THE TRUTH about the experiences of individuals conceived with donated sperm is finally being told, as if common sense were not enough. Karen Clark and Elizabeth Marquardt write:

Listening to the stories of donor-conceived adults, you begin to realize there’s really no such thing as a “donor.” Every child has a biological father. To claim otherwise is simply to compound the pain, first as these young people struggle with the original, deliberate loss of their biological father, and second as they do so within a culture that insists some guy who went into a room with a dirty magazine isn’t a father. At most the children are told he’s a “seed provider” or “the nice guy who gave me what I needed to have you” or the “Y Guy” or any number of other cute euphemisms that signal powerfully to children that this man should be of little, if any, importance to them.

Elizabeth Marquardt, by the way, is the author of one of the best books about divorce, The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce.

THOUGH NEW YORK state already has a devastatingly high divorce rate, with one divorce for every two marriages, the legislature is contemplating making marital dissolution easier by allowing spouses to unilaterally terminate a union after swearing to six months of unhappiness. Michale Virtanen, of the Associated Press, examines the proposed bill here purely from the perspective of women, ignoring the negative effects on men and children. He raises the specter of domestic violence by men repeatedly and profiles a woman who testified about the hassles of divorcing her husband. There is no effort mentioned to seek comment from the husband and no reference to the well-documented psychological harm to children.

In a column in The Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday, Rachel K. Sobel writes:

I joke with my other mommy-career friends about the best places to pump. The Chicago airport has amazing bathrooms with lots of space. The toilets have seats covered in plastic that rotate. You know it’s clean when you sit down to pump.

The phenomenon of mothers hooking themselves up to funnels and mechanical pumps in offices or toilet stalls to extract milk for their babies is chillingly inhuman. The breast pump is hideous. Yet, in the unwritten laws of feminism, this contraption is a hallmark of progress and enlightenment, a necessary inconvenience for the normal woman, not simply for the mother facing illness or weaning. A practice that seems to come from the pages of science fiction is now widely accepted as normal.

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I WAS rooting around this weekend for a poem to post on Father’s Day and, as I was meditating on this, I remembered a verse I once read by the modern poet Anthony Hecht about divorced fathers hanging out in Central Park with their children on Saturdays. I looked it up. Reading it again was unbearably sad, as sad as it was the first time. Obama did not speak of these fathers in his proclamation this weekend.

The experiences of the men I have known who have been unwilling participants in divorce have changed my life. I cannot quite explain why this phenomenon has affected me more than it has others. These are terrible injustices, some of the greatest instances of injustice I have personally encountered, but I know many people who are entirely unmoved. 

These men are not perfect people.  But most of them are not more imperfect than, say, I am. Not a single one of them committed adultery; they were all tried and convicted on the grounds of insensitivity. “The punishment is incommensurate to the crime.” I have said that many times. I have said that to friends and family members. Whatever flaws they had as husbands, these men did not deserve the exile they received. (The same, of course, can be said of many women who have been left under no-fault divorce. I just don’t know many women who fall into this category.)

These men are not whiny people, although some have been occasionally enraged. They are loving fathers, and they have all, with one exception, worked hard to stay involved in their childrens’ lives despite rejection by their childrens’ mothers. Those who are rich have found it easy to remarry if they wanted. Those who are poor, less so. Read More »

A READER recently asked me to compile a homeschooling reading list. It’s a good idea, but I haven’t completed it as there is so much to include from both my own experience homeschooling one of two sons (as well as supplementing my other son’s education), and from the recommendations of others. I still hope to post one soon, but in the meantime, here is a list of the books my 16-year-old son read this year. It does not include science and math textbooks, reference works and a few odds and ends. As is noted in the list, not all of the works were read in their entirety.

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Larry B.  writes:

Here’s the White House release on Father’s Day. I found it to be a poorly written thing, and so I have sent a copy with my parenthetical comments. Here’s the original.

