I REMOVED a bird's nest from its position above a light fixture on our back wall recently. The birds - a family of American robins - had left. All that remained of their industry was this woven bowl and some splattered stains on the wall. Birds have no outhouses or plumbing. They have no bathrooms or living rooms, kitchens or bedrooms. One room serves all their purposes and it is open to the skies, so that the baby bird can direct his hunger and grievances not just to parents but to the heavens, to God himself. Once the fledglings can fly, the bird breaks with his nest completely. Neither parents or offspring come back and search for the destroyed dwelling. This has been true of all the squalid nests I have removed from birdhouses and crevices and shrubbery after their fledglings have left. So much work and the bird departs without a backward glance. What the bird loses in domesticity he gains in freedom. The air is his home and it fills his lungs with the trivial song of independence. Birds are the quintessential bohemians.  The robin or wren quickly returns to the air and to the recesses of shrubbery. He calls out from the forest at daybreak: Here I am. Here am I. His twitterings and choruses are sound without sentiment. We could live in the secret shadows of the forest. We could survive. But the heart demands a home. The bird can sing, but the man covets what he loves. The delights of the forest grow within. The human being soars in his woven nest. At home, pinned in place, he is borne aloft on the currents of…

DIANA writes:

See the picture? Very misleading. Fact is, the majority of “gay” couples are lesbian couples, who are raising children from one of the lesbians’ former marriages. This is buried in one sentence on the second page: “And the largest number of children in same-sex families are a result of previous heterosexual marriages.” (Yes, it doesn’t say that they are lesbian couples, but I’ve read this repeatedly in other sources.)

Now that’s out of the way, what’s missing in the picture? The boy’s mother!

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MRS. P. writes:

When you mentioned the trousseau, I was reminded of the hope chest I received as a young girl around 1952 when I was twelve. The hope chest, or glory box as they were called in the UK and Australia, contained a young woman’s trousseau (special clothing and household items such as linens and quilts) that she was accumulating in preparation for marriage in the future and her own home. Although hope chests are still popular today, the concept of acquiring a trousseau made up of these items began to lose its appeal after 1950. Perhaps the need for a young woman to come to a marriage prepared to start a new home has been satisfied with bridal shower gifts and wedding gifts.  (more…)

IN PREVIOUS discussions of interracial marriage at this site, one reader insisted that the white race was a “dangerous fiction.” She stated: 

There is quite simply no ‘white race,’ not even in America. 

In other words, the white people are nothing more than an amalgam of physical characteristics, not a distinct people with cultural tendencies. There is no reason for whites to identify with each other.

See this excellent reply by Robert B., who wrote: 

Only a non-thinking fool would think race and culture have nothing in common…

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A READER WRITES:

You’ll want to see this at Fox News:

7-Year-Old Driving 50 mph Just Wanted to See His Dad

CASEVILLE, Mich. — A 7-year-old Michigan boy barefoot and in pajamas drove a car for 20 miles, sometimes hitting speeds of 50 mph, before finally slowing down and stopping with the help of authorities.

“He was crying and just kept saying he wanted to go to his dad’s,” Caseville Police Chief Jamie Learman said. “That was pretty much it. He just wanted to go to his dad’s.” (more…)

BEN J. writes:

A co-worker and I were recently discussing some of the odd things our various employers in the aircraft industry have done to inspire employees. Often large quantities of boxed greasy foamboard are ordered and delivered to the hangar. This is a bad idea on many levels.  (more…)

CAROLINE writes:

Josaphine’s story brought me to tears. Liberalism is indeed the sea we swim in, but how much heartbreak its delusions bring about. Her story is a testament to the words “the truth will set you free.” May God bless her and her family.

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LIBERALISM is the sea in which we swim. For many of us, it takes some stark encounter with reality to get us out of the water. Here is one reader’s story of how she changed from a “lunatic liberal” to a traditionalist. All her problems are not solved, but her life has been renewed. She has shed many illusions.

