FROM today’s New York Times:

An Army cook and single mother is under investigation and confined to her post after skipping her deployment flight to Afghanistan because, she said, no one was available to care for her son while she was overseas.

The woman, Specialist Alexis Hutchinson, 21, said she had no choice but to refuse deployment orders because the only relative who could care for her 10-month-old son, her mother, was overwhelmed by the task and already caring for three other relatives with health problems.

Her civilian lawyer, Rai Sue Sussman, said one of Specialist Hutchinson’s superiors told her she would have to go anyway and put the child in foster care.

Feminism is great, isn’t? It’s given women the thrilling opportunity to put their children in foster care so that they can go off and work as Army cooks. As Sarah Palin put it, “Things have changed. There’s so much equality now.”

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In my previous post on Obesity in America, I argued that the poor eating habits of Americans were not just a result of economics or poor nutritional advice or even the decline in home cooking, but of a deep and pervasive spiritual lassitude.

The problem of course is not unique to this country. Britain has seen the same phenomenon, perhaps to an even greater degree, among its native population.  Theodore Dalrymple describes it here:

I tell the doctors that in all my visits to the white households in the area, of which I’ve made hundreds, never—not once—have I seen any evidence of cooking. The nearest to this activity that I have witnessed is the reheating of prepared and packaged food, usually in a microwave. And by the same token, I have never seen any evidence of meals taken in common as a social activity—unless two people eating hamburgers together in the street as they walk along be counted as social.

This is not to say that I haven’t seen people eating at home; on the contrary, they are often eating when I arrive. They eat alone, even if other members of the household are present, and never at table; they slump on a sofa in front of the television. Everyone in the household eats according to his own whim and timetable. Even in so elementary a matter as eating, therefore, there is no self-discipline but rather an imperative obedience to impulse. Needless to say, the opportunity for conversation or sociality that a meal taken together provides is lost. English meals are thus solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

“This will sound callous, but I think the great suffering people feel in their own country is nothing compared to the great emptiness many feel in countries they feel alien towards. This existential suffering is far worse, far more damaging than the materialistic one. Poverty has always been with us. Societies have always found ways to deal with it. But, I know of no society which can deal with existential emptiness.”

                — Kidist Paulos Asrat, from Jolie and the Hidden Dynamics of International Adoption

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Angelina Jolie

KIDIST PAULOS ASRAT, writer of the Camera Lucida blog and an Ethiopian who lives in Canada, writes:

Congratulations on your brave post on transracial adoptions. I wavered to send you this, since the issue is so contentious, but I think, as you have shown, it needs to be said.

These days, there is a huge “market” for Ethiopian children for adoption into Western families. Besides Americans and Canadians, Australians are big competitors. Many say that Ethiopian kids are ideal adoptees, since they have mild manners, are alert, and are often attractive. Other African or Caribbean (mostly Haitian) children don’t get such rave reviews.

Of course, the Ethiopian government, and many other side-agencies, both in Ethiopia and in these adoptee countries, have made this into a profitable enterprise. I think it is terrible and atrocious.

There are many examples I can give of very satisfied white families. One was on Oprah recently, showing off its handicapped (she’s missing her arms) girl who taught herself how to swim, and speaks impeccable English she learnt in record time.

The most famous is Angelina Jolie’s daughter, Zahara. This is a notorious case, with an “out there” movie star, but I think it enunciates many of the problems inherent in this unfortunate enterprise.

Firstly, the birth mother recanted after the adoption. But I think she was convinced (coerced?) by various agencies that her illegitimate daughter would fare much better with Jolie. In fact, in her home country, Zahara would have had a myriad of older relatives, including a grandmother who was helping take care of her.

Secondly, Jolie has a strange and callous dynamic going on. Each time I see her with her own biological child, Shiloh, she seems to favor Zahara more, in subtle ways. Little blonde and blue-eyed Shiloh is in effect relegated as a back drop. Zahara will pick up on this. She will feel entitled. And so will of course Shiloh. I think it is a clear attempt at Jolie to change the dynamics of her country.

(Here’s another strange aside – Jolie keeps dressing Shiloh in “boys” clothes, and Zahara in dresses or skirts or brighter and prettier clothes. Who dresses a toddler in grays and blacks anyway? I have attached several photos).

