A READER in Italy writes:

Your post on what happened to unwanted babies in Italy was very personal for me. I am actually a descendant of one of those babies, born centuries ago somewhere in Sicily. The surname Di Dio (of God) was often given to those babies left in convents in Sicily, and I think that it may have been used to a lesser extent in some other parts of southern Italy as well. Read More »

IN A SPEECH in Berlin on Good Friday, Melinda Gates, a self-proclaimed Catholic, explained why the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is spending some of its vast wealth to push artificial contraception around the world, according to The Seattle Times.

“Some people worry that the real goal is to control populations,” she stated. But … “every year 100,000 women who didn’t wish to conceive die during childbirth.”

She stated, “600,000 women who did not want to become pregnant [give] birth to infants who die in the first month of life.”

Life is only meaningful if your mother wanted you or was in a good mood when she was pregnant.

Men and women “should be able to decide” when to have a child.

But men and women have always been able to decide when to not have a child. What she really means is global engineers such as the Gates Foundation should be able to influence heavily the decision.

Gates claims she is Catholic and yet — on Good Friday — said she has the right as a Catholic to defy Church doctrine. So weak and timid are those who claim to be Church authorities that someone like Gates can go on making statements like this and still be a member of the Church in good standing. This permissiveness is an affront to Catholics everywhere and an aggressive assault on the Church. Gates also misrepresented the Church’s position. The Church is not against continence and abstinence, which are birth control. It is against promiscuity and artificial contraception, which itself brings promiscuity, disease, fatherlessness and economic decline in its wake. Hello, Melinda. It’s not just about sex.

For Gates, the entire world is a canvas on which to paint her intoxicating utopian visions.

In the real world, the humble and poor will never use artificial birth control the way social engineers want. Call them too stupid or call them too smart, but the poor or lower classes will always have “unplanned births.” What the spread of birth control brings them is an overall devaluing of marriage and family. The sense of identity that comes from traditional sex roles decays. A poor man may have little in material goods but he still can have his identity and pride as man. Global social engineers are opposed to woman as woman, man as man, to chastity, modesty and self-restraint as essential virtues. These are the very building stones of civilization.

Experience has shown that artificial contraception, when encouraged and pushed by social leaders, ultimately decimates the family and brings about a world of debt slaves.

Gates could use her tremendous wealth to help people support their families (why, she could even do that in America, of all places). She could give cash grants to married women with four or more children. She could give grants to men who are supporting their families on little. What a difference she could make. What a message of affirmation and hope she could send to the world.

Instead, as a woman seeking to prevent other women from having children, as a philanthropist ostensibly driven by a presumptuous belief that poverty can be obliterated, she promotes a bleak creed of negation.

JEFF W. writes:

I agree with you that Joyce Maynard has exceptional skill for getting publicity and for understanding her reading audience. Her affair with J.D. Salinger was a publicist’s dream. But I do not think that skill developed in a vacuum. Nor am I saying that she has necessarily ever had a paid publicist. Read More »

ST. JOHN and Mary Magdalene as depicted in Raphael’s Deposition.

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THE idea that dangerous back alley abortions are the only alternatives to legalized abortion is one of the left’s most pernicious and evil lies. Writing in response to this excellent entry at VFR on abortion as “a form of child sacrifice” (see Thomas F. Bertonneau’s outstanding commentary), Vincent C. writes:

I wanted to mention two separate scenarios once used to deal with unwanted, but not aborted, births that may interest your readers.

Near the main church in Segovia, Spain, is a convent of cloistered nuns, although given Spain’s apostasy, I am not sure that it still exists. As one entered the convent, and I was fortunate enough to do so, I was shown a corridor that was windowless, and at the end of it was a door that opened up to what appears to be a huge lazy Susan device. Read More »

THE WOMEN’S writer Joyce Maynard, who has made a career of writing about her personal life since the age of 18 and believes there is no ugly side of the modern family that cannot serve as grist in a writer’s workshop, announced to her readers yesterday, after a long period of conspicuous and uncharacteristic silence, that she gave up the two girls whom she adopted from Ethiopia three years ago at the age of 56.

