JAMES P. writes: The Daily Mail has some photos of America in 1940. WARNING: Modern readers may find the images of clean, well-dressed white people with large families shocking and offensive; they are rated "NC-17" (Not Correct for readers under the age of 17). Note also the article's obsessive interest in Japanese-Americans, who were a tiny fraction of the 1940 population.
DIANA writes:
These are not questions that address the actual legal swamp/thicket that Dharun Ravi was placed in during his trial for hate crimes by the New Jersey state prosecutors office. That is a whole can of worms, which begins in the legislature, and which involves such noisome organizations as “Garden State Pride” – I checked their website after this wretched verdict, and it reeked of preening triumphalism. (more…)
THIS DETAIL from Federico Fiori Barocci’s Flight to Egypt (1570) depicts Joseph, whose feast day is today, in an unusually carefree pose as he playfully hands an olive branch to Christ.
Joseph, most faithful and most courageous, mirror of patience and lover of poverty, watch over us.
MISS UNIVERSE Canada has accepted a “transexual” male as a contestant in its beauty pageant, according to the pageant website Missosology. Given that Jenna Talackova is legally female even though he is a man, pageant officials concluded that it was inappropriate to exclude him and by the logic of radical equality and homosexual liberation, they are correct. (more…)
IN THE entry on the Democratic Party’s sinister, idiotic and thoroughly baseless allegations of a Republican “War on Women,” I stated that it is actually liberalism that has conducted a war on women for decades. By every conceivable social indicator, with the exception of how much money women earn, females at large – and that includes children – are worse off than they were prior to the 1960s. This is not to exonerate the Republicans, who are typically supporters of feminism too and haven’t the conviction to defend themselves against such claims. My intention is merely to point to the irreversibly warped state of mind behind the Democratic campaign.
To a reader who said liberalism’s freedoms, presumably sexual and economic freedoms, cannot possibly be construed as anti-woman, the reader Jesse Powell, who is a man, responds:
When a man says to a woman “you are free” he is at the same time saying “you are on your own.” Women’s liberation equals male abandonment. From the man’s point of view the purpose of liberating women is precisely to enable and justify abandoning women. (more…)
THE website Dash offers a brisk history of pizza in the United States, culminating in the Pizza Society, with 65,000 pizzerias (that’s an understatement; there are 65,000 pizzerias in my town alone) and 100 acres of pizzas consumed every year.
Dash points to the emergence of the artisanal, wood-fired pie in recent decades. It’s true, pizza at its best is one of the world’s most sublime foods. However, pizza in America is generally not at its best, not anymore. The elite dines on charred, organic pies while the common man, who no longer has a real family or a real home, feasts on greasy slabs of fiberglass covered with mock cheese, a substance that haunts his dreams and creates a leaden, ineffable awareness that something – something — is profoundly wrong.
Dash forgot to mention the children who carry cold slices in their school lunch day after day; the college students who gorge on pizza late at night, bewildered by the transition from normal life to a depersonalized, pagan subculture of binge drinking and serial hook-ups; the divorced fathers who can’t afford anything other than pizza for dinner and the empty cardboard pizza boxes piled in corporate offices, where employees sit at their desks struggling silently with Pizza Impasse Disorder, indigestion that comes in both acute and chronic forms.
The history of pizza is no longer cause for celebration. Only slick advertising can erase the truth. The Greek poet Hesiod identified five Ages of Man: the Golden Age, the Silver Age, the Bronze Age, the Heroic Age and the Iron Age. We are immersed in something he could not have foreseen: the Pizza Age. Someday even our rivers will turn red with excreted tomato sauce. There will be so much pizza in our bloodstreams that doctors will have to open de-mozzarella-fication clinics. As people sit in reclining chairs, the cheese globules painstakingly extracted from their veins by sophisticated technology, they will see their internal horizons gradually expanded and restored. Their souls and bodies will return to a state of innocence they never knew existed.