But I think every transracial adoption has to have this element in it. I understand many families are desperate for children, and the availabilities are restricted in their own countries, but by the very nature of the difference in their adopted children, they will have to go to much greater lengths to make them feel accepted. So, this “affirmative action” of adoptee preference, which is exhibited in Jolie’s behavior, will invariably occur perhaps in good faith, with adoptive parents of transracial children.

Third, once these children grow up, as many of the commentators in the New York Times article you cited have said, they will feel the conflict of their background against their environment. Most Americans and Canadians are now so diversity sensitive, that these children will in all probability have happy childhoods. Yet, they will always feel this tug about who they are and what they’re about. They have the double burden of probably not even knowing who their original parents are.

But, it gets more complicated.

Since they have been told, or been brought up, that they are better than anyone, including the native-born white children, they must in some way feel they have a greater entitlement to these countries. Yet everything around them shows them that it is really to the contrary. The more astute ones will realize that the world around them has actually been manufactured to make them feel that way. So, how will that affect their adulthood, their own families, their contributions to the countries that they call home?

But, beyond that, in societies which now put non-whites on pedestals, what about the original whites of the country? How will a grown-up Shiloh develop? What will be her aspirations for her country? She will most likely grow up liberal, but isn’t that more-or-less a nihilist death cult that she will have inherited, which put a foreign girl before her?

These things are almost too horrible to contemplate. The damage to human lives, both in the adoptee countries and in the original countries of the adopted children is great. (For example, if Ethiopian kids are so smart and attractive, who is going to replace them when they have been ferreted out of their countries for the satisfaction of desperate liberal white families?).  Most people downplay all this, or don’t understand it, or just don’t believe it. But everyone suffers. The repercussions for the future are dire, for the adopted children, the adoptive parents, siblings and other native children. And for both the societies.

Liberalism is amazing. Huge errors (dare I say evils?) are committed at the drop of a hat.

By the way, I didn’t forget to mention the two Asian boys Jolie also adopted, but I’ve always been interested in the Shilo-Zahara dynamic since they’re both girls. I don’t in any way underestimate the difficulties these two young boys will face.

 —– Comments ——-

Laura writes:

Kidist’s observations are superb.  The brightest are often taken from their home countries. Also, as she says, the fact that international adoptees such as these are so far from home and have little chance of ever finding their birth parents makes the ordinary emotions of the adoption experience more intense.

But, I would like to know what she thinks about a popular counter-argument. This sort of adoption may have complications, many will say, but it is better than Third World children living in poverty or starving in their own countries.

Kidist writes:

My position has always been that countries adapt to their people, and people adapt to their countries. For example, in Ethiopia, the traditional Christian Ethiopia, beggars have always been given a holy place. They always beg in the name of God, so their interaction with ordinary people is actually sacrosanct.

This will sound callous, but I think the great suffering people feel in their own country is nothing compared to the great emptiness many feel in countries they feel alien towards. This existential suffering is far worse, far more damaging than the materialistic one. Poverty has always been with us. Societies have always found ways to deal with it. But, I know of no society which can deal with existential emptiness.

There is a verse in the Bible where Jesus says:

For ye have the poor with you always, and whensoever ye will ye may do them good: but me ye have not always. (Mark 14:7).

I agree with you that this desire to mix everyone together has opened the doors for an ungodly world. In that manner, we rush to help the poor, yet we forget to follow truth.

Eric writes:

Kidist’s article on international adoption brought to mind the bizarre drama of Mia Farrow’s pseudo-family, which has dropped out of public view.

Recall that Farrow is the actress who started Hollywood’s infatuation with collecting children from the far corners of the world. At her high water mark, she was the mother of fifteen children, eleven of them adopted. Her adopted children came from all corners of the globe, with nine of the six identifiably Asian or African, and only two of European extraction, although I don’t know where she found them. Of the eleven adoptees, five were adopted in partnership with two different men, and six were adopted by Farrow alone. Her four biological children have two different fathers.

While we in Middle America might find this a little strange, in Farrow’s circles, she was celebrated and lionized for her generosity and caring, and the press was full of praise. The prick that burst her bubble belonged to her then-husband, film director Woody Allen, who bedded and subsequently married then-17-year-old Soon-Yi Previn, one of the girls Farrow had adopted with a previous mate.

