AT GalliaWatch, a website on current events in France, Tiberge writes about a shoe company’s controversial poster ads featuring children with their “families.” One poster depicts a child with two women and the words, “As my two mommies say, the family is sacred.”

The ads for the shoe retailer Eram are ambiguous. Though supporters of homosexuals see them as positive, the ads clearly lampoon the deconstructed family as well. The above ad on the right says, “As my mommy and her boyfriend who could be my older brother say, the family is sacred, ” and the one on the left: “As my dad, my mom, and my dad’s third wife say, the family is sacred.”

Eram was besieged with complaints, as well as support, and the company set up a Facebook page to deal with the ensuing controversy, which is no doubt exactly what it was seeking. Read More »

THE BLOGGER “Out of Sleep” contends that people can’t be argued out of liberalism, only awakened from it. He writes:

I … live in a very liberal neighborhood in a top-three liberal city, and work in a field absolutely lousy with doctrinaire liberals. And I don’t mean go-with-the-flow, vote Obama cause he seems like a reasonable guy kind of liberals. I mean religion-is-poison, whites-are-evil, if God were not dead it would be necessary to kill him kind of Sauron Morgoth Saruman liberals! Read More »

THE Victoria and Albert Museum has announced that it will be combing its collections for artworks and artifacts that put homosexuality in a positive light. The project has been given the highbrow name, “Sexing the V & A collections.” Here is the museum’s announcement. Comments have been added in brackets below. Read More »

The Fortune Teller, Charles Edward Halle

FROM the excellent website, British Paintings. 

MRS. M. writes:

Thank you for two brilliant pieces this week! The “Glass Ceiling” post made me laugh out loud with your insightful comments. The “Interracial Marriage” post rang true for me. My Hispanic aunt is married to a black man and experienced more racism from his family and friends than he did from hers. My Hispanic mother married my white father, and he encountered more racism from her side than she did from his as well. Read More »

KEVIN MACDUFF writes from Vermont:

That post on the Glass Ceiling was beyond epic!

Please have yourself cloned so other men may benefit from women like you.

You make Ann Coulter look like such an amateur!

IN A PORTRAIT today of an interracial couple, The New York Times manages to avoid some of the most obvious aspects of interracial families in America. The piece focuses on a black woman married to a white man when the overwhelming number of black/white couples (more than 70 percent) involve a black man and a white woman. The couple say they have been the target of stares and negative comments over the years, proof of ongoing racism. All of the comments presumably come from whites. A more realistic appraisal of interracial families in America would have revealed that whites are possibly more in favor of them than blacks and Asians. As Steve Sailer has written, and as has been discussed here before, black women and Asian men are often “bitterly opposed” to interracial marriage, as they have been the biggest losers since whites threw down the barriers that once prevailed. In this previous entry, a white woman described the hostility she faced from her black mother-in-law when she married her black husband.

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THE DISCUSSION in this entry about books has turned to the importance of reading aloud to young children and adolescents. Jill Farris wrote:

I grew up in a reading household with no TV in the 1960s and 70s when, even then, TV was dominating many homes. I married a man who is extremely intelligent but who spent many hours in front of the TV as a child. He had what I consider to be an impoverished childhood even though his parents were college educated. Read More »

A FRIEND OF MINE once attended a meeting of the Piscataway Township, N.J. school board. One of the schools in the district was well known for its drama productions. Read More »

LAST WEEK’S PIECE in the New York Times about the dearth of women in corporate executive positions should be retitled, “Despite Decades of Favoritism and Reparations for Male Success, Women Still Have Not Reached the Top.” Here is the article by Phyllis Korkki with my remarks inserted.

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READER N. writes:

As bizarre as this story of a woman giving birth in an art gallery is, I prefer it to the “abortion as performance art” notion. Still, there are so many things wrong with this it is difficult to know where to start.