AT VFR, Lawrence Auster writes:
Dharun Ravi, the 20 year old former Rutgers freshman, has been found guilty of most counts in the peeping Tom “hate crimes” case in which his roommate, Tyler Clementi, committed suicide by jumping off the George Washington Bridge. I opined last month that the case seemed very weak. The application of the still-new category of “hate crime” to Ravi’s behavior, under the even more questionable sub-category of “bias intimidation,” seemed so strained that I thought the jury would reject the charges. (more…)
JOHN E. writes:
Fr. Marcel Guarnizo, the Catholic priest who refused Communion to a lesbian and has been suspended from pastoral work, does well to warn priests of what is likely to come for the faithful among them. It looks like it is taking heroic fortitude for this priest to stand firm and not violate his conscience as it relates to his simple duties as a priest. (more…)
PETER SCHIFF explains the obvious. Also, as Schiff points out, the issue is not Church vs. State, but State -- and the unconstitutional demand that citizens buy a product, i.e. national health insurance.
FR. Marcel Guarnizo, the priest who declined Communion to a Maryland woman who identified herself as a lesbian minutes before her mother’s funeral Mass has been removed from pastoral duties by the Archdiocese of Washington. In this letter to the public, posted at CNA, he explained the events that occurred on the day of Loetta Johnson’s funeral and clarified how his removal from duty was connected to the incident, in contradiction to the archdiocesan statement that he was suspended because of “intimidating behavior” toward staff.
Fr. Guarnizo’s letter is an extraordinary document, both because it is an unusual departure from normal protocol under which a priest who has been disciplined would defer to higher authorities and because of the actual events of that day. Barbara Johnson appeared in his office to introduce her lesbian lover a few minutes before the funeral Mass. Fr. Guarnizo was physically blocked by Johnson’s lover from leaving his office in order to follow Johnson and inform her of her obligation to abstain from Communion. He says he was overcome by a migraine after the funeral Mass, no doubt because of stress brought on by the evident hostility and defiance of the deceased’s daughter, whom he had no choice but to refuse publicly at the altar.
According to The Washington Post, Johnson, who contends she is both a Buddhist and a Catholic, told Fr. Guarnizo in a letter, “I will do everything in my power to see that you are removed from parish life so that you will not be permitted to harm any more families.”
The Archdiocese of Washington has made good this Buddhist lesbian’s threats and condemned the man adhering to Catholic doctrine.
Here is his letter:
I would like to begin by once again sending my condolences to the Johnson family on the death of Mrs. Loetta Johnson.
THE degree to which the Republican Party has failed to respond to the Democratic Party’s current “War on Women” campaign is breathtaking. Once again we see a GOP leadership that is spineless and lacking in the most basic understanding of what should be its core principles.
In the face of Obama’s dictatorial mandate that employers provide contraception coverage and rejection by Republicans of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA), the Democrats are plugging away at the idea that Republicans are medieval misogynists. The Democrats had raised over a million dollars by early March with this utterly stupid campaign.
What should the Republicans say in response? Instead of shying from the battle, they should plunge in. They should point to what feminist values have brought to women: unwed motherhood, divorce, slavery to unsatisfying jobs, high rates of breast cancer, infertility, and sexual disease; demographic decline and children who are unhealthy, neglected and depressed.
Why can’t Republicans launch their own War on Women campaign? They can’t. The truth is, they think the Democrats are right.
JESSE POWELL writes:
Men have a duty to provide for and protect women; this is the basic code of chivalry. Protecting women from domestic violence committed by men certainly falls under the “protect” aspect of any civilized chivalrous code. There is an attribute of chivalry though that is important to emphasize in the context of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA): What chivalry dictates is decided upon by men. Chivalry encompasses the masculine duties towards women for the benefit of women that are defined and enforced by men. (more…)
THE Violence Against Women Act, the federal domestic violence bill, has destroyed countless homes, victimized many innocent men and employed thousands of feminist hacks on the public dollar. It’s one more example of how women and men with a pathological distrust of men and a belief in state control of the family have taken over our country. If you would like to know more about VAWA, which is currently up for reauthorization before the Senate, I recommend this recent piece by Phyllis Schlafly. I am posting in its entirety below.
