March 6, 2012
NEW DATA from the Department of Education shows that black students are disciplined much more often than other students. According to The New York Times, “Although black students made up only 18 percent of those enrolled in the schools sampled, they accounted for 35 percent of those suspended once, 46 percent of those suspended more than once and 39 percent of all expulsions.” Read More »
March 6, 2012
LAWRENCE AUSTER writes:
I like James P.’s “pillage” description of the left — that the X’s need “equality” with the Y’s; therefore the Y’s must be attacked and pillaged, etc.
But I think he is leaving out a big part of the picture. He seems to visualize a left consisting only of hard-core activists who use equality as a pretext in order to pillage their targets. He misses the more moderate type of liberals, not activists but regular citizens, for whom equality is not a pretext, who really do believe in equality and think that equality is the highest moral good and who are not thinking in terms of pillage. Read More »
March 5, 2012
N.W. writes:
I found the picture of a homosexual in a Marine Corps uniform kissing another man disgusting and reprehensible.
However, as a serving member of the United States Marine Corps, I must take issue with the somewhat flip title of your blog post, “The Girly Marines.” Read More »
March 5, 2012
AT VFR, the reader Thomas S. writes:
When I was a liberal, I chose what I wanted to believe.
I was the center of reality, deserving of attention. Read More »
March 5, 2012
CRANBERRY writes:
How fitting is Guido Reni’s painting of Joseph fleeing the wife of Potiphar, given the current state of femininity and feminism. Here we have a woman with no mastery of her own desires, no chastity, who attempts to corrupt a young and innocent foreigner to pass an afternoon’s amusement. Her desire turns to rage when he rejects her, and her immediate impulse (again, showing lack of self-control or honesty) is to accuse him of rape. Read More »
March 5, 2012
THE PUSH for free contraception is not simply about achieving women’s equality.
Liberals such as Obama genuinely believe that some of our worst social problems are caused by “unplanned pregnancies.” Think of Obama’s statements about the horror of a woman being saddled with an unplanned pregnancy. Like many liberals, he believes there are few things worse in life than having one’s career interrupted.
It’s not successful women such as Sandra Fluke whom they are really worried about. It’s the uneducated who continue to have children before getting college degrees and settling themselves in lifetime careers.
When liberals read about the rising rate of illegitimacy, they don’t think, “Gee, we need to return to traditional morals.” They think, “Why are these women giving up the opportunity to improve themselves? If only they had been smart enough to use contraception, their whole lives would be different.”
That’s why liberals are rabid when it comes to sex education in high school and to providing teenagers with condoms. They believe if contraception were cheap and widely available, everyone, including blacks who now live on welfare, would behave reasonably.
The liberal’s entire identity revolves around career and achievement. To him, those with unsatisfying or low-level careers suffer unimaginably. Children are great but only at the right time. Society could run at previously unknown levels of efficiency and prosperity if only people were given the adequate means to restrain their reproductive capacities. That’s why cheap contraception is important. Let synthetic hormones flow from the water fountains if need be. Save the common man from his own worst instincts.
March 4, 2012
THESE WORDS by Julian Savulescu, the editor of the Journal of Medical Ethics, are worth reading again. Savulescu was defending the article by two ethicists who made the case for infanticide of newborns with disabilities such as mental retardation.
What is disturbing is not the arguments in this paper nor its publication in an ethics journal. It is the hostile, abusive, threatening responses that it has elicited. More than ever, proper academic discussion and freedom are under threat from fanatics opposed to the very values of a liberal society.
Of course, the exact opposite is true. The freedom of liberal academics to offend normal human sensibilities is almost limitless. Savulescu is upset that those who object should exercise their freedom of speech.
March 4, 2012
READERS have probably already seen the photo, widely distributed this week, of a homecoming Marine kissing his boyfriend while children stand in the background. Wheeler MacPherson writes:
It’s all completely perverted and completely inverted – the (traditionally manly) Marine is apparently playing the part of the female in the relationship. He has leapt into the arms of his (presumably softer) civilian boyfriend and wrapped his legs around him.
It wasn’t that long ago that two men behaving like this would have been justly arrested and their lives and careers ruined. Read More »
March 4, 2012
WHILE public attention has fixed on the trivial issue of whether Rush Limbaugh was wrong in calling law student (or is she a Dickens character?) Sandra Fluke a “slut,” little notice has been given to the remarkable defense of Fluke by Georgetown officials. President John DeGioia issued this statement Friday about a student whose principles are a direct attack on everything the school once stood for. For DeGioia, the issue of whether the government should force citizens to subsidize birth control is “a legitimate question of public policy.”
Dear Members of the Georgetown Community: Read More »
March 3, 2012
HENRY McCULLOCH writes:
Thank you for another thought-provoking thread about contraception and politics. While you may have seen it already, I thought I should bring to your attention that a genuine expert on the subject has weighed in, in the Congress, no less. Testifying before the House Energy and Commerce Subcommittee on Health, HHS Secretary and “Catholic” Kathleen Sebelius assured the assembled Representatives that they really have nothing to worry about with respect to the costs of HHS’s mandate of free coverage of contraception and abortifacients arising from Obamacare.
You see, silly Congressmen, it is really all quite simple if only you will look at the matter from the social-engineering perspective of Ms. Sebelius: Read More »
March 2, 2012
JAMES P. writes:
Bruce B. writes,
“I think the essence of contemporary liberal thought is egalitarianism. To phrase it like Jim Kalb would, it’s ‘individual autonomy subject to the formal constraint of equality’ or we should all be equally free.”
And you respond,
“Yes, the idea of equality is so central to modern liberalism, and so foreign to Nazism, that it is impossible to think of them as neatly allied.” Read More »
March 2, 2012
Marion Collier, by John Collier
READ more about the Victorian portrait painter John Collier, who painted this portrait of his first wife Marion Huxley in 1883, here. After Marion’s early death, Collier married her sister. According to Wikipedia, the people he painted included: Read More »
March 2, 2012
IN THE entry about children and the night sky, Alan writes:
My father and I were not close, but the stars brought us together for a brief but wonderful time in our lives. When I was 13, he gave me a small telescope. A year later, he and I built a wooden carrying case for it. We stood in our backyard on many nights in 1964 watching the Echo II satellite, a tiny point of light that moved slowly and silently among the stars. We taught ourselves to identify the planets Venus and Jupiter; the summer triangle and Northern Cross in summer; Orion and the Pleiades in winter; and the stars Vega, Deneb, Altair, Capella, Arcturus, Antares, and Sirius. They have been “landmarks”in the sky, century after century, and are landmarks also in my memories of my father.
As The Drifters sang in their 1962 hit record “Up On The Roof”: “At night, the stars put on a show for free….”
Or as Emerson worded it: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”
March 1, 2012
IN MY POST earlier today about James Taranto’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal, I incorrectly assumed a typo was made in one of his sentences. He said artificial contraception is not harmful to women who choose career over family or who don’t want children. I thought he also said that artificial contraception is not harmful to women who cannot find husbands. Read More »
March 1, 2012
ANOTHER British bioethicist at the top of her game has a proposal for enlightened reproduction. According to Bioedge, Anna Smajdor (photo above) of the University of East Anglia recommends ectogenesis, or gestation with artificial wombs.
Smajdor argues that equality between men and women cannot be achieved as long as pregnancy is the norm. Writing in the January issue of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, she states: Read More »
March 1, 2012
GREG J. writes:
Daniel S. wrote about the professors advocating infanticide:
So eugenics is bad when practiced by Nazis, but good when advocated by liberal “ethics” professors? Liberalism is at its core a nihilistic cult of death. Read More »
