JENNIFER ZICKEL is outraged because her daughters will not be able to serve as altar girls at the Corpus Christi Catholic church in the Arlington, Virginia area. The pastor has ended the practice, returning to the traditional custom of altar boys, and there is very little protest. Nevertheless, The Washington Post writesof the dissatisfaction of Zickel and a few others. Even though women typically outnumber men on altars in Catholic churches, and the Novus Ordo liturgy is often infused with a feminine, heart-throbbing sensibility, Zickel ran out of church in tears when she learned her little girls will not be altar servers someday, as if she had been told they would be forcibly confined to convents for the rest of their lives.

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IT WOULD be difficult to find a public figure today wearing an expression of convincing severity and authority such as Winston Churchill wore in this 1941 photo. It’s true, those were serious times. But these are serious times too and he wore a similar expression long before the war.

We are surrounded by vapid smiles (see this official photo of Obama) – smiles on newscasters, politicians, journalists, priests, intellectuals. An age of radical democracy is one in which power is diffused and virility demonized. Noxious sentimentality masks the emptiness once occupied by men. (more…)

ALAN writes:

You asked in a recent post: “When did it become unacceptable to have one’s picture taken without an enormous grin?”

Excellent question.  

Tentative answer: About the time when TV stations began to feature “happy talk” in their news reports. I distinctly remember my reaction to that at the time (more than 35 years ago). It was, I thought, the most ridiculous thing I had ever seen: Grown men and women whose job was to report the news were now making cutesy-poo “happy talk.” It was, I said to myself, a sure sign that American culture was descending into infantilism.   (more…)

THE latest fad in public education is eliminating cursive penmanship, a move that Linda Schrock Taylor at LewRockwell.com says represents “literacy’s last hurrah.” Cursive helps children learn to read. She writes:

As a child does cursive writing, the rhythmic and purposeful movements of the hand and pencil echo and reinforce the child’s thoughts and speech, matching and practicing those two basic and automatically acquired skills. (more…)

THE MOST compelling argument monarchists have against democracy as a political system is right before our eyes: modern-day America. Is there any doubt that if Tocqueville were reborn and journeyed through America today he would conclude that democracy is man’s worst political innovation, that it produces stupidity, moral cowardice, soft slavery, and a ruling elite that diffuses and cloaks its rule with meritocracy? All of Tocqueville’s worst prophecies have come true. Our democracy is tyrannical.

At VFR, readers give bleak assessments of this great experiment in equality and representative government. Matthew H. writes: 

More and more the State and the majority of the centers of power and influence seem to be controlled by people who somehow combine the topsy-turvy nuttiness of an old Batman TV show villain with the clinical efficiency of the SS. We are beset by hosts of smutty, totalitarian buffoons. (more…)

TERESA OF ÁVILA, the saint and contemplative, wrote the following words to her Carmelite sisters. They apply well to the woman at home today even though she obviously does not live in seclusion or detach herself from “kinsfolk.” Because domesticity is so trivialized, presented as something easy and minor, the great spiritual challenges are rarely addressed. St. Teresa wrote:

Once we have detached ourselves from the world, and from our kinsfolk, and are cloistered here, in the conditions already described, it must look as if we have done everything and there is nothing with which we have to contend. But, oh, my sisters, do not feel secure and fall asleep, or you will be like a man who goes to bed quite peacefully, after bolting all his doors for fear of thieves, when the thieves are already in the house. (more…)

I failed to post this comment from an anonymous reader regarding the recent discussion about housewives, stay-at-home moms and domestic engineers. The reader wrote:

Perhaps a married woman who works outside the home for wages could be called a jobwife.   (more…)

  KEVIN NEARY, a 29-year-old graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, was walking home in his Philadelphia Northern Liberties neighborhood early Tuesday morning when he was stopped, asked for money by a gunman, and then immediately shot in the neck. It was just another day on the streets of America, where gun violence by blacks against whites is routine, leaving tears of agony but no collective outrage. The gunman was black. Neary is expected to be paralysed from the neck down for life. It was, in the words of a TV news reporter, "a robbery gone bad."

