NORA WRITES:

I just discovered your blog and very much appreciate some of the thought-provoking articles and arguments on it.  The entry on home economics was a bit nostalgic for me as it was part of the elementary school curriculum starting in second grade at a Benedictine convent school for girls.  In our school it consisted of learning how to sew, embroider, and crochet for the first few years, and then cooking/baking classes in sixth and seventh grade.  Yes, we second grade girls were handling dangerous objects like needles and scissors without incident. Imagine that.  I believe the boys’ school down the street had their own version of the class involving carpentry and household repairs.  Read More »

THE U.S. COMMISSION on Civil Rights Conference took place at the National Press Club in Washington this week. Policy analysts discussed the state of the black family, apparently without mentioning a word that was so crucial and yet largely ignored in the Moynihan Report of 50 years ago. That word is matriarchy.  Black society in America is matriarchal. Welfare helped push the black family in this direction, but an end to welfare, which has not yet been achieved, will not restore it as long as black women are sexually free and economically independent. 

The blogger Natassia, who is a commenter here, has put together a good summary of the conference proceedings. There are glimmers of sense in the remarks by conference participants, especially from Heather MacDonald and Kay Hymowitz of the Manhattan Institute. MacDonald said: Read More »

AN EXCHANGE of e-mails about The Thinking Housewife was sent to me and I promised to respond to it. The exchange between two men is posted below, with some minor editing changes. My response follows.

Fred writes:

Lots of interesting ideas from this right-wing website. It reminds me of how things used to be — some of what used to be was good, some was bad  — a lot of the good got thrown out with the bad.

A huge loss was the idea of a one living wage job per household  — this was the good reason to discriminate against women joining the workforce. We should have kept that rule, but with modifications. Read More »

BOYS AND GIRLS are different; they do not easily learn side by side as children. Segregated schools make sense. A British reality show about a school for boys is drawing some attention to this long lost idea. Gareth Malone, who made his name in the series The Choir, is star of the show Gareth Malone’s Extraordinary School for Boys. Malone recently told The Sunday Times, “I’m very interested in boys’ disenfranchisement.” He said boys need “risk, competition, physical activity and immediacy.” (Unfortunately, his idea of risk appears to be climbing a tree with a harness and a rope.) Read More »

 WILLIAM STEWART writes:

I’m not sure the scene depicted in your picture and caption is as innocent as it seems on the surface; in fact, I’m inclined to think otherwise. I don’t think the teaching in the public school system, of skills previously taught at home, was a good thing, because the teachers of “domestic science,” “household science,” or “home economics,” etc., tended towards an elitist view, that only experts knew how to properly cook according to the new “scientific” understandings of “hygiene,” and that what a girl might learn from her mother at home was no good, as that lady didn’t have the benefit of “scientific knowledge” that such self-appointed “experts” did. Read More »

Julia Child

MEAT EATERS are imperialists. Their refusal to trade the fatted calf for edamame or chickpeas is proof of aggressive instincts and fundamentalism, both political and dietary. The meat eater is a colonialist at heart, a supremacist of one kind or another. The vegetarian stands for world peace and tolerance, the carnivore for hatred.

The burger, in particular, is a symbol of all that is wrong with Western civilization. Most everyone likes it anyway.

Julia Child was inspirational in the field of burger cookery, even though she specialized in French cuisine. In general, Mrs. Child reveled in meat and was unapologetically Western compared to today’s fusion cooks. Mrs. Child’s burger recipes are excellent and simple. They are also somewhat counter-intuitive. Adding heavy cream to hamburger is not something that naturally occurs to us, but it works. Read More »

A READER writes:

IN THIS previous discussion, a reader asks:

How is [the pervasive sublimity of Muslim architecture – or, for that matter, poetry or spirituality] possible for a civilization that is “inherently false and evil”? 

This is an important question (although, for clarification, it is important to note that I never asserted that Islamic civilization was false or evil, but Islam itself.) This question is important not just in regard to Islam but to all false doctrines that flourish, produce admirable works and create some civilized order. Please see Kristor’s outstanding and succinct response. In a few paragraphs, he explains why evil must and always will coincide with the Good. He writes:

If Islam is false, then Muslim saints, poets and architects who approach sublimity are all the more remarkable, for they have won through to the Good at the heart of all things despite their false religion. It should hardly surprise us that there are Muslims who have scaled such heights. The falsity of their religion does not annihilate their appreciation or capacity for beauty or goodness. Nothing can persist unless it has some good and truth in it. So even Islam expresses some truths. And everyone, no matter how many false beliefs he may hold, must if he is to live perforce confront and deal with the world as it really is: so that the truth of things must press upon him, and shape him. Anything that is, then, may by being the handiwork of God be also for some creature the occasion of a theophany.

Read More »

FEISAL ABDUL RAUF, the imam promoting the Ground Zero mosque, is a man for his time, the perfect lubricant for an ecumenism that acknowledges faith and at the same time renders it meaningless. See this excerpt from his book What’s Right with Islam in which he argues:

The language of good versus evil is precisely the language of the fundamentalists whose worldview we oppose. Once we define as evil those who counter us, we lose the moral high ground and begin to descend an exceedingly slippery ethical slope.

Sufis teach that we first must battle and destroy the evil within ourselves by shining upon it the good within, and then we learn to battle the evil in others by helping their higher selves gain control of their lower selves.

