A CHRISTIAN businessman examines the moral, financial, and psychological complications of international adoptions in this thoughtful article. On this issue, he contends, reason “is seen as unspiritual while following the wisps of one’s emotions is seen as very spiritual.”  Read More »

Aservant, a commenter here at the Thinking Housewife, battles it out with knee-jerk misogynists at the Spearhead website in a discussion of  women-only relief lines in Haiti. He offers a  fascinating and pungent reading of Haitian culture. Go to the end of the thread to search for Aservant’s remarks. Here are a few excerpts:

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A reader sent this riveting photo of Winston Churchill and General Bernard Montgomery reviewing the troops. It seems apropos of recent discussions here of boys and heroes. Look at the faces. Glancing at this, I wondered what Churchill would have thought about the statements made yesterday by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff:

“I have served with homosexuals since 1968…  putting individuals in a position that every single day they wonder whether today’s going to be the day, and devaluing them in that regard, just is inconsistent with us as an institution.”

I could lend the admiral a few hankies if he needs ’em.

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From today’s  New York Times:

The nation’s top two defense officials called Tuesday for an end to the 16-year-old “don’t ask, don’t tell” law, a major step toward allowing openly gay men and women to serve in the United States military for the first time.

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 Terry writes-

I realize that I am very late to this thread, but the posts (here and here) on, Mika Brzezinski, the female co-host of Morning Joe and the resulting conversation about whether or not her dress was provocative was very interesting. I didn’t find her dress in the photo you posted all that immodest. In fact, I watch Morning Joe pretty regularly, and I think that Ms. Brzezinski dresses quite modestly as she seems to want to be taken seriously as a journalist, first. She takes her duty to the sisterhood of feminism quite seriously, as her book title implies.  Read More »

Sibella writes:

Just discovered your website through Google Alerts (“female law enforcement” was the key). What a treasure! You’re going on the Favorites right away.

Agree completely with your “I guess being at home is boring if…” statement. Life bloomed when I left the feminist stranglehold of “working mother.” For ten-plus years I worked as a daily newspaper journalist. I’m now a stay-at-home mom and novelist who homeschools two kids. When I left the newsroom, the other reporters were aghast. “What are you doing?!” they asked. “I’m raising the future of America,” I said, “what are you doing?” Read More »

 Eric, a police officer, responds to the previous post about women in police work.

He writes:

I have been a policeman for about 15 years. When I was a young officer, a wise older officer told me that there are three types of female police officers: “nymphos, lesbos, and psychos.” My experiences have (with one exception) demonstrated that he was right. The one exception was a girl who I shared an office with once. Her daddy had been a trooper in West Virginia, and she was just a good old country girl who grew up in law enforcement.

Almost all of the rest of the female officers (even ones I have become friendly with) are there to find girlfriends, boyfriends, or for some reason besides the desire to serve (at least in a law enforcement capacity) their community. Read More »

A male high school senior I know recently visited an elite liberal arts college. The college matched him up with a student who was responsible for showing him around. The school arranged for him to spend the night in the student’s dorm room. The student was a girl.

She made known her intentions during the night. Was this part of the college tour? He declined to sleep with her. They spent the rest of the night talking about her problems with other men.

America’s colleges are in the business of prostituting women in a thousand subtle and overt ways.

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There’s an interesting post at What’s Wrong with the World on women in positions of command. Jeff Culbreath reflects on the appointment of a female police chief in his hometown in California:

This isn’t just any job: the essence of police work is violence and coercion. The employment of violence and coercion by women – in a way that is habitual or defining for them – turns them into something beastly. A female police chief is uniquely perverse because those whom she will be leading (police officers) and those whom she will be coercing (criminals) are predominantly male. Her position is one of wielding power and authority specifically over men. Tell me, is it healthy for any woman to aspire to this? Does it not indicate some deep spiritual and psychological problems?

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A reader sent a note asking if I was a Darwinist, perhaps because of a recent piece I wrote on evolutionary psychology. This is a good time to explain where I stand.

To put it in crudely simple terms: No, I do not believe in Darwinism or the theory of evolution, which state that life evolved from matter and that successive life forms were created by random mutations. This theory has not been proved by science.

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In the ongoing discussion on idealized feminine beauty, one reader recommends the famous Helga paintings by Andrew Wyeth. Above is his painting Cape Coat.

Wyeth said:

I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape – the loneliness of it – the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it – the whole story doesn’t show.

It is often said that while today’s college students lack the reading habits of past generations, they make up for this relative unfamiliarity with the written word with a greater visual and auditory literacy that allows them to navigate the modern world of images and the spoken word.

