Katherine S. writes:
Your evaluation of Sarah Palin is completely accurate in my view. Just wanted you to know that! She has done tremendous harm to the concept of traditional motherhood, for all the reasons you have mentioned. And, if she were not so pretty and glamorous, she would be a nobody.
Annie, a reader who is age 23, writes:
I am expecting baby number three! My husband told a friend from work, a young man in his late twenties, and do you know what he said? “Oh, and your wife’s a Catholic, so she doesn’t believe in abortion, huh?” “NO” was my husbands firm reply, with a disgusted, angry look in his intimidating, Sicilian eyes. Can you believe that is the response you get for having a third baby in Boulder? Unbelievable! Like we’re idiots because we don’t want to murder one of our children!
Laura writes:
Congratulations to you. That is wonderful.
I am not surprised at the response of your husband’s co-worker, as revolting as it was. People hesitate to have children today not just because of the economic burden, but because of an active disdain for the disorder and unpredictability of family life. Children are spoiled today and yet so despised. They are not machines. And, that’s the problem.
It’s amazing that some people still believe overpopulation is a problem. Westerners commit cultural suicide by not replacing themselves yet some consider it noble to withold the fruit of their loins. Westerners travel the world to procure children whom they believe are uncared for and yet when someone produces a large family here, they say, “That’s going too far!”
“Dear Sister. Do you miss home? When are you coming home to me?”
This is a quote from one little girl’s letter to another. They are twin sisters. One remains in China where she was born while the other was seized from the home of relatives and put up for adoption on the international market.
The quote comes from the remarkable articles of Barbara Demick of the Los Angeles Times on the sometimes fraudulent adoption business in China. Most of the children end up in the homes of families in the United States. According to some Christians, it is the duty of Americans to take these children thousands of miles away from their families in order to expose them to Christianity and give them all the material benefits of life in the West. [See discussion below about this statement.]
Here is more from Demick’s piece on the twin girl who was seized by government officials:
The twins were separated before their first birthday, when their mother, Yuan Zanhua, a migrant worker, went off to another province. Afraid she wouldn’t be able to handle two babies in addition to an older daughter, Yuan took Shangjie, strapping her to her back, and left the other twin, Xiuhua, with her brother and sister-in-law in the countryside.
Then on May 30, 2002, a dozen officials from the local family planning office stormed Yuan’s brother’s house. They grabbed 20-month-old Xiuhua, shoved her into a car and drove off.
Although couples aren’t supposed to be penalized for having twins, and this rural family was entitled under Chinese law to a second child because their first was a girl, the family planning officials demanded 6,000 yuan, then about $750. The brother had the money, but when he went to get the girl back, they demanded 2,000 yuan more.
“My brother borrowed money from all the families in the village, a little here and a little there. If people could only give 10 yuan, they did,” says Yuan. But when her brother handed over the money, the family planning officials again raised their demands.
“He’d already borrowed money from hundreds of people,” she says. “There was just no way he could get any more.”
By the time Yuan got home, Xiuhua had been sent to the orphanage in nearby Shaoyang. When she complained to the family planning office, she says, the officials sneered at her: “Why did you give birth to so many babies?”
By the way, I have met Barbara Demick. She is one of the finest journalists in America.
Lines of Love O, Sarah we'll always love you No matter what you do With eyes, smile, and glasses Or the teasingly-tousled do. You're a pipeline of hope for America, A cup of true liberty; Like Joan, Deborah, and Diana, A torch of femininity. From the moons and mountains of Alaska Came this pure and radiant force. You'll dine on elites for breakfast And ride the Beltway on your horse. O, Sarah we will always love you Even when they say you're essentially dumb. We'll stand by you and protect you From now til eternity come.
Most people probably would say that America’s school buildings resemble prisons with windows – and without the barbed wire – because it would be too expensive to make them otherwise. But, that doesn’t make sense. Some of this ugliness is enormously costly.
In 1906, William Torrey Harris, U.S. Commissioner of Education, wrote in his influential book The Philosophy of Education:
The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places…. It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.
I agree with John Taylor Gatto, author of a more recent book on education, Weapons of Mass Instruction. This architecture serves one of the main purposes of school. Its aim is to create a shallow inner life.
IN a dialogue on international adoption at the website What’s Wrong with the World this week, I argued that child adoption should occur only within national borders. We cannot control the adoption business in other countries or ever be assured that it does not become a form of child trafficking, especially given the large sums Westerners are willing to pay.
