JOSH F. writes:

I sense something very insidious in the elevation of women such as Bachmann and Palin, especially when one considers their political male  peers on the “right.” Add to this mix, the Coulter’s and Malkin’s and it’s as if the women are the real bull dogs defending and defining the Republican Party, i.e., the “right.” It is a precarious time to be a politician and when we look at their Republican male peers in the bureaucracy and the media, one can’t help get the feeling that these women are being allowed to be the first ones to go down in the coming political calamity. Call it anti-chivalry. Radical autonomy is deep inside the “right” also. (more…)

ALEXANDRA writes:

I recently began reading your blog and I find myself coming back to it not because I agree with everything you write, but because it has been helping me clarify my thoughts on feminism. I’d be curious to hear your thoughts on Michele Bachmann. You’ve taken Huma Abedin to task for pursuing her career goals at the expense of her marriage and described as “sickening” Obama’s deference to his wife in matters of family planning.

But consider Michele Bachmann: she’s a conservative woman, faithfully married, who told a conference in 2006 that she only pursued a degree in tax law because her husband asked her to. Now she is running for president of the United States of America. She says her husband is “supportive” of her goals. I highly doubt she’s running for president because he asked her to. What if she is elected? Will she defer to her husband on matters of policy? Would a vote for Michele Bachmann actually be a vote for Marcus Bachmann? (more…)

NEW YORK GOV. ANDREW CUOMO  said Tuesday with regard to town clerks who object to issuing marriage licenses to same-sex couples:

The law is the law; when you enforce the laws of the state, you don’t get to pick and choose. If you can’t enforce the law, then you shouldn’t be in that position.

A reader writes: “Contrast this with their approach to the immigration laws. As if they don’t already ‘pick and choose.”‘ (more…)

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes about college plagiarists in an article at the website of the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy. The bloating of college enrollment has created a pool of students unqualified to complete college writing assignments and shameless enough to steal. While the Internet offers unprecedented temptation, it also has made it easy for professors to catch plagiarists. Mr. Bertonneau describes one student who stole an entire article about Henrik Ibsen’s play, Emperor and Galilean. When confronted with proof, she denied it. She then suggested Mr. Bertonneau was in the wrong: “You are my only one professor that says I plagiarized.” 

Quite a few plagiarists consider completing a writing assignment beneath them. The professor deserves to be deceived for the crime of assigning difficult and pointlesss work. (more…)

TEXANNE writes:

We really appreciate your blog. Here in the Northeast, it often feels like living behind the Iron Curtain — and your posts and discussions are like Radio Free Europe :-) 

Thank you.

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THE NASSAU COUNTY, N.Y. district attorney has warned town clerks who issue marriage licenses that they will be arrested if they refuse to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Already one town clerk in another county has resigned on principle. Same-sex “marriages” will be officially recognized as of July 24. It seems only a matter of time before individuals who do not support the law are indeed arrested given that there are hundreds involved in the wedding industry who object.

The recent news in New York is heartening. Rallies are scheduled in several cities to protest the new measure on the day of its enactment. Brian S. Brown, the president of the National Organization for Marriage, told The New York Times: “The notion that you pass same-sex marriage and the issue goes away, that’s one of the biggest lies told by proponents for redefining marriage.”

The other lie is that opponents of same-sex marriage bear animus toward homosexuals as homosexuals. (more…)

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BEN J. writes:

A publishing company owned by the United Methodist Church doesn’t think the Bible is inclusive or readable enough. The new $3.5 million Common English translation contains shorter sentences, shorter words, and, for the first time ever, contractions. (more…)

JILL FARRIS writes:

When Tocqueville exclaimed over the safety of American women, those women were not doing blatantly stupid things such as riding their bicycles alone across America. Women in past history hadn’t yet been schooled to ignore their instinctive modesty and God-given fear to go alone into questionable situations. (more…)

BUCK O. writes:

The Friday of Memorial Weekend, my cousin and I were doing burgers and beer at our local Ale House. A young woman (we’re guessing about age 25) came in and sat two stools to my left. She just happened onto our ale house after peddling her trusty bicycle north out of Washington DC, on her very round-about way to a wedding in Boston. She lives in Portland, Oregon, but began her cycling trek in San Diego, California at the end of March – alone. She would log mile 4,000 the next day. She hit 5,000 miles last week via northern Maine. (more…)

ALEX writes in response to the post on modern art:

