IN THIS 1971 BBC interview, Muhammad Ali passionately defends racial identity and explains why he objects to interracial marriage. It’s well worth watching for his unapologetic and commonsense arguments. Sir Michael Parkinson, his interviewer, is a typical liberal sap. He insists that the races are all the same and only “society has made us different.” To which Ali instantly responds, “No, God made us different.”

Ali is applauded by the audience. “It’s nature to just want to be with your own,” he says. “I want to be with my own…. You a hater of your people if you don’t want to stay who you are. Are you ashamed of what God made you? God didn’t make no mistake when he made us all as we are.”

“I think that’s a philosophy of despair,” Parkinson says. (more…)

  A READER shared this card from his own personal mailbag:

  THE BOYS CHOIR is one of the few artistic endeavours in which a masculine esprit de corps still survives. In a boys choir, a boy can sing like a girl and yet not be a girl. See this lovely 2008 version of O, Holy Night  from the Liverpool Metropolitan Cathedral with James Orrell as soloist.

 JAMES N. writes:

We just put it together. Six hours. Solid wood.

Should I be worried about stereotyping or setting patriarchal expectations?

(more…)

LAST MONTH, I wrote very briefly about Kevin Neary, a 29-year-old graduate of the University of Pennsylvania whose life changed irrevocably in November. His story, as familiar as it seems, is haunting. Neary was walking home in the Northern Liberties neighborhood on Nov. 15 when he was approached by a black thug. The man asked Neary for money. He then fired a bullet into Neary’s neck, shattering his spine, and ran away.  (more…)

AT VFR, a reader argues that it was wrong for a New Zealand Catholic to destroy a billboard that portrayed Mary disrespectfully. After giving some thought to it, I am inclined to agree with him. The reader, Pentheus, writes:

This billboard is like a mousetrap into which these protesters hastened thoughtlessly. They are of their own volition completing the set-up for this propaganda exercise. This brute response is in no way helpful, and is rather in every way detrimental, to all of us who in any way share or sympathize with their views. It is also something of a confession of intellectual impotence, like Billy Budd. (more…)

   AS reported by the Associated Press: Petty Officer 2nd Class Marissa Gaeta, left, kisses her girlfriend of two years, Petty Officer 3rd Class Citlalic Snell at Joint Expeditionary Base Little Creek in Virginia Beach, Va., Wednesday, Dec. 22, 2011 after Gaeta's ship returned from 80 days at sea. It ís a time-honored tradition at Navy homecomings - one lucky sailor is chosen to be first off the ship for the long-awaited kiss with a loved one. On Wednesday, for the first time, the happily reunited couple was gay. Notice the way this couple is imitating a man and woman, with the one on the left playing the dominant male and the other the submissive female. They are playing roles. This is theater. So why not be real women instead? Wouldn't it make life simpler? The answer to this question is that it is no longer fully acceptable to be a real man or a real woman. But it is acceptable to play a real man or a real woman.

DIANA writes:

I rarely watch the evening news due to the rampant bias, but tonight I tuned in. One of the channels (I forget which, they are so interchangeable, and I switch between the three), had a report on the repeal of Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell and its effects on the troops in Afghanistan.

It was a puff piece. Everything peachy keen. No problems – none. Everyone gets along, mutual respect, yessir. As if soldiers in the field would ever confide dissenting opinions on camera. (more…)

A READER writes:

I thought you might be interested in the “My Abortion, My Life” campaign, which is trying to end the “silence” and “shame” of abortion by normalizing it. Their mission statement is quite disturbing:

“[W]e will: Help women who have had abortions to not feel so alone. Begin to end the shame and secrecy that surrounds abortion in this country. Help people see abortion for what it is: a normal and necessary part of women’s reproductive lives and health. My Abortion, My Life will end the silence surrounding abortion one story at a time. Read more about it. Think about it. And join us in this effort to create a new and positive conversation about abortion.” (more…)

BRUCE writes:

The thread on Hitchens made me reflect on several things – one of them is the matter of what we pray for in public prayers. 

