JAMES P. writes:

Bruce B. writes,

“I think the essence of contemporary liberal thought is egalitarianism. To phrase it like Jim Kalb would, it’s ‘individual autonomy subject to the formal constraint of equality’ or we should all be equally free.”

And you respond,

“Yes, the idea of equality is so central to modern liberalism, and so foreign to Nazism, that it is impossible to think of them as neatly allied.” (more…)

READ more about the Victorian portrait painter John Collier, who painted this portrait of his first wife Marion Huxley in 1883, here. After Marion’s early death, Collier married her sister. According to Wikipedia, the people he painted included: (more…)

  IN THE entry about children and the night sky, Alan writes: My father and I were not close, but the stars brought us together for a brief but wonderful time in our lives. When I was 13, he gave me a small telescope. A year later, he and I built a wooden carrying case for it. We stood in our backyard on many nights in 1964 watching the Echo II satellite, a tiny point of light that moved slowly and silently among the stars. We taught ourselves to identify the planets Venus and Jupiter; the summer triangle and Northern Cross in summer; Orion and the Pleiades in winter; and the stars Vega, Deneb, Altair, Capella, Arcturus, Antares, and Sirius. They have been “landmarks”in the sky, century after century, and are landmarks also in my memories of my father. As The Drifters sang in their 1962 hit record “Up On The Roof”: “At night, the stars put on a show for free….” Or as Emerson worded it: “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which had been shown! But every night come out these envoys of beauty, and light the universe with their admonishing smile.”

IN MY POST earlier today about James Taranto’s editorial in the Wall Street Journal, I incorrectly assumed a typo was made in one of his sentences. He said artificial contraception is not harmful to women who choose career over family or who don’t want children. I thought he also said that artificial contraception is not harmful to women who cannot find husbands.  (more…)

ANOTHER British bioethicist at the top of her game has a proposal for enlightened reproduction. According to Bioedge, Anna Smajdor (photo above) of the University of East Anglia recommends ectogenesis, or gestation with artificial wombs.

Smajdor argues that equality between men and women cannot be achieved as long as pregnancy is the norm. Writing in the January issue of the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics, she states: (more…)

GREG J. writes:

Daniel S. wrote about the professors advocating infanticide:

So eugenics is bad when practiced by Nazis, but good when advocated by liberal “ethics” professors? Liberalism is at its core a nihilistic cult of death. (more…)

AT The Orthosphere, Kristor explores the ill humor and petulance of atheists he has known. Given that they seem settled in their views and have thought about them a great deal, why do they seem angry? He gives a small example:

The tiniest thing will provoke their outrage. The current hatred of Tim Tebow is a good example. But it can get incredibly picayune. A member of my congregation went directly from Mass to a tennis match a few weeks ago. (more…)

BRUCE writes:

I recently (inadvertently) overheard a long conversation between a group of upper middle class, full- time mothers who had met in a cafe.

Naturally, children were a major topic – since this was apprently the main factor bringing them together.

Aside from this, the first 20 minutes was mainly occupied with discussions of diets and exercise regimes. The strongest approval was given to extreme long distance running exploits and thinness, the strongest disapproval to examples of obesity. (more…)

JEANETTE V. writes: As you can see from a photo of Barbara Johnson, anyone can tell she is a practicing lesbian. This woman is using her mother's death as a launching pad for a political statement. I find her actions especially vile.

ALAN writes:

A Maryland priest who denied Communion to a lesbian at her mother’s funeral last weekend has not received the full support of the Diocese of Washington, according to WUSA9. com. Diocesan officials said the priests should not have withheld Communion without talking to the woman privately. But the Rev. Marcel Guarnizo did not learn the woman was lesbian until a few minutes before the funeral. He had no choice but to openly refuse her once she placed him in this bind.

The lesbian, Barbara Johnson, says she is still angry because her mother’s funeral was ruined. I’m sure much more than her mother’s funeral was ruined by her daughter’s preference for voluntary sterility and girl love. Perhaps this priest expressed what her mother never could.

(more…)

JESSE POWELL writes:

The New York Times recently ran a series of two articles by Jason DeParle and Sabrina Tavernese on out-of-wedlock births and single parenting among middle class whites in Lorain, Ohio.  “For Women Under 30, Most Births Occur Outside Marriage” and “Young Mothers Describe Marriage’s Fading Allure” convey a grim picture of family breakdown. More than 60 percent of all births to mothers under 30 in Lorain County are to unwed mothers.

The city of Lorain is characterized as “a ragged industrial town on Lake Erie” and is further described as having “lost most of two steel mills, a shipyard and a Ford factory, diminishing the supply of jobs that let blue-collar workers raise middle-class families.”

 A few words about the demographics. The county of Lorain excluding Lorain city is 87% white but Lorain city, the main focus of the interviews in the articles, is 55% white. The children of Lorain city are 37% white, 36% Hispanic, 23% black, and 13% racially mixed (a child may be Hispanic and  racially mixed at the same time). Among whites in the city of Lorain, the Married Parents Ratio is 60%; for the county of Lorain (excluding Lorain city) it is 78%. In Elyria, also in Lorain County, the white Married Parents Ratio is 65% and 62% of the children are white. Data comes from the 2010 Census.

(more…)

THE REV. JAMES JACKSON writes:

One often hears of the importance of respecting national customs. This respect is demanded by immigrants to Western countries, over anything from foot washing facilities to honor killings. General Sir Charles Napier, the British Army’s Commander-in-Chief in India in the mid-19th century had quite a response to this sort of thinking. The response was to a contingent of Hindu priests complaining to him about the prohibition of sati by British authorities. Sati was the custom of burning a widow alive on the funeral pyre of her husband. (more…)