What struck me about the case was the way Allen, with all the moral judgement of an erect cock, sized up the situation and struck the softest spot. Farrow may have thought that she was really the girl’s mother, and her long-term boyfriend was really the girl’s father, but Woody knew better, and made his opinion known, as such men are wont to do.

It must have been one hell of a wake-up call for Mia. For all Allen’s faults, he understood that Farrow’s family was nothing more than a collection of exotic human pets, and that if he took some liberties in such an environment, he could never be held to account. When he was before a judge answering charges of child molestation, he blithely answered that the girl was of legal age, and he was never her legal parent or guardian. By that logic, he had done nothing wrong, and the judge agreed he had broken no laws.

Allen did not fare so well in divorce court, where he lost any right to contact his adopted children without supervision. His biological son by Farrow chose never to see him again, saying, “He’s my father married to my sister. That makes me his son and his brother-in-law. That is such a moral transgression. I cannot see him. I cannot have a relationship with my father and be morally consistent…. I lived with all these adopted children, so they are my family. To say Soon-Yi was not my sister is an insult to all adopted children.” I can’t argue with that, and even the judge who let Allen off the hook on criminal charges said his conduct was “grossly inappropriate.”

Allen is the easy target here, but what about the woman who assembled this bizarre collection of adults and children, and thought she had made a family? What about the people who supported and praised what was clearly the self-serving behaviour of an unbalanced woman? And what authority would let her adopt, knowing she was not married? In that situation, it is a near certainty that a man will come along, placing the adopted daughters in a household with no biological parent, a man with paternal access but no legal (or moral) restraint, and a woman inclined to please a man whom she wished to keep. Can it be surprising Allen took advantage? Is it asking too much to expect the State of New York to refuse adoption in such a case?

Allen and his daughter/mate/paramour took up housekeeping, eventually to marry. They appeared frequently together in public, and seem to have been accepted as a couple by New York and Hollywood high society. Mia Farrow is still bitter, but the balance of public opinion seems to be with Allen and Soon-Yi. They are still together, and it appears they have miraculously retrieved a something resembling a marriage from the wreckage of Allen’s and Farrow’s former lives, although they are over thirty years separated in age.

Except for one small thing: they have not had children of their own. They have instead chosen to adopt two small girls ….

Laura writes:

The whole thing was shocking and repulsive. Eric is right in noting how Farrow got away with little public censure for setting the stage for all this and for collecting children the way others might collect antique furniture or paintings. I haven’t kept up with it and hadn’t realized Allen and Soon-Yi had adopted children. Can you imagine them being approved? By the way, Farrow helped normalize adoption by single women, which is now widely accepted and  is of course the logical and necessary outcome of feminist entitlement.  Frankly, it blows my mind. As I said earlier, the desire to be a parent is like other human desires. It is not necessarily good.

Gail Aggen writes:

Apparently Angelina Jolie was very close to and idolized her mother, recently deceased. She is still grieving very much for her. I saw an interview with Jolie, wherein she was close to tears talking about her mother, saying what a warm, wonderful person she was. She went on to say that adopting these children is tied to her love for her mother – that her mother was the type of person who would love this and thus she is doing it as a kind of tribute to her.

I really do not know what to think. I can certainly understand her feelings for her mom, but do not understand the assembling of all these children as being a moral thing to do out of a sense of needing to complete something for her mother. I was struck not only by the sheer number and variety of these children, but also the speed at which she is adopting and birthing them.

When you have a baby, of course you need time to heal and replenish physically, but you also need time to grow the relationship with the child. It feels like she is objectifying them and not really appreciating their “personhood” by “collecting” them one after another, close in age as they are.

And of course the fact that she began the relationship with Brad Pitt, her partner, when he was still married to another woman is also troubling.

One thing is for sure, the magazines and celebrity gossip shows have probably made millions out of this “family”, and relentlessly continue to grind out stories about them for a very fascinated populace. This also is troubling, at least to me.

Laura writes:

Angelina appears to be mentally unbalanced. What is most disturbing is that an unbalanced woman, whether it is Jolie or Mia Farrow, can do this and receive the approval of the nation and the countries from which her children are adopted.