In my Church, there is an unfortunate tendency to use the phrase ‘pray for’ in a non-specific fashion in the guided prayers – and indeed most of these prayers may be directed at anti-Christian groups, including enemy nations. (This is almost certain to happen when the subject matter is drawn from whatever is being covered prominently by the BBC that day – the BBC being one of the most powerful forces for political correctness and all its evils.) (more…)

FITZGERALD writes:

This quote from Lawrence Auster on Christopher Hitchens is worth rereading:

The way these Christians talk about Hitchens is the way conservatives justify our trade relations with China: we have trade relations with China, they say, because such relations will convert the Chinese to be like us. (more…)

JILL FARRIS writes:

As the mother of eight children who writes and speaks on mothering I wanted to add my observation [as to] why Michelle Obama would allow her daughter to hang all over her. It is true (as Kidist Paulos Asrat wrote) that she is a distant mother. Thus, when she is with her children she thinks that physical closeness is proof that she is “close” to her children and that they have a “deep” relationship. Actually, my observation is that mothers who feel guilty and who err on the side of permissiveness because of that guilt, let their children hang all over them. I’ve observed children who play with their mother’s hair and comb it and are allowed to do that even when the mother is visiting with adults.

Of course, these actions are not the sign of a close relationship (as the mother falsely convinces herself) but of disrespect. The pose in the photograph is actually very disrespectful to a mother but Michelle wouldn’t know that because she doesn’t know very much about mothering…not because she only has two children but because she is a feminist and contemplation of such things as mothering and mother/daughter discipline and teaching is “beneath” her. (more…)

AT Corporette, a website for feminist go-getters, an unmarried career woman describes the soulless process of freezing her eggs and fertilized embryos for future use. She admits that the procedure makes her momentarily “sad, lonely, depressed, desperate,” but does not consider the possibility that it might someday make her children “sad, lonely, depressed, desperate.” Instead of realizing that she has been lied to about everything, most of all about this, she enthusiastically recommends the same choice to others. She writes:

[I]n our first appointment, the doctor told me that frozen embryos are more viable children than frozen eggs alone. I hadn’t actually thought of freezing embryos, and my reaction to his suggestion surprised me. Although I have never believed that life starts at conception/fertilization (and still don’t), the thought of creating embryos, freezing them, and then possibly not using them, gave me pause. It just felt more personal, somehow, and like somehow it created the obligation for me to use all of them. (more…)

  AT Camera Lucida, Kidist Paulos Asrat compares the Obama family Christmas portraits to presidential family portraits of the past. This 2011 portrait is noticeably lacking in formality. It reminds me of the strange tendency families have today to express exaggerated affection for each other in public. Kidist addresses this point.

AT The Brussels Journal, Thomas F. Bertonneau writes of Franz Liszt’s “passionate fusion of musical art and religious conviction:” 

Wagner, before Nietzsche, was a revaluator of values. Liszt, while never as verbally astute as Wagner, was a re-revaluator of values, a natural agent of the type of counter-revolution recommended by Joseph de Maistre, whom Liszt read and admired. Liszt naturally – in his life and work – understood that while Wagner had recorded history accurately, he had interpreted history inaccurately. In Wagner’s aesthetic-ethical history, the crumbling away of religious illusion opened the space for the belated self-divination of the genius or hero, who as artist-politician would redeem society from its corruption through the éclat of his example. Wagner could adore the music of Palestrina and Bach, or “Christian Harmony,” as magnificent instances of musical self-expression, but not as signs pointing to a transcendental referent – he enjoyed them shorn, that is, of the deity to whom the polyphony was worshipfully directed. For Liszt, a loss, for example the loss of faith, was real, and could only be made good through reinstitution. (more…)

SEVERAL READERS expressed interest in Ingres’s famous 1845 painting of the Comtesse d’Haussonville, which I posted recently without comment. Though the image here does not do justice to the arresting colors and lifelike gaze, it’s still worth a second look. (Click on the image for a larger version.) The Comtesse’s marble white skin is so lovely in this ravishing blue gown against the blue mantel. Her unusual pose was perhaps inspired by classical statues of the muses. Her blue eyes, with unusually large pupils, suggest a penetrating inquisitiveness and detachment. She wears the most restrained of smiles and is not intent on proving  bouyant happiness. On the mantle, in between the classical vases, there are a small pile of visiting cards and pots of pink and salmon-colored chrysanthemums, suggesting feminine busyness. Everything is exquisitely refined and yet she lends it an inviting warmth and unpretentiousness. (more…)