DIANA writes:

I decided to watch the news this morning and got what I deserved. On NBC, during the interminable Olympics coverage, there was a piece about “gender-neutral” bagpiping.

Turning in disgust away from this to another channel, I saw a commercial whose premise wasn’t immediately clear to me. The scene was a group of parents of young kids in a playground.

Most of the parents were white, they were well into their 30s, one was a white father with a baby strapped to his chest in one of those padded cloth contraptions. The parents were playing “middle-class one-upmanship.” (Should that be changed to one-up-personship?) Each parent challenged another parent with a question.  The questions came in very rapid fire fashion with that supposedly humorous undertone latterly known as “snarky.”  (more…)

DIANA writes:

Back in the 1970s, when Ms. Magazine was the new thing and all the rage, I read it. Billie Jean King was once on the cover. The interview took place before Maria Sharapova was conceived. Perhaps before her mother was conceived. BJK was ranting about how irrelevant a woman athlete’s looks should be to her public acceptability. “Does anyone judge a linebacker by his looks? Does it matter if he’s ugly, as long as he can tackle?”

I was reading the magazine in the lunchroom. A black female colleague looked at her picture on the cover and said, “Who is that?” I replied, “Billie Jean King.” Lillian said, “She is a moose.”

These arguments about beauty are endless and circular. In fact maybe they are not even arguments. It’s just one side ranting, the other side saying, “Yes dear….yes dear…..”

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AT Tradition in Action, Marian T. Horvat explains how Pope Benedict XVI’s recent blessing of the Olympic Games, and his statement that the Olympics are important in creating “universal fraternity,” were in contradiction of earlier teachings of the Church. The modern world idolizes sports. In 1952, Pope Pius XII, who almost certainly would not have placed his benediction on the London Olympics, said sports, as the highest aim of life, would be “too trifling for man, whose primary greatness consists in far higher aspirations, tendencies and talents.”

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SARAH PALIN, still the avatar of Republican Girl Power, was in Missouri this week campaigning for Senatorial candidate Sarah Steelman in platform shoes, tight jeans, over-sized sunglasses and a Super Man T-shirt. Playing the ditz liberals always said she was, Palin referred to Steelman as a “hot mama grizzly.” The woman who inspired a mass cult and left the Alaska governor’s office to turn the country around has given up any pretense of being a serious politician, which was a very tough act to maintain anyway. Steelman was defeated in Tuesday’s primary.

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  SHANNON EASTIN, who will be officiating at Thursday's Packers-Chargers game, is only a replacement, but NFL officials say there will be full female referees soon. In the New World order, wherever men are, there must be a mom nearby.

  AT Galliawatch, Tiberge has posted an interview with the French author Maurice Bonnet about his book L'Empire du Mensonge. Bonnet maintains that French society is saturated with lies. Among them is the lie of feminism. Bonnet states in the interview: I know many intelligent, marvelous women, and I feel that none of them would disagree with me. I call a spade a spade, and the condition into which our society is sinking is a disaster, due to the combined forces of the egalitarian lie, the venom of mixing women with men ("mixité"), the stupid principle of parity, and other idiocies of the same ilk. The situation is extremely grave. The invasion of all functions by women, even in the police and the army, should put us on the alert. We are going mad. This world, these people, who never stop talking about their "values", without ever explaining what they really consist of, have lost the most precious of values: simple common sense. Thanks to Tiberge, we are able to obtain these glimpses into the top French stories and French culture with her excellent translations.

IZZY writes:

One of the most common arguments for homosexuality is that it happens in nature and is seen in animals, so therefore, it is natural. Take this comment from a user on YouTube, who is supposedly “anti-feminist:”

“Homosexuality happens in nature, why wouldn’t it happen in humans? However, it might be more prevalent now than in the past because of environmental estrogens and other hormones and hormone-mimicking chemicals that affect sexual development post and pre-birth.”

The “homosexuality happens in nature” myth is exposed by NARTH’s article:  “The Animal Homosexuality Myth.” I highly recommend it.

By the logic of those who argue that homosexuality may occur in animals, and thus is normal in humans, eating our children and killing them is normal, as cannibalism is common in nature (and albinos should be thrown out of trees and off other high buildings). (more…)

A READER writes:

I’ve noticed you’ve avoided the whole VFR firestorm. I found the conversation interesting but I thought that it was not a conversation to be engaged in within the public sphere. The reason why is this; some subject matters require proper discipline and education to be responsibly engaged in. (more…)

JEANETTE V. writes:

I occasionally browse sites run by adoption agencies. I am too old to adopt a baby but I look anyway. This is what I saw. Very disturbing indeed. Quite frankly even though I am 60 and my husband 55, I believe we would make a far better home for a child than any homosexual “couple.”

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AFTER almost 50 years of aggressive, government-enforced affirmative action and non-stop celebration of every and any worldly accomplishment by women, feminist outrage lives on with no sign of abating. Jessica Valenti argues in a piece in The Nation that women continue to be victims of society’s relentless beauty standards. Beauty shouldn’t matter at all.

Be forewarned: There is profanity in this article. Valenti’s anger is so boiling hot one wonders if she might assault someone — but whom? The enemy is everywhere. Surely, Valenti will not rest until every little girl is a fuming, cursing revolutionary. Girls still want to be girls, and that’s a problem. She loathes femininity with a red-hot fury.