Jolie probably has very little in the way of  maternal feeling. One way a woman overcomes grief for her own deceased mother is to become her and pass on her mother’s good qualities to her own children. Angelina’s grief may be amplified by her own narcissism and her inability to be a real mother. Hollywood stars are not known for their stable family lives, but this sets a new standard. As Kidist points out, she has helped further politicize family life. For the life of me, I can’t understand why people think of her as representing an age of racial enlightenment. To me, she represents an age of denial and heartlessness.

Ingrid writes from Europe:

I have been following your posts on interracial and international adoptions, and it reminded me of a documentary, called Daughter from Danang, that I had seen a few years ago. The documentary, which can be seen here, tells the story of a half-Vietnamese, half white American woman who was born in Vietnam, during the Vietnam war. Her father was an American soldier, who left when her mother was still pregnant. She was eventually sent to the US, where she grew up. As an adult, she finally decides to start searching for her mother, with whom she had lost all contact. She ends up visiting Vietnam and things don’t go very well. I think that the documentary touches on many of  the issues that have been discussed on your blog recently.

Generally, I tend to agree with you, Laura, on international and interracial adoptions. I don’t think that they are, generally speaking, a good idea. I don’t feel that it is right for a parent, or two parents, to take a child from his native country/culture, and then force him to grow up somewhere as a racial and ethnic minority where he will not learn to speak his native language. Not to mention, I assume that many (most?) children who are adopted by foreign parents lose their citizenship in their country of birth and acquire the citizenship of their adoptive parents, without being given any choice in the matter.

However, I feel that the situation of the Amerasian children was a little bit different. [Laura writes: Yes, it was very different, but the cultural homelessness of the Amerasian children is similar to that of international adoptees.] I am not writing to make a judgement on whether it was “right” or “wrong” to send them to the US, even if they had a mother and were not orphans. They were, after all, half-American and entitled to US citizenship, and the US government had an obligation to protect them if their lives were indeed in danger in Vietnam. I just think that the documentary does a good job of showing the difficulties that this woman faced, and I felt very sympathetic towards both her and her family in Vietnam…it is easy to understand why there were so many misunderstandings between them.

“The leaves of the trees which are between you and the sun are of five principal shades of color, namely a green most beautiful, shining and serving as a mirror for the atmosphere which lights up objects that cannot be seen by the sun, and the parts in shadow that only face the earth, and those darkest parts which are surrounded by something other than darkness.”

                                —– From The  Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

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A reader named Paul, commenting in the post on the possible federal takeover of health care, says: “I look at myself like someone in north Africa in the early 7th century: a member of a doomed culture under attack.”

One week after they suffered devastating injuries and possibly the most harrowing experience of their lives, survivors of the Fort Hood massacre “have already begun the process of moving on,” according to this report in the New York Times. It quotes one of the victims, who was shot three  times, as saying he was praying for Nidal Malik Hasan and his family. “He had a bad day,” he said.

The message is this: If these immediate victims can move on and forget this incident, so can you.

In Genesis, Rachel offers Leah an extra night with their husband Jacob in exhange for the mandrakes gathered by Leah’s son. The wild root was believed to magically cure infertility. After years of barrenness, Rachel conceives twice, but ironically dies in childbirth. She names her second son Ben-oni, “son of my sorrow,” before she dies. 

After early death and grave illness, premature infertility is the worst physical affliction a woman can face. The Old Testament recognizes murder, illness, family strife of every variety. It does not leave infertility out as one of the most grievous curses humankind encounters and it is a major theme in Genesis.

More than simply a biological phenomenon or an emotional event, inferility is a state of spiritual paralysis. A woman who wants children and cannot conceive stands on one side of a locked door. On the other side are her children waiting to be brought across the threshold and into life. She struggles with the lock. So palpable and living do these children seem, she enters a state that can only be called mourning. She grieves those who have never lived.

One of the greatest crimes of feminism is its callousness to the universal pain of infertility. Feminism has actively promoted promiscuity, which often leads to sexually-transmitted diseases and the inability to conceive. Feminism has actively promoted delayed child-bearing even though female fertility begins to decline in a woman’s late twenties. Feminism has actively denied some of the cultural causes of infertility and instead promoted extreme efforts to overcome it, such as gruesome laboratory procedures and trips around the globe in the quest for available children. Perhaps worst of all, feminism has promoted the deliberate destruction of the unborn, leaving thousands of women who have abortions and then cannot conceive later in life in a state of  indescribable guilt and loss.

