JESSE POWELL writes:

In 1900 and before, the rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and working married women were all very low. Indeed, they all had similar levels in the distant past and they all have similar levels today. It is widely agreed that divorce and illegitimacy are indicators of family breakdown but what about married women working? Isn’t a married woman working a sign of “empowerment” and vital to her sense of identity and a necessary part of her contribution to society?

In 1900, certainly, people didn’t think so. A look at family-related indicators from the distant past suggests that this view was correct. Married women working should be seen as just as significant an indicator of family breakdown as illegitimacy and divorce; all three phenomenon were rare in the past and socially stigmatized. Similarly, today, all three phenomena are common and widespread.

 In 1900, the divorce rate was 8.1 percent (only 3.3 percent in 1870), the illegitimacy ratio was about 1 percent, and the proportion of married women working was 3.0 percent (I’m referring to white women here). In 2009, the divorce rate was 50 percent; the illegitimacy ratio was 29.0 percent, and the proportion of married women working was 61.3 percent. This represents about a twentyfold increase in all three measures over the course of 110 years (140 years on the measure of divorce). The annualized rates of growth in the quantity of the three measures are 2.5 percent for divorce, 3.5 percent for illegitimacy, and 3.7 percent for married women working. Read More »

JILL FARRIS writes:

Thank you for posting this article. Planned Parenthood is a for-profit agency that makes millions of dollars exploiting women. It has always targeted blacks and minorities from the very beginning of its history (as the Birth Control League started by Margaret Sanger). If you doubt that PP targets blacks, check out how many abortion clinics are located in inner-city black neighborhoods and how many are actually on Martin Luther King Blvd! Margaret Sanger called blacks “human weeds” that must be eliminated.

If your local PP does not currently have an abortion clinic but, instead, has “education” classes, be aware that their education classes unleash evil through information. My mother (who still thinks Margaret Sanger was a “great humanitarian”) sent me to PP’s Human Sexuality course when I was 16 years old. It was there that I viewed movies of bestiality, homosexuality and other perversions. Every class period ended with a bowl of condoms being passed around. The “teacher’s pet” was a beautiful 16 year old who was often called upon to testify about the abortions she had had with her 35-year-old biker boyfriend and how she was doing great after all these abortions. If PP is really about giving women a “choice,” why were we not told anything else in this class except that we needed to be sexual (in any way and form we liked) and that abortion has no consequences, physically or otherwise? Lies, both of them. Classes were always mixed; teen boys and girls together in order to break down our natural modesty and embarrassment about discussing such intimate details with the opposite sex. Read More »

Lila Rose, president of Live Action

THE ANTI-ABORTION group Live Action sent a man and a woman posing as a pimp and a prostitute into a New Jersey Planned Parenthood clinic. In a lengthy interview, the manager of the clinic advised them how to get abortions and testing for sexually transmitted diseases for prostitutes as young as 14 and 15. The manager also told them how to circumvent mandatory reporting laws aimed at preventing abuse of minors. The video of the interview can be seen here.

Lila Rose, the student at UCLA who is president of Live Action, stated in a release, “This proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Planned Parenthood intentionally breaks state and federal laws and covers up the abuse of the young girls it claims to serve. Time and time again, Planned Parenthood has sent young girls back into the arms of their abusers. They don’t deserve a dime of the hundreds of millions they receive in federal funding from taxpayers. Congress must cease funding and the Department of Justice should investigate this corrupt organization immediately.”

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

It came to my attention recently that the current reading assignment in my son’s tenth-grade English class involves Jay Asher’s so-called young adult novel Thirteen Reasons Why (2009).  Asher’s publishers have pushed his book skillfully and have succeeded in insinuating it in high school reading lists across the nation.  Commercially, Asher has scored a hit, with a captive audience of high school students. 

What to say about Thirteen Reasons Why?  The Amazon webpage devoted to Asher’s title cites the Booklist summary of the plot: “When Clay Jenson plays the cassette tapes he received in a mysterious package, he’s surprised to hear the voice of dead classmate Hannah Baker. He’s one of [thirteen] people who receive Hannah’s story, which details the circumstances that led to her suicide.  Clay spends the rest of the day and long into the night listening to Hannah’s voice and going to the locations she wants him to visit.  The text alternates, sometimes quickly, between Hannah’s voice (italicized) and Clay’s thoughts as he listens to her words, which illuminate betrayals and secrets that demonstrate the consequences of even small actions.”  Does it sound like a soap opera in prose?  It is that assuredly, but it is regrettably much worse than that.

