JOEL BAKAN, a Canadian law professor, writes in The New York Times,

WHEN I sit with my two teenagers, and they are a million miles away, absorbed by the titillating roil of online social life, the addictive pull of video games and virtual worlds, as they stare endlessly at video clips and digital pictures of themselves and their friends, it feels like something is wrong.  (more…)

WHO WILL this child be someday? His parents – a black woman and an Asian man – conceived him in a contractual arrangement. His mother lives with a white woman. They have all three fulfilled their desire for parenthood, without viewing the child as a whole, as a social being.

I always wonder what the people who work in the clinics that facilitate these kinds of families are like. I can’t imagine it. Life must seem so cheap to them. (more…)

THIS STORY OF foreign students protesting their wages at a chocolate plant in Pennsylvania is truly remarkable. The students came to this country on State Department work-travel visas, known as J-1 visas, which are commonly used to provide businesses with a pool of cheap foreign labor, especially in the summer. The students’ complaints, judging from the news accounts, are two-fold. One, they wanted to make more money for less labor. (They are paid $8.35 an hour.) Two, they wanted to have a good time.

One of the students came right out and said that she was expecting Charle’s Chocolate Factory, not a real manufacturing plant.  What an outrage. No Oompa-Loompas or Willy Wonka. No Veruca Salt or Mike Teavee. According to the New York Times,

When she was offered a contract for a job at a plant with Hershey’s chocolates, she said, she was excited. “We have all seen Charlie’s chocolate factory,” she said. “We thought, ‘This is good.’ ”

The State Department grants the students visas through an agency called the Council for Educational Travel. The Council works with employers around America to find foreign students jobs, a service unavailable to Americans. There are no agencies rounding up paying jobs and summer housing for any American college students who are without employment and would like to work. (more…)

WRITING IN The Sidney Telegraph, Columnist Miranda Devine last week discussed the publicity surrounding Finance Minister Penny Wong’s lesbian partner, who is expecting a baby. Devine spoke in fairly mild terms, condemning a fatherless society and same-sex marriage. She wasn’t in the least critical of Wong herself. (more…)

MICHAEL S. writes:

I find the comments of the Marriage Project with regards to the new marriage norm very interesting. Over the pass several months I have discussed marriage with my girlfriend. In the process I expressed a desire to marry and start having children. In my mind, the next step after marriage is starting a family. (more…)

SEBASTIAN C. writes:

My disagreement with you and Dalrymple is so extreme, I’m going to try to write a piece for Zero Hedge blasting him for making such a stupid, unfair, morally relativistic argument. The fact that the windbag was trying to criticize moral relativism makes it even worse. Comparing the London looters to the bankers who now hold the whole Western world hostage and threaten a war of holocaust proportions to match the ones they manufactured in the previous century, who refer to the cradles of our civilization as “Piigs,” who rape and enslave entire nations, defames the rioters’ good name. (more…)

DIANA writes:

Two observations came to me as a read this article about the horrific child-murder involving physician Louis Chen which you discussed last week:

1. Journalists now accept as normal the biologically impossible: that two males can “have a child.” (Up there with “gender reassignment” and other forms of science fiction we have
to accept as fact.)

2. More important, this is a stew of sheer perversity!

(more…)

COMMENTERS in the British press in the past week have drawn disturbing parallels between looters in the recent riots and the bankers involved in the 2008 financial crisis, as well as members of parliament accused in the expenses scandal. Theodore Dalrymple at City Journal examines the warped comparison between looters and the bankers. He writes: (more…)

IN THEIR 2010 report,  Brad Wilcox and Elizabeth Marquardt of the National Marriage Project make an excellent case for why marriage has declined among the less educated. When marriage is redefined to mean, first and foremost, intimacy between adults, rather than an institution for the rearing of children, it is far less attainable for ordinary people. I would take it one step further and say when marriage is redefined to mean “soul mate” intimacy and radical equality, it is far less attainable.

They wrote: (more…)

NEWS ORGANIZATIONS are heavily reporting the latest findings by the National Marriage Project, which show once again the continued decline of marital relationships among the lower middle class, with working-class whites increasingly resembling inner-city blacks in their family structure.

Cohabitation has grown fourteen-fold among parents since the 1970s. A quarter of American women with multiple children have children with more than one man. Out-of-wedlock births are uncommon among college-educated women. (The Marriage Project does not mention here that this is partly due to the greater acceptance of abortion among the educated.) Cohabitation is common among the highly educated but usually occurs before marriage.

With the growth in cohabitation, the divorce rate has decreased by four percentage points among couples in the first ten years of marriage. Cohabiting couples are more than twice as likely to break up before their first child is twelve and children who live with cohabiting adults have worse outcomes and a much higher incidence of behavior problems.  (more…)

  BREAK OFF an elm bough three feet long, in full leaf, and lay it on the table before you, and try to draw it, leaf for leaf. It is ten to one if in the whole bough (provided you do not twist it about as you work) you find one form of leaf exactly like another; perhaps you will not even have one complete. Every leaf will be oblique, or foreshortened, or curled, or crossed by another, or shaded by another, or have something or other the matter with it; and though the whole bough will look graceful and symmetrical, you will scarcely be able to tell how or why it does so, since there is not one line of it like another. But if nature is so various when you have a bough on the table before you, what must she be when she retires from you, and gives you her whole mass and multitude? The leaves then at the extremities become fine as dust, a mere confusion of points and lines between you and the sky, a confusion which, you might as well hope to draw sea-sand particle by particle, as to imitate leaf for leaf.                           ---     John Ruskin, Modern Painters, Vol. I, Pt. 2, Ch. 1.

  THE NATION never tires of the smoldering bitterness of Gloria Steinem. A new documentary of the 77-year-old child-hating, man-despising, God-taunting socialist aired last night on HBO. I did not see it, but then who needs to see it? It's all been said a million times before. Since feminism has been institutionalized and now exerts coercive power over the lives of many millions, how does Steinem interpret this amazing success? She refuses to see it as success. The feminist revolution has only just begin. "The point is we go forward. We're nowhere near where we need to be," she said in the film. But where is it that we need to be? A world where no woman feels ashamed for turning her back on others. Somehow, in Gloria's mind, the "system," the "structure," the "dominant group" can be changed in such a way that women are pleased with lives of selfishness and heartlessness. The feminist revolution must continue precisely because femininity cannot be destroyed.

JANE writes:

I haven’t visited the topic of nursing for a long time and I’ve enjoyed your perspective on the issue. The experience of nursing lays close to my heart.

I’m aware of the long and sordid history of the artificial feeding of infants. Yes, there are, and were, malevolent forces behind this trend (step one towards getting women into the workforce) but ultimately it is each individual woman who chose to abandon the practice. At one time, many naively believed the experts who said formula is superior to human milk. We now know that to be false, and yet women still choose formula and bottles. Good and loving stay-at-home mothers choose formula. Why? (more…)

   TODAY IS the Feast of the Assumption. In this fifteenth century painting, once the center of an altarpiece, Matteo Giovanni depicted the Assumption of Mary. Angels ascend to heaven with the Virgin's throne. Her girdle drops and is caught by St. Thomas, known as Doubting Thomas, the apostle who questioned that Christ stood before him after the Resurrection. Christ awaits her at the top of the panel with prophets and ancestors. O, Glorious Queen, hear us. Help us to desire celestial things.  Mystical Rose, Morning Star, Gate of Heaven and Refuge of Sinners, may we meet you someday in Paradise!