AS THE U.S. Supreme Court ponders Hollingsworth v. Perry and whether states have the authority to prohibit same-sex unions, it’s important to remember that, whatever the outcome of this decision, there is a marriage crisis in this country that will not be resolved by a Supreme Court decision upholding California’s Proposition 8. The states already actively discourage marriage and encourage immense damage to it. Divorce is a full-blown government industry.

Civil marriage has devolved into an individualistic, cruel and oppressive free-for-all. The solution is not better divorce laws. The solution is to return to an older model, in which marriage is a vow upheld before the non-governmental authorities of God, family, community and church. George Washington didn’t have a state marriage license, and you don’t need one either.

See Jeremy Morris’s excellent and persuasive defense of ecclesiastical marriage in this previous entry. He wrote:

I submit to you that God, and the families of origin for both parties have the only real influence and jurisdiction [over marriage.] If their influence in a particular case is insufficient, no true remedy will be had, at least not immediately. The state is notorious for causing minor problems to escalate. When an offended party cries to the state for help the result is the creation of wedge between husband and wife that in most cases can never be removed. Sole custody and child support are not true remedies. Whereas following God’s plan, conscience and family justice ultimately rule the day, whether it be sooner or later.

As for my wife and I, we have chosen the pure form of ecclesiastical marriage, if anyone considers it a “risk” I simply say to them, “You do not have to take the risk.” (more…)

  WRITING in Slate, Lionel Shriver says that Margaret Thatcher was a model feminist. British feminist commenters also say, in so many words, "Well, she was a powerful woman so she was one of us." Liberals can't conceive of a powerful woman who wasn't a political narcissist so they rush to say she was really one of them. The truth is, Thatcher did not see women as her favorite interest group and did not believe in restructuring British society so that women could attain power. She was comfortable with men in charge. Unlike Hillary Clinton, who made women her priority as Secretary of State, and unlike Christine LaGarde, the head of the International Monetary Fund who attributed the financial crisis of recent years to too much testosterone, Thatcher rejected the institutionalized enforced equality that is feminism. Thatcher is quoted as saying: ‘The feminists hate me, don’t they? And I don’t blame them. For I hate feminism. It is poison.’ Not only was Margaret Thatcher not feminist in her policies, but her demeanor was manly. She behaved by the standards of a male dominated world, not a world where the likes of Barbara Walters and Nancy Pelosi are in charge. As such, she was not a role model for most women because most women don't want to be men. Little girls will never long for Margaret Thatcher dolls.

AS THE press reacts to the death of Margaret Thatcher, a leader of exceptional talents who stands out among powerful women of the 20th century for her rejection of feminism, which she called “poison,” we will find her identified — and demonized — as an arch conservative. Here are interesting comments to the contrary by Peter Hitchens and Lawrence Auster in 2007.

Hitchens wrote a review in The American Conservative of John O’Sullivan’s celebratory book about Reagan, Thatcher and Pope John Paul II, The President, the Pope, and the Prime Minister: Three Who Changed the World. In that review, Hitchens stated:

What did Prime Minister Thatcher and President Reagan do for the institution of marriage, rigor in education, adult authority, or the idea that people are responsible for their own actions? Far too little.

What did they do for the idea of national sovereignty without which no proper conservative positions can be defended? Well, Reagan was less to blame in this matter, but Thatcher repeatedly compromised with the European Union’s aggrandizement, which is actually one of the major instances of real great-power aggression in our age. She began the betrayal—now almost complete—of Britain’s own people in Northern Ireland, and even became involved in the campaign for liberal intervention in Yugoslavia, a foreign-policy impulse that led directly to the Iraq fiasco. (more…)

SEXUAL predators used to have to go to the trouble of luring children in off the streets. Now all they have to do is marry each other and legally adopt children. George Harasz and Douglas Wirth allegedly did just that in Connecticut. The men adopted three sets of male siblings. They are now facing charges of sexual assault, after they withdrew their initial no-contest pleas to lesser charges in a hearing on Friday. According to the New York Daily News:

One of the victims who spoke during the court hearing said sexual assault began when he was 6. (more…)

ALTHOUGH I have read several of her husband’s books, I am embarrassed to say I have never read the works of Edith Schaeffer, wife of Francis Schaeffer, the Evangelical Christian thinker who had a gift for deflating philosophical materialism. Mrs. Schaeffer, who died in Switzerland last week at the age of 98, helped her husband run L’Abri, their famous intellectual hostel in Switzerland. She wrote more than two dozen books and ardently defended the role of women at home. She wrote in The Hidden Art of Homemaking:

If you stop putting off homemaking until your hope of marriage develops into a reality, and start to develop an interesting home right now, it seems to me two things will happen: first, you will develop into the person you could be as you surround yourself with things that express your own tastes and ideas; and second, as you relax and become interested in areas of creativity, you will develop into a more interesting person to be with.

Mrs. Schaeffer apparently understood that domesticity is a state of being, not just a state of doing.

Here are some other quotes (page numbers omitted) from the book: (more…)

Before us lies eternity: our souls
are love, and a continual farewell.

— “Ephemera,” W.B. Yeats

LAWRENCE AUSTER, traditionalist writer and culture critic, was buried by friends and family on Tuesday, April 2 in Pennsylvania.

His body was carried at 11:30 a.m. into the vestibule of the Holy Cross Catholic Church in Mount Airy in a simple oak coffin made by Trappist monks in Iowa, a fitting enclosure for a man who lived as austerely as a monk, without many of the basics of modern life, such as cell phone, car or cable television. The church was just two miles from the summer home of one of Mr. Auster’s fondest heroes, George Washington, a figure who always inspired him.

