IN A letter to the editor at The New Oxford Review, the Rev. Kenneth Baker writes:

Radical informality is an assault on form. Form in our culture has taken a big hit since the 17th century. Jay Richards, in his book God and Evolution, points out that Des­cartes identified quantity with essence and thereby eliminated form. We know from Aristotle that there are four causes: material, formal, efficient, and final. Since Descartes, science has discarded formal and final causality; for modern science, the only real causes are material and efficient. One result is that, if there is no form to make a thing be what it is, then each thing is just an accumulation of atoms and molecules that can be arranged in any way. According to this thinking, there is no formal difference between a dog and a cat. And if there is no formal or final cause, then nothing really makes any sense — and you can do or dress as you will.

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A NEW CDC study shows that sexual activity among teenage girls continues to decline from its high in the mid-1990’s. It also shows an increase in the use of the Pill among teenagers. According to the Associated Press:

More teen girls now use the best kinds of birth control, a new government study says.

About 60 percent of teen girls who have sex use the most effective kinds of contraception, including the pill and patch. (more…)

HETEROSEPARATIST.COM features a video made by Tradition, Family and Property of its volunteers who, while picketing against the redefinition of marriage, were threatened, pepper-sprayed, punched, cursed, assaulted with beer bottles and spat upon. Their literature was stolen and burned.

As you’ll notice, all of the attackers are white, mostly between the ages of 18 and 30. As a commenter below remarks, “Their hate-contorted faces are terrible to behold.”

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THE Leadership Conference of Women Religious, the largest organization of American nuns, was recently censured by the Vatican for its feminist, leftwing ideology. LCWR will be holding its annual national assembly this August. The theme is, “Mystery Unfolding: Leading in the Evolutionary Now.”

Judging from the event logo, above, the “evolutionary now” is a global, multiracial, panreligious era of One World Bliss. Notice the facelessness of the twirling nuns, so typical of Catholic symbolism since Vatican II. The faceless, depersonalized world – without loyalty to home or people – is key to the Catholic Progressivist’s belief in this-world salvation and his revolt against his historic faith.

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ANN DOUGLAS, columnist for the Toronto Star and author of books on baby care and motherhood, recently interviewed a sex education expert who advised broadening teen education to include lessons on what sexual moaning sounds like, how to tell if a drunk girl really consents, and the sexist stereotypes in pornography. Douglas was interested and approving of Cory Silverberg’s ideas.

“Teenagers need to know what pleasure looks and sounds like — pleasurable moaning, asking for more — in order to be sure that a partner is providing enthusiastic consent to sex,” said Silverberg.

Douglas wrote that “to be relevant to today’s generation of kids, sex ed needs to cover a lot more ground” than in the past.

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  FROM British Paintings.

SHEFALI writes:

I hope this mail finds you in good health. I have been devouring your writing uninterrupted but have run into a snag. Many of your older, fine posts don’t show up in the labels they should. Or even on search engines when the keywords are typed. (more…)

MARIANNE writes:

I don’t know if you care to address this question, but here it is: what about those of us who are married, but do not have any children, and will not be having any children in the future (not by choice)? What is our role as women, and as wives? Should we be employed full-time in your view? The question is not a trick or trap for you, but something I wonder about.

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MARY writes:

I find it odd that a woman like Elizabeth Badinter, who hails from a country as proud of their traditions of food and wine and meal-taking as the French are, would have a problem with breastfeeding. Breastfeeding and social meal-taking are some of the lovely, natural goods of life that rejuvenate and sustain us. Should wine be sold in six-packs? Shall we eat most of our meals in the car, on the run to the next big meeting? (more…)

IN HER book, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, Elizabeth Badinter is guilty of outright distortion on a number of issues. Foremost among these is the issue of the French fertility rate. Badinter makes much of the fact that the fertility of French women is higher than that of other European women (even though it is still below replacement level.) She dismisses the statistical significance of immigrant fertility. (more…)

THE outrage of breastfeeding, in the mind of a feminist, is that it is something men can never do. It is inescapably feminine, an activity that resists the 50/50 division of child-rearing that is so much a feminist fantasy. In her book, Elizabeth Badinter, the French intellectual, insists it is wrong to hold up breastfeeding as an ideal. She writes:

A few advocates of breast-feeding do recognize that mothers might feel trapped by political correctness and they challenge the movement’s sentimental image of motherhood with its erasure of all the other aspects of breast-feeding: the loss of freedom and the despotism of an insatiable child. They recognize that a baby might be a source of happiness, but also a devastating tornado. On-demand breast-feeding can leave women feeling like “a walking meal” or a “giant pacifier” or a milk-producing “ecosystem,” of having lost their status as individuals with their own will and desires. But these cries do not appear in the pro-breastfeeding literature, which claims that what is good for some is good for all.

There is a good reason such statements don’t appear in the breast-feeding literature. They smack of selfish complaining. Whether one enjoys breastfeeding or not, whether one agrees to do it or not, public whining about despotic children is something mothers — I mean, real mothers — resist, in the same way real soldiers resist complaining about helping a wounded friend.

