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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THREE extraordinary developments in women’s fashions have occurred over the past 100 years. They are so widely accepted that most people barely notice them anymore. They are:

1) The gradual acceptance of pants. Once exclusively reserved for men, pants were completely embraced by the 1960s and are so universal now that a first violinist in a major orchestra in my area sits with her legs spread-eagle during the performance. She is wearing pants and is considered free to sit in any position.

2) The rise of informality. Everyday clothes worn 100 years ago would be considered special occasion dress today. Even nuns wear T-shirts and jeans.

3) The striking increase in revealing clothing.  Unisex pants lead to camisoles and other forms of public lingerie, clothes that are unambiguously feminine. College presidents and congresswomen even wear low-cut blouses.

These changes have not liberated women. Far from it. They have confined them. They have encouraged women to ape men. They have caused them to lower themselves, especially in the eyes of their children, as a pseudo-man is necessarily inferior to a real man. They have created a world that is less beautiful and less ceremonious. Sixteenth-century peasants dressed with more dignity than wealthy Western women today.

All of this is by way of introducing a remarkable document on this subject. No one has expressed the consequences of these changes better than one particular man writing 52 years ago. Giuseppe Cardinal Siri, the Archbishop of Genoa, wrote a prophetic letter to local clergy in 1960 on the subject of the increasing appearance of women in “trousers.” Archbishop Siri maintained that the adoption of masculine dress by women would ultimately spell disaster:

When we see a woman in trousers, we should think not so much of her as of all mankind, of what it will be when women will have masculinized themselves for good. Nobody stands to gain by helping to bring about a future age of vagueness, ambiguity, imperfection and, in a word, monstrosities.

When a sense of the eternal feminine is lost, there is a flattening of society. He wrote:

The consequences of such violations are not a new outline of man, but disorders, hurtful instability of all kinds, the frightening dryness of human souls, the shattering increase in the number of human castaways, driven long since out of people’s sight and mind to live out their decline in boredom, sadness and rejection. Aligned on the wrecking of the eternal norms are to be found the broken families, lives cut short before their time, hearths and homes gone cold, old people cast to one side, youngsters willfully degenerate and — at the end of the line — souls in despair and taking their own lives.

His letter, posted at Catholicmodesty.com, is well worth reading in its entirety. These are extreme words, but all of it has come true.

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  A GROUP of Catholic nuns began a well-funded bus tour yesterday to campaign for more federal monies for the poor. While the most vulnerable members of society suffer the ravages of the sexual revolution and the loss of the sacred, these leftist sisters of mercy insist what people need most is government charity. Confirming the image of America's religious sisters as political hucksters, these nuns are committed to a desacralized society. Pray for these foolish revolutionaries. They know not what they do. Their minds have been steeped in Kumbaya.

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LIFESITE NEWS reports that General Mills, one of the world’s largest food companies, has come out in opposition to a Minnesota state constitutional amendment banning homosexual “marriage.” The marketer of products such as Cheerios and Pillsbury biscuits, based in Minnesota and heavily dependent on families with children, has committed what Brian Brown of the National Orgnization for Marriage calls “one of the the dumbest corporate PR stunts of all time.”

Here, according to Wikipedia, are some of the products marketed by General Mills, all of which you can easily do without: (more…)