AT The Heritage American, Stephen Hopewell has a fascinating post on his experience at the local library with the latest board books for babies. The books aggressively assert racial diversity, even to the point of depicting animals as black or white, and yet ironically it is white parents who are the most frequent borrowers. Hopewell writes:

[A]m I the only one who feels like I am being targeted or manipulated when I am presented with book after book with a black child on the cover, to take home and read to my white baby?

But like so many features of our culture today, the new norms for children’s books were established with no honest public debate and no understanding of what was being given up. There is an opportunity cost to every choice made; energy expended on making children’s books “diverse” is then not used for some other creative purpose. And these products, in my mind, are very unsatisfactory.

Read More »

THREE extraordinary developments in women’s fashions have occurred over the past 100 years. They are so widely accepted that most people barely notice them anymore. They are:

1) The gradual acceptance of pants. Once exclusively reserved for men, pants were completely embraced by the 1960s and are so universal now that a first violinist in a major orchestra in my area sits with her legs spread-eagle during the performance. She is wearing pants and is considered free to sit in any position.

2) The rise of informality. Everyday clothes worn 100 years ago would be considered special occasion dress today. Even nuns wear T-shirts and jeans.

3) The striking increase in revealing clothing.  Unisex pants lead to camisoles and other forms of public lingerie, clothes that are unambiguously feminine. College presidents and congresswomen even wear low-cut blouses.

These changes have not liberated women. Far from it. They have confined them. They have encouraged women to ape men. They have caused them to lower themselves, especially in the eyes of their children, as a pseudo-man is necessarily inferior to a real man. They have created a world that is less beautiful and less ceremonious. Sixteenth-century peasants dressed with more dignity than wealthy Western women today.

All of this is by way of introducing a remarkable document on this subject. No one has expressed the consequences of these changes better than one particular man writing 52 years ago. Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, the Archbishop of Genoa, wrote a prophetic letter to local clergy in 1960 on the subject of the increasing appearance of women in “trousers.” Archbishop Siri maintained that the adoption of masculine dress by women would ultimately spell disaster:

When we see a woman in trousers, we should think not so much of her as of all mankind, of what it will be when women will have masculinized themselves for good. Nobody stands to gain by helping to bring about a future age of vagueness, ambiguity, imperfection and, in a word, monstrosities.

When a sense of the eternal feminine is lost, there is a flattening of society. He wrote:

The consequences of such violations are not a new outline of man, but disorders, hurtful instability of all kinds, the frightening dryness of human souls, the shattering increase in the number of human castaways, driven long since out of people’s sight and mind to live out their decline in boredom, sadness and rejection. Aligned on the wrecking of the eternal norms are to be found the broken families, lives cut short before their time, hearths and homes gone cold, old people cast to one side, youngsters willfully degenerate and — at the end of the line — souls in despair and taking their own lives.

His letter, posted at Catholicmodesty.com, is well worth reading in its entirety. These are extreme words, but all of it has come true.

Read More »

A GROUP of Catholic nuns began a well-funded bus tour yesterday to campaign for more federal monies for the poor. While the most vulnerable members of society suffer the ravages of the sexual revolution and the loss of the sacred, these leftist sisters of mercy insist what people need most is government charity. Confirming the image of America’s religious sisters as political hucksters, these nuns are committed to a desacralized society. Pray for these foolish revolutionaries. They know not what they do. Their minds have been steeped in Kumbaya.

THE NEWS media reported last week that Obama’s executive order granting work permits to illegal immigrants who came here as children would give citizenship to some 800,000 people. The number is closer to two to three million, according to Roy Beck at Numbers USA. He blames Republicans in Congress for their failure “to tackle immigration priorities the last two years.”

— Comments —

Buck writes:

Roy Beck’s column is about numbers; about the economics. No one is better at that than Beck. Sadly, he says nothing about the existential damage being done to the American nation; the permanent and fatal damage. If the United States had the extra three million jobs, would Beck see this as a problem or a solution? Would any but a few Americans care that they are disappearing as a people – jobs or no jobs?

Read More »

.

LIFESITE NEWS reports that General Mills, one of the world’s largest food companies, has come out in opposition to a Minnesota state constitutional amendment banning homosexual “marriage.” The marketer of products such as Cheerios and Pillsbury biscuits, based in Minnesota and heavily dependent on families with children, has committed what Brian Brown of the National Orgnization for Marriage calls “one of the the dumbest corporate PR stunts of all time.”

Here, according to Wikipedia, are some of the products marketed by General Mills, all of which you can easily do without: Read More »

A FEMALE READER in Canada writes:

You have a wonderful site and I am so glad that there are other women out there, like me, who oppose feminism and have had just about enough of the lies, the distortion of history, and the constant victimhood status of feminists. Read More »

ALAN writes:

My father was an ordinary, patriotic American working man. He grew up in the 1920s, was an Army Air Corps veteran of World War II, and a loyal Catholic throughout his life. He understood that certain things are sacred and never open to negotiation. He knew that “No” is one of the most important words in life. He always played by the rules. His character would never allow him to play any other way.

