WERE Americans ever asked if they wanted their federal government to promote “women’s rights” around the world? The answer is no. Just as voters were never asked if they wanted mass immigration from non-European countries or if they wanted legal abortion or if they wanted God banished from public life, so they were never asked if they wanted their government to promote feminism in foreign countries.

In this video, America’s first-ever Ambassador-at-Large for Global Women’s Issues Melanne Verveer, who was appointed by Obama, explains her mission. She makes the astounding and factually incorrect claim that female-run businesses are “the accelerator” of economic growth.

Promoting women’s rights means promoting discrimination. It doesn’t mean creating equality of opportunity. It means creating inequality of opportunity. Our Global Mistress of Feminist Supremacy advocates directing economic aid to female-run businesses and helping women purely because they are women to attain positions of power.

Political power is now a human right for women. Woman’s traditional place in the home and community is now, by definition, a violation of human rights.

Feminism is ever-radicalizing, demanding not just the reconstruction of American society but of the entire world. Family collapse, disastrously low fertility, feminized poverty, sexual disease, stupid children, moral apathy and a pervasive decline in civility and manners —-  all this, Verveer wishes to spread.

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JAMES P. writes:

The Daily Mail reports Putin’s remark about the band Pussy Riot:

“We have red lines beyond which starts the destruction of the moral foundations of our society,” Putin went on. “If people cross this line they should be made responsible in line with the law.”

Wasn’t there a time when American leaders talked like this instead of whimpering about “freedom of expression”?

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THIS IS a heartbreaking picture of the sister of Yoselyn Ortega, the nanny who murdered two children on the Upper West Side of Manhattan last week.  Mylades Ortega said she was horrified by what her sister had done and could not comprehend it. Her 50-year-old sister appeared to enjoy and love the Krim children. According to reports of neighbors of the Krim family who saw the nanny with the children, she was kind and sociable. It is unlikely she would have been kept in the position of nanny for two years by a doting mother if she had not been. Marina Krim apparently saw no warning signs, or did not take them seriously, but such things happen even in close families. Not long ago, an otherwise normal family near where I live was killed, the mother, father and son all stabbed with a samurai sword by another son, whom they knew was mentally ill but believed they could help on their own. Call it a psychotic breakdown or demonic possession, the Krim murders similarly defy all human motivations.

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THERE is a brief essay at Tradition in Action by the late Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira on the Santa Maria Formosa Square in Venice in the 18th century. From the piece:

This small world assembled around a square is ceremonious and distinguished, yet it is also marked by a note of intimacy. It reveals the spirit of a society where men, far from being dissolved in the anonymous multitudes, tend to create organic and distinct groups that escape the isolation, anonymity and desolation of the individual facing the masses.

In this square, so picturesque and human, so distinguished and so typically sacral with the radiating presence of the small church, the different classes live together harmoniously. How it differs from some of the immense modern squares, where on the mare magnum [enormity] of asphalt and lost in an agitated mob walking madly in every direction, men can only see the cyclopean skyscrapers that dishearten them.

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NICHOLAS writes:

Your post about a young woman in college who wants more than anything a traditional marriage was an immense consolation to me. I am a young man in college in the perfectly complementary position. (Though by God’s grace with more hope, I think.) To the wise, the path that God has set for us should always appear terrifyingly impossible, but for the confidence we have in his providence.

To Sophia, may God bless you. And to God, may I meet someone like her someday!

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PENNY writes:

I was paging through my copy of Mansfield Park by Jane Austen last evening and ran across a couple of passages that really jumped out at me, probably because of some of the things you’ve been writing about.

The first concerns Fanny and her cousin Edmund.

“Kept back as she was by everybody else, his single support could not bring her forward; but his attentions were otherwise of the highest importance in assisting the improvement of her mind, and extending its pleasures. He knew her to be clever, to have a quick apprehension as well as good sense, and a fondness for reading, which, properly directed, must be an education in itself. (more…)

GUILAIN writes from France:

This is in response to your recent entry on French women.

