October 15, 2012
MARY M. writes:
There are traditional ways for patriotic women to support the military without joining. Somehow those traditional forms of support have been forgotten or demeaned in the rush to push women into combat. Read More »
October 15, 2012
A LOYAL READER writes:
I recently watched a TV show (I suppose you would call it a sitcom) produced c. 1971 or ’72. Office setting. A female employee discovers she is being paid $200 a month less than the man who had the job before her. Confronting her boss, she is told this is naturally because he had a family to support. Outrage. Fast forward to the present. Within a few days of this I had a daughter tell me of a similar situation involving her employment in the past month. My instinct tells me you would find offering the man more who has a family to support justified. (Forgive me if I’m wrong.) MY instinct tells me it is justified. But for the life of me I can’t make a case for it in my head. IS it justified? I have the greatest respect not only for your judgement but your ability to clearly define principles. Thank you. Read More »
October 15, 2012
THIS maudlin Washington Post story, more editorial than balanced reporting, argues that the same sex “marriage” law on the Maryland ballot is in the interest of children, echoing the slogan used by Gov. Martin O’Malley, who says people should vote for homosexual unions “for the kids.” That’s right. The governor of Maryland believes that being raised by homosexuals and being denied a relationship of any kind with one parent is actually a good thing and should be championed for its own sake.
The article by Aaron C. Davis features two overweight, middle-aged lesbians (almost all middle-aged lesbians are seriously overweight, or so it seems) seeking to formalize the adoption of one of the woman’s twin sons by the other. They are already legally both the parents of another boy who was born to the same woman. The women appear before a female judge who is delighted with their petition and with the idea of three boys being raised by lesbians. Unsurprisingly, they succeed in the adoption of the twins. Now both of their names are on the childrens’ birth certificates, making this document an outright lie and falsification of parentage. One small battle is won in the ongoing war on children.
Amid the sympathetic details about the immense sacrifices of the lesbian couple, we find this interesting paragraph:
Rice [one of the lesbian women], who manages a homeless shelter in the District, carefully documented their Shady Grove fertility clinic’s use of sperm from an anonymous donor so that no one could later claim fatherhood.
These women have with deliberate calculation obliterated the boys’ father from their lives, and we are supposed to believe that they have the children’s best interests at heart.
October 15, 2012
HERE is an undated photo from the Facebook page of the Tea Party showing George W. Bush dancing recently with an injured veteran. The sight of a woman dressed in military fatigues says a lot about what a society thinks of women. But the sight of a woman who has lost her leg in military action, having been deliberately put in harms’ way, says even more, painting a picture of a world that does not value, well, anything. It fills me with horror and disgust, not for this particular woman, who has been maimed permanently and deserves some compassion, but for the powerful institutions and leaders who have condoned this.
In the recent entry on women in the military, a female reader, an Air Force veteran who stated that she joined the military for solely economic reasons, says that women, purely on the basis of their patriotic sentiments, are an asset to the military as soldiers. Terry Morris, also a veteran, disagrees. He writes:
In short, while I agree with you that women CAN BE, and often are, patriotic Americans, I reject that patriotism, as defined above, is in general the chief motivating factor for female enlistments in the U.S. military today.
His comments are worth repeating in full: Read More »
October 13, 2012
JESSE POWELL writes:
What makes for a healthy community? Children. It is really quite simple. A community that invests in children is investing in the future; it is demonstrating the desire to perpetuate itself. This is not simply a worthy ideal. It is a reality apparent in the statistics of social health.
The fertility of a community turns out to be the best indicator of both current family functioning and future flourishing. High fertility is associated with both positive family outcomes in the present and change in a positive direction in the future. A high Married Parents Ratio by itself does not indicate a positive future direction; neither does high income or other indications of economic prosperity. In this way, fertility is different; high fertility is actually a predictor of future increases in fertility as well as future increases in the Married Parents Ratio.