Presidential Proclamation–Father’s Day

FATHER’S DAY, 2010

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

From the first moments of life, the bond forged between a father and a child is sacred [Not his child?]. Whether patching [Bandaging? Patching is for torn fabric.] scraped knees or helping with homework, dads bring joy, instill values, and introduce wonders into the lives of their children [It’s not Dad’s Day, it’s Father’s Day! Father’s instill values, dads throw footballs.]. Father’s Day is a special time to honor the men [Shouldn’t this be ‘man’?…I wonder where this is leading…] who raised us, and to thank them for their selfless dedication and love. Read More »

IT’S THE petty things that are often the most difficult. Leo Tolstoy, the great observer of family life whose own domestic relations were often turbulent, wrote this in a letter to his son, Ilya:

“In order to love people and be loved by them, one must learn humility, gentleness, and the art of bearing with disagreeable people and situations, the art of always behaving in a way that will not hurt anyone… and this is the hardest work of all, work that never ceases, from the moment you wake up in the morning till you go to sleep at night. But it is the most joyful work, because day by day you can rejoice in your growing success and receive the added reward, unnoticed at first but very gratifying, of being loved.” (My Father: Reminiscences, Ilya Tolstoy)

ON BEHALF OF FATHERS everywhere,  contact The Atlantic magazine and complain about its cover piece this month, “The End of Men,” which does not exactly celebrate the takeover of the world by women but does suggest this takeover is inevitable given that women are just so darn smart.  See the excellent insights here by readers Brendan and Alan Roebuck.

"Now Batting for the Tampa Bay Rays... "

KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church (appearing second to left in this photo), has unerring fashion sense. Particularly fine examples of Schori-wear, which has elevated liturgical garb in America to new heights, can be seen at  Bad Vestments, a hilarious website dedicated to “subjecting particularly awful Christian liturgical vestments to the ridicule they so richly deserve.”  Here is Schori in what the dry-witted author of the site calls an oven mitt.

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FOR a probing and erudite look at ancient Gnosticism, see the recent three-part series by Thomas F. Bertonneau in The Brussels Journal. It can be read here , here, and here . Bertonneau looks beyond the work of Eric Voegelin for evidence that the religious fervor and irrrationality of modern liberals have their precedent in Antiquity. Read More »

SARAH writes:

I would like to share with you a recent experience I had that illustrates why your blog means so much to me. 

On the weekend, my husband and I, along with our two young daughters, were invited to the bar mitzvah of our rabbi’s son. The service itself was pleasantly unremarkable: the bar mitzvah boy read from the Torah, a number of speeches were made and then, at about 11 a.m., the rabbi invited everyone to make their way to the hall (adjoining the synagogue) for brunch.  Read More »

Angus Buchan

JESSE POWELL writes:

Your readers may be interested to know that there is a huge patriarchal movement in South Africa today, and it is growing. I am referring to Mighty Men, more officially known as Shalom Ministries. This movement has as its charismatic leader the evangelical Christian Angus Buchan.  Buchan is a white farmer of Scottish descent, originally from Zambia, who moved to South Africa in 1977. He and his wife, Jill Buchan, started Shalom Ministries in 1980. In 1998 Angus wrote a book about his life, Faith Like Potatoes, which was made into a movie with the same name in 2006. In the late 1990s, Angus Buchan spoke to a crowd of 35,000 people in a stadium in Durban. The crowd came to hear him and to join in a prayer for rain.  Read More »

HERE’S a fascinating piece by a female copywriter who was unable to make much money until she changed her name to James. It could be true.

POPE JOHN PAUL II wrote beautiful and profound meditations on sexuality and the human family in his famous work Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. It is impossible to reconcile most of these philosophical reflections aimed at modern hedonism and radical individualism with the cultural movement we know as feminism.