I recommend the reader Brendan’s excellent commentary in this post. He writes: Read More »

CHRISTOPHER BURCHFIELD writes:

In 1981, the U.S. Forest Service entered into the Bernardi Consent Decree against the advise of its own attorneys within the Department of Justice. In essence, the Washington Office determined that 43% of its employees, within each of its some sixty professions and trades, should be women. Beginning, ironically enough in 1984, through the year 2000, a mass exodus of men with “on the ground knowledge and skills” took place in a purge so extensive that today no institutional knowledge of the 174 individual forests remains.   Read More »

LADY GAGA is an “overconceptualized and claustrophobic” performer whose image as “the voice of all the freaks and misfits of life” is slick marketing. So writes Camille Paglia in a long profile of Gaga in today’s Sunday Times. Paglia writes:

There is a monumental disconnect between Gaga’s melodramatic self-portrayal as a lonely, rebellious, marginalised artist and the powerful corporate apparatus that bankrolled her makeover and has steamrollered her songs into heavy rotation on radio stations everywhere. Read More »

PETER S. writes:

I find in practice that I rarely disagree with Laura on essential matters, and am rather pained to do so now.  With respect to the vigorous defense of traditional Christianity against Islam, this is perfectly in order and perfectly justified.  Christian civilization, to the degree that it can claim to be at all integral, has a right and necessity to defend its boundaries, both political and intellectual.  Further, as much as one might be attracted to the possibility of mutual respect and understanding, this is of little point if such requires either the dilution of theological positions or the unilateral letting down of guard. 

And yet, in light of the assertion that Islam is inherently false and evil, I am haunted by the thought of Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi.  Read More »

The Israelites gathered manna. Maybe pizza will someday fall from above too.

PIZZA is to Americans what manna was to the Hebrews: a source of wonder and sustenance. Pizza, in all its forms, sustains us in the desert of modern life. It does not fall from the heavens, but it might just as well because it is available on almost every block. At this very moment, thousands of 18-wheelers are traveling the nation’s highways, hauling the necessary rubber cheese and factory dough to busy pizza vendors. Any town that is halfway civilized is a center of ceaseless pizza production. The “pizza paunch” is proof of this ongoing miracle.

Here is important breaking news on the pizza front.

The actress Julia Roberts, star of Eat, Pray, Love, says that pizza consumption has given her a fuller bust. The latest photos of Julia clad in a bikini while on vacation suggest she has undergone a transformation. But Julia says she did not have surgical augmentation. She just ate more pizza. Read More »

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes:

There may be no excuse for it, but there is a very compelling and authoritative reason for the Vatican’s statement this week that the Koran must be respected and protected by Catholics. I discussed this reasoning several times in 2006-07 following the Regensburg Lecture Jihad and the pope’s pathetic surrender thereto. Why did he surrender to the rioting Muslims and renounce the penetratingly critical statements about Islam that he had made in Regensburg? Because the Church’s own authoritative documents from the Vatican II period, implanted in the Catholic Catechism, require Catholics to look at Muslims as “fellow adorers of the one God.”

Here is a 2007 entry at VFR in which I discuss the Catholic Catechism’s teaching on Catholics’ relationships with Islam. I’m quoting the entire initial entry. (The discussion following the iniitial entry is lively and I recommend it too.): Read More »

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

That mitered fool Cardinal Thomas McCarrick says, “We are committed to building a future in which religious differences no longer lead to hostility or division between communities.”  So is Islam.  Once all communities have submitted to Islam there will precisely “no longer be hostility or division between communities.”  The name for this is Sharia; the political form of it is the Caliphate.  In Euripides’ play The Bacchae, everyone rushes to become an intoxicated follower of Dionysus; in Eugene Ionesco’s Rhinoceros, no one can resist the urge to become a bellowing pachyderm.  In both cases, great fear takes hold lest all not submit to the dehumanizing transformation; it is embarrassing to remain human.  As our elites rush to become dhimmis, I have the sick feeling that we are living out The Bacchae or Rhinoceros. Read More »

 HERE’S the main part of a shocking statement by Cardinal Thomas McCarrick and a U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops official released earlier this week: 

We are profoundly distressed and deeply saddened by the incidents of violence committed against Muslims in our community, and by the desecration of Islamic houses of worship. We stand by the principle that to attack any religion in the United States is to do violence to the religious freedom of all Americans. The threatened burning of copies of the Holy Qu’ran this Saturday is a particularly egregious offense that demands the strongest possible condemnation by all who value civility in public life and seek to honor the sacred memory of those who lost their lives on September 11. As religious leaders, we are appalled by such disrespect for a sacred text that for centuries has shaped many of the great cultures of our world, and that continues to give spiritual comfort to more than a billion Muslims today. Read More »

THE VATICAN and prominent Christians, such as the evangelical pastor Franklin Graham, have announced that it is morally wrong to set fire to the sacred texts of any religion, even a religion considered false and dangerous by the person lighting the fire. Read More »

BRENDAN writes:

You may be interested in Heather Boushey’s article from yesterday’s Slate/XX Blog, which attempts to minimize the recent study confirming that young women are, indeed, out-earning their male counterparts in America’s large cities. The summary: this isn’t a problem, because young women are better educated than young men. The main issue, for Boushey, is not that women are out-earning men, overall, but rather the supposed difference in pay between the women who are earning more money than men on average and the man in the office next door. In other words, it doesn’t matter that men in general are falling behind women in education and pay (in fact, that’s viewed as good … see below) — what matters is that the relatively few men who are highly educated are earning slightly more than women are.

The reason for this pay difference is that women tend to choose different jobs and also tend to work less when they choose the same kinds of jobs that men do. The Department of Labor study released during the final year of the Bush Administration (and which was suppressed almost immediately when Obama took office in 2009) confirmed these facts relating to the so-called “pay gap.” But that doesn’t stop feminists like Boushey from continuing to pound this misleading point in an effort to deflect attention from a much more troubling and substantive trend in the broader society: the decline of American men, in terms of education, work, pay, marriage, fatherhood and so on. Read More »