Read More »

KAREN writes:

Regarding the discussion over abortion and adoption, I just had to offer a few thoughts. I am adopted and I was adopted into a family that has been plagued with some amount of infertility in every generation.  There are at least seven people who are adopted in our extended family.  It is a wonderful thing. My adopted mom said our joy comes at the price of heartbreak for someone else, which is so true and yet we all seem to be well-adjusted and well-loved. I dislike hearing that some people think that all adopted children are emotional wrecks. This gives adoption a bad name. Having met my biological family as an adult, I can say that a few of my own quirks (and we all have them, adopted or not) came directly from my birth family.

Adoption is so much better in a case where a mom is emotionally unable to raise her children. Abortion is never the answer. My cousin just paid thousands of dollars to adopt her daughter and it took years while a million babies were thrown in a garbage can in that same time.I cost my parents the huge sum of $5.00 in 1959 .The Bible is full of stories of adoption. It is not a bad thing.

TWO lesbian students were cheered as they walked into a Minnesota school assembly as a couple. They were permitted to partake in the “royalty court procession” after the Southern Poverty Law Center and a lesbian rights group threatened legal action if they were denied. A mother of one of the girls praised her daughter’s courage.

A PETITE, 34-year-old blonde who worked as a corrections officer at a Washington State prison was murdered on Saturday while she was on guard alone in the chapel, according to The Seattle Times. The Monroe Correctional Complex houses 2,400 men. Jayme Biendl, who was named officer of the year at the prison in 2008, was 5 feet three inches tall and weighed 130 pounds. She was unarmed when she was strangled by a 200-pound rapist sentenced to life without parole. He had once doused a woman with gasoline and set her on fire.

Guards at the prison do not carry any weapons, not even pepper spray or batons. Scott Frakes, the prison superintendent, told the Seattle newspaper that women guards are seen as “equal and just as valuable” as men. Read More »

Gilbert Stuart's Williamstown portrait of Washington

GEORGE WASHINGTON was famous for his finely-honed manners, which combined the polish of a European aristocrat with the democratic simplicity of a colonial farmer. Some of this  refinement was apparently inspired by “The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and in Conversation.” This set of 110 social maxims originated with sixteenth-century French Jesuits and was translated into English in 1640. Washington copied out the rules in his student exercise book when he was under 16.

“The Gestures of the Body must be Suited to the discourse you are upon.” That is rule #20, one that can lead to many hours of fruitful reflection.

Some of the rules, such as the prohibitions against drumming one’s fingers, humming and bedewing the faces of others with spittle, deal with small matters. Others concern iisues of the highest morality, such as #21, “Reproach none for the Infirmaties of Nature, nor Delight to Put them that have in mind thereof.”  Deference to others, even those equal or below in rank, is central to this ethical system. Rule #34: “It is good Manners to prefer them to whom we Speak before ourselves especially if they be above us with whom in no Sort we ought to begin.” Read More »

IN VIRGIL’S epic poem The Aeneid, the hero Aeneas leaves the smoking ruins of Troy with his aged father on his back and his young son by his hand. His destiny is to found a second home for his remnant people in Italy and to give birth to a new civilization. Not long after the Trojan armada embarks, Aeneas’ father, Anchises, dies and is buried in Sicily. A year later, after a sojourn in Carthage, Aeneas returns to the shores of Sicily and there observes the anniversary of his father’s death.

Ever conscious of his place in the chain of generations, bidden to undertake a dangerous and daunting task, Aeneas finds beauty and meaning in his duty toward the dead.

He is not a mere warrior or adventurer. As he stoops to his father’s grave, he pledges to remember forever. The Trojans have lost everything. They have only their will to survive and their few ships. Even so, a new world will be founded on the old, intermingled with the past as spring earth with the dust of the dead.