THE discussion about monarchy vs. democracy, a topic considered obsolete by much of the world, continues in this thread.

In response to the point that monarchy violates American tradition and represents too radical of a change, James P. writes:

We could not get from democracy to monarchy without profound change, and many people would find the new regime unpalatable. (more…)

  IN 1786, British portraitist Thomas Gainsborough completed this portrait of the wife of the playwright and politician, Richard Brinsley Sheridan. The reproduction here does not come close to capturing the loveliness and interest of the rendered scene, with Elizabeth Linley Sheridan elegantly perched on a boulder overshadowed by foliage, billowing clouds in the distance. The expression on her face is serious and serene. As Sister Wendy Beckett wrote: Her loneliness and elusive charm are conveyed to us in her portrait. Only the grave and lovely face is solid; all else is thin, diaphonous, unstable. Her mood is echoed by the wistful melancholy of the setting sun. (Sister Wendy's History of Painting, p. 243)  In this age of smiley faces, it is a relief to view portraits of the unsmiling. When did it become unacceptable to have one's picture taken without an enormous grin? A smile does not contentment make. Mrs. Sheridan was a celebrated singer when she eloped with Sheridan, who later was unfaithful to her. She is famous for having said to him: “Take me out of the whirl of the world, place me in the quiet and simple scenes of life I was born for.” Mrs. Sheridan's unleashed hair in this painting suggests someone with a fanatic heart who could not happily be confined to the drawing room.

GRAHAM SPANIER, who was forced to resign as Penn State president last week in response to the Jerry Sandusky scandal, wrote an article in 1975 for the Archives of Sexual Behavior on wife-swapping. The academic article opens with this:

This article attempts to illuminate the understanding of swinging, or mate swapping, an increasingly common form of extramarital sexual activity. A theoretical formulation argues that swinging is a form of extramarital sexual activity which serves to define as good and acceptable a behavior that in other forms and in the past has been considered deviant or immoral.

Spanier, who earned his Ph.D. in sociology from Northwestern University and studied wife-swapping for his dissertation, has been the object of criticism by conservative activists for years. (more…)

JOSEPH FARAH writes at World Net Daily on the question as to why the rapes and cover-up at Penn State occurred:

The answer is right in front of our faces – but nobody wants to state it. 

The more our society condones and glorifies aberrant sexual behavior, the more of it we will see. Period. End of story. (more…)

  AT his website, Theodore Harvey explains why he is a monarchist. He wrote this essay when he was a liberal. He has since become Christian and more conservative in his views: I believe that monarchy, with its colourful, inspiring, and unique pageantry, is worth the expense. I believe that there is something special and magical, something which words cannot quite describe, about a king or queen which a president can never hope to offer. I believe that the long histories of the world’s monarchies are glorious treasures to be cherished, and that present-day monarchs provide the only continuous link to that past. I do not want to live in a world where royalty exist only in fairytales and history books. I do not want to have to explain to my children that, yes, there used to be real princes and princesses, but all that has been abolished. I believe in keeping the great romantic tradition of royalty alive. That is why I am a monarchist.

AT the blog Collapse, which is about “making sense of the coming catastrophe,” the author writes:

Over time, societies will tend toward stabler and less complex forms of organization: toward monarchy and tribalism and away from democratic bureaucracy; toward smaller-scale economic arrangements and away from large, top-heavy corporations and distribution systems; and toward localized social governance and away from centralised federalism. It must, as a matter of social necessity arising from the variable and unpredictable availability of social resources and the comparatively static and unchanging nature of social organization. 

The hilarious thing is that nothing but a monarchical figure can halt this trend, and the trend (if not halted) leads us back to monarchy, anyway. (more…)

  THE BILL is $27,400 a year for secondary students of the Friends Central School in suburban Philadelphia to be taught everything they need to know about enlightened promiscuity by sex scholar Al Vernacchio.