I would not say that the French are not classy anymore. Actually, many women look like very classy prostitutes.

In general, there are two kinds of women. Those who spend lots of time grooming and choosing clothes in their wardrobe, and those who don’t. (more…)

IN AMERICA, a vote is a shockingly trivial thing. And it’s the most important thing in the world.

In this ad for the Obama campaign, a young actress describes the ecstasy of voting for the “first time,” playing on the double meaning of “the first time.” Lena Dunham is hideously tattooed and simmering with righteousness. She suggests girls must be wary of doing it with just any man. He might not be a supporter of the Lily Ledbetter Act, a piece of legislation most 18-year-old girls probably know nothing about. The bill, which allows older women to sue for retroactive wages, stands for brutal oppression. Miss Dunham also brings up the contraceptive issue, and how important it is, (there’s something a feminism-addled girl can understand) linking democratic participation again to sexual fulfillment.

This ad is so telling. For the liberal, a vote is like sexual intercourse. It’s a form of transcendence. Through politics, heaven on earth can be realized. “Before I was a girl, now I was a woman,” Miss Dunham says about her initiation. She voted for the greatest lover a girl could have, Barack Obama.

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LEGEND has it that Rembrandt completed this sketch of 1645 in the time it took a servant to run to a nearby village for a pot of mustard.

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THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

I write in response to the postings, here and here, on the life-damaging consequences of the cost of higher education and student loans.

Modern people generally, liberals, logical positivists, moral relativists, and the entire tribe of sociologists, vehemently deny that correlation is causation. Personally, correlations impress me – as do analogies, to which the same people listed above also deny significance.

When I began as a freshman at UCLA in the fall semester of 1972, the cost of a college-term was under one hundred dollars. My memory, which might be faulty even though it is quite good, is that the price (it was not called tuition, but a “registration fee”) of a ten-week quarter (three quarters in the academic year) was forty-eight dollars. Books were an extra cost. Life in the dorms or in an apartment near campus, was an additional cost. Commuting was an additional cost. But the cost was affordable. Of course, admission to the UC system was still more or less strictly by meritocratic measurement. Anyone in the top tenth percentile of his high-school graduating class was guaranteed admission to the University of California – as I recall, at the campus of his choice. Affirmative action existed in some primitive form, but it was not the totality of the game. (more…)

  MANY excellent comments have been added to recent discussions. I hope you will go back and read the additions. Please see the entry on student debt, in which Proph from The Orthosphere responds to the story of a recent female graduate of a top university whose parents have advised her to default on her student loans. Proph is $60,000 in debt for his higher education, and makes occasional loans to his father. He writes: I can certainly agree ... with David’s indignation at the rank, monstrous irony with which a grown man would complain about the irresponsibility of young men, while himself selling his daughter into debt slavery so she could pay his Social Security bills. I’m 26 myself, $60,000 in debt, with a strict budget and a plan to get myself debt-free in six or seven years, and I’m still lending money to my father, who, with twice my income and half my debt, often finds himself surprised and bankrupted by modest, anticipated expenses. His is the “dumbest generation of narcissists in the history of the world” (to borrow a turn of phrase from The Last Psychiatrist), and they’ve made a mess of everything.

SOPHIA writes:

As a young woman with traditionalist values, I am finding things difficult. I am enrolled in college and find it more disagreeable and unfulfilling with each leftist professor and aimless course. I have found a select few schools that offer compelling curriculum, such as Thomas Moore College of Liberal Arts and St. John’s College, but their accumulative tuition and board costs surpass my available funds, and I am not willing to go into debt. Thus, I seem to be stuck getting this “education” and for what purpose I’m without a clue. I feel I am merely going with society’s flow and look to the future with vague, idealist dreams and simplistic trust in God. (more…)