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. Read 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.  Read 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. Read More »

A Valkyrie from Arthur Rackham's The Ring

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. Read 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. Read 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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Constantinople Sunset, Ivan Constantinovich Aivazovsky; 1899

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. Read 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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Brigadier General Billy Mitchell

DOUGLAS writes:

You hit on something larger in your comment that the military seems to be devoid of martyrs. From what I observe daily it seems our whole society is devoid of martyrs except for lone voices on the web.

I remember during my military career reading the story of Col. Billy Mitchell and how he sacrificed his career to gain support for an official Air Force. He received a court martial over his actions. We were taught he was a hero, yet there were no heroes mentioned who stood up for constitutional values or any other values. Instead, people who did things such as refusing to wear the blue U.N. beret were described as kooks.

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THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

Sage McLaughlin’s remarks on comedy are pertinent.  I might add an observation or two.  One way of explaining why comedy hasn’t been funny since, let’s say, Lenny Bruce is that at about the heyday of Lenny Bruce comedy began to be politicized, just like everything else.  It’s a short step from Lenny Bruce to the Smothers Brothers and from Tommy and Dickie Smothers to Howard Hesseman and George Carlin.

Read More »

DIANA writes:

William McRaven, the head of Special Ops, says that women can make great Navy SEALS.

I “googled” McRaven, and found that he is struggling with budget cuts. So let’s assume the powers that be are telling him: toe the line or your forces get chopped. Or YOU get chopped.

 I don’t care. It’s a shameful, dishonest and dishonorable thing for him to say.

Read More »

IN THIS previous entry, Sage McLaughlin analyses the subversive influence of all those funny, clever, sarcastic people on television.

“Sometimes humor can be crafted in the service of objective truths…,” he writes.  “Just as often it is made in the service of lies.”

Read More »

MARY BURR writes:

I thought of you this evening as I watched this May 1965 episode of “Bewtiched.”  Samantha uses her magical powers to create an ad campaign for struggling a Italian restaurant owner named Mario. His business is failing because everyone wants pizza and Mario comes from a long line of culinary artisans who refuse to serve pizza. Samantha’s magic campaign is so effective that a manufacturer of pizza wants to cut a deal with Mario to make him rich.  Even for a million dollars, Mario refuses to make pizza.

Read More »

JAMES H. writes:

I’ve been meaning to write in response to the post about St. Elizabeth’s Academy which will be closing here in St. Louis.  My great aunt taught there her entire life. She was born in Centralia Illinois at the turn of the century.  She and my grandmother worked in their father’s drug store in Centralia and when she was old enough, she left and joined the Sister’s of the Most Precious Blood convent and then became a teacher at St. Elizabeth’s Academy.  I’m attaching a picture of my sister, Sister Veronica (my great-aunt) and me from 1955 – boy was that a different world! Read More »

DANIEL S. writes:

While American liberals celebrate the lifting of a ban of women serving in combat roles in the U.S. military, as well as news that the Boy Scouts of America are considering lifting their ban of homosexuals among its membership and troop leadership, and that there is a bipartisan consensus in the Senate to grant amnesty to millions of illegal aliens, the Catholic patriarch of Egypt has come out decrying the alienation and persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt.

Now there might not seem to be any sort of obvious relationship between domestic events in America and those in Egypt, except that the same politicians and media outlets that have eagerly embraced the Revolution in America are the same that have condemned the Christians of Egypt to perpetual violence, repression, and persecution. Read More »