October 13, 2012
IN THE latest entry about the issue of cancer, abortion and oral contraceptives, Samson, a physician, writes:
[M]ost doctors are utterly unaware of the abortion-OCP-and-breast-cancer controversy. Understand: it’s not merely that most doctors disagree that there is a link, but most have not heard that there is a debate surrounding the issue whatsoever. When I was in residency (within the past five years) I was going to do a research project on the question of a link between contraceptive pills and breast cancer, but was talked out of it by several supervisors who thought the topic was unworthy of investigation because they had never heard tell of it.
To me, the issue highlights the power of the supposedly “unbiased” and “scientific” literature, but that is a whole other discussion.
When one thinks of how much public interest there is in the effects of pesticides on human health, the relative lack of interest in this subject is striking.
October 12, 2012
A GREAT ad by the RNC on Biden’s grinning and laughing during the debate.
Lawrence Auster captures the meaning of these grins:
Biden’s constant guffawing while Ryan was speaking—conveying the message, “I can’t believe Ryan is telling such a howler of a partisan lie, I just can’t believe it!”—epitomizes the liberal domination of U.S. politics.
And, as I’ve said so often, the Republicans lack the wit, the steel, and, most importantly, the non-liberal principles to identify this insidious manipulation for what it is and put the Democrats on the defensive over it.
October 12, 2012
A picture of Jane Austen by her sister Cassandra
HISTORY is filled with bright and cultured women who never went to college. Jane Austen, to cite one example, had no formal schooling after the age of eleven. Austen was born in December of 1775. According to the Wikipedia entry on her life:
In 1783, according to family tradition, Jane and Cassandra were sent to Oxford to be educated by Mrs. Ann Cawley and they moved with her to Southampton later in the year. Both girls caught typhus and Jane nearly died.[24] Austen was subsequently educated at home, until leaving for boarding school with her sister Cassandra early in 1785. The school curriculum probably included some French, spelling, needlework, dancing and music and, perhaps, drama. By December 1786, Jane and Cassandra had returned home because the Austens could not afford to send both of their daughters to school.[25]
Austen acquired the remainder of her education by reading books, guided by her father and her brothers James and Henry. [26] George Austen apparently gave his daughters unfettered access to his large and varied library, was tolerant of Austen’s sometimes risqué experiments in writing, and provided both sisters with expensive paper and other materials for their writing and drawing.[27] According to Park Honan, a biographer of Austen, life in the Austen home was lived in “an open, amused, easy intellectual atmosphere” where the ideas of those with whom the Austens might disagree politically or socially were considered and discussed.[28]
Strange, that Austen’s father saw to her education. As we know, from reading Mary Wollstonecraft, Virginia Woolf and many other feminists, fathers back then, for all intents and purposes, hated their daughters and wanted to keep them as stupid as possible.
One wonders what kind of person Austen would be if she had been born 18 or 20 years ago and was an English major taking courses in textual analysis at an Ivy League school today. Instead of wandering through a private library, content to follow her own way through Shakespeare, Milton and Sophocles, with the loving supervision of her father, she would be grinding out papers on interspecies dialogue or great African authors or on the role of women in ancient Chinese poetry. And even Jane might be getting drunk on weekends or having naked trysts in library stairwells. After all, human beings can only rise so much above their circumstances.
Poor Jane. She would never be able to probe her great, God-given subject: the tension between the sexes. She would be relentlessly informed that the sexes don’t exist. How then can there be tension between them? There is now only tension between the age when the sexes were believed to exist and the age, enlightened and liberated, when they do not exist. Issue closed. What more can one say?
Jane would be silenced.
Perhaps she would be one more bit of walking proof that spending $200,000 on a fancy education can, however much it may equip you for the job market, actually make you dumber.