José Ortega y Gasset in his essay, “The Dehumanization of Art,” alleges that the essential function of modern art is to partition the public into two classes – those who can understand it and those who cannot. Modern art, he says, is not so much contingently unpopular, as deliberately anti-popular. It acts “like a social solvent which separates from the shapeless mass of the many two different castes of men”. It’s intended to have that effect. (more…)

SARAH NELSON writes:

As an avid reader of your blog, I thought you would be interested in an article from the Huffington Post. As a full-time wife and mother who sees her husband’s income confiscated and redistributed a little more each year, this angers me. I also believe this is only the beginning. The state will continue to use the tax code not only to enforce the purchase of products such as health insurance, but to “socially engineer” (reward/ punish) family structures. (more…)

THIS MAGNIFICENT painting by Lord Frederick Leighton, titled Mother and Child and dated 1865, is probably unfamiliar to you. You have seen Monet’s water lilies, Picasso’s Guernica and Warhol’s soup can many times, but not this interesting scene, with its very human interaction, complex beauty and idealized femininity. (Please click on the image and see it in more detail.) The period from 1850 to 1910 saw one of the greatest outpourings of artistic masterpieces in Western history. But many of these masterpieces have been systematically relegated to obscurity, the artists charged with sentimentality and the cold embrace of technique over emotion.

We have been cheated of many great works by modernism’s revolutionary campaign.

The Art Renewal Center, an organization started by millionaire Fred Ross, is dedicated to restoring appreciation for traditional humanist art, especially the works of this neglected period. I highly recommend the center’s essay “The Great 20th Century Art Scam.” It states:

For over 90 years, there has been a concerted and relentless effort to disparage, denigrate and obliterate the reputations, names, and brilliance of the academic artistic masters of the late 19th Century. Fueled by a cooperative press, the ruling powers have held the global art establishment in an iron grip. Equally, there was a successful effort to remove from our institutions of higher learning all the methods, techniques and knowledge of how to train skilled artists. Five centuries of critical data was nearly thrown into the trash. It is incredible how close Modernist theory, backed by an enormous network of powerful and influential art dealers, came to acquiring complete control over thousands of museums, university art departments and journalistic art criticism. We at the Art Renewal Center have fully and fairly analyzed their theories and have found them wanting in every respect, devoid of substance and built on a labyrinth of easily disproved fallacies, suppositions and hypotheses.

The essay is worth reading in its entirety and there are many other excellent pieces at the Center’s site.

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ALEX A. writes from England:

Thanks for posting George Cole’s superb painting, Harvest Rest. Landscapes similar to the one depicted in this painting can still be seen in some counties of England. But the timeless and untroubled composure suggested by the three field workers eating their simple meal amidst the corn, beneath a beautiful tree and under a benign sky, has disappeared without trace. (more…)

  I will extol thee, my God, O king; And I will bless thy name for ever and ever. Every day will I bless thee; And I will praise thy name for ever and ever. Great is the Lord and greatly to be praised; And his greatness is unsearchable.        (Ps 145: 1-3)

STEPHANIE writes:

I am currently on the hunt for apron patterns and came across this heart-warming page. It made me smile and I think it would be appreciated by many of your readers.

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JR writes:

You said in your post about the Atlanta cheating scandal: 

At the heart of this scandal is the failure to recognize that blacks should not be held to impossible standards. It is not right. Black education should be different from white education. It is not compassionate to deny racial differences. (more…)

  IN THE discussion of the latest prominent news story about a mother who forgot her child not once but twice in her parked car and has been charged with his death, Josh F. writes: I am in the process of raising a fourth two-year-old. The idea that one could forget a two-year-old in the car seems impossible. A child this age will almost certainly either be requiring constant attention or will have fallen asleep alerting one to this occasionally alleviating event. Exactly. These deaths are inconceivable. These events are mind-blowing. Even if they are rare, they are the extreme manifestation of something very common: a callous detachment from the young. Liberalism has endlessly encouraged and celebrated this state of detachment in mothers. The fact that it has also encouraged parents to spoil and indulge their children, to shower them with gifts and gadgets, does not negate its murderous indifference. Indulgence and neglect are part of the same cultural phenomenon. The child alone in his car seat, strapped in, crying in bewilderment, slowly dying from hyperthermia while his parent files papers or answers phones a few yards away, is the inevitable consequence of a radical estrangement between the generations and the withering away of the institution that protects the vulnerable: the traditional family.