I’m not suggesting feminism is the only cause of infertility, but it has greatly increased its incidence. There is an entire subculture now in Western society that reverberates with the unrequited hunger for children. It is impossible to say just how many women over the years have stood on this side of that locked door because of the insidious and inhuman ideology of liberalism and female liberation. Not only is this state of things an injustice to women and to the fathers of children never conceived, it is an injustice to those who stand on the other side of that door. As C.S. Lewis said, one of the greatest misdeeds one generation can commit against another is the simple refusal to bring it to life. 

As for the women now reliving the ancient sorrow of Rachel, searching for those wild mandrakes, may they experience miracles. May they miraculously conceive as did Rachel and Sarah. Or may they open that door someday in Paradise.

The inevitable has happened. Both the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times have recently posed this question: Do same-sex couples actually make better parents than the old-fashioned, increasingly obsolete Mom and Dad?

Here’s from the Chronicle writer Amy Graff:

My daughter’s first best friend had two dads. My husband and I used to joke that the dads were better parents than us, and the thing is they were.

We’d show up for a play date at the park, and my daughter would announce that she was hungry. I’d dig out a bag of old mushy raisins from the bottom of my purse (who knows how long they had been in there), while one of the dads would magically pull a spread of carefully chopped fruit (enough for everyone) from his satchel.

Now I’m not saying that you can judge a parent by the quality of their snacks but this theme of thoughtful parenting carried through into everything these dads did.

Out of any parents I knew, they were the best at gathering their family around the table every night for dinner, at finding a work-family balance, at disciplining their children in a fair yet firm way, at filling their kids’ schedule with a healthy mix of creative free play and planned activities.

And then there was the dad’s relationship, which impressed me the most. They worked as a team, raising the kids as equals. They weren’t restricted by gender roles or rules.

.

This country is being pickled, Pelosi-ed and pressure-cooked. Take it from a housewife. She knows a mess when she sees it. We are on the road to bureaucratic tyranny. I highly recommend this editorial from Investor’s Business Daily on the Congressional health bill passed last Saturday. Kerry Jackson writes:

Two hundred twenty U.S. lawmakers voted late Saturday night for a federal takeover of the American health care sector. They had no right.

Passage of the 1,990-page bill is a national disgrace. Agitators say it’s a shame that the government in the world’s wealthiest country doesn’t provide health care for all. But the real blemish on this nation is a political party pushing the U.S. ever closer to being a nation of dependents.

Congress has no constitutional authority, no moral standing to force a federal health care system on a people whose nation-founding forefathers promised them they’d be free of government coercion — not even if a wide majority was demanding it.

Those 220 lawmakers abused the nation’s trust in them. They performed an intellectually and morally corrupt act. They forgot that they are public servants, not masters of the citizenry. They have elevated the soft tyranny of invasive government over the freedom that is the hallmark of this nation, the legacy of the founders who understood the dangers of a state acting with no limits.

Should the House bill ever become law, it would, like all socialist policies, dehumanize and demean. Socialism, statism, collectivism, communism — they’re all varying degrees of cruel regimes that crush the human spirit and drain the soul. In systems in which the individual is forced to yield to the collective, the individual loses his humanity, his hope and his dignity.

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The discussion about popular culture, and how to reasonably and effectively protest it, has continued in the post Remaking Rome. 

 Here are comments from Clark Coleman and from me:

Clark writes:

I touched on two different issues in my earlier reply: the level of protest that certain things would elicit in a previous generation compared to our own, and conservatives using their dollars to support the decline of our culture. You have to have a certain critical mass of protesters in order to succeed, and I agree that this is unlikely to be the case today. Controlling your own environment is the way to go, as Laura mentioned.

As for the morality of supporting the enemy with our money, my comments stand and I believe that conservatives need to spend a little time thinking about it.  How can we complain about the depravity of our popular culture while supporting the depravity financially?

 Laura writes:

The fact that there is good among the dross, as both Diana and Clark mentioned, keeps conservatives coming back for more in the hope that they don’t have to take a more radical stand. It’s important to remember this: There will always be some good in popular culture. Unfortunately the overwhelming preponderance of the bad and immoral requires a rejection of the good that is there.