She did not reveal any details of why exactly she decided to find a family elsewhere for the two girls, ages six and 11 at the time of the adoption. Instead, she spoke of her need for “healing,” of the therapist she visited, of the nights she did not sleep and the people who had harshly judged her. That the idea of adopting two children of a different race and culture and melding them into the life of a middle-aged white divorcee who writes novels and runs women’s writing workshops in California might have been fatally flawed and selfish is not something she admits.

The photo above, with the two girls standing on a table, the child-like Maynard at their feet and the multicultural decor, speaks volumes. Maynard became famous years ago for her precocity as a teenager, as well as for her affair with the writer J.D. Salinger. She now conveys an advanced case of immaturity. Perhaps precocity inevitably leads to regression.

I wrote about her silence on the absence of her adopted daughters last year. Maynard, who has never remarried and is a cult figure to aspiring women writers despite – or perhaps because of – her divorce, wrote yesterday:

I will not speak here of all that transpired between that happy, hopeful day I first brought the girls home to where I sit now, writing this. I will simply say here that though there was no shortage of love or care–and despite some very happy and good times–the adoption failed. Read More »

RAPHAEL’S oil painting The Deposition (1507) depicts an unusual scene in which Christ is being carried to the tomb. It is one of the Italian High Renaissance artist’s greatest achievements and a dramatic masterpiece. Above is one detail; I will post others before showing the painting, which was part of a larger altarpiece, in full.

The youth in the foreground above, who is one of two people carrying the body of Christ, is believed to be Grifoneto Baglioni, who was killed in a feud between the Baglioni and Oddi families in Perugia in 1500. Atalanta Baglioni, the murdered youth’s mother, commissioned the altarpiece for the family chapel. In this detail, Calvary is in the background, the crosses standing out against a blue sky and billowy clouds. Mary, the Mother of Christ, has fainted and is supported by the three other Marys.

The bright vividness of the blues, golds and reds in this painting, which hangs in the Galleria Borghese in Rome, is not captured in this Internet image. In reality, the picture is brimming with exuberant color and passion.

Giorgio Vasari, the biographer of Italian artists, said of Raphael’s Deposition: Read More »

A FEDERAL appeals court ordered the Department of Justice today to clarify its interpretation of federal judicial powers in light of President Obama’s remarkable statements on Monday calling the Supreme Court “an unelected group of people” and suggesting it doesn’t have the authority to overturn Obamacare.

The president stated on Monday, in response to questions about the case, that it would be an “unprecedented, extraordinary” move for the court to overturn a law passed by Congress. He added: Read More »

THE Associated Press reports:

An 11-year-old Dutch boy has gone where many of the best economic minds in Europe have feared to tread and proposed a radical solution to the European single currency’s problems – using a pizza as his inspiration.

Jurre Hermans received a special mention from judges for the prestigious Wolfsohn Economics Prize, which comes with a $401,000 award. He came up with a scheme for an orderly return of the Greece economy to its old currency, the drachma.  The boy suggested Greeks hand in all euros to banks and receive drachme in return. The banks would use this enormous euro “pizza” to give out slices – extra cheese, please – to Greece’s creditors.

I would also like to be considered for that prize. I say, why not use miniature pizzas – coated with shellac to keep the sauce from getting on people’s hands – for currency?

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MICHELLE OBAMA may have taken inspiration for the outfit she wore to the Kid’s Choice Awards from the Klingons of Star Trek fame.

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THE DISCUSSION continues in the entry “Law and Disorder: The End of Male Mentoring at Law Firms,” an extremely important topic that is relevant to many other professional fields.

