THE AMISH are officially exempt from Obamacare mandates because of their longtime refusal to participate in major health insurance plans. The Amish save and collectively support individuals in need of medical care. On this principle of independence and interdependence, they are eminently wise.

Contrast that with the stance of the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops which even today, despite the prospect of Catholic hospitals and agencies being forced to pay for contraceptives and abortifacients, still blithely endorses nationalized medicine. As a commenter writes at the USCC blog:

If the use of this term [universal health care] means that the Church otherwise supports “Obamacare,” which is government dictating (gov. already does this) to insurance companies their coverage and to medical doctors procedures and groups of persons to be covered, I would then posit that the Church no longer views humans as individuals with inalienable rights to life, liberty, and property, but rather as members of groups with “rights” according to group membership. (more…)

KEN KLUKOWSKI, legal counsel for the Family Research Council, writes:

The Supreme Court has today given the federal government unlimited authority to use its tax power to require Americans to engage in specific commercial activity. The obvious implication is chilling: Uncle Sam can make you buy anything, at any price, for any reason. (more…)

ALAN writes:

In regard to people wearing vapid smiles in photographs:

A bank in St. Louis produced a flier promoting auto loans. It depicted a young, bearded male (to say “man” would be absurd), gripping a steering wheel, and wearing blue jeans, baseball cap, orange jacket, jogging shoes with orange laces, and an inane smile. (more…)

  FROM the Associated Press: The Supreme Court on Thursday upheld the individual insurance requirement at the heart of President Barack Obama's health care overhaul. The decision means the historic overhaul will continue to go into effect over the next several years, affecting the way that countless Americans receive and pay for their personal medical care. The ruling also handed Obama a campaign-season victory in rejecting arguments that Congress went too far in requiring most Americans to have health insurance or pay a penalty.

  Maria Sharapova USA TODAY reports: A plan to crack down on ultra-loud grunting in women’s tennis has been “unanimously green-lighted” by the WTA players’ council, representatives from all four majors and the International Tennis Federation, according to USA Today. “It’s time for us to drive excessive grunting out of the game for future generations,” WTA CEO Stacey Allaster told the publication. Women athletes are so driven to display brawn and aggression that far more than a ban on excessive grunting will do the job for future generations. At this rate, there will be no future generations.

  THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes: My computer catastrophe of last Thursday wiped out all my e-mail records including my e-mail addresses. I am asking my correspondents to e-mail me at dactylic@verizon.net so that I might rebuild my address book. About a dozen of the friendliest ones are regular readers of The Thinking Housewife. Thank you.

PAUL writes:

My brother was a combat medic in Vietnam. I don’t ask him about his horrific experiences, but they come out from time to time. He recently told me about his platoon crossing a river and trying to avoid huge Chinese claymore mines (much bigger than American claymores). His platoon used makeshift flotation devices such as tree branches. (more…)

DANIEL S. writes:

According to American researchers, societies in which the belief in a literal Hell is accepted as the norm have a lower level of crime than those that eschew damnation and divine punishment for a universalist Heaven. (more…)

C.S. LEWIS said many of our most hailed scientific advances do not represent a conquest over Nature so much as a conquest of some men by other men. So it is with contraception. “Each generation exercises power over its successors; and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors,” Lewis wrote in The Abolition of Man.

There are at least four ways in which the mass acceptance of contraception represents a form of subjugation of some by others. (more…)

A PRINCETON professor who left her job in the State Department because it was wrecking havoc on the lives of her teenage sons, has tiresomely written about it in Atlantic Magazine, as if reporting on this type of conflict for the very first time. Joining the ever-swelling ranks of women who exploit their personal lives for journalistic fame and fortune, Anne-Marie Slaughter has created a virtual firestorm of controversy, however, because she states that it is hard for women to have it all. What is the solution? Slaughter asks.

The solution is this. Women can have it all, she says, but only when women have it all. Yes, friends, this is the startling crux of her argument. She writes:

The best hope for improving the lot of all women, and for closing what Wolfers and Stevenson call a “new gender gap”—measured by well-being rather than wages—is to close the leadership gap: to elect a woman president and 50 women senators; to ensure that women are equally represented in the ranks of corporate executives and judicial leaders. Only when women wield power in sufficient numbers will we create a society that genuinely works for all women. That will be a society that works for everyone.

The essay is no less oblivious and dishonest than the mountains of other pieces by whining feminists.

I suspect one reason it has caused such a storm, and Slaughter is viewed as something of a traitor despite her full support for feminism, is that she has had the audacity to speak of the difficulty of raising even teenage children with a high-powered and well-paying job. That’s a no-no.

Slaughter’s focus, of course, is on the happiness of women and not on the ultimate effects of their decisions on their dependents, on the mood and temper of society at large, or on employers forced to tolerate the relatively low retention rate and “flexibility” of women employees.

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DIANA writes:

What on earth happens in the mind of an impressionable adolescent when he, or she, is told that the Ancient Greeks thought love between two men was the highest form of love, as they are told in this highly-touted sex education book for pre-teens, It’s Perfectly Normal? I imagine that it throws the boys into extreme confusion, and makes the girls feel ugly and undesirable. Which is the intended effect.

Interesting, that they don’t mention that homosexuality among the Ancient Greeks involved pederasty.

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CONSTANCE writes:

I read this opinion piece in the New York Times and thought it would be of interest to you and other readers of your site. The author, a professor of philosophy, argues that the decision to have children is the biggest ethical decision we make. But the fact that it’s a decision at all is a byproduct of contraception, abortion, and the mentality that fertility should be controlled at all times. What about those of us who let God and nature take their course instead? Are we opting out of the hard ethical decision-making, or are we acting unethically for not taking control in the first place? I also noticed that she thinks through in depth what parents owe a child but fails to address what a child might give to a parent, especially as pertains to the parent’s access to the full range of human experience and character development.

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AT The Heritage American, Stephen Hopewell has a fascinating post on his experience at the local library with the latest board books for babies. The books aggressively assert racial diversity, even to the point of depicting animals as black or white, and yet ironically it is white parents who are the most frequent borrowers. Hopewell writes:

[A]m I the only one who feels like I am being targeted or manipulated when I am presented with book after book with a black child on the cover, to take home and read to my white baby?

But like so many features of our culture today, the new norms for children’s books were established with no honest public debate and no understanding of what was being given up. There is an opportunity cost to every choice made; energy expended on making children’s books “diverse” is then not used for some other creative purpose. And these products, in my mind, are very unsatisfactory.

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