Josaphine writes:

I am white, 42, and married to a black man. My husband is a fine art painter by trade, and a corporate accounts manager by day. We are celebrating our 16th wedding anniversary this year. (more…)

  THE SUPREME COURT today rejected a class action lawsuit filed by women employees against Wal-Mart. In a 5-4 decision, the court ruled that hiring decisions involving 1.6 million employees could not be reduced to the single common factor of the sex of the employees. This ruling represents a positive restraint on mandatory, government-enforced hiring of women and discrimination against men. The idea that 1.6 million women in many different stores were affected by a policy of hostility to women, and were fired or denied promotion because of this hostility and not because of their job performance, is patently absurd.

LYDIA SHERMAN writes:

“The economy” or “in this economy” are two new religious phrases honoring the god of this age. It seems that all you have to do to get people to gasp and fall to their knees in awe is say, “in this economy.”

Many women really do want to stay at home, but fear of doing so “in this economy” prevents them. The Bible says that “where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Luke 3:34) Every human action is guided by the heart, or the conscience, if you will. The things you protect and defend the most are your treasures. That determines where your heart really is. (more…)

IF YOU are unfamiliar with the story of Timothy Miller, who was arrested in April for helping a former lesbian flee the country with her child, you can read about it here. Lisa Miller, who is unrelated to Timothy, is the woman who was ordered by Vermont Supreme Court to  turn over her biological child to a former lesbian partner who is neither related to the child or the adoptive parent. Imagine a mother who was taking good care of her child being forced to flee the country to keep her child after a court ordered her to turn over the child to a man who was unrelated to the child and not the adoptive parent. Such a thing would not happen.

Homosexuals are the most intolerant people in America. They are bullies and persecutors.

From the Timothy Miller site:

On Monday morning April 18th of this year, Timothy Miller, or Timo as he is known to most, boarded a flight bound for Washington, D.C. from their mission station in Nicaragua . Traveling with him was his wife JoAnna and their four young children. They were returning to the States for a short break from their service there, as well as to attend a close friend’s wedding. (more…)

At Truth Shall Set You Free, Justin writes:

Others in the Mensphere have long noticed signs that Obama does not wear the pants in his own family. His latest comments add more direct confirmation of the fact that he is the family Beta all the way.

 Quoting from a Yahoo article:  (more…)

EMILY HALL writes:

I found this article on WSJ.com and immediately thought of you. The author did a study of 75 very successful (by modern, feminist standards) women and was surprised by ” how deep (and surprisingly traditional) the bond” between father and daughter is. (more…)

ALAN writes:

Apropos your recent discussion of “turning the clock back:” 

In a moral or cultural sense, people would not talk about “turning the clock back” if they had not abandoned the moral fiber and cultural standards that once made America a better and stronger nation than it is today. (more…)

FROM the website Tradition in Action comes this excerpt from Maria von Trapp’s autobiography The Story of the Trapp Family Singers, published in 1949. Von Trapp describes the Sundays of her childhood in rural Austria and the Sundays she experienced when the family emigrated to America: 

As I have spent most of my life in rural areas, it is Sunday in the country that I shall describe.

First of all, it begins on Saturday afternoon. In some parts of the country the church bell rings at three o’clock, in others at five o’clock, and the people call it “ringing in the Feierabend.” Just as some of the big feasts begin the night before – on Christmas Eve, New Year’s Eve, Easter Eve – so every Sunday throughout the year also starts on its eve. That gives Saturday night its hallowed character. When the church bell rings, the people cease working in the fields. They return with the horses and farm machinery, everything is stored away into the barns and sheds, and the barnyard is swept by the youngest farm-hand. Then everyone takes “the” bath and the men shave. (more…)

FATHER’S DAY should be somber and serious, almost a day of grief, in the Western world. Father hunger is everywhere. So many children are raised without intimate, daily contact with their fathers that many of them have a secret longing, and a fixation on fathers, that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives. They dream of father. They idolize him. They wonder if they did not deserve him. A present father is human. An absent father is larger than life.

There are parents who never married. There are parents who divorced. Worst of all, there are those children who were deliberately deprived of any link with their natural fathers. Children conceived with anonymous sperm donors live in a fatherless hell, as described this week in Canada’s National Post: (more…)