A recent story in the Los Angeles Times confirms my point. According to Barbara Demick:
Since the early 1990s, more than 80,000 Chinese children have been adopted abroad, the majority to the United States.
The conventional wisdom is that the babies, mostly girls, were abandoned by their parents because of the traditional preference for boys and China’s restrictions on family size. No doubt, that was the case for tens of thousands of the girls.
But some parents are beginning to come forward to tell harrowing stories of babies who were taken away by coercion, fraud or kidnapping — sometimes by government officials who covered their tracks by pretending that the babies had been abandoned.
Parents who say their children were taken complain that officials were motivated by the $3,000 per child that adoptive parents pay orphanages.
“Our children were exported abroad like they were factory products,” said Yang Libing, a migrant worker from Hunan province whose daughter was seized in 2005. He has since learned that she is in the United States.
Doubts about how babies are procured for adoption in China have begun to ripple through the international adoption community.
![bigstockphoto_Abstract_Pattern_2492330[1]](https://thinkinghousewife.com/wp/wp-content/uploads/2009/11/bigstockphoto_Abstract_Pattern_249233012-150x150.jpg "bigstockphoto_Abstract_Pattern_2492330[1]")
Joel, the reader who wrote in the previous entry, sends this:
I appreciate your reply. The sense of abandonment felt by middle-class aspiring males in my generation is immense. Combine this with the preachiness and sentimentality of most social conservatives from older generations, my mother being a good example, and you get a festering resentment toward more traditional forms of living.
In a previous entry, a reader commented that it was impossible to reverse the destructive course of sexual liberation because the age of marriage and child-rearing is now relatively late. People can’t wait to have sex until they’re 30 and it is no longer possible, for economic reasons, to get married earlier.
I responded that there are a number of social and economic remedies to this, but I forgot to mention another way people can marry sooner: by becoming more resourceful with a single income. Here a reader explains it well.
Gail Aggen writes:
I was sitting with a group of fellow baby-boomers and younger folks, discussing current events. I pointed out how the fertility rate among Americans, has, but for the Hispanic immigrants, fallen below sustainable levels. Europe is in even worse shape, as I am sure people know. I voiced my somewhat flippant opinion that the best thing that could happen for America would be to bring all the soldiers home so they could make lots of babies (within the context of marriage, of course). This would save all that blood and treasure and do more to protect our country from our enemies (who are procreating at quite a clip), than remaining in the Middle East. Just my opinion of course.
One of the ladies, my age, replied by asking me, “Well, how could they afford to support all these children?” That is a fair enough question, and here is the answer.
Kidist Paulos Asrat writes at her blog: The most revealing thing about Palin's re-emergence as an author is that the book, from the many reviews and critiques about it, says very little about her political aspirations. Instead, it seems replete with petty personal grievances about her botched vice presidential campaign, and attacks of her grandson's father. A serious person, who has spent years in public office, would surely dedicate the majority of his book to his political work, his political philosophy, and his future aspirations in politics – although not necessarily as a president. Instead, Palin produces a "tell-all" type of book. And still more revealing was what she said on her recent Oprah interview. We see her driving to her mansion (how come she still lives there?) and says she feels really free to go where she wants and do what she wants. Yes, after resigning her governorship, which included responsibilities and grueling work, she is now free to hop on a bus and do a tour for a book which has no political significance whatsoever. This, I think, confirms the shallowness of Palin. I wrote about her in a previous post looking like an aging country music star. Maybe that is the image she wants to convey - a type of rock star politician, complete with a tour bus. But I wonder how long that will last until she is required to fill in the blanks.
JOEL writes:
I’m not sure how conservatives, such as yourself, can object to teen pregnancies, such as Bristol Palin’s. While I agree that single-motherhood is horribly destructive to the fabric of society, I cannot see how preaching and pontificating makes any difference in its inexorable march. As the average age of first marriage steadily increases, what you are asking is for individuals to forego having sex until their thirties, given that the average age of first marriage is now that high in some coastal cities. Recently, I was speaking with some older social conservative types, I live in Seattle, and joked that the reason my peers don’t vote Republican is that “Republicans are the people who don’t want anyone to have sex until thirty-five”, and, with the social reality in big cities, that assessment is not far from the truth.
If the rich countries of the West could bring thirty percent, or even five percent, of the poor children of the Third World into Western homes, taking them away from their poor parents and poor grandparents and poor cousins, removing them from the grinding poverty that limits their prospects and shortens their lives,would this be the best thing for these children? The answer to this question appears to be, ‘Yes,’ according to those who support unlimited adoption of the unfortunate children of the world by Western couples.
