HAVING apparently learned nothing from the divorce revolution in the West, India is preparing to dramatically alter its divorce laws to eliminate lengthy waiting times, to make incompatibility an acceptable ground for divorce and to make it especially easy for women, who currently have no right to property acquired by their husbands during marriage, to sue for divorce.  The Times of India reports about proposed amendments to the Marriage Act: Read More »

DIANA writes:

I saw the blockbuster du jour, Hunger Games, on the second day of its release. Suffice it to say, I thought it was drivel, with awful production values and shopworn ideas. What most interests me here is not the movie itself but two reviews of it in conservative publications.  I respectfully disagree with the approval that The Hunger Games has been accorded in two conservative outlets, which I generally admire. Read More »

AT LEWROCKWELL.COM, Heather Carson writes against the “Cry it Out” method of baby care. It’s far better to respond generously to an infant’s demands, she argues, than to let him regularly cry himself to sleep, as the Cry it Out method recommends. I agree, with the caveat that minor, unmet crying is necessary and inevitable. Her argument that persistent neglect of a crying infant causes psychological harm is persuasive.

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A READER at VFR explains why Obama’s comment about Trayvon Martin, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” was politically astute and why it would not be acceptable for a white politician to make a similar statement.

RICK SANTORUM is picking up strong levels of support from women voters, particularly in the South, The New York Times reports. If, as Democrats contend, conservatives are waging a war on women, that war is largely being fought by women. From the Times’s piece: Read More »

DANIEL S. writes:

Recently the Grand Mufti of Saudi Arabia, the ranking Muslim scholar in that country, announced that churches in the Arabian Peninsula should be destroyed, basing his words on a statement attributed to Mohammed, the founder of Islam. Read More »

Why extremists always focus on women remains a mystery to me. But they all seem to. It doesn’t matter what country they’re in or what religion they claim. They all want to control women. They want to control how we dress. They want to control how we act. They even want to control the decisions we make about our own health and our own bodies. Yes, it is hard to believe but even here at home we have to stand up for women’s rights and we have to reject efforts to marginalize any one of us, because America has to set an example for the entire world.

         — Hillary Clinton, at the recent Women in the World Summit in New York

THE recorded happenings of the recent Women in the World Summit in New York, which was part consciousness-raising session and part Global Girls Night Out, are a cornucopia of feminist sloganeering and power-mongering. The arrogance, saccharine self-pity and unabashed lies of the assembled female eunuchs, some of the most influential women in the world, are breathtaking to behold. The immortal crow, Gloria Steinem, was there, cawing about reproductive freedom. For Steinem, women will not have reproductive freedom until they stop reproducing altogether. Mass sterilization might make the Queen of Cold Hearts, who presumably never met a child she approved of, rest at last.

You can read more about the “summit” here if you have the stomach for it. Coca Cola, Hewlett Packard, Liberty Mutual – these are some of the noble, paternalistic corporations that sponsored this orgy of self-love.

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VICTORIA WELLMAN at the Daily Mail writes:

Cheerleaders, with their micro-minis, tight mid-riff baring sweaters and iconic pom-poms, have been impressing male fans and rousing excitement among eager sports spectators in America for decades.

But the half time show of a professional football game that these days centres around a group of scantily clad women writhing and waving their toned arm in the air to the beats of the latest number one hit, was once a strictly male-only arena.

In fact in the late Thirties, the job was deemed too ‘masculine’ for women whose appropriation of slang and loud shouting was seen as unfeminine.

The Mail’s photo of the 1924 cheerleading squad for Columbia University appears above.

The art of cheerleading has most certainly declined. When I was a football cheerleader (photo below), I wouldn’t have been caught dead doing risky athletic stunts. That much enthusiasm for football would have been unthinkable to me. Nor would I have sought the position if it involved quasi-nakedness or clothes purchased from a porn shop.

Mostly, being a cheerleader was a massive civic commitment. It wasn’t just the team that depended on you. An entire municipality might draw sustenance from your selfless support for a game you hadn’t the least bit of interest in.

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Charles Jones, A Cow and a Calf in a Meadow

A March Calf

Right from the start he is dressed in his best – his blacks and his whites
Little Fauntleroy – quiffed and glossy,
A Sunday suit, a wedding natty get-up,
Standing in dunged straw

Under cobwebby beams, near the mud wall,
Half of him legs,
Shining-eyed, requiring nothing more
But that mother’s milk come back often.

