LAURA F. writes to Laura Wood:

I know you’re taking a lot of flak from Mrs. Palin’s admirers right now, so I wanted to let you know I appreciate your assessments of her. She is absolutely a feminist. Feminism has been assimilated into mainstream U.S. conservatism and the conservatives haven’t even noticed it. People many years my senior who claim to support conservative family values love her, and I ask them, “If 20 years ago she had come on the scene as she now is, would you have considered her a conservative?” They don’t seem to think it matters because liberalism has progressed so far since then. So in many minds, conservatism means “staying a few steps behind the liberals” rather than having eternal principles. And people are so alienated from our own traditional family structure that they think it comparable to life under the ayatollahs in Iran. Thanks for putting your courageous voice out there.

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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.…

“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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  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…

“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…

  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…

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…

  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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