October 12, 2012
MARY writes in response to the discussion in this entry about the pervasive ignorance of the cancer risks and health dangers associated with abortion and contraception:
Planned Parenthood is proud that it doesn’t just do abortions; it also offers pap smears and mammograms – the need for which is accelerated by the sexual freedom they promote. This is tantamount to McDonald’s offering cholesterol tests or Phillip Morris doing free lung exams. It’s ludicrous. In a country that has successfully banned smoking in public in the name of second-hand smoke and whose First Lady has managed to drastically change school lunches for children nationwide due to childhood obesity, why is no one screaming from the rooftops for people to stop sleeping around? We are in the midst of a sexual-activity related crisis and no one will say it. Where is the First Lady when you need her? Read More »
October 12, 2012
JILL FARRIS writes in response to the post on the Navy’s “Love Boat culture:”
Of course, the inevitable result of sex between shipmates under stress are unplanned pregnancies resulting in abortions. Women who undergo abortions have an increase in drug use, divorce/relationship problems, depression etc. In other words, these “love boat” conditions lead to an increase in ruined lives.
Whenever I read of women in the military or see any woman in a man’s uniform (ie., border guard, police woman etc.) I wonder where is her father and why didn’t he protect her? There is something so perverse about a woman acting like a man! And, apparently, underneath that uniform the hormones still do what hormones do and women still act like women!
October 12, 2012
MARTHA RADDATZ, the moderator of last night’s vice presidential debate, failed to control the show. She did nothing while Joe Biden frequently interrupted Paul Ryan, who came across as sincere and had a few good lines, but was generally disappointing and overwhelmed by Biden, who was laughing and grinning like the Joker in Batman. At times, both candidates were talking at once.
Lydia Sherman writes:
For some reason the comments by Ryan: “This is the…this is the inspector general,” reminded me of some words in the song “The Very Model of the Modern Major General,” from the Gilbert and Sullivan show, The Pirates of Penzance. When my daughter plays and sings it on the piano for her children, some of them fall on the floor laughing. When she read the debate script to them, they did the same thing.
Here is some of the transcript: Read More »
October 12, 2012
THERE is a vacuum of authority at the highest levels of the Church. Once again last night, Joe Biden, whose diabolical smirk dominated the vice-presidential debate, stated his support for Roe v. Wade. He said he doesn’t support abortion in his private life, but doesn’t believe it’s right to impose his belief on others, including Jews and Muslims, as if opposition to abortion was a private religious practice, comparable to abstaining from meat on Friday or attending Mass. Biden, who met privately with Pope Benedict XVI just last year, knows full well that his position is rejected by the Church. When Benedict met with Nancy Pelosi in 2009, he explained to her why her position was wrong. He surely did the same with Biden. The Vatican News Service reported after Pelosi’s visit: Read More »
October 11, 2012
THE Washington Times has an article (posted at Galliawatch) on great thinkers who have issued warnings on Islam. Here is a quote from Alexis de Tocqueville:
“I studied the Kuran a great deal…I came away from that study with the conviction that by and large there have been few religions in the world as deadly to men as that of Muhammad. As far as I can see, it is the principle cause of the decadence so visible today in the Muslim world. Its social and political tendencies are in my opinion infinitely more to be feared and I therefore regard it as a form of decadence rather than a form of progress in relation to paganism itself.”
October 11, 2012
A READER received this personal invitation from the Romney-Ryan campaign:
We are extending the deadline for you to enter for a chance to eat pizza with Mitt before joining the Romney-Ryan Team as I face off with Joe Biden at this week’s debate.
It will be a lot of fun, and it will be great to know the whole team is cheering me on. Read More »
October 11, 2012
SUPPORTERS of homosexual “marriage” now commonly refer to their program as a question of “marriage equality.” This is one of those phrases, similar to “reproductive rights,” that is so remarkably illogical and absurd it can be demolished in but a few words. And yet so few people speak up to point out that it makes no sense.
There is one politician who speaks the obvious. The Legislative Assembly of Northern Ireland recently defeated a “gay marriage” initiative. In explaining her vote, Michelle McIlveen of the Democratic Unionists Party said it is “simply a myth that this is an equality issue.”
“Everyone is free to marry,” McIlveen said.
This is true. No one is denied the right to marry. There is no marriage inequality.
You could as easily argue that a man who is denied the right to marry, say, Angelina Jolie is a victim of marriage “inequality” as argue that homosexuals who cannot marry people of the same sex are denied equality.