I say the answer is, ‘No.’ The poor are just like the rich in one respect. They need more than material things. They need their home lands and their people. They cannot be stripped naked of these and be forced to accept a creed of universal liberation. They are human too, not rootless beings fed only by abstractions and material goods.
“If the poor man’s right was only derived from strict necessity, your piddling selfishness would soon reduce him to a bare minimum, paid for by unending gratitude and servility.”
Such are the words of Monsieur le Curé de Torcy, the senior curate of George Bernanos’ The Diary of a Country Priest. He continues to say of Christ’s claim, The poor you have always with you, but me you have not always with you:
Rich and poor alike, you’d do better to look at yourselves in the mirror of want, for poverty is the image of your own fundamental illusion. Poverty is the emptiness in your hearts and in your hands. It is only because your malice is known to Me that I have placed poverty so high, crowned her and taken her as My bride. If once I allowed you to think of her as an enemy, or even as a stranger, if I let you hope that one day you might drive her out of the world, that would be the death sentence of the weak.
LAURA F. writes to Laura Wood:
I know you’re taking a lot of flak from Mrs. Palin’s admirers right now, so I wanted to let you know I appreciate your assessments of her. She is absolutely a feminist. Feminism has been assimilated into mainstream U.S. conservatism and the conservatives haven’t even noticed it. People many years my senior who claim to support conservative family values love her, and I ask them, “If 20 years ago she had come on the scene as she now is, would you have considered her a conservative?” They don’t seem to think it matters because liberalism has progressed so far since then. So in many minds, conservatism means “staying a few steps behind the liberals” rather than having eternal principles. And people are so alienated from our own traditional family structure that they think it comparable to life under the ayatollahs in Iran. Thanks for putting your courageous voice out there.
FROM today’s New York Times:
An Army cook and single mother is under investigation and confined to her post after skipping her deployment flight to Afghanistan because, she said, no one was available to care for her son while she was overseas.
The woman, Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, 21, said she had no choice but to refuse deployment orders because the only relative who could care for her 10-month-old son, her mother, was overwhelmed by the task and already caring for three other relatives with health problems.
Her civilian lawyer, Rai Sue Sussman, said one of Specialist Hutchinson’s superiors told her she would have to go anyway and put the child in foster care.
Feminism is great, isn’t? It’s given women the thrilling opportunity to put their children in foster care so that they can go off and work as Army cooks. As Sarah Palin put it, “Things have changed. There’s so much equality now.”
IN AN INTERVIEW with Barbara Walters on Good Morning America today, Sarah Palin insisted she was not seeking revenge against the McCain campaign in her new book. "Vindication is not the goal of mine," Palin said, with characteristic syntactical roguishness. She also said nasty allegations against her were "bullcrap." Palin made another revealing and unsettling revelation about her personal life. She told Walters that she was shocked by the news that her daughter Bristol was pregnant and her reaction was, "Didn't you know there were things you could do to prevent this or not do it all?" In other words, this family-values conservative thought her 17-year-old daughter should have been using birth control. She described what appeared to be a laissez-fair approach to her daughter's activities and sexual education. "There was that assumption that you're [Bristol] not doing it," she said. By "doing it," she meant having sex. Palin addressed once again questions about the rebellious Levi Johnston, Bristol's former boyfriend, the father of Palin's new grandson and the man who is likely to hound her for years to come. She maintained that his accusations about the Palin family have no basis in fact. Palin appeared in a segment on the Oprah Winfrey Show yesterday in shorts and a T-shirt, at one point lying on an exercise mat and cycling her legs. But she told Walters that a photo of her in running shorts on the cover of Newsweek was "a wee bit degrading." The news magazine should…
I LIKE SARAH PALIN. There is something refreshingly genuine and un-smarmy about her. But, after watching Oprah’s interview this afternoon with the former candidate, I have not altered my fundamental opposition to her as a future president.
I oppose her possible candidacy for two reasons. One, she is not smart and steely enough. Two, she is a feminist.
Granted, she is not an extreme feminist and she differs with the mainstream movement in her opposition to abortion. But Palin wholeheartedly embraces feminist egalitarianism and the radical transformation of society that it entails.
Palin made a number of interesting revelations in this interview. She said she did not tell her husband that the child she was carrying had Down’s Syndrome until three weeks after she learned of it from doctors. It was three weeks before the couple was alone and she could share this important information.
This amount of estrangement due to busy schedules did not, judging from this interview, seem to bother Palin in the least. She also said that when she learned she was pregnant with Trig, even before she knew he had Down’s, she felt understanding for women who choose abortion.