In the foyer, his remains were blessed for the first time. Accompanied by a quiet reverence —  a decision was made to forgo music —  the coffin was taken by his friends to the front of the stone Gothic church. Easter lilies decorated the main marble altar.  Large baskets of snapdragons, white chrysanthemums and other flowers flanked the casket.  Artificial illumination of the altar and the sunlight that filtered through the stained-glass windows evoked the significance of the great feast that gives the Church its meaning. The stone walls and wooden beams, dramatically carved with the faces of angels and their wings, enhanced the prayerful atmosphere.

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CHARLES STEVENS writes:

Some thoughts on this Easter:

“He is not here: for He is risen, as He said. Come, see the place where the Lord lay.” Matthew 28:6

The Resurrection leads us to an ever-present transcendence and perfect freedom. Earthly “freedom” is not what traditionalists and conservatives should be supporting. Freedom as the primary agenda inevitably morphs into license and narcissism.

What we must champion instead is ordered liberty, i.e., the pursuit of optimality. We live in the reality of an imperfect world, where there are always trade-offs, personal choices, responsibilities, and results. But just like Satan himself, leftists tempt the ignorant and naïve with delusions of pure autonomy. “Demand your rights” they insist, “and you shall be free.” (more…)

MY ENTRY on the death of Lawrence Auster can be found here at VFR. I am also posting it in its entirety below:

LAWRENCE AUSTER: JANUARY 26, 1949 – MARCH 29, 2013

Lawrence Auster died today at 3:56 a.m., Eastern Daylight Time, at a hospice in West Chester, Pennsylvania. His death came after more than a week of rapidly worsening distress and physical collapse caused by the pancreatic cancer he endured for almost three years.

On Monday evening, after arriving at the hospice in the late afternoon, Mr. Auster read and responded to a few emails. He then closed his battered and medicine-stained Lenovo laptop for the last time. “That’s enough for now,” he said, holding his hands over the computer as if sated by an unfinished meal.

He did not expect that to be the last. (more…)

ALYSSA writes:

I’ve been thinking about the story of King Solomon and the two women who brought a baby before him and were seeking judgment. While one woman thought it was perfectly fair to split the baby in two, the other would rather give the baby up entirely before she saw any harm done to it. I see a shocking parallel in America today. (more…)

DON VINCENZO writes:

The clock struck 10:01 A.M. on the clock that sits above the chair of the Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court yesterday, and the Clerk intoned, “All rise,” and with those words the nine Justices of the Court filed into their respective seats that are bracketed by four Doric granite pillars. There was not an empty seat to be found in the Court, for this case had prompted widespread attention not only in the U.S., but from media outlets all over the world.

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JEANETTE V. writes:

Today was my voice class recital at the Unitarian Universalist Fellowship of Winston-Salem. There was a new sign on that bathroom door that wasn’t there six months ago. (more…)

  IN THE first of two articles at Tradition in Action, Dr. Carol Byrne takes an interesting look at Giorgio La Pira, the charismatic Italian politician, twice mayor of Florence, who is formally being considered for canonization by the Catholic Church. She writes: Let us look at the teaching and example set by this “saint in politics” who is now being considered for formal canonization. Outwardly, La Pira presented himself as an extraordinarily pious Catholic. He attended Mass daily, read the Bible, lived for some years in a monastery cell and was often seen walking around Florence barefoot, having given his shoes, coat, umbrella and most of his salary to the poor. But his good works were accompanied by flamboyant and idiosyncratic gestures, (8) and inwardly he was not lacking in self-aggrandizing flights of fancy. .... Here La Pira shows himself to be one of those millenarian impostors who throughout history have sought to mobilize the masses of the poor towards a communistic dream of a Golden Age where everyone would supposedly live together in harmony. When these utopian dreams are put into practice, however, they have always resulted in widespread mayhem and bloodshed.

JEANETTE V. writes:

A mentally confused man who has been medically altered to appear as a woman appeared before the New Jersey Senate, which is considering outlawing therapy for children and adolescents who want to overcome homosexual desires. As reported by Christopher Doyle at World Net Daily, the man lied about a therapy he never got. I’m so not surprised. What is shocking is that sane people would even pay attention to this disturbed individual.

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JAMES P. writes:

The Daily Mail reports on the “enthronement” of the new Archbishop of Canterbury:

Amid a spectacular celebratory ceremony of African music and dance, former oil executive Justin Welby became the 105th Archbishop to preside over the world’s 77 million Anglicans. [JP: African music and dance has what to do with the Church of England? Is this the Church of Making Africans Happy now?]

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AT Reclaiming Beauty, Thomas F. Bertonneau reflects on works by Ralph Vaughan Williams and Gustav Holst, two twentieth century composers who sought to preserve traditional English folk music. Alluding to this tradition, compositions such as Vaughan Williams’ famous score, The Lark Ascending, evoked the gentle splendor of the landscape of England:

… Vaughan Williams and Holst began to tramp the countryside in Somerset, Hampshire, Essex, East Anglia, and Norfolk, notebooks at ready, to collect and annotate the archaic song-tradition that they well knew was on the verge of extinction. These were the years from 1902 to 1905. In addition to their project of preserving the treasury of the traditional ballads, love songs, and lullabies, both men had the notion that English folksong could become the basis of a novel and truly English concert music. That music would be new because its basis would be more ancient than that of the Germanic conservatory-vocabulary employed by Stanford and his peers.
(more…)