Self-discipline, hard work, responsibility, self-restraint, and loyalty were the essence of his character. Decency was his middle name. In all my life, I never heard him use a profane word or expression. He enjoyed life but was no cockeyed optimist. He had no illusions about the follies and foolishness of most human beings. He had no use for the speed and busyness of modern life. He looked upon rock “music” as several grades below noise. He was certainly no Modernist. He never read a word of what Richard Weaver wrote. But he shared a profound distrust of what Professor Weaver called the “hysterical optimism” so typical of Modernists, i.e., the delusion that they are going to make the world over with “new ideas” and “new solutions” because they are so much “better informed” than those who preceded them. My father knew that Modernists usually make things worse by abandoning long-established ideas and principles. Read More »

WINNIE writes:

Living in New York’s Capital Region, I’ve grown up subject to the ugliness that is the Empire State Plaza – Nelson D. Rockefeller’s brainchild, the construction of which called for razing old ethnic neighborhoods and laid waste to “residential” Albany as such. (Ann Althouse had a thread about this monstrosity from a few years back.)

Here are but a few examples of what New York’s state workers are visually and spatially bombarded by as they arrive at and leave their jobs — as if the jobs themselves were not sufficiently soul-crushing. (“Art” & architecture as oppressor: part of the plan?)

As an antidote and a call to better attention, I recommend Roger Scruton’s documentary on Youtube. Read More »

WE DISCUSSED (here and here) one of the stunning female portraits of Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres  — the portrait of the Comtesse D’Haussonville. Here is another captivating face, that of Madame Frederic Reiset. The oil painting was completed in 1846. Notice its conscious resemblance to the early form of photography, the daguerreotype, which would have been capturing attention then.

The art critic Kenneth Clark wrote that Madame Reiset was a friend of the painter’s and “one can feel it.” Clark wrote in his book The Romantic Rebellion:

Madame Reiset has recorded that when he was painting it she used to hear Monsieur Ingres groaning and sobbing in the next room, so painful to him was the attempt to combine truth and style.

Ingres had a way of harmonizing the sumptuous clothing of the era with personality. The delicate lace collar here complements the melting quality of Madame Reiset’s face and turns a somewhat austere gown into a thing of great beauty. As for the dramatic ringlets, they are the perfect enclosure — like an ornate wrought iron fence around a garden — for the deep pools of Madame Reiset’s eyes.

Everything about Madame Reiset as conveyed in this portrait is a standing rebuke to modern feminism. To a feminist, her passivity, her elegance, her delicacy  — all are signs of her victimization.

Read More »

SIGRID writes:

I am a regular but silent reader. Your passing reference to the cult of ugliness struck a chord today. As it happened, I read the post just after returning from a docent-led tour at the Corcoran Gallery. The docent was an delightful older woman (probably well into her 70s) who skillfully mixed “textbook” art history with her own personal take on the pieces. Read More »

TITLE IX, the federal law which institutionalized discrimination against men in collegiate athletics, has not been a success, say sports experts interviewed by The New York Times. That’s because whites are deliberately excluding black women from scholarships and team participation. Read More »

NO ONE perceived as only good has genuine moral status as a human being. Most white Christians believe it is virtuous to deprive non-whites of moral status. In fact, it is wrong and dehumanizing to do so. At VFR, Jeff W. has an excellent statement on this issue: Read More »

SEE the descriptions by Thor Christopher at DoublethinkNot of black assaults last weekend in Chicago. Here is the real story, not the “coverupage.”

When it comes to black crime, most journalists are professional deceivers similar to the journalists in Jean Raspail’s apocalyptic novel The Camp of the Saints. They do not think. They throb. Steve Chapman of The Chicago Tribune throbs when asked why the newspaper routinely refuses to tell the race of flash mob attackers, whose primary aim is not to rob, which might imply something other than pure sadism, but to harm and intimidate.

The journalists in The Camp similarly do everything to avoid the facts as the terrible flotilla approaches Europe to beseige its native population. From Chapter 17:

And so, into the pressroom of the Élysée Palace, amid five hundred reporters all concerned more with rhetoric than truth, slipped the battering ram’s most recent recruit: the starving passenger of the pathetic fleet. The question was very well put. Not the principle question, to be sure. No frontal attack that might frighten off the faint of heart. But a question that checked the big issues at the door, and subtly aimed at the hidden, the most vulnerable spot: “…may I ask if the government has any plans to ease the plight of these poor, suffering souls? It’s reaching a point where we can’t sit idly by…” True, the West can’t sit idly by anymore. [Transl., Norman Shapiro]

Read More »

THE MODERN apocalypse leads with inexorable logic to pizza vending machines. Rene Lyon reports at Los Angeles Times that European pizza machines are coming to America this year. Read More »

DRINA writes:

You have clarified before that homemade pizza is a perfectly good and acceptable food. Perhaps some of your readers who aren’t ready to give up pizza would consider making their own? I challenge them to make their own pizza for a few months and then try going back to cheese-product topped cardboard if they dare.

Pizza is on our family menu at least once a month, and we usually enjoy three basic kinds: regular tomato sauce, Alfredo sauce, and pesto. Read More »

DON VINCENZO writes:

The subject of feminism within the “women religious” organizations in the Catholic Church, or, for that matter, the U.S. Forest Service, or the U.S. military, has been discussed before, but please allow  me to add several notable events that might serve as a coda to earlier commentary about its impact on the Church. Read More »