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 »

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.

Read More »

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.

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

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 »

IN THE entry about children and the night sky, Alan writes:

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 »

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 »

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 »

AT The Orthosphere, Kristor explores the ill humor and petulance of atheists he has known. Given that they seem settled in their views and have thought about them a great deal, why do they seem angry? He gives a small example:

The tiniest thing will provoke their outrage. The current hatred of Tim Tebow is a good example. But it can get incredibly picayune. A member of my congregation went directly from Mass to a tennis match a few weeks ago. Read More »

RICK SANTORUM, whose political shortcomings are serious, deserves immense credit for his statements on contraception in recent months. Santorum is making points that no mainstream politician has dared to make, principally that artificial contraception has led to a catastrophic increase in illegitimacy and single parenthood. Furthermore, he has said, artificial contraception is harmful to women’s health. This is true. According to the Abortion/Breast Cancer Center, approximately half of the increased cases of breast cancer in recent decades is attributable to oral contraception, abortion and delayed childbearing.

In a column yesterday at the Wall Street Journal, James Taranto praises Santorum and seems to agree with his points. But then he makes this stunningly clueless statement:

Santorum has come under particular attack for saying that contraception is “harmful to women.” Read More »

LAMENTING the resignation of GOP Senator Olympia Snow, other liberals in the Republican party expressed disappointment yesterday that voters care about issues other than the economy. Gee, they ask, why is the basic breakdown of society such a big deal to these people? The New York Times reports:

Georgia Chomas, a cousin of the senator who described herself as more like a sister, said social conservatives and Tea Party activists in Maine were hounding her at home, while party leaders in Washington had her hemmed in and steered the legislative agenda away from the matters she cared about. Read More »

MRS. Z. writes:

Perhaps you saw this article from The Blaze. According to two ethicists from Australian universities, in a recent article in the Journal of Medical Ethics, newborns should not be considered persons, and therefore doctors and parents should be allowed to determine if “after-birth abortion” is the best possible option for the family and society as a whole. According to the article, Read More »

BRUCE writes:

I recently (inadvertently) overheard a long conversation between a group of upper middle class, full- time mothers who had met in a cafe.

Naturally, children were a major topic – since this was apprently the main factor bringing them together.

Aside from this, the first 20 minutes was mainly occupied with discussions of diets and exercise regimes. The strongest approval was given to extreme long distance running exploits and thinness, the strongest disapproval to examples of obesity. Read More »