JOHN HARRIS, editor of Praesidium and executive director of the Center for Literate Values, writes:

ROWAN ATKINSON, the British actor, spoke out recently against Britain’s draconian hate speech law, which has led to hundreds of arrests for those who have violated liberal rules of etiquette, such as the man who called a police horse “gay.” The “right to insult and offend” is basic to British tradition, Atkinson said. He stated:

“‘I’m not intolerant,’ say many softly-spoken, highly educated liberal-minded people. ‘I’m only intolerant of intolerance.’ And people tend to nod sagely and say, ‘Oh yes, wise words, wise words.’ And yet if you think about this supposedly inarguable statement for longer than five seconds you realize that all it is advocating is the replacement of one kind of intolerance with another.” Read More »

JANE S. writes:

Dennis Prager writes:

“Same-sex marriage is the only social movement to break entirely with the past, to create a moral ideal never before conceived. . .. After all, you need a lot of self-esteem to hold yourself morally superior to all those who preceded you.”

Dennis Prager doesn’t get it. To wipe out the accumulated social knowledge of the past is the goal of totalitarianism, not an incidental byproduct. That is what makes it so irresistible. Few people, it turns out, can pass up the opportunity to style themselves morally superior to every person who has ever lived.

SAME-SEX “marriage” has never been approved by voters in any state, but will be on the ballot in four states next week: Maine, Washington, Maryland and Minnesota. Unsurprisingly, the New York Times does not believe the issue should be submitted to the electorate at all. An editorial in today’s paper openly objects to democratic processes. The editorial states: Read More »

AT Galliawatch, the writer Tiberge theorizes that Yoselyn Ortega, the Dominican nanny who killed two children in New York last week, was acting upon powerful, partly subconscious feelings of envy that emerged in sudden violence against the two children. In that case, the murders would not be, as I said, “incomprehensible” psychotic or demonic acts. Tiberge speculates that the nanny’s envy may have been worsened by the kindness of the Krims, who even went so far as to visit Ortega’s family in the Dominican Republic and gave her expensive gifts.

Tiberge makes an interesting comparison. When she worked as a city public school teacher, her students, whom I believe were largely nonwhite, had more, not less, hostility toward her when she was especially kind to them. She writes:

One thing I learned in the public schools is that the kinder and more familiar you are with the kids, the more they hate you. They hate your kindness because in their mind you are supposed to hate them so that they can hate you. When you remove any justification for their hatred they may get even. Crazy, but true.

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WERE Americans ever asked if they wanted their federal government to promote “women’s rights” around the world? The answer is no. Just as voters were never asked if they wanted mass immigration from non-European countries or if they wanted legal abortion or if they wanted God banished from public life, so they were never asked if they wanted their government to promote feminism in foreign countries.

In this video, America’s first-ever Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues Melanne Verveer, who was appointed by Obama, explains her mission. She makes the astounding and factually incorrect claim that female-run businesses are “the accelerator” of economic growth.

Promoting women’s rights means promoting discrimination. It doesn’t mean creating equality of opportunity. It means creating inequality of opportunity. Our Global Mistress of Feminist Supremacy advocates directing economic aid to female-run businesses and helping women purely because they are women to attain positions of power.

Political power is now a human right for women. Woman’s traditional place in the home and community is now, by definition, a violation of human rights.

Feminism is ever-radicalizing, demanding not just the reconstruction of American society but of the entire world. Family collapse, disastrously low fertility, feminized poverty, sexual disease, stupid children, moral apathy and a pervasive decline in civility and manners —-  all this, Verveer wishes to spread.

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JAMES P. writes:

The Daily Mail reports Putin’s remark about the band Pussy Riot:

“We have red lines beyond which starts the destruction of the moral foundations of our society,” Putin went on. “If people cross this line they should be made responsible in line with the law.”

Wasn’t there a time when American leaders talked like this instead of whimpering about “freedom of expression”?

