Marital compatibility is an inexact science. It goes without saying that like race and like culture are no guarantee of a good marriage. Leaving aside these larger cultural issues, there seem to be two general types of incompatibility: ideological and psychological. The first is far more serious than the second.

Two people can be entirely different personalities, one an extrovert and the other introverted, one energetic and the other passive, one fastidious and the other so messy he wears two different socks and throws his bath towels on the floor, and still it is possible to create lasting and harmonious matches. Many people even prefer to live with opposites.

But when two people share entirely different world views, this is a potential disaster. To have to spend one’s days with a person who sees the meaning of life in opposing terms is not impossible, but very hard. Since many people haven’t really formed a world view when they marry, a similar background and culture help to assure they move in the same direction.

But similar culture does not guarantee this kind of compatibility.

Before she married Charles Darwin, Emma Wedgewood, who was a Christian believer, was distressed by Charles’ skepticism. “My reason tells me that honest and conscientious doubts cannot be a sin, but I feel it would be a painful void between us,” she wrote to him in a letter.

She finally concluded in another letter that “though our opinions may not agree on all points of religion, we may sympathise a good deal in our feelings on the subject.” They were married for more than 40 years and had nine children. But the truth is her happiness depended on two things. First, her ignorance:  she did not understand the metaphysical nature of his work. Second, Darwin considered faith an acceptable flaw in a wife.

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Speaking of mixed marriages, is the stunning blonde wife of Tiger Woods, the Swedish model Elin Nordegren, deserving of sympathy? After all, she did physically attack her husband. If she were a man, assault charges probably would have been filed by her spouse. On the other hand, her sudden lack of self-control is not difficult to understand. Not difficult at all. Here are two views.

A male reader writes:

I see her as having attacked him in screaming rage and humiliation. I see her, in 60 seconds of intense fear and hatred, as defending her pride, her dignity and her honour as a beautiful young wife cheated and betrayed; as a young mother defending her home and her children. 

During her 60 seconds of violence she forgot about the private jets, the cars, the houses and the yachts. She forgot about the money. I like to imagine that for those few seconds she wanted to kill him for being a rat instead of a man. I respect her. I like her for it.

Mrs. N. writes:

I was grieved to see the comment of the male reader in your blog. Why on earth would we applaud a woman for forgetting herself so completely as to think she had the right to resort to physical violence? Mrs. Tiger is hardly the first woman to find herself married to a man who has been unfaithful to his vows. As a society, we discipline our sons to the point of emasculation for exhibiting any form of aggression and yet we encourage our daughters to give vent to every emotional whim and applaud them, when a truly devastating blow comes, for devolving into hysterical lunatics thrashing around without control. Tiger may have been deserving of a punch in the nose, but not from his wife. It is unfortunate that shame has lost much of its usefulness as a behavior modifier in our culture because they are equally deserving of a healthy dose of its benefits.  

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A male reader writes:

I have become a daily reader of yours and just finished your pieces on public “I love you’s” and “mom” as slightly smarmy, sentimentalized uses of the language. I fully agree. 

I am an overly-educated soon-to-be-elderly unrelapsed Catholic and father of a lovely daughter whom I had to raise essentially alone in the face of relentless poisoning by her mother. It wasn’t easy, let me tell you. 

I could never understand how a mother could do such a thing to her own child. My daughter is, in some ways, still paying the price for it. 

I will skip several steps in the usual tedious syllogism and repeat what you already know: The so-called sexual revolution was the worst thing that ever happened to young women. 

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In the continuing discussion on interracial marriage, commenter Van Wijk, who is white, looks beyond the issue of whether mixed race individuals suffer from identity conflicts and flat-out states that miscegenation is wrong.

In his comments, which can be found here, he writes:

Let me also state that I find it disturbing that the Christian religion is continuously used to justify miscegenation and interracial adoption. Marcus Aurelius said that if the gods are not just, you would not want to worship them. Any god who seeks the displacement or annihilation of my people is not just.

Dead love is a terrible thing, lying stone cold on the hearth of our minds without any movement or sign of life. But living love can seem dead. It experiences its own comas.

The reality of what is lovable awakens it.

We could not possibly keep before us what we have perceived about the people we love any more than we could preserve intact the vision of spring when it is winter. Love is nothing without memory and memory sleeps.

One day we awaken and we are standing at the cottage door. Beyond lies the ocean and the wild moor. We remember.

The discussion continues in the post, The View from One Interracial Marriage. Laura H., a mother of eight children and a white woman married to a black man stationed in the military in Germany, has been accused of not understanding the innate need for cultural and racial connection. She continues to resolutely defend herself, maintaining that her children will not be culturally adrift and are not headed for a racial identity crisis. They have a strong sense of being American, she says, and that provides them with the larger group connection they need. In addition, they have something many people lack: a large, stable family and a Christian foundation.

I want to sincerely thank Laura H. and all who have participated in this conversation for their civility. I appreciate it.

Some may ask: Why are you even discussing this? Intermarriage is no longer a controversial issue. It is not illegal and few people openly condemn it anymore. Here is my answer. It is important to discuss interracial marriage because race is a real facet of existence, a biological and cultural reality. Though intermarriage is not openly controversial, I believe many people harbor private thoughts – both pro and con – on the subject.

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Is love a serious thing? Or is it easy and cheap? Here’s what I think. Love is so serious and delicate, one should never wave its banner in public, except during weddings and catastrophic events, such as volcanic eruptions or earthquakes. “I love you!” one cries out as one slips into the crack that has just opened in the earth. In that case, it’s okay if one’s private devotions are displayed.

I could never loudly tell someone – husband, friend, child or parent – that I loved him while I was speaking on a cell phone standing in line at a supermarket or eating in a restaurant or waiting in a packed elevator. Is there something wrong with me? This emotional promiscuity is everywhere. Perhaps I am frigid, maybe even autistic, but I say anyone who can wear his heart so visibly on his sleeve may not truly possess one.

Since the advent of this amazing technology, I have heard many dozens, maybe even hundreds, of  women tell their husbands and children they loved them over the phone. I was once waiting to vote in a presidential election when a middle-aged woman told a man over the phone that she loved him. He apparently made some witty remark. She protested that she definitely did love him. But, she said, if she were living in Europe, where the men were more interesting, she probably wouldn’t.

I suspect people like being heard telling others that they love them. Love has become a status symbol. To fail to publicly display it is like keeping a beautiful diamond ring in a box at home.

There is Christmas cheer in Washington. According to this story in yesterday’s New York Times:

An unusual holiday message began appearing this week in the nation’s capital on the sides of buses and trains.

“No god? … No problem!” reads the advertisement featuring the smiling faces of people wearing Santa Claus hats. “Be good for goodness’ sake.”

Similar campaigns by evangelical atheists have taken place in other cities in the United States and Europe. But it seems believers haven’t figured out how to react yet. Should they be hurt or outraged or perhaps indifferent? According to one prominent Christian spokesman, they should be hurt. Ian Urbina reports in the Times:

“It is the ultimate Grinch to suggest there is no God during a holiday where millions of people around the world celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ,” said Mathew D. Staver, founder and chairman of the Liberty Counsel, a conservative religious law firm, and dean of Liberty University School of Law in Lynchburg, Va. “It is insensitive and mean.”

I don’t follow Staver’s thinking. Any believer who encounters strident atheism for the first time in the form of an ad on a bus has probably lived a life so sheltered and secure from secularism he can hardly be laid low by this one encounter. No, I can’t see believers breaking down at the sight of these ads. Most likely they swim in a sea of un-belief. They are accustomed to strident atheism. Many have been strident atheists. They can handle one more blow.

The only proper reaction is this: genuine concern for the people who put these ads together. They’ve made a dangerous gamble and need to be reasoned with for a few minutes.

There is no proof an omniscient, infinite and judging God does not exist. Let me amend that. There is no proof that an omniscient, infinite and judging God who would not like the claim that he does not exist trumpeted all over the Washington public transit system does not exist. If he does exist, he is going to see these ads. If he does see these ads, he will consider them “insensitive and mean.”

Atheists have traditionally laid low and not rented billboard space. There is good reason for this. The alternative is too risky.

When did grown women start publicly referring to themselves as “moms”? The other day, Sarah Palin said she was concerned about foreign policy as “a mom with a son in Afghanistan.” Soccer moms, hockey moms, stay-at-home moms, working moms, single moms. What ever happened to ‘mother’?

Rule #1 of domestic nomenclature: Do not refer to a woman as a mom unless you are that woman’s child. 

Rule #2: Do not refer to yourself as a mom with anyone who is not your child.

The less time and energy women expend being mothers, the more adorable motherhood becomes. This cornball vocabulary trivializes and demeans an exalted and timeless institution, this sacred vocation that has wrecked more lives than any other. A mom is decorative. A mother is severe and semi-official and disturbingly ever-present. A mom sits in the bleachers and yells, “Go, Buster! I love ya!” A mother takes you by the ears and scrubs your mouth out with Fels Naptha.

As Florence King said, “Let’s face it: We like the idea of motherhood, we like the symbols of motherhood, we like the metaphors of motherhood, and we like the cute, casual vocabulary of neo-motherhood that we have cooked up, but we don’t like motherhood…”

What kind of woman calls herself a “rogue?” A liberal, feminist, roguish kind of woman. John Lofton of the American View makes this and other excellent observations about Sarah Palin in his radio show on the Oprah interview. He dares to call Palin a non-conservative and to denounce Christians for supporting her. I wonder if he has hired bodyguards.

Lofton makes a couple of points I have made. He says Palin’s comment during the Oprah interview that she felt sympathy for women who choose abortion was tasteless, improper and hypocritical.  He also calls the Palin family a model of domestic abnormality.

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Last week, a reader wrote to me about my past entries on interracial marriage and adoption. The reader, Laura H., is a white woman married to a black man. Her husband is in the military in Germany and the entire family lives there.  Here is our exchange, as well as some additional comments by me.

Laura H. writes:

I read with interest your blog posts about international and interracial adoption. Many of your thoughts are very similar to my own, based on personal experience. Whilst in Korea for two years I started to slowly realize that the traditional American understanding of international adoption was flawed in many important aspects. 

However, I wanted to broach with you some, I think, important ideas about your understanding of interracial marriage, again based on personal experience (amoungst other things). 

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In a previous post, a reader asked about the reasons for Oprah’s staggering success. I gave a few superficial reasons, and discussion followed. But I did not probe a major factor in this success: Oprah’s role as spiritual leader. 

Oprah takes trivial matters, such as fashion, relationships, shopping and cooking, and skillfully blends them with issues of ultimate meaning and destiny. This deft combination of the small and the large, the high and the low, is at the heart of her ascendancy. Oprah is more than a talk show host. She is captain at the helm of a ship heading through the troubled waters of self discovery. The spiritual answers she provides deeply appeal to women today.

Oprah is not radically new in providing these answers and American women have been tending toward these beliefs for well over 150 years. Religion in America has been in the process of being feminized since at least the nineteenth century.  But Oprah is new in the extent of her cultural reach. No American minister ever had Oprah’s audience of more than 20 million viewers five days a week.

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Mrs. N. comments on the previous post regarding the lamentable ‘Ms.’:

I grew up in a small midwestern town that in my mind’s eye was not unlike the fictional town of Mayberry. Unmarried women carried the title Miss. A married woman was addressed by her husband’s first and last name, i.e. Mrs. John Smith. If a woman was widowed, she was addressed by her own first and last name, i.e. Mrs. Jane Smith. Letters were addressed as such and many women signed their checks and other binding documents in this same manner. 

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A commenter named Richard W. at View from the Right has a great essay on the inevitable collapse of the federal government. This event is to be welcomed, he argues, and holds out thrilling possibilities for cultural renewal. The behemoth must die.

Richard writes:

I view our position now as analogous to an airplane which loses its engines in flight. The pilot and copilot know the flight is over. There is no way to avoid a crash landing, only procedures to follow to increase the chances of survival.

Those of us who understand the situation in America are like those pilots. One of our duties is to tell the rest of the crew and passengers what is going to happen, but it’s not the main task at hand. The main task is survival.

In our case survival has multiple levels.

Individual and family survival must come first. We need to ensure that despite the increasing societal chaos we retain health and hearth.

At the level above that is the survival of a larger group or community: one’s church, one’s neighbors, a close nit group of friends.

At the next level is survival of critical cultural and political institutions.

We must all make our own plans for family and group survival. It is at this third level of the survival of these larger institutions that we need to talk, plan, and work towards agreement.

Clearly the “thing” which is failing and must be destroyed is the Federal Government. This destruction (or decommissioning) will be a wonderful event and should be desired by all sane people.

Read the rest here.

Is it now shameful to be a ‘Mrs.’? When ‘Ms.’ came into use thirty or so years ago, the idea was that it would serve as a title when the marital status of a woman was uncertain or when she preferred to not have it known. Today, it is often used as a catch-all, even for women who are clearly married.

Michael S. writes:

I was reading this New York Times story about Grand Central Terminal and I came upon these two paragraphs:

Among those seeking assistance were Joseph and Sabina Prusan, who had planned to meet their granddaughters, Jillian Griesmer, 10, and Alexandra, 13, around noon at Pennsylvania Station, where they were informed that the girls had been rerouted to Grand Central.

“We were nervous,” Ms. Prusan said after a conductor helped reunite the group. “It’s the only time the girls ever went by themselves.” The girls were more sanguine. “We had to stay seated and wait for 20 minutes,” Alexandra said with a shrug before returning to her BlackBerry.

Okay, never mind that the 13-year-old has her own Blackberry. Apparently Joseph and Sabina Prusan are a married couple. Married to each other, that is, which makes them husband and wife. (Otherwise the common last name, and the practice of referring to them as “Joseph and Sabina Prusan,” rather than “Joseph Prusan and Sabina Prusan,” is rather a challenge to explain.) And this married couple are waiting for their granddaughters.

So why does the writer refer to the grandmother as “Ms. Prusan”? Is there any genuine doubt at all that Joseph and Sabina are married to each other?

MarkyMark writes:

My question is this: Why is Oprah so popular? Why were so many women taken in by her? Why weren’t more women able to see through her and her message? You’re one of the few who has. By the way, I agree with you: Few people have done more to damage American women than Oprah Winfrey has. 

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See the entry, The Demented Sarah Palin Debate, for discussion of this phenomenon.

Having announced that she’s giving up her TV show in 2011, Oprah is not headed toward retirement. She is redirecting her efforts, which will include a cable TV series focused on an L.A. housewife who dumps her family to pursue a life of erotic adventure.

Is this any surprise, dear reader? Oprah never was the girlfriend, true and loyal, she presented herself to be. She stands front and center with all those who would destroy any remaining shred of decency in America’s wives and mothers.