Paradoxically, John Paul II has also been a major inspiration for feminism in the Catholic Church. In two works, Letter of Pope John Paul II to Women and Mulieris Dignitatem, John Paul embraced feminism in all its misbegotten glory. He encouraged Catholic women to see traditional society as inherently oppressive, to view themselves as victims, and to bask in self-adulation. At a time of declining fertility and destructive careerism, when millions of women were leaving their children in the care of strangers, daycare centers and assembly-line schools, or not having children at all, John Paul proclaimed in the 1995 Letter:

Thank you, women who work! You are present and active in every area of life – social, economic, cultural, artistic and political. In this way you make an indispensable contribution to the growth of a culture which unites reason and feeling, to a model of life ever open to the sense of “mystery,” to the establishment of economic and political structures ever more worthy of humanity.”

He speaks of the “feminine genius” as the unique gift of women to nurture and love, but he does so with the sort of bloated rhetoric that clearly suggests female superiority and that degrades the very meaning of “genius.” In a third work, Evangelium Vitae, on the Value and Inviolability of Human Life, John Paul speaks of a “new feminism.” He writes:

 In transforming culture so that it supports life, women occupy a place, in thought and action, which is unique and decisive. It depends on them to promote a “new feminism” which rejects the temptation of imitating models of “male domination,” in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society, and overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation.

Unfortunately the rejection of masculine behavior for women is incompatible with campaigns to remove discrimination. Traditional sex roles achieve their sustaining support from customs and habits of discrimination. New Feminism attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, and some Catholic women now proudly wave its banner. The movement aims for nothing less than what Catholic convert Elizabeth Fox-Genovese called “a new model of the way to be human.” Sound familiar?

New Feminism is Old Feminism without abortion rights and with less promiscuity. It still rejects the traditional role of women as a moral imperative and promotes the feminist myth that women can pursue money and power while fulfilling their feminine duties. It sees male domination of the public sphere as an expression of contempt for women.  New Feminism seeks the same radical transformation of society as Old Feminism and promotes the same calculated neglect of children. It has no basis in Catholic doctrine or theology, no matter how much affirmation it received from John Paul II, and I write as a Catholic. Read More »

TIME magazine also had a recent piece hailing the lesbian “mother” as the parental ideal. The study that was the basis for this glowing report, as well as the one cited in a recent article in The Atlantic, involve statistically insignificant samples and highly questionable methods of evaluation.  The study in Time, which first appeared in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, looked at 84 “families.” Its findings were based on interviews with the mothers, their lesbian partners and the children, including an “online questionnaire” addressed to the children at age 17. Alice Park writes:

Data on such families are sparse, but they are important for establishing whether a child’s environment in a home with same-sex parents would be any more or less nurturing than one with a heterosexual couple.

In other words, there is not reliable data to draw any conclusions but we are going to draw some anyway, and use them to influence public policy. Read More »

AS DISCUSSED at VFR, Rush Limbaugh recently effused about his wedding and marriage to his fourth wife:

I’ve had people come up to me, guests there that were former producers for major networks, movie theaters, studios and so forth, “I’ve never seen a production like this. Read More »

BRENDAN writes:

I think that the piece from Alan Roebuck is quite on target in asserting that the current regime of holding tolerance, non-discrimination and personal autonomy as the new “gods” does not provide men with any real basis for motivation to achieve, to invest in themselves and in family life.

I think a closely related issue is the more or less complete destruction — in theory — of the male familial role. Of course, this role was, in our culture, largely based on religious ideas about the “roles” of men and women in family life — ideas which liberalism sees as oppressive, arbitrary (in being handed down from above rather than being the product of personal autonomous choice) and restrictive. However, if men do not have a defined role to play in family life — if, in fact, the role of men is irrelevant, as the spate of recent articles has claimed, or that men have no role at all to play, in essence, in family life, other than as a kind of “less competent woman” — they will simply not invest, either in themselves or in family relationships. The reasons for this relate to men and women alike, albeit each in a rather different way. By and large, men will not invest if there isn’t really a return, and if the “return” is to be considered a somewhat dysfunctional woman/mother who “helps” the “real parent” with tasks she delegates that he perform under her supervision and who is merely tolerated as a kind of court jester or sex/emotional needs provider for women, men will continue to flounder and fail to invest in themselves and their relationships, on a large scale. Read More »