Thomas F. Bertonneau, a professor of literature and film studies, argues here that this is not so. The less reading a student does, the less likely he is to understand even movies. He writes:

I have taught film and popular-culture courses at the college level in Michigan and New York during a twenty-year period and, during the same period, have taught literature—classics in translation, American literature (nineteenth and twentieth century), poetry, literary theory, genre fiction, and much else. Given that experience, I find no validity in the strained romantic hope that the inadequately lettered and spottily informed student will prove somehow to be cognitively sharp in domains “beyond” the book…

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Leaving aside for the moment any comment on his literary works, I would like to point out one potentially enduring legacy of the writer J.D. Salinger, who died this week. He had the guts to admit that fame is not all it’s cracked up to be.

There is a conspiracy of silence among famous and rich people. They are afraid to say fame and wealth are not all that great. Perhaps they worry that this will reflect poorly on them. After all, why haven’t more famous and rich people spoken up? Maybe there is something wrong with them and so they keep quiet. Read More »

Say it to your friends. Say it to your relatives. Say it to your coworkers. “Jobs for Men First.”  Say it loud and clear.

As Tim Allen quipped, men have two choices: go to work or go to jail. The majority of men are either under the burden of supporting others or should be. Women and children need their success. We flourish when they flourish. We applaud their accomplishments and cherish their victories. Yes, these victories benefit us, but that is not the sole, or even the most important reason, for our applause and our belief in the primacy of male accomplishment in the world. The main reason we cheer them on is this. We love them and wish them well.

That’s right. We love them and wish them well. Is that so hard to understand? Jobs for Men First.

Preserve fatherhood and the future of today’s boys. Jobs for Men First.  Preserve camaraderie and focus in our corporate offices. Jobs for Men First. Preserve masculinity and life-giving femininity. Preserve domestic tranquility and order. Preserve our culture. Jobs for Men First.  Shout it from the mountaintops. Your country and its survival depend on it. Jobs for Men First.

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National Geographic

Imagine a community in America where children live without television and junk food, playing outside in their free time like almost all children once did. In Colorado City, Arizona, many children enjoy this wholesome life. There’s only one hitch: their fathers typically have many wives.

In its latest issue, National Geographic magazine explores the lives of polygamous Mormon fundamentalists, members of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of  Latter-Day Saints (FLDS) in Colorado City and Hildale, Utah. It’s a fascinating glimpse into an alternate universe, enviable in some ways, believe it or not, but clearly a world that is structurally unsound. Read More »

Think of it. Women once aspired to look like Lady Agnew. Now they aspire to look something like TV anchorwoman Mika Brzezinski, who appears in the post below. They are both pretty, but there is a world of difference between them. There is no manliness in the woman above; no tenderness in the woman below. Into whose arms would a man or child rush? Feminine beauty will never die, but we seem to have entered its twilight.

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Mika Brzezinski, co-host of the cable show Morning Joe, gave one of the more novel perspectives on contemporary parenting in a recent talk at the Philadelphia Free Library, where she was promoting her paean to female careerism, an autobiography titled All Things at Once.

“My career wouldn’t mean a thing to me if I didn’t have my children to share it with,” she said. It’s true. Children love hearing about office politics and can provide excellent guidance to a tired parent. Families are for sharing.

By the way, according to a recent review in The New York Times, Brzezinski recounts in her book that she was so tired one night from work that she fell down the steps while carrying her newborn baby. All things at once. This brings to mind Richard Weaver’s statement: If you seek the monument to our folly, look about you.

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Marketing can be one of life’s great pleasures. In the simple effort of feeding a family, a woman may accumulate a lifetime of small adventures in the universe of grocers, farmers and food purveyors, ranging from the bored convenience store clerk to the butcher with a bloody apron.  

Unfortunately, the mega market, with its vast aisles of packaged and frozen food simulacra, its canned music and flourescent lights, towers of cereal, pyramids of phony fruit, and gleaming rows of plastic, has an atmosphere that is so removed from the messy and fascinating business of food that one could just as soon be in a place selling office furniture and copy machines. There is an illusion of progress. There is always something very impressive at work here. We are so used to the centralized and the impersonal, to falling into lockstep acceptance of whatever corporate retail offers us, that we barely notice the sterility of it and accept the deadly boredom with hardly a protest. The richest nation on earth and we can’t afford the pleasant, humanizing exchanges between small-time merchant and buyer that the poorest nations have.  Read More »