I’d like to restate my earlier First Law of Popular Culture, mentioned in the discussion of Kate and Jon Gosselin:

The more absorbed a person is in popular culture, the more removed he is from his own culture.

Many conservatives and thinking people justify staying abreast of TV and movies with the argument that they are obliged to stay attuned to the times and the world at large. This is wrong-headed. Popular culture removes people from their real cultural surroundings, deprives them of deep pleasures and furthers the decline of our civilization with breathless speed. There will never be a day when in order to reject it and improve it we won’t have to also toss out some decent movies, TV shows and music as well.

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As mentioned in the previous post, international adoption has soared in the last 40 years and yet is a relatively unexamined cultural phenomenon. A new study looks at the confused identity experienced by many transracial adoptees from foreign countries.

The study does not examine a major cause for the growth in transracial adoption: feminism. The rejection of motherhood in early adulthood has caused dramatic increases in infertility. Feminists have concealed the facts of biology from ordinary women, and as a result many have found they could not conceive on demand.

Feminism has also promoted abortion. Given the rate of sexual activity among the young, pregnant women should be a common sight on our college campuses. But they are rarely seen. Millions of children that might end up in the care of infertile couples are never born.

Many thousands of transracial adoptees have found loving homes in the West.  That’s an undeniable fact. But it’s important to be honest. It would be far better if fewer women were infertile. And it is ideal for children to be raised within their native cultures. To say this is not to lose sight of the happiness, love and good fortune many foreign adoptees have experienced in Western homes. 

These children are now full members of  Western society and it must wholeheartedly embrace them. But the future of this trend should be placed in check. To do so, it’s necessary to admit just how numerous the casualties of feminism are. Here is an ideology that would rather send mothers-to-be halfway around the world on a desperate quest for children than recognize the sacred and primary call of motherhood itself.

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INTERESTING observations by readers have been added to the following posts:

Transracial Adoption: the Undiscussed Issue

The Overly Affectionate Mother (about the Obama family portrait)

Remaking Rome  (See exchange between Diana and Clark Coleman on conservatism and popular culture.) 

Since 1971, American parents have, by conservative estimates, adopted more than half a million children from foreign countries, particularly girls from Asian orphanages. These children have been given loving homes, but the cultural and psychological implications of these adoptions are seldom discussed. A study released on Monday by the Evan B. Donaldson Adoption Institute examines the first generation of adoptees from South Korea and concludes that many have struggled with ethnic and racial identity.  This conflict typically was mild in early childhood but intensified in adolescence and adulthood.

“Race/ethnicity is an increasingly significant aspect of identity for those adopted across color and culture,” the report states. It also says,  “A significant majority of transracially adopted adults reported considering themselves to be or wanting to be White [sic] as children.”  In an article in the Sunday New York Times, two Korean adoptees speak of their satisfaction with the study:

“This offers proof that we’re not crazy or just being ungrateful to our adoptive parents when we talk about our experiences,” said Mr. [Joel] Ballantyne, 35, who was adopted at age 3 and who grew up in Alabama, Texas and, finally, California.

Jennifer Town, 33, agreed.

“A lot of adoptees have problems talking about these issues with their adoptive families,” she said. “They take it as some kind of rejection of them when we’re just trying to figure out who we are.”

Some 468 adopted adults responded to an online survey for the study, making it the largest study of its kind, the authors of the report said. The Times article, an unusually candid discussion of the report, also quotes another adoptee:

Sonya Wilson, adopted in 1976 by a white family in Clarissa, Minn., says that although she shares many of the experiences of those interviewed in the study — she grew up as the only Asian in a town of 600 — policy changes must address why children are put up for adoption, and should do more to help single women in South Korea keep their children. “This study does not address any of these issues,” Ms. Wilson said.

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There is one bright spot in the ongoing debate over so-called health care reform. And that is the fanatical, unreasoning, unquenchable, blind and ever-vigilant devotion to abortion rights by supporters of socialized medicine. So unthinking is this devotion it may, by some slim chance, doom the ultimate success of proposed reform bills.

To truly understand the inextinguishable nature of this fire, this burning passion for abortion “rights,” it’s important to know how much an abortion costs in this country. It costs on average less than $500. That’s right. Less than five hundred bucks to destroy a life and damage a woman’s soul and her ability to love.