IN PREVIOUS ENTRIES, I discussed the influence of sterile modern design on the home. In a series of intermittent posts, I will be offering some basic principles of interior decorating for traditionalists. Here is Principle Number One. 
I. DEFLECT THE EYE FROM UGLINESS.
Traditional homes, in an age when the model of the two-income family reigns, have one big problem. Let’s call it fundlessness. Adhering to the absolute necessity of a woman at home, the traditional family may live in a state of genteel poverty or, even worse, serious impecuniousness. Forced by this condition to buy a small, hideous house or rent a small, hideous apartment, traditionalists face a seemingly insurmountable foe: ugliness.
The one-income family is much more likely to encounter architectural oppression than its relatively high-flying two-income counterpart. This oppression may appear in the form of a rectangular 1950s ranch house with metal windows and asbestos flooring; a tiny, dormered Cape Cod with rooms no bigger than horse stalls, or a “garden” apartment complex that has all the charm of a Stalingrad high-rise. There’s no point in pretending you live in a castle when you live in a shoebox. It is of absolute importance to acknowledge ugliness in one’s immediate surroundings. Denying it will only make things worse. Once a person reckons with the existence of a demon, he can begin to exorcise it.
And, that’s what interior decorating becomes in these unfortunate cases: a form of exorcism. One cannot knock down walls; erect additions that will obscure the original outlines of the house; or blast the whole thing to smithereens. One has to work within the body one has been given.
Do not despair. The human eye craves beauty. It is easily distracted from ugliness whenever there is the slightest sign of true beauty in a room. The trick is to purge the demon by your own process of embellishment. This is not always easy and takes some careful thought and consideration. Women who come into an ugly house and immediately festoon it with stencilled flowers in an effort to mask cheap architecture only make things worse. You must first examine the ugliness, breathe it in, look for the breaches in its defenses. Do nothing until you have taken stock of the enemy. This may take months or, depending on the formidability of the foe, even years.
Once one has studied the enemy, one can come up with simple strategies. Find the ugliest point in a room and work to move the eye away from it. Initially, it may be things no more expensive than a few house plants, a beautiful table cloth, or a collection of sea shells gathered at the shore to begin the process. Later, one can work with paint, furniture, fabric, lamp fixtures and art objects, all within whatever budget you are given, to lend your shoebox charm. There is no home that is irretrievably ugly. None. The very cheapest of homes can indeed be made into a castle with patience and perseverance.
I once met a woman who lived on the edge of a four-lane highway. Her tiny ranch house was the sole remnant of a vanished neighborhood that had been knocked down to make room for strip malls. To make things worse, her house was not originally lovely. Surrounded by hideousness all around, embedded in the very heart of the demon, she had created a home filled with feminine delightfulness. It was not possible to point to one little knick knack in her collection or one piece of furniture that was responsible for the pervasive atmosphere of charm and repose. It was a mysterious almagamation of effects, all of them very cheap.
This woman had come into the heart of the beast. She had seen. And she had conquered.
Country Living Magazine
In my previous post on Obesity in America, I argued that the poor eating habits of Americans were not just a result of economics or poor nutritional advice or even the decline in home cooking, but of a deep and pervasive spiritual lassitude. The problem of course is not unique to this country. Britain has seen the same phenomenon, perhaps to an even greater degree, among its native population. Theodore Dalrymple describes it here: I tell the doctors that in all my visits to the white households in the area, of which I've made hundreds, never—not once—have I seen any evidence of cooking. The nearest to this activity that I have witnessed is the reheating of prepared and packaged food, usually in a microwave. And by the same token, I have never seen any evidence of meals taken in common as a social activity—unless two people eating hamburgers together in the street as they walk along be counted as social. This is not to say that I haven't seen people eating at home; on the contrary, they are often eating when I arrive. They eat alone, even if other members of the household are present, and never at table; they slump on a sofa in front of the television. Everyone in the household eats according to his own whim and timetable. Even in so elementary a matter as eating, therefore, there is no self-discipline but rather an imperative obedience to impulse.…
“This will sound callous, but I think the great suffering people feel in their own country is nothing compared to the great emptiness many feel in countries they feel alien towards. This existential suffering is far worse, far more damaging than the materialistic one. Poverty has always been with us. Societies have always found ways to deal with it. But, I know of no society which can deal with existential emptiness.”
— Kidist Paulos Asrat, from Jolie and the Hidden Dynamics of International Adoption