JOSEPH L. EBBECKE writes:

Nothing But a Lout

Charles d’Orléans (1394-1465), Rondel 333 (tr. R.N. Currey):

Winter, you’re nothing but a lout.
Summer is polite and gentle;
Only look how May and April
Accompany him day in, day out.
See how fields and woods and flowers
Wear his livery of verdure
And of many other colours
According to the rule of Nature;
But, Winter, you are all filled out
With snow and sleet and wind and drizzle;
It’s time we sent you into exile;
I never flatter, but speak out;
Winter, you’re nothing but a lout. (more…)

A READER writes:

I’ve also noticed this creepily excessive hugging and kissing among politicians, but Democrats engage in it more frequently than Republicans. Its inconsistency with their speech and sexual harassment codes leads me to believe that it’s another of their self-congratulatory rituals of mutual identification, saying, “See, a dirty conservative can’t kiss and  hug except as the prelude to sexual conquest; but we enlightened liberals can touch each other’s bodies in a loving, but non-sexual way.”

It also smacks of both Europe and Hollywood, giving it a double frisson for liberals.  It won’t be long before American politicians will be greeting each other as Khrushchev greeted Yuri Gagarin!

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  I HAVE been unable to do more than glance at my e-mails and at this site for several days due to extenuating circumstances. I plan to post recent comments today.

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ELAINE J. writes:

For years I worked as a nurse at the local hospital and throughout the year we were bombarded with fundraisers. First there was breast cancer awareness, then Relay for Life, Diabetes, Go Red, etc. I guess my heart has been hardened against so many disease fundraisers. It seemed like one wouldn’t end before another started (kind of like professional sports). I saw in the paper just this past week, a researcher lamenting the fact that there were no fundraising blitzes for lung cancer!

Am I not sympathetic to the plight of cancer sufferers? Yes and no. In the mid-nineties, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. (more…)

LEONORA writes:

Your post “Suffering and Purity of Heart” from January 20^th caught my attention. A friend showed it to me on the day I had to go back to school after my winter break, and I have been experiencing the deep truth of those words first hand since then. I want to share some of that with you because it might be of interest to you.

I am a 25-year-old woman, studying and teaching language and literature on graduate level at a liberal state university in the Midwest. I would describe myself and my religious as well as political views as conservative for the most part. I am not married or in a relationship, and thus working and studying at the University, though I would be happy to give up my pursuit of a career for having a family and being a housewife with a good husband by my side any time. I will always be thinking about issues, reading, trying to stay informed and keeping my mind going, yet I realize more and more and feel strongly what women were really created for, and that is not to toughen up, be like men and pursue great careers as a primary goal.

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DANIEL S. writes:

Several American bishops have expressed their willingness to oppose Obama’s HHS mandate, even to the point of going to jail. I truly hope the bishops are sincere in this, and I pray they remain strong and steadfast in the facing the malevolent, secularist tyranny of Obama and the American government. (more…)

AN ANONYMOUS correspondent of a reader writes:

CNN and MSNBC and even FOX have become adept at finding cute little lasses who identify themselves as conservative. Their function is to discredit or undermine conservative ideas with weak defense, no defense or outright hostility. Of course, they’re so absorbed with their own celebrity that they don’t know this and aren’t aware of their role as useful idiots. Most of all they want to show off their hipness and cool. Like Sally Field, they just want to be loved. They want to proclaim to the world, “Hey, I’m a Conservative, but I’m cool!”

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A MALE READER writes:

I am still trying to wrap my head around the idea of women in combat. It horrifies and saddens me no end that a nation has decided to send women to the front lines of combat. Women are the procreators and help carry civilization forward with children who will become upstanding, law-abiding and contributing citizens to the country. Why on earth has this decision been taken to further masculinize and dehumanize women when there is enough manpower to fill those positions?

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MICHAEL MATT, of The Remnant, responds to the recent widely-reported statement by Vatican spokesman Federico Lombardi in favor of Obama’s gun control proposals. He says Lombardi’s remarks did serious damage to the Vatican’s reputation among American conservatives and displayed ignorance of the fundamental threat to civil rights and privacy. “I’m sorry, Father Lombardi, you’re wrong on this one. If you don’t understand the intricacies … don’t interject yourself,” Matt says.

However, he also notes that the international press wildly exaggerated the authority of Lombardi’s statement.

Matt’s appearance before skulls in the Catacombs is somewhat distracting, but he makes important arguments.

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DON VINCENZO writes:

In Spring a young man’s fancy turns to thoughts of love. On the first Sunday in February a huge number of citizens of this country turn their thoughts to the Super Bowl, the most widely viewed sporting event in the world.

Professional football is a national religion. Many, if not most, of our citizenry will remain at home to observe its rituals today. Hence, the stores will be virtually empty; the streets deserted. Well, not quite. From hither, thither and yon, delivery trucks will crisscross our cities delivering the victual that has now become synonymous with the Super Bowl: pizza.

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IN RESPONSE to the young woman who wrote in about her marriage, Matthew H. writes:

The first year or two of marriage is always difficult. My wife and I married when I was 30, and the first year of our marriage was an ordeal, frankly. The wedding day was difficult, the honeymoon was difficult, most everything was difficult. We fought constantly, my wife gave me the cold shoulder more often than not, and I yelled at her far too much. But our marriage has gotten better ever since then. We will have been married for 12 years this month, and we are both far happier now than we were 11 years ago.

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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. (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.  (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. (more…)

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. (more…)