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ELIZABETH BADINTER, the French feminist in the news, seems to have stepped from the pages of a contemporary fairy tale, so perfectly does she combine almost all the major elements of modern-day power and influence. She is a lecturer in philosophy at an elite academic institution (she smokes, so she must be a French philosopher) and is married to a prominent socialist politician. She is the major stockholder of one of the largest communications companies in the world, which was founded by her father. She’s never been a movie star, but she is so well-placed in government, business, academia, and the media, was it possible she would not be heard?

Badinter, 66, has authored a number of books on feminism. Like so many women who have achieved great success in recent decades, she is, despite her undeniable and impressive intelligence, walking proof of the intellectual inferiority of women. How many male philosophers end up writing about the male sex, championing its cause and tabulating its accomplishments in comparison to women? How many male philosophers become famous on such thin and narrow works? There is great irony in the fact that feminists should themselves prove what they have so often denied. But then mediocrity is the inevitable fruit of egalitarianism. (more…)

    THE French feminist and best-selling author Elizabeth Badinter has been the subject of wall-to-wall coverage in the mainstream press in recent weeks on the occasion of the North American edition of her book, The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women, which was a bestseller in France two years ago. It is no surprise that Badinter should receive such notice. Aside from the feminist message of her book, she is a woman with towering connections in the communications industry. Badinter, 66, is a Jewish professor of philosophy at the elite École Polytechnique in Paris. Her deceased father was Marcel Bleustein-Blanchet, founder of the company Publicis Groupe, one of the top four multinational advertising and communications companies in the world. She is the major stockholder in Publicis and chairperson of its Supervisory Board. She is one of the wealthiest people in France, with a fortune valued at more than 750 million euros. Badinter is the wife of Robert Badinter, the former French Minister of Justice under the socialist government of François Mitterand who was influential in eliminating capital punishment. The couple has three sons and lives near Luxembourg Gardens. I will offer my thoughts on Badinter's book later today. Stay tuned.

Savage stands by his comments at the gathering, according to CNN. Why shouldn’t he? After all, he has the support of the president of the United States. What does he have to lose?

The message of It Gets Better is that homosexuality gets better with time. The purpose of It Gets Better, which Obama warmly endorses, is that teenagers should endure the difficulties of being openly homosexual. It Gets Better is probably the most open and effective mass homosexual recruitment project ever conceived.

Given the criticism of Savage, perhaps the homosexual at next year’s convention will be more polite.

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    VINCENT van Gogh painted  "Blossoming Almond Tree" as a gift to his brother Theo on the occasion of the birth of his son, on Jan. 31, 1890. Theo named the baby after van Gogh, who wrote to his mother: "How glad I was when the news came... I should have greatly preferred him to call the boy after Father, of whom I have been thinking so much these days, instead of after me; but seeing it has now been done, I started right away to make a picture for him, to hang in their bedroom, big branches of white almond blossom against a blue sky." This painting is hard to see fresh because it is so often reproduced, and because of the inadequacy of computer images, but in person the background sky of turquoise, the different shades of pink, the twisting, thick lower branch with its flat, abstract quality are arresting. It is intensely joyful. "Blossoming Almond Tree" shows the influence of the Japanese art that Van Gogh studied and collected. It conveys the exuberance and delicacy of spring, but also an unsettling quality in its groping branch. In van Gogh, rapture and absorption in nature alternate with despair and confinement. He once wrote to his sister that he wished to convert everything ugly in himself into physical beauty on canvas. He killed himself a few months after “Blossoming Almond Tree" was painted.

  THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes: As this rare documentary footage reports, the graffiti problem is an ancient one, by no means peculiar to contemporary modernity. Older civilizations, such as the Roman, had to deal with it, and, as opposed either to tolerating or encouraging it, found effective means to curb its profligacy.

IN 1966, Pope Paul VI urged all Catholics who had taken religious vows to “to examine and renew their way of life and towards that end to engage in wide-ranging experimentation.” The wide-ranging experimentation that ensued was a full-blown disaster.

Thousands of nuns picked up and left. Many more who might have taken vows, never did. Over the course of the next four decades, the total number of women religious dropped by more than two thirds. With the abandonment of the traditional habit, the mystical threads fell away. Shorn of their ceremonial dress, nuns became distinguishable by their manly haircuts and bustling efficiency. They became social workers and political activists. Lesbianism and feminism swept through convents. These led, after interminable delay, to recent disciplinary measures by the Vatican against the largest organization of women religious, as discussed in the previous post.

Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow were the leading proponents of “third force psychology” in the 60s. Maslow said in 1949, “I can report empirically the healthiest persons in our culture … are most (not least) pagan, most (not least) instinctive, most (not least ) accepting of their animal nature.” In his book Libido Dominandi: Sexual Liberation and Poltical Control, E. Michael Jones describes the role of the self-actualizing theories of Rogers, Maslow and others on women religious.

Jones writes:

In 1965, Carl Rogers began circulating a paper entitled “The Process of the Basic Encounter Group” to some religious orders in the Los Angeles area. One group which found his ideas intriguing was the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary. (more…)