Now, $500 is not so much money that most women in this country could not somehow come up with it through loans from family and friends. But, abortion activists are not happy with that. They want a woman to be so unimpeded in her search for an abortion that she need only take out a few bucks from an ATM and be on her way. They don’t want simply the freedom to abort, they want abortion to be automatic and quick, leaving no time for reflection.

President Obama, as unthinking an abortion advocate as one can find, said yesterday that he is unhappy with the bill passed in the House on Saturday because it does not allow women to obtain government-subsidized insurance that covers abortion. He hopes to approve a bill that allows extra premiums or co-pays so they can have this essential coverage.

Thank you, President Obama! May you continue to pursue this brand of zealotry because it will effectively doom this bill. The American public seems unable to grasp many of the details of this reform, but they can understand abortion subsidies, and they don’t like them. By the way, most women who support abortion could care less whether their insurance covers it. It’s only the abortion apparatchiks who march to this tune.

Obama does not just support abortion rights. He believes in actively encouraging abortion, which is what subsidies through insurance coverage or government aid do. He talks as if there is no possible alternative for women, which is the single most heinous lie of abortion supporters. They see no possibility of sexual restraint and no possibility of putting unplanned children up for adoption.

A man dressed in a business suit walks onto a crowded suburban commuter train. He sees no place to sit until he notices a passenger next to an empty window seat. He walks up to the male passenger and says in a polite voice, “Excuse me, Sir. The train is very crowded. Do you mind moving in so I can sit down?”

The passenger explodes in rage and spits out these words, “You over-pompous, over-privileged [idiot]!” An argument ensues in which the polite man defends his right to be polite.

This incident was witnessed by a friend the other day.

Kidist Paulos Asrat offers some reflections here on this official portrait by photographer Annie Liebovitz of the Obama family. She points out the way Malia is draped about her mother.

This is characteristic of the open affection often displayed by mothers today with their older children. Affection is good and important. But what we’re seeing is something on an entirely different level from normal and healthy maternal love. I have seen grown adolescents sitting in their mothers’ laps stroking them and kissing their necks. This is fine in private, but what is strange is that it is done in front of outsiders and in the middle of conversations with others.

It seems physical contact has replaced other forms of intimacy – most especially the intimacy to be found in words and conversation – in relations between men and women, and within families. This outward display may seem to signal intense rapport. But in truth, I believe it often masks distance and a lack of  inner connection. Open hugging and vows of love – hastily and very publicly delivered by cell phone – cover up the void.

It’s also very difficult for a mother to maintain any sense of authority with her older children when she allows them to publicly sit in her lap. It becomes impossible to send out the subtle and all-important maternal signals of approval and disapproval.

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THE HBO series Rome, which was made in collaboration with the BBC and aired from 2005 to 2007, was such a popular success that a film version is in the works with Bruno Heller, producer of the TV series. In the meantime, past episodes are still shown on HBO 2.

According to a reader named Diana, the lavishly produced TV show, filmed on a five-acre lot in Italy and billed as an “intimate drama of love and betrayal,  masters and slaves, and husbands and wives,” panders to modern female audiences with wild distortions of Roman history. It also underscores the dark side to the contemporary fascination with ancient Rome.

Diana writes:

A few years ago HBO and BBC TV collaborated on a  blockbuster, highly-touted miniseries on ancient Rome, focusing on the crucial transitional period from the Republic to the Empire. The series was touted as being a genuine, historically accurate depiction of life in ancient Rome, as opposed to the fake, artificial products of “Holly-Rome.” The first season focused on the events leading up to and culminating with the assassination of Caesar in the Senate The second season focused on the consequences of that act, and the rise of his adopted son Octavian as the first emperor.

As a counterpoint to all the comings, goings, and doings of the patrician political class, the series focused on two real, historical plebeians: a legionary (infantryman) and a centurion (officer), both of whom were soldiers mentioned in Caesar’s chronicles of the Gaul campaign. (Caesar apparently pointed out these two otherwise unremarkable commoners because they had put aside personal difficulties to save one another’s lives with exceptional bravery.)

I am not an expert in ancient Roman history. But I can smell horse manure, and every time my antennae went on alert, I looked up the record on the Internet and discovered that my gut was right.

In the interests of brevity I will focus on two aspects of the series that I found most dismaying: the portrayal of Roman women and its depiction of sex.

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