Here is the scene from Book V of the Robert Fagles translation:

When, in the following Dawn, bright day had put the stars
to flight, Aeneas called his companions together,
from the whole shore, and spoke from a high mound:
“Noble Trojans, people of the high lineage of the gods,
the year’s cycle is complete to the very month
when we laid the bones, all that was left of my divine father,
in the earth, and dedicated the sad altars. And now
the day is here (that the gods willed) if I am not wrong,
which I will always hold as bitter, always honoured. Read More »

HOW IS IT possible that we live in a world where some women, infertile after years of career advancement, arrange to have surrogates provide babies for them while other women, even married women who already have homes and husbands, abort their children?

One reason we live in such a world is that women are not told the most basic facts of fertility. They are routinely lied to about the consequences of delaying childbirth. What college teaches women that with every passing year after their mid-twenties, their fertility declines significantly? What college really impresses this information on the minds of the young?

The information that many thousands of infertile couples are eager for unwanted children is also withheld. The hopes of the infertile should be widely recognized and they are not. Supporters of abortion never state the obvious: that nine months of pregnancy is not a great hardship. It is painful to give up a baby for adoption, but not life-ruining. As a reader wrote in this entry, these simple facts “cut through all the intellectual meanderings that we are subjected to when faced with abortion.”

Our world is infused with hostility toward motherhood and life. No amount of focused childrearing nor the very real love mothers have for their children can hide this fact. 

Daniel Mitsui

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A READER, Bill W., at VFR also writes:

  …. [T]he forced nature of the welfare state colors everything. This form of “charity,” rather than really helping people, creates dependence, undermines thrift and hard work, and destroys people spiritually, both by undermining what is good, and also by creating a sense of wounded, resentful expectation–the idea that the world owes them something. I’m a doctor. And having worked with Medicaid patients in emergency rooms before, I can tell you that they are far more demanding, suspicious, complaining and overall “entitled” than any other group. Read More »

AN ARTICLE in The New York Times about a survey of college freshmen makes this point:

Women’s sense of emotional well-being was more closely tied to how they felt the faculty treated them…. It wasn’t so much the level of contact as whether they felt they were being taken seriously by the professor. If not, it was more detrimental to women than to men.

The idea that a woman’s sense of well-being might be tied to how she treats others is not seriously considered.

Read More »

FROM IAN FLETCHER’S book, Free Trade Doesn’t Work: What Should Replace it and Why:

The idea that America’s economic tradition has been economic liberty, laissez faire, and wide-open cowboy capitalism – which would naturally include free trade – resonates well with our national mythology. It fits the image of this country held by both the Right (which celebrates this tradition) and the Left (which bemoans it). It is believed both here and abroad. But when it comes to trade at least, it is simply not real history. The reality is that all four presidents on Mount Rushmore were protectionists. (Even Jefferson came around after the War of 1812.) Protectionism is, in fact, the real American Way. (p. 131) Read More »

HERE is a brilliant essay by the Catholic artist Daniel Mitsui on mass media and Catholic liturgy. He writes:

I have heard many times the claim that the Catholic Church should have great success in her New Evangelization, because Catholicism is a visual religion and contemporary society is also visual. But to call Catholicism a visual religion is a meager assertion; it is no more visual than any of a thousand kinds of paganism. It would be more accurate simply to say that human beings are visual animals. The visuality of Catholicism is only remarkable because the religion’s most obvious alternatives in the West are rather inhuman. Read More »

CORY writes:

In regard to your update on homeschooling, this is one of those issues that infuriates the mainstream left not only due to its countering of centralized top-down state indoctrination, but perhaps more so because it is a liberating and empowering movement that they cannot take credit for. The left sells itself as a democratizing force that all past progress can be attributed to. Yet upon closer inspection, we see that whenever a group pushes for progress without encasing itself in all the prevailing ideology of the leftist hive-mind, they are viewed with contempt regardless of virtue. Read More »

MR. SPEAKER, Mr. Vice President, members of Congress, distinguished guests, and fellow Americans:

I would like to begin with an apology. My sincere regrets go to all Americans tonight for my disappointing performance over the past year. As you know, I do not believe in the language of divisiveness and therefore feel that it is only right that I personally assume responsibility for the anger and worry this country’s failing economy and recent government measures have caused.

First, I pledge to do everything I can in the year ahead to undo the recent health care legislation passed by Congress. In good conscience, I cannot continue to insist on something that is so contrary to the will of the people. Read More »