June 28, 2012
SJF writes:
I just realized, the HHS Mandate is being imposed by a Catholic (Kathleen Sebelius), and Obamacare was upheld by the swing vote of another Catholic (Chief Justice John Roberts). Roberts is a practicing Catholic who faithfully attends Mass at his parish in Maryland. We’re committing suicide as a Church and as a country. Unbelievable.
June 28, 2012
THE AMISH are officially exempt from Obamacare mandates because of their longtime refusal to participate in major health insurance plans. The Amish save and collectively support individuals in need of medical care. On this principle of independence and interdependence, they are eminently wise.
Contrast that with the stance of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops which even today, despite the prospect of Catholic hospitals and agencies being forced to pay for contraceptives and abortifacients, still blithely endorses nationalized medicine. As a commenter writes at the USCC blog:
If the use of this term [universal health care] means that the Church otherwise supports “Obamacare,” which is government dictating (gov. already does this) to insurance companies their coverage and to medical doctors procedures and groups of persons to be covered, I would then posit that the Church no longer views humans as individuals with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property, but rather as members of groups with “rights” according to group membership. Read More »
June 28, 2012
KEN KLUKOWSKI, legal counsel for the Family Research Council, writes:
The Supreme Court has today given the federal government unlimited authority to use its tax power to require Americans to engage in specific commercial activity. The obvious implication is chilling: Uncle Sam can make you buy anything, at any price, for any reason. Read More »
June 28, 2012
ALAN writes:
In regard to people wearing vapid smiles in photographs:
A bank in St. Louis produced a flier promoting auto loans. It depicted a young, bearded male (to say “man” would be absurd), gripping a steering wheel, and wearing blue jeans, baseball cap, orange jacket, jogging shoes with orange laces, and an inane smile. Read More »
June 28, 2012
FROM the Associated Press:
The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the individual insurance requirement at the heart of President Barack Obama’s health care overhaul.
The decision means the historic overhaul will continue to go into effect over the next several years, affecting the way that countless Americans receive and pay for their personal medical care. The ruling also handed Obama a campaign-season victory in rejecting arguments that Congress went too far in requiring most Americans to have health insurance or pay a penalty.
June 28, 2012
USA TODAY reports:
A plan to crack down on ultra-loud grunting in women’s tennis has been “unanimously green-lighted” by the WTA players’ council, representatives from all four majors and the International Tennis Federation, according to USA Today.
“It’s time for us to drive excessive grunting out of the game for future generations,” WTA CEO Stacey Allaster told the publication.
Women athletes are so driven to display brawn and aggression that far more than a ban on excessive grunting will do the job for future generations. At this rate, there will be no future generations.
June 26, 2012
INGRES, as we have discussed before, was famous for his portraits, including official portraits of Napoleon and idealistic renderings of nineteenth-century European artistocrats. While living in Rome, he also executed many drawings of wealthy tourists, usually family portraits full of character and charm. Here is his drawing of Charles Hayard and his daughter, Marguerite, a work which captures the subtle tenderness between a father and his child. The girl depicted is precocious, intelligent and clearly proud of her father. They seem utterly comfortable in each other’s arms. Ingres was fascinated with the clothing of the period and its interplay with personality. Here, the father’s stiff high collar and military cuffs contrast with the slim, fragile child he clasps. The drawing examines the ever-powerful tension between masculine and feminine, both necessary and incomplete. Neither smiles here, at least not in the way we tend to think of smiles today; both are content.
Ingres is famous for saying, “Le dessin c’est la probité de l’art,” or “Drawing is the probity of Art,” so great was his conviction regarding the power of the simple outline. One of his inspirations was the British sculptor and illustrator John Flaxman, whose illustrations of Homer’s poems captured action and personality with simple outline and silhouette. How is it possible that lines on paper can bring so much to life?
Odysseus in the Underworld, John Flaxman, 1792
June 26, 2012
IZZY, who is 17 years old and lives in Canada, writes:
There is a contingent within the Men’s Rights Movement, which can be found in various places on the Internet, that pushes the idea of artificial wombs. They say that selectively choosing boys over girls is a good thing. They actually advocate exterminating one sex. To state this simple fact will incite rage, name-calling, and the oh-so-tired label of “feminist”from the Men’s Right Movement. One must ask, however, what makes them speak this way? It may be obvious to say, but most MRAs (Men’s Rights Activists) are young men who have had no success with women, and so hate them for denying them. Though this is a foolish way to judge someone, it is one of the reasons why they think they way they do. Instead of seeking better opportunities, they flock to the idea that to get rid of all women is the best thing. Read More »
June 26, 2012
FEMINISTS, such as Anne-Marie Slaughter, often claim that companies have an obligation to create an equal number of positions for men and women because equality is profitable. The expenses of accommodating women employees in demanding jobs, so the argument goes, are ultimately compensated. If employees devote much less time to their jobs and are often distracted, productivity increases.
