I HAVE quite a few comments, many of them excellent, regarding the recent post, “Contraception and the Culture War.” I will be posting them over the course of the next few hours.

THE COLOSSEUM and the Roman Forum are under snow today. The city has experienced its first measurable snowfall in 26 years.

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MARY writes:

Mike Adams writes eloquently about the issue of abortion and he is right: pre-1973 thinking about abortion is not enough. How about pre-contraception?

Elizabeth Anscombe wrote this of contraception in 1972: “… what can’t be otherwise we accept; and so we accept death and its unhappiness. But possibility destroys mere acceptance. And so it is with the possibility of having intercourse and preventing conception…This can make the former state of things look intolerable…”  Read More »

KEVIN MYERS, writing in The Independent, examines the differences between women’s and men’s tennis and the injustice of awarding equal monetary prizes to female and male champions. He also ponders the extent to which women’s tennis has become a matter of sexual allure.

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SEE the ongoing discussion in this entry of the Orthodox Jewish community of Kiryas Joel, where families are large and less than 50 percent of the working age men are employed.

NANCY PELOSI spoke warmly yesterday of the official relationship between Planned Parenthood and the now thoroughly leftwing Girl Scouts of America. According to our top female elected leader, an organization that supports abortion, rough sex and masturbation is just fine for little girls. 

Remember the dizzying hopes of the suffragettes? They foolishly argued that the entry of women into politics would make for better mothers. What a delusion. Women who believe women should lead the world are enemies of motherly love and destroyers of girlhood innocence.

University of Georgia cheerleader Anna Watson

 JAMES P. writes:

Aren’t cheerleaders supposed to be feminine?

It is hard to believe her claim that she has not taken steroids.

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THE Huffington Post reported something stunningly new and unexpected this week. Conservatives are stupid. Surprise! It’s true: “Intelligence Study Links Low I.Q. To Prejudice, Racism, Conservatism.”  

The website posted a banner photo of the Klu Klux Klan over its piece, just in case you weren’t aware that conservatives are not only stupid, but very, very mean. Unfortunately, it did not post photos of some of the countless geniuses and super smart people who have believed in what The Huffington Post would define as conservative ideas.

The article is nothing new in itself as it represents a common and intractable belief among liberals that liberalism is true because so many smart people believe in it. But the piece does take this widespread notion to possibly unprecedented extremes. The Huffington Post states:

Dr. Gordon Hodson, a professor of psychology at the university and the study’s lead author, said the finding represented evidence of a vicious cycle: People of low intelligence gravitate toward socially conservative ideologies, which stress resistance to change and, in turn, prejudice, he told LiveScience. Read More »

RENÉE writes:

I am struck by the image of Victorian men mentioned by one of the commenters in the entry about “men’s studies” — probably because I read quite a bit of literature from that time period. When I think of men from that era I often picture them smoking a pipe in the company of men, not just discussing business but engaging in friendly banter, and developing male camaraderie. Men in our country and throughout the world have always had a place to gather as men, not just as workers, but as friends. And it only makes sense. Men are the ones who go to war and that requires a great deal of trust and respect to fight with and for one another.

Feminists have fought to enter into every sphere of the male world, not just in the public sphere, but in private spheres as well. They protested any club that excluded women. Many men today have not experienced healthy male bonding. I wonder how many men who are in sports and garner some semblance of what it’s like to live in a world where men have room to be men and brothers would make the statements these men’s studies professors make.

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ALAN ROEBUCK writes:

Atheism now has a confession of faith.

It’s in my essay “No Evidence for God?” posted at Intellectual Conservative. The essay makes the elementary and crucial point that most atheists, when they try to rebut arguments for God, simply presuppose atheism. Viewing reality through atheism-colored glasses, they naturally see what they want to see. Their reasoning is circular. I lay out two common lines of evidence for God and show how the common atheistic rebuttals are invalid. There is evidence for God.

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AT Townhall, Mike Adams explains why it would not. He also writes regarding the legalization of abortion: Read More »

N.W. writes:

Despite my conservative views, I still listen to NPR on a regular basis. I really shouldn’t. It often gets me mad. However, I enjoy that NPR gears its programming towards a more intelligent audience.

I really got riled yesterday morning, however, with a piece on an art exhibit in Italy exploring the rise of banking in Florence at the start of the Renaissance. The segment started by describing how the Church’s rules against usury had up until then prevented banks from prospering in Medieval Europe. The exhibit illustrates the way in which “Florentine merchants got around the Catholic Church’s ban on money-lending and bankrolled the Renaissance.” Read More »

JESSE POWELL writes:

I have made the point before that there are serious problems with the thesis, put forth last week by Charles Murray, that “the upper class” is doing just fine in its family behaviors while “the lower class” is deteriorating dramatically. It is indeed true that “the upper class” is doing better than “the lower class” but this is merely a class distinction; it does not indicate a cultural divide. The same overall culture has within it people who are “better off” and people who are “worse off” and not surprisingly the people who are “better off” are better off; their social indicators show fewer problems.  Read More »

A CANADIAN “professor of masculinity” proposes the abolition of masculinity. Would you expect otherwise? Marc LaFrance tells The Montreal Gazette:

“The irony is the dominant norms of masculinity, what the academics call hegemonic masculinity – the breadwinner, the guy who never gets scared, the guy who is extremely successful – really make for an unlivable life for men.

“These structures distance men from themselves,” he says. “You can’t be a person who can feel, you can’t be weak, you’re not allowed to be sad, to fail.

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CHRISTINA HOFF SOMMERS wrote last week on preposterous new rape statistics released by the federal government. The Centers for Disease Control recently announced that thirty percent of women are victims of sexual violence. In The Washington Post, Sommers explained how surveyors came up with this patently absurd number. She wrote: Read More »

LISA writes:

While I would not say it was wise for 16-year-old Laura Dekker to sail solo around the world, I cannot think that she would have been “safer,” in the spiritual, cultural, and mental sense of that word, in a public classroom in the Netherlands.

I MISSED many stories last week, including this Wall Street Journal piece by Charles Murray, who points to the now familiar facts of class and family disintegration. He writes:

We have developed a new upper class with advanced educations, often obtained at elite schools, sharing tastes and preferences that set them apart from mainstream America. At the same time, we have developed a new lower class, characterized not by poverty but by withdrawal from America’s core cultural institutions.

Murray’s solution to the explosion of divorce and illegitimacy among the less educated is for America’s elite to express disapproval of those who don’t raise their children in married homes. He never comes right out and says that the elite should vilify promiscuity, but that seems to be his point.

Married, educated people who work hard and conscientiously raise their kids shouldn’t hesitate to voice their disapproval of those who defy these norms. When it comes to marriage and the work ethic, the new upper class must start preaching what it practices.

But his notion that there is a great American divide is problematic. America’s elite does not believe in sexual restraint. It does not believe in traditional sex roles any more than America’s working classes. The well-educated simply suffer less from the consequences of the cultural revolution. How could they possibly preach what they don’t themselves endorse?  Read More »

The Cumaean Sibyl, Domenichino (1616)

I WILL be resuming my normal blogging schedule after a busy interlude away from home. I had hoped to post sooner, but unfortunately could not due to happy and exciting events.

Here is Domenico Zampieri’s The Cumaean Sibyl, a prophetess of the ancient world portrayed as a Renaissance noblewoman with her elegant turban and flowing drapery. Her viola da gamba stands in the background. She would not have so rudely abandoned her audience. Thank you for your patience.