THOUGH the subject of the previous post, these words of the reader Paul V. are so apt and so beautifully expressed I’d like to feature them again:

The child has only one father and one mother. For better or worse, their moral authority is irreplaceable. The fourth commandment, to honor one’s father and mother, is the first of those concerned with human relations. It precedes the prohibitions against murder and adultery. Parents take the place of God for the child; one’s patrimony has an aura of possession about it that one’s own earnings can never have. It is given by someone higher than oneself, just as what is given by God, one’s talents, is possessed as nothing else is. I recall a talk given to prospective foster-care parents in which the speaker remarked that no matter how much one does for the child or gives, the wayward mother will drop by with a bag of potato chips for the child and he will be talking about it six weeks later. It is touching in the most wrenching way.

This authority, which is to say, the source of all goodness for the child, is the most important gift the parent can give to the child. Failing in one obligations obviously diminishes it, perhaps ultimately destroys it, which is probably why children cling to it, and why the consequences are so grave when in adolescence it is seriously compromised. I think one of the greatest losses of growing out of childhood, hardly, if ever, mentioned, is of perfect innocence and trust towards one’s parents.

(more…)

PAUL V. WRITES:

Sarah asks whether she should lie to her girls or tell them the truth regarding her past while attempting to inculcate in them a love of virtue and the good, especially in sexual matters, as they grow into young womanhood. There is a suggestion, even by the use of the word “lie,” that not to reveal the truth of her past, which contradicts what she is teaching now, compromises the communication and to some degree the whole effort. The girls may get good moral guidance, but lie or not it would have been much better if she had been able to teach by example as well. On top of this, the attitude of the culture at large is pretty much “you’ve had your fun, why are you trying to spoil mine?” 

As far as whether it would have been better to have been able to teach by example, it would have been better for Sarah if her past had been different, but the issue here is not Sarah but the instruction of her daughters. In that regard, it is only her present example that matters. Nor is that example and the instruction that goes with it unique, unavailable anywhere else, except in one respect, and that is the moral authority of the parent that comes with it.  (more…)

SARAH WRITES:

I’m a happily married mother of two young girls (ages 3 and 5). I want to bring my children up to embrace the kind of ideas and moral virtues you espouse on your blog, but there’s a small problem. Unfortunately, in my quest to encourage their remaining chaste until marriage, let’s just say that leading by example won’t be an option. My great fear is that a ‘do-as-I-say,-not-as-I-do (or did)’ approach will ultimately be ineffectual. Should I lie to them about what went on before meeting my husband/their father, tell them the truth (with 101 disclaimers!) or simply hope that the topic doesn’t arise?! Maybe I’m making a mountain out of a molehill, but rightly or wrongly, the issue is weighing on my mind.  (more…)

  KILROY WRITES in response to this post on Elena Kagan: My colleagues and I, all legal practitioners, have learned a very important lesson when adducing expert evidence before courts and tribunals presided over by female members: Always use women as the Expert Witness, never use a man. In our experience, even in positions of power, women still feel they have something to "prove" to the men "beneath" them. It's funny, actually. We share a joke about it after each session when a snide comment is made that would otherwise not have been made if we were women. It doesn't happen often, but frequently enough to note it and make an unwritten rule about how to deal with it. We find that male judges and tribunal members are at pains to be equitable with those before them, especially if they are women, but many female judges have a slight but noticeable air of arrogance in the manner in which they deal with male litigants and legal representatives.

  YOU MAY have seen yesterday's story about the first divorce trade fair in Italy. The article failed to mention some interesting facts about love and marriage in Italy. Italy’s out-of-wedlock birth ratio has climbed from 8 percent in 1995 to 19.6 percent in 2008, according to this report. Italy’s divorce rate went from 158 separations and 80 divorces per 1000 married couples in 1995 to 272 separations and 151 divorces per 1000 married couples in 2005, according to this article. The divorce rate jumped 74 percent in 10 years. Love is now about self-expansion in Italy too. Love also produces very few children. It expands but does not reproduce. Italy is dying.

CLARK COLEMAN WRITES:

I think the best things that can come out of this whole interesting discussion about a reader who praised his wife in terms that were uncomplimentary to men are:

1) Men can realize that women do need verbal appreciation. Men who are blessed with wives who are traditional mothers should especially express their appreciation, as their wives do not get a lot of that from the surrounding culture.

2) Just as cutting someone else down is not a good way to make yourself feel better (a lesson we try to teach our children at a young age), putting yourself down is not a necessary or desirable component of a compliment paid to another. A man should praise his wife for all that she means to his life, which can be praise that is entirely focused on her attributes and her contribution to their family, without describing himself negatively. I think that almost any woman would say she thrives on the praise and appreciation, not the self-deprecation. Yes, self-deprecation is a valuable aspect of humor, and of humility, but Randy went way over the top in this respect. (more…)

PSYCHOLOGISTS are studying the science of marital commitment, much to humanity’s relief. According to The New York Times:

 “.. it may not be feelings of love or loyalty that keep couples together. [ARE YOU SURPRISED?] Instead, scientists speculate that your level of commitment may depend on how much a partner enhances your life and broadens your horizons — a concept that Arthur Aron, a psychologist and relationship researcher at Stony Brook University, calls “self-expansion.”

There’s more:

“We enter relationships because the other person becomes part of ourselves, and that expands us,” Dr. Aron said. “That’s why people who fall in love stay up all night talking and it feels really exciting. We think couples can get some of that back by doing challenging and exciting things together.”

I suspect Dr. Aron does not include having and raising many children as “doing challenging and exciting things together.”

There’s something disturbing about the word “self-expansion,” leaving aside the obvious societal implications. It conjures images of bellows inserted into an orifice and gas pumped into the body. It makes me think of helium-inflated forms in the Thanksgiving Day parade, of the self, un-tethered and floating away, up, up, up into the atmosphere. Could you imagine being married to that?

(more…)

WHAT an embarrassment it is to so-called women’s advancement when an under-qualified woman is chosen for a powerful position. Such is the case of Elena Kagan, Obama’s Supreme Court nomination. She has no judicial record and a very thin portfolio of legal writings. This is a bright and capable woman, a leftist who views our military with hostility and who has an impressive resumé, but she’s an administrator not a judge.

What’s truly amazing is the hypocrisy of many who advocate for parity on the court. On the one hand, they argue, women are no different from men and thus should be equally represented. On the other hand, they say, women are different from men, that their presence will alter the judicial culture, and therefore they should be equally represented. Sex differences are only relevant to the degree to which they argue in favor of female ascendancy. 

In today’s New York Times, a Georgetown legal expert argues that if there were three women on the court, there might be more inclination by clients to choose women to represent them before the court. In other words, these lawyers might be chosen partly because they are women, something that is considered an absolute no-no when it comes to men. Says Pamela Harris, of the Georgetown Law Center, “If clients are visualizing the court as a predominantly male entity, they are going to want a lawyer who looks like the people on the bench,” she said. “I think this could also be a critical moment in terms of women arguing before the Supreme Court.”

This is one of the silliest reasons I have ever heard for choosing a lawyer to appear before the highest court in the land. Would one chose a lawyer because they had, say, a haircut like Elena Kagan’s? Harris also seems to be suggesting that a women lawyer may come to be considered morally superior to a male lawyer, regardless of her actual qualifications. Certainly, in the eyes of her supporters, Kagan is qualified partly because she is a woman. Feminism merely replaces one form of discrimination for another. No society can avoid discrimination.

(more…)

AT A restaurant last night, where I was celebrating Mother’s Day with my sisters and mother, I couldn’t help but make a few furtive observations of the people in the room. It’s bad to eavesdrop, but it’s also difficult to avert the eyes. The restaurant was filled with families, though I use the word in the postmodern sense. At the next table, there were two mothers, two sons, and no fathers. There were also two of the largest sets of artificial knockers I have ever seen in my life. One women had breast implants so commodious, the waitress could have rested two platters on top, and a wine bottle too. A corsage would have looked ludicrous on this woman, and on most of the women in the restaurant. The freshness and innocence of a single bloom – well, it just wouldn’t do.

I guess there are many parts of the world where the American woman is envied, poor and hardscrabble places where women own only two saris or cover their graying hair in scarves instead of highlights. But I’d rather look like Aunt Bea or a toothless Russian babushka than many an American woman today. Women seem to spend larger and larger sums of money on breast implants, tans, face lifts, hair cuts, hair coloring, hair highlights, make-up and clothes that make them look like street walkers or superannuated dolls.

Where is this money coming from? I thought women were so broke they “had to” work.

(more…)

FEMINISM has battered most of the major Christian denominations during the past 40 years. Here is an apt quote from Mary Daly’s Beyond God the Father, most recently published in paperback in 1985. Daly, who died early this year, was a professor of theology at the Jesuit institution, Boston College, for 33 years.

She wrote:

The cosmic covenant means coming into living harmony with the self, the universe and God.

For men of the past – and most are living in the past rather than now – life has meant feeding on the bodies and minds of women, sapping energy at the expense of female deaths. Like Dracula, the he-male has lived on women’s blood. The priests of patriarchy have eaten the body and have drunk the blood of the Sacrificial Victim in their Mass, but they have not wished to know who has really been the Victim whose blood supported this parasitic life. (more…)

MOTHERS NEVER were perfect and quite a few have been rotten. They have always possessed the power to create or destroy, to raise up or to tear down. Mothers never were perfect and yet the institution is without flaw. The ideal is unparalleled. A good mother is one of life’s greatest gifts.

The more degraded motherhood becomes, the more sickly sentimental it is. As the blogger Tiberge writes at her excellent traditionalist site Galliawatch:

Mother’s Day, like Valentine’s Day and Halloween, has ballooned in importance in recent decades, as if to compensate for the loss of love in today’s promiscuous world, the loss of souls in today’s paganized, world, and the loss of traditional motherhood in today’s world of “working moms, single moms, moms on welfare and other newly created icons of the liberated woman. There are even “cougar moms” who, in front of their own daughters, prey on men. These holidays at one time were mostly for the benefit of children who would make Valentine cards at school, dress up on Halloween to knock on doors and ask for candy treats, or buy (or make) a small precious gift for Mother (before she became, by feminist diktat a “mom”).

I know one woman whose mother continually undercut her confidence, complaining bitterly that she was not more successful in her career and that she had married the wrong man. Not surprisingly, this woman never had children of her own. She was rendered un-motherly by her own mother.

And yet miraculously, good mothers abound. In his church bulletin today, the Reverend James Jackson, of Our Lady of Mt. Carmel Catholic Church in Littleton, Colorado, includes a letter to his own mother. He writes:  (more…)

  IN RESPONSE to yesterday's post on noise and music pollution, a reader recommended the 2005 movie Into Great Silence, about the Grand Chartreuse monastery in the French Alps. This is one of my favorite movies, one of only two I personally own, given to me as gifts. Josef Pieper said, "Worship is the fountainhead of leisure." The same is true of silence. We revere silence not because we love emptiness. To the contrary. The exact opposite is true. I highly recommend the movie, which is very long and includes little action. You can fall asleep for an hour and wake up and the movie is still there.   

IN A 2002 VFR entry on the relentless noise in public places, Lawrence Auster wrote:

One expression of this breakdown [in the Western idea of form] is the ubiquity in our society of loud unpleasant “music” and other electronic noise and, more significantly, the unthinking acceptance of same. In today’s New York City, for example, you will walk into a retail store or a hair-cutting salon, and not only will there be loud black funk music blasting from speakers in the ceiling from morn till night, with its interminable, melody-less, rhythmless, lyric-less (and identical in every song), “oh ooo ohh, ooh, hoh baby, woohoo, uhh, uhh, Woohoo WoohuahAHahAAA, yeah-huh, baby oh yeah”, but the radio reception is so bad it’s all static. I’m talking about loud static, filling the establishment from powerful speakers. When you ask the employees to adjust the tuning of the radio station or to turn the volume down, they will do so, but there seems to be absolutely no consciousness on their part that there was anything inappropriate about this horrible noise. There is a shocking insensibility in young people today, a complete acceptance of noise and disorder in one’s environment.

It reminds me of India, where villagers love to have all-night festivals with electronic speakers turned up to the max, where people in cities are surrounded by unbelievable, all-encompassing noise and disorder and are not disturbed by it at all. In one sense, this is an impressive quality, expressing the spiritual dimension of the Eastern civilization and the idea of the soul unaffected by matter. (more…)

IN MORE THAN 20 years of marriage, I have made, as mentioned before, many hundreds of gallons of chicken broth. A poultry vendor nearby sells six-pound bags of chicken bones for $2.69. I put the bones in a pot of water, add onions, carrots and bay leaves, and let it sit on the stove for hours, often ignored until late at night when my husband pours it into a container and puts it in the refrigerator. I make soups and sauces with the broth for very little money. If I could summon all the broth I have made, we would be awash in stock. I could sail to France on a broth sea or fill the Grand Canyon with soup. I have made so much of the stuff that my husband has dabbled in broth jokes. Here are a few. (more…)

JIM B. WRITES:

I just wanted to relay a story which made me think of your blog.

A few days ago, after I had been at work a few hours, my wife called me up, annoyed. It seems that the door to the baby’s room had swung shut. The breeze coming in the windows newly opened to the warm spring air had done the deed. Unfortunately, the outer doorknob was broken, and it couldn’t be opened. This was something that was on my list to fix before the baby came three months ago, but you know how it is (we never shut the door, and many other things had to be done, etc.etc.) (more…)

  Speaking of Oz Conservative, I highly recommend Mark Richardson's 2008 entry on the David Blankenhorn book, Fatherless America. Richardson writes: There is now an assumption that "parenting" is what women have traditionally done - the hands on care and nurture of children - and that a good father is therefore a man who shares or takes over this mothering role. This is an excellent insight into parenting today.