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THIS IS a heartbreaking picture of the sister of Yoselyn Ortega, the nanny who murdered two children on the Upper West Side of Manhattan last week.  Mylades Ortega said she was horrified by what her sister had done and could not comprehend it. Her 50-year-old sister appeared to enjoy and love the Krim children. According to reports of neighbors of the Krim family who saw the nanny with the children, she was kind and sociable. It is unlikely she would have been kept in the position of nanny for two years by a doting mother if she had not been. Marina Krim apparently saw no warning signs, or did not take them seriously, but such things happen even in close families. Not long ago, an otherwise normal family near where I live was killed, the mother, father and son all stabbed with a samurai sword by another son, whom they knew was mentally ill but believed they could help on their own. Call it a psychotic breakdown or demonic possession, the Krim murders similarly defy all human motivations.

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THERE is a brief essay at Tradition in Action by the late Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira on the Santa Maria Formosa Square in Venice in the 18th century. From the piece:

This small world assembled around a square is ceremonious and distinguished, yet it is also marked by a note of intimacy. It reveals the spirit of a society where men, far from being dissolved in the anonymous multitudes, tend to create organic and distinct groups that escape the isolation, anonymity and desolation of the individual facing the masses.

In this square, so picturesque and human, so distinguished and so typically sacral with the radiating presence of the small church, the different classes live together harmoniously. How it differs from some of the immense modern squares, where on the mare magnum [enormity] of asphalt and lost in an agitated mob walking madly in every direction, men can only see the cyclopean skyscrapers that dishearten them.

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NICHOLAS writes:

Your post about a young woman in college who wants more than anything a traditional marriage was an immense consolation to me. I am a young man in college in the perfectly complementary position. (Though by God’s grace with more hope, I think.) To the wise, the path that God has set for us should always appear terrifyingly impossible, but for the confidence we have in his providence.

To Sophia, may God bless you. And to God, may I meet someone like her someday!

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Giovanna Garzoni

PENNY writes:

I was paging through my copy of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen last evening and ran across a couple of passages that really jumped out at me, probably because of some of the things you’ve been writing about.

The first concerns Fanny and her cousin Edmund.

“Kept back as she was by everybody else, his single support could not bring her forward; but his attentions were otherwise of the highest importance in assisting the improvement of her mind, and extending its pleasures. He knew her to be clever, to have a quick apprehension as well as good sense, and a fondness for reading, which, properly directed, must be an education in itself. Read More »

GUILAIN writes from France:

This is in response to your recent entry on French women.

I would not say that the French are not classy anymore. Actually, many women look like very classy prostitutes.

In general, there are two kinds of women. Those who spend lots of time grooming and choosing clothes in their wardrobe, and those who don’t. Read More »

IN AMERICA, a vote is a shockingly trivial thing. And it’s the most important thing in the world.

In this ad for the Obama campaign, a young actress describes the ecstasy of voting for the “first time,” playing on the double meaning of “the first time.” Lena Dunham is hideously tattooed and simmering with righteousness. She suggests girls must be wary of doing it with just any man. He might not be a supporter of the Lily Ledbetter Act, a piece of legislation most 18-year-old girls probably know nothing about. The bill, which allows older women to sue for retroactive wages, stands for brutal oppression. Miss Dunham also brings up the contraceptive issue, and how important it is, (there’s something a feminism-addled girl can understand) linking democratic participation again to sexual fulfillment.

This ad is so telling. For the liberal, a vote is like sexual intercourse. It’s a form of transcendence. Through politics, heaven on earth can be realized. “Before I was a girl, now I was a woman,” Miss Dunham says about her initiation. She voted for the greatest lover a girl could have, Barack Obama.

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WHAT happens to a woman as lovely, talented and patrician as Helena Bonham Carter when she embraces modern Hollywood? She becomes a raging nihilist. See Kidist Paulos Asrat’s post on Bonham Carter’s latest role as Miss Havisham in a remake of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations. Forty horses couldn’t drag me to see this movie.

Remember how charming Bonham Carter was as Lucy Honeychurch in the film version of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View? She’s now more Medusa with snakes in her hair than Miss Honeychurch.

Bonham Carter with What's His Name, her partner in crime

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Six's Bridge, Rembrandt

LEGEND has it that Rembrandt completed this sketch of 1645 in the time it took a servant to run to a nearby village for a pot of mustard.

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JESSE POWELL writes: