, Boy Scouts. You are about to sell your soul. We don’t need you anyway.

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IZZY writes:

My previous post here on the men’s rights movement has made the rounds on other blogs, and has sparked a debate on the issue of sex robots. Reading the comments, it seems that the young men would be ever so content with being with a non-human object, rather than a real woman. (more…)

DIANA writes:

Reading the pervasive, fawning praise of Michelle Obama’s new bangs is no different from reading propaganda in Pravda, back in the unlamented days of the U.S.S.R. (Only the designer Karl Lagerfeld has had the guts to say her hairstyle is ugly. He said Michelle looks like a French news anchor.)

Michelle’s hairdo is certainly a wig. It reminds me of what was said about the fad of Roman matriarchs for blonde wigs. I think it was Ovid who said that the compliment should not go to the matriarch, but to the Rhinish maiden from whose head the locks were taken. So the compliment to Michelle Obama should go to the Indian lady whose hair she is now wearing. If you want to compliment her at all.

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ALAN writes:

Thank you so much for your excellent comments on the unbelievably ridiculous women-as-soldiers idea.  Here are a few additional thoughts:

Has any nation in history been stupid enough to permit their women to fight wars or defend their nation – and survived to tell about it?

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DANIEL S. writes:

James Kirkpatrick at Alternative Right has an important reflection on a recent, artificial grievance instigated by a Turkish Muslim group concerning a Star Wars lego set that they claimed was racist because it supposedly imitated the Hagia Sophia mosque in Istanbul. As Kirkpatrick reminds us, the “mosque” in question used to be one of the greatest churches of Eastern Orthodoxy, the jewel of Eastern Christendom, the heart of the then Constantinople, before the Muslim Turks conquered the city, desecrated the church, and forcibly converted it into a mosque. (more…)

ANYONE who believes that the lifting of the ban on women in combat will eliminate or even diminish feminist resentment toward the Armed Forces is ignorant of the simplest premises of modern feminism. The decision to lift the ban will enhance, not lessen, feminist grievance — and for very good reasons.

Obviously the ban will create resentment that women are and always will be the victims of sexual assault or harassment in the military. In the eyes of feminists, all unwanted sexual advances, even those occurring in close combat, can be prevented by administrative oversight. Obviously the ban will also create perpetual, unending resentment that there are not, and never will be, as many top female commanders or decorated heroes. The more the military opens itself to women, the more it opens itself to their dissatisfaction.

Less obvious is the fact that the decision is an admission that women were the victims of a male conspiracy in the past. What could have motivated the establishment of an all-male military — both in America and virtually every society in recorded history — if women were fully capable of fighting all along? Only enmity toward women by men could explain it. Thus the lifting of the ban affirms the feminist belief in this historic injustice.

In short, all of history is tainted with the claim that women can fight as well as men.

Notice this recent article in The New York Times which comes on the heels of Leon Panetta’s announcement that women can now fight. Three women who have successful careers complain. Why? Because they were excluded from combat before the ban and would have had even more spectacularly successful careers if they had had combat experience. Note their unashamed conviction that a major purpose of the military is to offer them career opportunities.

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