Excerpt:

“A pregnant Brooklyn performance artist is planning to have her baby in an art gallery in front of an audience as part of a piece examining childbirth. Read More »

MY SON was recently talking to a college student who bragged that he had never voluntarily read a book in his life. That he had never voluntarily read a book is less disturbing than that he bragged about it. I have talked to a number of students like this. A book arouses their condescension, but even more strange and perplexing is that the written word seems to make them angry.  When they speak about a famous, long-dead author, they usually mention whether they “like” him or not. Typically, it’s not. “Oh, I don’t like Shakespeare,” a student at a well-regarded university told me. And when he said it, his lip curled. He didn’t mean that he found Shakespeare difficult, though certainly he did. He just didn’t like Shakespeare. He was angry at Shakespeare.

This attitude is not surprising. At the institution where a person should learn to revere the book, he is taught to despise it.  Schools will choose anything over the book, replacing it with the pseudo-book, the textbook, the anthology, PowerPoint, games, worksheets, music, Internet chatboards, and movies. Even at fancy prep schools, you may find high school students watching Saving Private Ryan in English class.  I know a third grader who has a regular class in “rapid research.”  He is in third grade and has reached the point where he can read a chapter book on his own. He is bright and curious, but his attention is now being scrambled. “Rapid research” does not call for sustained reverie or thought. He will hate the book someday too.

The problem with the book is not so much that it is difficult to teach, but that it is not a tool of social harmony. It doesn’t serve the aims of collectivism.The modern school is an elevated form of crowd control. For this job, a real book written by a single person gets in the way. As Richard Allen, wrote in The Leaning Tower of Babel: Read More »

AT Oz Conservative, Mark Richardson writes about a Swedish female prison guard who was beaten to death by an inmate. In some Swedish prisons, the majority of the guards are women. On the face of it, this seems stupid and dangerous. However, a reader who operates detention centers for adolescent male offenders in this country said in a previous discussion here that male inmates tended to be less violent when guarded by an all-female staff. He wrote:

We in fact see less violence to the female staff but I personally don’t think it has anything to do with communication but rather is due to the fact that the patients (inmates) relate better to women as this has been their experience. Moreover, many of them view the women staff as potential sex partners and/or someone they can manipulate and subsequently they are not often overtly aggressive.

He also said women guards have more difficulty handling the stress of the job.

IN AN excellent piece at Youth for Western Civilization, Kevin DeAnna describes the “Occupy Wall Street” protesters. He writes:

Much like the May 1968 protests in Paris that almost toppled de Gaulle, the action in the streets is as much driven for a search for meaning as it is a search for economic justice. Read More »

DAN writes:

The persecution of the Church in Dar al-Islam, specifically Egypt, Iraq, Nigeria, and Pakistan, is generally known to anyone with a basic following of recent world events. In each case, Pope Benedict XVI has spoken out for these Christian populations, many of them nearly two thousand years old. Now the violent jihad being waged against Christians in “moderate” Indonesia has garnered the attention of the bishop of Rome. Read More »

AMBER MILLER finished the Chicago marathon in six hours and 25 minutes Sunday and then delivered her second child a few hours later. Good for her. She was 39 weeks pregnant, had the approval of her doctor and had run throughout her pregnancy.

IN A RECENT INTERVIEW with Time magazine, Gloria Steinem was asked what she would do if she knew she had only two years to live. This is a strange question to ask a 77-year-old woman, but this is what she said in reply:

Mainly seeing friends, my chosen family. And writing about what I believe, which is that things are a circle, not a hierarchy: the women’s movement and the antiracist movement and the gay movement and the environmental movement are all linked. And maybe living with elephants. I do still want to live with elephants.[emphasis added]

Steinem is refreshingly honest. She would fit in better with a herd of elephants. In a herd, she would find some of the uniformity and sameness she longs for.

However, leaving aside the difficulties of a 77-year-old urbanite fitting in with such different creatures, I believe Steinem would still have trouble locating that pure, elusive circle. Life is hierarchical even among elephants. Correct me if I’m wrong, but male elephants don’t do 50 percent of the child care. Aren’t they bigger and stronger? Steinem would be tooting the feminist horn in her elephant existence too.

Elephants have reproductive freedom but not in Steinem’s sense, which is the freedom not to reproduce.

Also, elephants don’t “choose” family and they don’t feel guilty about liking elephants better than giraffes. In that sense, they are like millions of ordinary human beings. Choice has nothing to do with it.

I don’t think Gloria would be happy as an elephant any more than she has liked human society.