AT VFR, Ed H. writes, regarding the massacre at a school  in Connecticut:

As they track down the story of Adam Lanza, and all standard parts fall into place — the weak absent father, the dingbat single mother, the liberal, well-meaning psychologist who was “working” with Adam, the shallow friends who found him “edgy” and “different,” Adam’s cultural life which consisted of an addiction to violent imagery, music, and movies supplied by the same media-political complex that is now feigning “grief” — as all of America is brought before the microphones blinking, crying, totally uncomprehending, we will notice one repeated phrase, a phrase so universal, so emblematic of Liberal America and its mounting catastrophes that I am proposing it become the new national motto, or rather the epitaph to be engraved on the tombstone of the Republic:

“HOW COULD IT HAVE HAPPENED?”

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THE shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut were much worse than I knew when I posted the previous entry. According to the AP, 27 are dead, including 18 children. This is a living nightmare. The latest reports are that a fired teacher was the attacker. The New York Daily News reports it was a masked gunman.

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IN THE entry about the new French National Observatory of Secularism, which will crack down on “religious pathology,” Daniel S. writes, quoting CNA news service:

In an interview with Le Journal du Dimanche, [Interior Minister Manuel Valls] said that secular morality is to “understand what is right and to distinguish good from evil.”

“Secularism is not about simple tolerance … it is a set of values that we have to share.”

That sure sounds like religious language to me. Will someone investigate the Interior Minister for religious pathology?

JEANETTE V. writes:

Depraved liberals are already blaming the NRA for the shootings at the Sandy Hook Elementary School in Connecticut, never realizing it is a fact that there were more guns at schools 50 years ago and these incidents never happened. Read More »

ALAN writes:

Last January, in a post titled “A Tale of One High School,” I wrote about the decline of the neighborhood around Cleveland High School in St. Louis, the story of a “dead school in a decadent city.”

Here is a brief update:

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MALCOLM POLLACK writes:

I pass along to you an article in The New Republic by Judith Shulevitz, “How Older Parenthood Will Upend American Society.” I was struck in particular by this passage, a quote from a female researcher who has been documenting the deleterious effects of fathering babies later in life: Read More »

Illustration from Victor Hugo et son temps (1881)

WHILE FRANCE’S National Observatory of Secularism sets to work ridding the nation of “religious pathology,” the ramparts of the extravagantly anti-secularist Notre Dame Cathedral remain, towering over Paris, flying buttresses buttressing and gargoyles gargoyling, as they have for hundreds of years. The cathedral celebrates its 850th anniversary starting this week. Galliawatch reports on the installation of a new organ and the festivities.

In 1185, Heraclius of Caesarea called for the Third Crusade from the still-unfinished cathedral. On November 7, 1455, Isabelle Romée, the mother of Joan of Arc, requested that her daughter’s conviction for heresy be overturned at Notre Dame. In December, 1804, Napoleon I was crowned there and in August of 1944, the liberation of Paris was celebrated with a Te Deum mass. To a gargoyle on the towers of Notre Dame, Quasimodo said, “Why was I not made of stone like thee?”

Notre Dame is France.

Victor Hugo wrote of Quasimodo in The Hunchback of Notre-Dame:

He would sometimes spend whole hours crouched before one of the statues in solitary conversation with it. If anyone came upon him then he would run away like a lover surprised during a serenade.

1853 photo by Charles Nègre of Henri Le Secq next to le Stryge in the then-new Gallery of Chimeras.

THE FRENCH government will monitor and shut down any groups that demonstrate “religious pathology,” Interior Minister Manuel Valls said on Tuesday, two days after the announcement of a new agency called, with Orwellian candor, the National Observatory of Secularism. Valls asserted that many religious groups are of concern. According to Reuters:

Valls said the government had a duty to combat religious extremism because it was “an offence to the republic” based on a negation of reason that puts dogma ahead of the law.

Giving examples of religious extremists, he mentioned creationists in the United States and the Muslim world, radical Islamists, ultra-traditionalist Catholics and ultra-Orthodox Jews who want to live separately from the modern world.

As reported at CNA, the interior minister stated that the Catholic group Civitas, recently in the news for its peaceful protests against homosexual “marriage,” pushes “the limits of legality … All excesses are being minutely registered in case we have to consider dissolving it and defending this before a judge.”

Of course, who are the religious pathologists? They are the millions of Muslims opposed to historic France and bidden to conquer infidels. But, presumably in order to justify its concern about Islam, the government will monitor any groups that are actually religious, any groups that refuse to confine faith to the private realm. Perhaps France will eventually rival Saudi Arabia in its prohibition of any and all expressions of devout Christianity. Then the National Observatory of Secularism could be turned into a mosque. Read More »

Elizabeth Cady Stanton

“THE Declaration of Rights and Sentiments” approved by the suffragists at the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848 is a remarkably puerile and deceitful political document. That it has achieved such immense historical stature is not a tribute to women’s rights but a glaring indictment. If eloquent 15-year-olds gathered to draw up a list of complaints against their parents, they would be no doubt be remarkably similar to the complaints in this document. The Declaration of Rights, which was written as a cheap knock-off of the Declaration of Independence even though the suffragists had absolutely no intention of declaring their own government or physically defending their views, intones at the end of its opening paragraphs:

The history of mankind is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations on the part of man toward woman, having in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over her. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world.