This fantastical argument, rehashed in Slaughter’s latest piece in The Atlantic, defies common sense. It has also been refuted. See British academic Catherine Hakim’s long report on the subject.
Despite the many forces pushing equality, there is virtually no organized resistance to this flawed thinking and the coercive project of workforce quotas. There is promising news, however, from Britain. A businessman, Mike Buchanan, has started a new organization, Campaign for Merit in Business, to resist “positive discrimination for women.” He writes:
The reasons for the ‘imbalances’ between the numbers of men and women in the senior reaches of organisations in general, and in the boardroom in particular, are very well understood, although not widely understood. They’re attributable (as are phenomena such as the ‘gender pay gap’) to the choices freely made by men and women with regard to the world of work and have nothing to do with discrimination against women.
June 26, 2012
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:
My computer catastrophe of last Thursday wiped out all my e-mail records including my e-mail addresses. I am asking my correspondents to e-mail me at dactylic@verizon.net so that I might rebuild my address book. About a dozen of the friendliest ones are regular readers of The Thinking Housewife.
Thank you.
June 26, 2012
PAUL writes:
My brother was a combat medic in Vietnam. I don’t ask him about his horrific experiences, but they come out from time to time. He recently told me about his platoon crossing a river and trying to avoid huge Chinese claymore mines (much bigger than American claymores). His platoon used makeshift flotation devices such as tree branches. Read More »
June 26, 2012
PENNY writes:
Your recent entry on women who want to have it all made me think of the author Emilie Loring. She wrote romances from the 1930s through the ’50s. Her heroines were spirited, can-do women who tried to make the world a better place. They had a sense of humor, were loving, and believed in family. The heroes were hard-working men who, like the heroines, placed duty above personal desires. Read More »
June 24, 2012
DANIEL S. writes:
According to American researchers, societies in which the belief in a literal Hell is accepted as the norm have a lower level of crime than those that eschew damnation and divine punishment for a universalist Heaven. Read More »
June 22, 2012
FRED OWENS writes:
Compare the photos. The first one shows the Supreme Court Justices in 1917, with stern and serious faces — one would even describe them as being “judgmental.”
Of course, we don’t see the justices of 1917 in their private moments, and no doubt they smiled, joked, and laughed at certain moments in their lives, but they reserved their serious faces for their serious work of judgment.
But we’ve come a long way, baby. Now we serve up justice with a smile in this 2012 photo of the Supreme Court. Let’s be lighthearted, joyful and casual — not “judgmental” or, God forbid, serious.
June 22, 2012
C.S. LEWIS said many of our most hailed scientific advances do not represent a conquest over Nature so much as a conquest of some men by other men. So it is with contraception. “Each generation exercises power over its successors; and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors,” Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man.
There are at least four ways in which the mass acceptance of contraception represents a form of subjugation of some by others. Read More »
June 22, 2012
A PRINCETON professor who left her job in the State Department because it was wrecking havoc on the lives of her teenage sons, has tiresomely written about it in Atlantic Magazine, as if reporting on this type of conflict for the very first time. Joining the ever-swelling ranks of women who exploit their personal lives for journalistic fame and fortune, Anne-Marie Slaughter has created a virtual firestorm of controversy, however, because she states that it is hard for women to have it all. What is the solution? Slaughter asks.
The solution is this. Women can have it all, she says, but only when women have it all. Yes, friends, this is the startling crux of her argument. She writes:
The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.
The essay is no less oblivious and dishonest than the mountains of other pieces by whining feminists.
I suspect one reason it has caused such a storm, and Slaughter is viewed as something of a traitor despite her full support for feminism, is that she has had the audacity to speak of the difficulty of raising even teenage children with a high-powered and well-paying job. That’s a no-no.
Slaughter’s focus, of course, is on the happiness of women and not on the ultimate effects of their decisions on their dependents, on the mood and temper of society at large, or on employers forced to tolerate the relatively low retention rate and “flexibility” of women employees.
June 21, 2012
DIANA writes:
What on earth happens in the mind of an impressionable adolescent when he, or she, is told that the Ancient Greeks thought love between two men was the highest form of love, as they are told in this highly-touted sex education book for pre-teens, It’s Perfectly Normal? I imagine that it throws the boys into extreme confusion, and makes the girls feel ugly and undesirable. Which is the intended effect.
Interesting, that they don’t mention that homosexuality among the Ancient Greeks involved pederasty.
June 21, 2012
CONSTANCE writes:
I read this opinion piece in the New York Times and thought it would be of interest to you and other readers of your site. The author, a professor of philosophy, argues that the decision to have children is the biggest ethical decision we make. But the fact that it’s a decision at all is a byproduct of contraception, abortion, and the mentality that fertility should be controlled at all times. What about those of us who let God and nature take their course instead? Are we opting out of the hard ethical decision-making, or are we acting unethically for not taking control in the first place? I also noticed that she thinks through in depth what parents owe a child but fails to address what a child might give to a parent, especially as pertains to the parent’s access to the full range of human experience and character development.