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.

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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.

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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…)

I WAS lying on our living room sofa last night at about 11 p.m., reclining full-length on the couch and facing the front windows, which look out through tulip poplar trees and over a hill. I have been recovering from a shoulder injury and have been unable to sleep in bed because it is too painful. I was planning to stay in that spot for the night. In the distance, I could see the twinkling lights of the local mall. The retail behemoth was also in a state of quasi-slumber. The mall never really sleeps but it does rest, with its doors locked, its retail clerks dispersed along the highways and byways, its vast continent-sized parking lots empty of cars.

It was very pleasant lying there, gazing out through the trees. I said to my husband before he went to bed how much I liked falling asleep before the windows. When he left, I continued to look at the sky. (more…)

THE MURDER TRIAL of Stephanie Lazarus, the former Los Angeles police department detective who is accused of slaying her ex-boyfriend’s wife 26 years ago, continues this week. Lazarus was charged with the murder of Sherri Rasmussen in 2009. The victim’s family had unsuccessfully pleaded with detectives years ago to consider a former girlfriend of their son-in-law as a suspect. (more…)

BARTHOLOMEW writes:

AS DISCUSSED in the previous entry, energies once directed to the human race are now lavished on cats and dogs. It’s not that cats and dogs don’t deserve human kindness and attention. They just don’t deserve so much of it. Call it the sublimation of maternal instincts. Call it cultural suicide. Call it what you will, but it’s a real observable phenomenon, the extreme manifestation of which is the animal rights movement.

In this piece, an Australian writer, Ruby Hamad, argues that feminism and animal rights are virtually the same movement. Women can identify with animals, she says, because both have suffered historic oppression at the hands of men. (more…)

DARREN R. writes:

Simple question: At what point can I honestly say modern liberal society worships women?

Laura writes:

Do you think a society that requires women to negate their femaleness worships women?

Excuse my language, but modern feminism is penis envy writ large.

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  THE DISCUSSION on the excessive love of dogs (and cats) continues in the previous entry. By the way, the painting above, A Boy with Dogs and Kittens, by the artist Claude Joseph Bail, who died in 1921, does not portray anything remotely decadent. It conveys the pure joy to be found in relation to animals.

CATHERINE H. writes:

I just wanted to bring up the two Catholic presidential candidates’ lack of ashes during last night’s debate.  While Santorum attended Mass that morning and was photographed with a smear of ashes later in the day, I was nevertheless disappointed to see that he did not retain them for that night’s television appearance. (more…)

MRS. M. writes:

Recently my mother and I took my four year-old to a birthday party at a local mall. As we left the mall, I saw the strangest sight: two women in their 50s or 60s, appearing to be a “couple,” pushing baby strollers with a large pillow and a small DOG inside each one! (more…)

AT The Orthosphere, Proph makes the case against consensual politics. Democracy, he writes, is a “misrepresentation … of the nature and structure of reality”:

Existence is not reducible to a mass of equal and sovereign wills who must agree to coordinate their movements through space in order to avoid collision. Rightness and moral law are not determined by voting or even by choice; goodness is not convertible with consent; and authority, being rooted in God, transcends individual wills. Life under a consensual political system tends to inculcate its society with the delusion that “freedom” is the highest good, with the predictable consequence that the order of being, in all its determinism, comes to be regarded as oppressive and unjust. Thus, you wind up with people demanding taxpayer-subsidized elective sex change operations — how else can we be free of the tyranny of reality?

So prosperity misrepresents man’s spiritual condition, driving him to believe (falsely) that he is self-sustaining and self-actualizing; and democracy compounds the misrepresentation by driving him to believe (also falsely) that he is by nature free, that duty is an unjust imposition, authority something to be rebelled against, and reality itself something negotiable. A bad situation, indeed, and one in dire need of correction.

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  JESSE POWELL writes: A new group blog your readers will be interested in has launched! It's called The Orthosphere and, since its beginning on February 17, 2012, it has been active at a rate of three posts per day. It offers interesting commentary on religion, politics, and the various maladies of our sick culture. One thing I like about The Orthosphere is that it has a lot of testosterone and fighting spirit! It is an especially good blog for those wishing to explore spiritual and religious questions and for those interested in the political fight against liberalism.  The four contributors so far are Svein Sellanraa (Dispatches from the North), Bonald (Throne and Altar), Proph (Collapse: The Blog), and our very own Kristor. The blog bills itself as a “movement of Christian traditionalist conservatives” with the appropriate slogan, “Wherever an altar is found, there civilization exists” (a quote from Joseph de Maistre).  I urge your readers to check it out!

ALAN writes:

OF ALL the Christian denominations, the Eastern Orthodox Church takes Lenten fasting the most seriously. Here are the prescribed rules, which include abstinence from meat, dairy products and fish throughout Lent and abstinence from olive oil and wine for much of it. The Orthodox Lent extends from next Monday to the Friday before Palm Sunday. (more…)