This was written by women whose daily existence was subsidized and protected by men, women who would not have publicly uttered these words without fear of arrest or imprisonment if truly they lived under “absolute tyranny” or even its close approximation.

First among the abuses of which mankind is alleged guilty:

He has never permitted her to exercise her inalienable right to the elective franchise.

As the anti-suffragist Helen Kendrick Johnson pointed out in her 1897 book Woman and the Republic, the franchise was never an “inalienable right” for anyone, neither in America nor in Britain. From the very beginning, suffrage was limited and carried property and citizenship qualifications. The vote was no more an inalienable right than being a senator was an inalienable right. Many men had been denied the vote. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, one of the authors of the Declaration, obviously did not believe the vote was a natural right because she did not support granting the franchise to blacks after the Civil War.

The second count in the Declaration is this:

He has compelled her to submit to laws, in the formation of which she had no voice.

False again. Women did indeed have a voice in the formation of laws both privately, in their close individual influence over male voters, and publicly, in their formal right of petition. Here is an example cited by Johnson:

At the very time when Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott were writing that indictment against the United States Government, Dorothea Dix was presenting a memorial to the National Congress asking for an appropriation of five hundred thousand acres of the public lands to endow hospitals for the indigent insane. [Women and the Republic, p. 25]

The proposal, which later included tens of millions of acres, ultimately passed the House and Senate but was vetoed by President Pierce, who was against extending federal power in this instance. Dix then took it to the state level and achieved success in seven states that ultimately led to separating the criminal from the insane throughout the country.

Not only did women have the right of petition, but because of women’s non-partisan situation they were arguably of especial influence in politics.

I DID not realize until today that the militantly anti-white Southern Poverty Law Center, which lists websites such as View from the Right and Vdare as “hate groups,” also defines traditionalist Catholics devoted to the Tridentine liturgy as extremist haters. That’s interesting. It seems wherever there is life, the SPLC is there to smear it.

As posted at The Remnant, here is Conservapedia’s informative entry on the SPLC, with descriptions of its extensive activities and finances. The organization now has over $200 million in assets.

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BUCK writes:

An entry at VFR discusses and links to an article by Daniel Greenfield in which he discusses a possible way to restore America through by limiting immigration, cultural secession and by properly marshaling the forces of traditionalist demographics. Greenfield discusses how the Amish and Chassidic Jews successfully segregate their culture from others with little friction. He mentions a Chassidic community that was visited by Oprah that had no idea who she was. I found the video.

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A NEW JERSEY man is in jail for failing to make alimony payments that exceed his income, and he has lost his job as a result of his imprisonment, according to the Hunterdon County Democrat. John Waldorf was ordered to pay $107,000 a year to his former spouse. His average income has been about $90,000 in recent years, according to the newspaper.

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JOHN E. writes:

My wife and I have discussed the phenomenon of Ann Barnhardt on a few different occasions. We both find her intriguing and have basically concluded about her what she concludes about herself – that she is an anomalously masculine woman, that masculinity does not find its optimum expression in her because she is a woman, and that her manner and activity would find a better vehicle of expression in a man. This is not to criticize what she is doing, or to say she should refrain from doing it. Read More »

ELLEN writes:

I wanted to bring up yet another cultural problem that women in the workforce have created in our society: The awkwardness of dealing with “stay-at-home dads.” When my child becomes friends with someone, it’s nice to have a play date. I can have a little grown-up time with the mother; they can run around and be kids with their friends. The problem with stay-at-home dads is that suddenly you as a married woman are expected to spend time alone with a married man, and everyone has to pretend like this is okay. It’s not appropriate and I believe it can lead to improper relationships. Read More »

CAROLYN, who commented on the University of California’s new logo at her blog, writes:

The University of California and the culture it represents aren’t quite meaningless, as you suggested. They now have a derived meaning. For example, remember Kentucky Fried Chicken? Each of those three words had an actual and specific meaning. Now the company is simply KFC. The meaning of those letters is derived entirely from the past: For all those old enough to remember, they still stand for Kentucky Fried Chicken. The meaning of the letters rests on the past . . . while the letters themselves simultaneously demolish the past. Read More »

Still Life by Giovanna Garzoni

CHRISTIE writes:

I am so grateful to have found your website. I am struggling with my current situation and feel a light of hope shining in – the possibility of truly engaging my mind while being a housewife.

I am a college educated, stay-at-home mother of two young, elementary school children. Having come up for air out of the whirlwind life of preschoolers at home, I am struggling with the rhythm and meaning of my daily life. I physically labor each day cleaning and cooking, etc. for my family, but my mind feels dull much of the time.

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THE brave new world of commercial reproduction creates a welter of interesting stories for journalists. There is never a dull day for the news media as long as the child-production factories, with their sleek labs and carpeted waiting rooms, roll along. Engineering human life is extremely complex and therefore extremely interesting. For instance, Cathy Lynn Grossman, (beaming in the photo above) of USA Today, reported earlier this week on the legal “challenges” involved in the cold-blooded, high-tech market for children. Who will be called a mother when one woman provides the eggs and another the womb? It is extremely complex and therefore extremely interesting. It was as if the beaming Grossman were reporting on the latest exciting app for IPhones. We are told the various legal and commercial maneuvers two homosexual men go through to procure twin girls, with the only drawback being that it is all so complex. She wrote: Read More »