Sen. Dianne Feinstein told The New York Times this week that renewed opposition to the bill “is part of a larger effort, candidly, to cut back on rights and services to women. We’ve seen it go from discussions on Roe v. Wade, to partial birth abortion, to contraception, to preventive services for women. This seems to be one more thing.” Feminists allow no challenge to their agenda without proclaiming an all-out war on women. All of the issues Feinstein refers to are features of feminist totalitarianism. Her comment is similar to a Communist bureaucrat saying that objections to his putting innocent people in jail are “one more thing” he has to cope with.
From Schlafly’s site:
The reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) passed out of the Senate Judiciary Committee on February 2 on a straight party-line vote. That proves again that the feminists control the Democratic Party, and also is a refreshing indication that Republicans are no longer intimidated by feminist demands. (more…)
LAWRENCE AUSTER writes:
As I have said before, the non-discriminatory principle at the core of modern liberalism means that every traditional institution and community, every nation, every culture, every religion, must be eliminated. In line with that principle, the UN-affiliated human rights organization Gherush 92 demands that Dante’s Divine Comedy be banned from classroom teaching because it is “offensive and discriminatory” against Muslims, homosexuals, and Jews. This is not, as one critic predictably calls it, “an excess of political correctness”; it is simply consistent liberalism. Which means that if people want such attacks on our culture to end, it is liberalism itself that they must reject.
On a side point, I recently re-read The Inferno, and I don’t remember any anti-Jewish material in it. However, when it comes his offensive treatment of Muhammad, Dante is spot on. See my entry, “Muhammad in Hell.”
AN Oregon jury’s decision last week to award nearly $3 million to a couple who sued for wrongful birth in connection with their daughter with Down Syndrome was not the first award of its kind but it was still a stunning development. How can a health clinic be blamed for the birth of a child with genetic abnormalities? Why should anyone be blamed for the birth of a child with genetic defects? Only in a world where infanticide is acceptable does such an action make sense.
The decision will mean that doctors in states where “wrongful birth” suits (yes, there is such a thing as wrongful birth) are permitted will apply even more pressure to pregnant women to have risky prenatal tests and to abort if there are abnormalities. (more…)
EARLIER THIS month, Kathleen Sebelius, secretary of Health and Human Services, said Obama's contraception mandate would not cost the country anything. Health dollars would be saved, she said, if fewer children were born. The Washington Times ran an editorial yesterday on her remarkably revealing statement. The editors wrote: The secretary’s testimony reveals a diabolical view of the mission of Health and Human Services. For the agency, a human being now represents little more than a debit entry on a balance sheet. In other words, the fewer, the better. Accordingly, Uncle Sam recommends insurers achieve savings by preventing babies from being born and winding up in the expense column.
LAWRENCE AUSTER writes: For those who may be wondering why there has been no activity at VFR for the last two days, the site is not functioning due to technical issues. To fix them, the Movable Type software that runs the blog needs to be upgraded. Yesterday I was working on that, but realized the job is beyond my abilities. I've asked my hosting service if they can do it for a fee. If the answer is no, I'll have to find someone else.
RICK SANTORUM’S continuing success in the Republican race, with his victory in primaries in Mississippi and Alabama yesterday, is remarkable. Though Romney is still significantly ahead and took more delegates last night, Santorum has gained momentum. A candidate who has said that artificial contraception is harmful to women and society at large, who homeschools his large family, who is a devout Catholic and who receives an A plus [correction below] from Numbers USA on immigration policy has captured national attention and is holding it. If Santorum ran against Obama, opinions rarely voiced by major public figures would be aired. That alone would be a great thing.
Truthfully, I am stunned by Santorum’s limited success. Santorum elicits intense hatred from liberals in Pennsylvania, where he lost the Senate race in 2008. But he also managed to alienate Republican centrist voters with his support for the war in Iraq. He is a flawed candidate, lacking in charisma, boyish in demeanour, but he is a man of principle. He will be hated – absolutely hated – by those on the left. But anyone who could change this country for the better would be despised.
(more…)