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MARY writes:

In light of your recent post “Britain’s Plague of Drunks,” I must pass on this ad for Skinny Cocktails. It shows girls getting drunk together. What fun.

Through a guest who brought a bottle of this stuff to my house for a barbeque I learned that the creator of this line of drinks is a former Real Housewife (of God only knows where). Anyway, the priorities seem to be, in no particular order: skinniness; flip flops; tanness; alchohol consumption; grinning; girl fun; bikinis; laughing; and dancing-with-a-drunk-sexy-expression-on-one’s-face. (more…)

SEE this amazingly forceful presidential election ad by Catholics Called to Witness that goes so far as to suggest that Catholics who vote for Obama in November will jeopardize their salvation. This commercial is unlike any anti-Obama advertisement I have ever seen.

The commercial has one weakness and that is its reference to the talking point of “religious liberty.” Obamacare is not essentially a question of religious liberty, at least not for Catholics. Is that what Catholicism stands for — freedom for all religions? It makes me cringe to hear bishops speak this way. Do we wish liberty for cults that believe in human sacrifice? Should we countenance liberty for a religion that entombed live people in pyramids or one that believed in killing infidels? It’s a question not so much of religious liberty but of the government supporting immorality, actively encouraging people to do wrong, and of marginalizing one particular religion: Christianity. And, as a commenter points out below, it’s a matter of individual freedom of commerce. So far there has been no serious repudiation by Catholic organizations of the idea that universal health care is in itself anti-Catholic even if it does not subsidize abortion and contraception.

Nevertheless, this is a very compelling video that should give pause to many liberal Catholics.

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AT Tradition in Action, Carol Byrne writes about disturbing efforts within the Catholic Church to beatify Dorothy Day of the Catholic Worker movement. Archbishop Timonty Dolan has called Day “one of the most significant women in the life of the Church in the United States.” Writes Byrne:

Every so often the name of Dorothy Day pops up in the media, especially in the Catholic press, where she is invariably presented as a revered icon of social reform, a peace-loving and charitable figure who dedicated her life to helping the poor.

In fact, Byrne argues, Day’s thinking was that of a radical who wished to overturn the existing economic and social order.

The data [recommending Day] repeat the same hackneyed ideas that we have heard and read ad nauseam in the standard hagiographies of Day – how she had “a passion for the poor and dispossessed,” gave up Communism on becoming a Catholic, and rejected all forms of violence and war. But how true are all these claims?

We have every reason to doubt the veracity of these claims because they all have one basic flaw in common: Their authors pick and choose from among details of Day’s life in order to put as much distance as possible between her and Communism. But, as authentic documentary evidence has shown, Day never gave up her communist friends or philosophy. (6) (more…)

HERE is a scene vastly different from the sunlit domestic idylls of the nineteenth and early twentieth century by Carl Larsson. The Stone Grinder’s Family (1653-55) is the work of Dutch painter Gerard ter Borch. Here is a scene of squalor and toil, with the knife grinder in the background and a mother picking lice from her daughter’s hair. And yet it also conveys a domestic ideal. In his book, The Embarrassment of Riches, on the Golden Age of Dutch culture, Simon Schama wrote:

Some of the most affecting family scenes in Dutch genre painting are of children submitting to their mother’s inspection of their heads for nits and lice. Gerard ter Borcher painted two: one as much an image of domestic virtue as a lace worker or a distaff spinner, the second in the much more unusual setting of an impoverished knife grinder’s yard. This is all the more extraordinary for being anything but the idealized image of the kempt bourgeois household. It is, in fact, one of the few authentic pictures of the kinds of hovels in which many of the poorest artisans and semiskilled laborers lived in Dutch towns. Yet, for all the dereliction and squalor, it is also unmistakably an image of domestic virtue. It is virtue offered within the same canvas, at work and at home, the knife grinding invoking the universal image of hard unremitting toil, and in the foreground the mother at the threshold of the dwelling, occupied with the moedertaak, her labor of love. (p. 395)

Here is another view from the same era of a mother delousing a child. Pieter de Hooch’s The Mother’s Task (1658-60) shows the immaculate surroundings more typical of Dutch domestic scenes and the illumination of the darkened and serene home by light from two windows. Thus the prosaic act of removing bugs from a child’s hair is glorified and rendered a meditative form of connection. As in so many Dutch paintings, the contemplative quality of domesticity is masterfully conveyed as an anchor of the spiritual world.

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HANNON writes:

Here is a rather striking example of official British cowardice in all things social. A poster campaign by police warning women that drunkenness may end in “regret” has roused the ire of feminists, who say the posters blame rape on women. (more…)

MARY writes:

It’s interesting that homosexual activists were so furious over the success of the day promoting Chick-fil-A. Some have responded by calling for protests and aggressive tactics against Chick-fil-A in response, which is unfortunate. There must be multitudes of businesses, musicians (Melissa Etheridge et al), etc. that are thriving solely due to the devotion of homosexuals, but apparently this fact is lost on them. (more…)

KAREN I. writes:

The post about liberalism leading people to error, and then exploiting their error reminds me of something I saw a family do recently.

I live in a large apartment complex. It features townhouse-style apartments in a country setting, and it is very affordable, with heat included. Several families with stay-at-home parents have chosen to live here because the good value allows families to live on one average income fairly comfortably. I will be the first to admit, it is not a lavish lifestyle, but an average family determined to have a mother at home can do so without tremendous difficulty.  (more…)