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HENRY E. McCULLOCH writes:

The Catholic World Report offers a pre-trip report on Pope Benedict XVI’s visit to Mexico. Pope Benedict is en-route as I write, and should land in the State of Guanajuato this afternoon. He will spend the whole of his brief visit in that state – at Guanajuato, the capital, and the industrial city of Leon – before heading home via Cuba. Read More »

DANIEL S. writes:

The has-been pop singer Madonna has promised to “speak up” up for the homosexual movement in Russia during in upcoming performance in that country. The Russians have threatened to fine her for her possible homosexual advocacy. What I want to know is what business is it of Madonna’s to go into another country and tell the people of that country how to order their society? My advice to the Russians would be to ban the arrogant pop singer and the rest of the glitter imperialists from coming entirely.

In a similar vein, I must confess my sympathy for the Mohammedan cleric in Indonesia who encouraged his countrymen to return their tickets for a Lady Gaga concert and boycott the event altogether, rightly noting that the malevolent Lady Gaga promotes immorality.

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A NOTE to readers of Lawrence Auster’s View from the Right: VFR is currently offline because of a problem at the hosting service. Mr. Auster is moving to another hosting service. The site should be online again by tomorrow, perhaps even sometime tonight. [UPDATE: The site is now up and running.]

GUIDO RENI’S Saint Joseph with the Infant Jesus (1635)

N.W. writes:

I thought you’d appreciate this story my mother told me. A woman asked her 11-year-old son if he knew why the priest wore rose colored vestments at Mass last Sunday morning. After a moment’s thoughtful pause, the boy replied “I don’t know for sure but I think it has something to do with breast cancer awareness, right?” Read More »

JANET BAIRD writes:

President Obama and the Department of Health and Inhuman Services, as you know, recently decreed that free sterilizations be available to all college-age women under Obamacare.

But the truth is even more sinister. Note the wording of the HHS regulation.

As reported at CNS news, ‘[a]ll Food and Drug Administration [(FDA)] approved contraceptive methods, sterilization procedures, and patient education and counseling for all women with reproductive capacity,’ as prescribed by a provider,” said the HHS description of the regulation. [emphasis added]

This clause caught my eye, “for all women with reproductive capacity.” Have you thought about the demographics included here? Girls obtain reproductive capacity these days as young as age nine or 10, but almost always by age 12 or 13. This is NOT just about college women.  Read More »

IN THIS previous entry, I discussed Susannah Cornwall, the British academic who has written a lengthy, well-funded academic paper stating that there is no conclusive proof that Jesus was male. According to Cornwall, Jesus could have been an “intersex” person (the latest fad in the Gender Confusion Movement) and possessed characteristics of both sexes, as do some rare human beings. Thus he may have been outwardly a man, but still anatomically a woman.

Lawrence Auster points out the logical implication of this remarkably inane theory: We cannot be sure of the sexual normality of many historical figures. Virtually any man could have been a biological freak. This is a dream come true for feminists. The prophets, the geniuses, the male artists, the famous statesmen — perhaps many of them were women.

Mr Auster writes: Read More »

PAINTED in 1474, Antonello Da Messina’s Portrait of a Man is striking for its naturalness and luminous quality. The face is of an unknown man in a setting with a plain black background, no landscape or vista behind him. “The sitter’s gaze meets our own, establishing a suggestive dialogue,” says the Galleria Borghese’s catalogue of its finest masterpieces. Da Messina’s portrait is far more beautiful where it hangs in the famous Roman gallery than it appears here and yet the pleasure of establishing a dialogue with this interesting, subtle face remains. You can also see a better version of it here at Art Renewal.

WRITING at The Orthosphere, Kristor examines a rhetorical weapon highly effective against modern liberalism. He writes:

Utopians are almost always intoxicated by some grand, glorious and beautiful vision, so that they tend to make sweeping statements of perfect generality. This tendency makes them, and their ideas and proposals, quite vulnerable to a rhetorical technique known as retortion. Retortion applies a doctrine to itself, to see whether it survives the treatment. If it does, the doctrine is more likely sound. If not – well, then it is dead. A doctrine that does not survive retortion is autophagic: self-devouring. Read More »