The dream of an egalitarian work force is a lie. Male and female are radically different. The attempt at equality boils down to favoritism for women. Indeed deference to women is rooted in human biology so it is no surprise. Equality means the gradual emasculation of professional fields, with men deprived of the favoritism that is their due. This is a trend that is opposed to the better interests of both men and women. Read More »

AT Camera Lucida, Kidist Paulos Asrat writes about Michelle Obama’s latest fashion transgression, yet another hideously ugly get-up that represents a finger in the air to the institution of First Lady. She’s more the First Bratty Teenager who needs a mother to tell her to go home and get changed.

Michelle is like so many adults today. They think the duty of a parent is to act juvenile. She reminds me of Christine Lagarde, the chief of the International Monetary Fund, who, when presented with a job opportunity in Chicago that entailed leaving her sons in Europe, asked her eleven-year-old son for permission to go. Of course, her son said, “Go for it, Mom!” But then most children out of love for their parents will become authority figures, if asked. They then go on to become juvenile adults, having never had childhoods of their own.

Below is Michelle further demonstrating the dignity of her office while presenting an award to Taylor Swift, who displays the stiffness characteristic of a woman trying to keep her dress from slipping. Read More »

REGINA HESS writes:

I am grateful to Alan for the beautiful piece about “The Lady in White.” It gave me the boldness I needed to stand my ground on the way my daughters dressed as we went to a baby shower on Saturday afternoon. Read More »

DANIEL S. writes:

Thomas Fleming has a very good article on the science fiction writer Philip K. Dick and his prophetic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (which was later adapted into the film Blade Runner). Read More »

Ms. Eigenwerth had an enormous head and was brilliant even as a child.

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

The death of Adrienne Rich, in calling disproportionate attention to itself, has overshadowed the nearly simultaneous passing of another important figure in the evolution of modern feminism. That few people have heard or read the name Zera Selbstwerther-Eigenwerth is not surprising considering that Ms. Eigenwerth’s bold, transgressive style of thinking roused the hackles of her male colleagues in the elite world of meta-mathematical theory, causing her to be marginalized on the fringes of academic respectability. Ms. Eigenwerth, who suffered the indignity of never being promoted beyond full professor, was repeatedly fired from various mathematics departments during her early career until she switched subjects and became an expert in Women’s Studies, where she pioneered such areas of femino-numeric theory as Clitoriparabolistics, Gynosymptotics, Tribadometrics, and Sapphoconics. Read More »

JOHN PURDY writes:

According to the Times’ obituary of Adrienne Rich, “poetry’s formalist rigors gave Ms. Rich something to rebel against.”

Huh, what century was Adrienne Rich living in? It’s probably been a hundred years since there was anything like ‘formalist rigor’ in poetry. Anyway, just to prove the Right (i.e. non-marginalised men) can produce bad modernist poetry too…  Read More »

JIM writes:

I recently quit my job after a 10-year career at large and mid-size law firms in a big city. I do not believe in whining, sour grapes, or blaming women for the world’s problems. I have never told anyone what I am about to write, which is in response to the following comment you made on January 31, 2010:

“Like all other occupations which women have moved into, a large stratum of men choose to quit or not join rather than put up with the PC nonsense of aggressive feminism.”

Sometimes this decision is unconscious. But there is an iron law regarding the entry of women into formerly all-male vocations. These jobs instantly become less desirable to men. Therefore, to allow women to become police, firefighters or soldiers is to jeopardize our safety.

At both law firms where I worked, the male partners of the baby boom generation would select a female as a favorite associate. Every male partner had his own younger female sidekick that would have the opportunity to tag along with him and work on important cases. These women excelled at the tasks expected of a junior associate; they had meticulous attention to detail and strong organization. The partners got not only excellent support but also the satisfying feeling of having a young, attractive woman look at them with reverent, adoring eyes. As far as I know, these relationships were not sexual, but they were personal. The younger female associates would know the details of “their man’s” personal life–his relationship with his children, his hobbies, where he went on vacation, what he did there. It is impossible for most men to forge this kind of a personal bond with a senior man in the workplace. Read More »