AT Lifesitenews, Ben Johnson writes about the Scottish “poet” Leyla Josephine and her video on her abortion:

That intimation that her daughter died for “choice” – that she offered her baby as a living sacrifice on the altar of abortion – confirms the darkest rhetoric of the pro-life movement: That for some in the movement, abortion is sometimes regarded as an idol.

And that raises one other, more universally held question: What kind of parent asks his son or daughter to die for the “right” to abortion? Parents are supposed to be the one who sacrificially care for their children, who forsake their own comfort, who do whatever is necessary – even die – to keep their children safe, healthy, and well. Josephine’s blithe, “Sorry, but you came at the wrong time” sounds as hollow as a gangland assassin’s apology to the family caught in the crossfire of a drive-by shooting. Abortion severs the love that God, or Mother Nature, or evolution, or whatever you choose to believe in placed within every pregnant woman to link the mother to her child.

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RAPE is definitely a reality and a problem on American campuses, which is not surprising given campus culture. But the epidemic touted by Obama and other feminists is not based on reliable evidence. From Kevin Williamson at National Review:

The fictitious rape epidemic is necessary to support the fiction of “rape culture,” by which feminists mean anything other than an actual rape culture, for example the culture of the Pakistani immigrant community in Rotherham in the United Kingdom. “Rape culture” simply means speech or thought that feminists disapprove of and wish to suppress, and the concept has been deployed in the cause of, inter alia, bringing disciplinary action against a Harvard student who wrote a satire of feminist rhetoric, forbidding politically unpopular speakers from speaking on campuses, and encouraging what often has turned out to be headlong and grotesquely unjust rushes to judgment, as in the case of the Duke lacrosse team. Feminism is about political power, and not the Susan B. Anthony (“positively voted the Republican ticket — straight”) full-citizenship model of political power but rather one dominated by a very small band of narrow ideologues still operating under the daft influence of such theorists as Andrea Dworkin and Catharine MacKinnon, each of whom in her way equated political opposition to feminism with rape.

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  FROM Early American Gardens.

MARISSA writes in response to the post about a ruling by a Texas judge protecting “up skirt” photos:

It sounds terrible to the liberal’s ear (and yes, I count the vast majority of Americans as liberals, either classical or modern), but this is one of the many problems with the First Amendment, which incidentally receives more love and recognition than the First Commandment. No one has the right to engage in pornography or in spreading it. No one has the right to practice worship of Satan. That the decadent Western world has enshrined these disgusting practices as rights only shows how the system founded on the Constitution and Bill of Rights leads to corruption and enslavement to the basest forms of human sinful expression. The American nation was founded on rejecting any form of objective Truth and Beauty for a banal, beige “neutrality” which has devolved into massive immigration, child-murder and forced acceptance of homosexuality. Thank you, Freemasons!

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OWEN FRANCIS DUDLEY became an Anglican minister in 1911 and worked in an East End parish in London for several years before converting to Catholicism. “What I Found” is his essay on his conversion. It is the best description of the common mentality of Anglicans toward Catholicism that I have ever read. He begins:

My first introduction to the Catholic Church was being spat in the eye by a Roman Catholic boy at school. He was bigger than I; so I let it pass. But I remembered he was a Roman Catholic. My next was at a magic-lantern entertainment to which I was taken by my mother. In the course of it there appeared on the screen the picture of a very old man in a large hat and a long white soutane. I must have asked my mother who it was, and been informed briefly that it was the “Pope of Rome.” I don’t quite know how, but the impression left in my mind was that there was something fishy about the “Pope of Rome.” At school, I learned in English history (which I discovered later was not altogether English and not altogether history) that there was something fishy not only about the Pope of Rome, but about the whole of the Pope’s Church.

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  "[Y]our opposition to the spirit of the age must primarily be an inward attitude rather than outwardly successful rebellion. The current world system knows how to suppress insurrection, so if you judge success by outward standards, looking for the successful public institutionalization of traditionalist ways you will probably become demoralized. You must begin small, first by reclaiming your mind, and then by living more traditionally, along with a few others near you, if possible. One day, God willing, a better American social order will be reestablished. But this is not possible today."  --- Alan Roebuck, in a nine-part series on "American Traditionalism"

FROM today’s New York Times:

Under leaden skies, throngs of demonstrators stretching as far as the eye could see moved through Midtown Manhattan late Sunday morning, chanting their demands for action on the common cold.

With drums and tubas, banners and floats, the People’s Common Cold March represented a broad coalition of ages, races, geographic locales and interests, with union members, religious leaders, scientists, politicians, manufacturers of tissues and students joining the procession.

“I’m here because I really feel that every major social movement in this country has come when people get together. And besides I had nothing better to do with my life than protest something,” said John Tipton, the president of a teachers’ union. “It begins in the streets.”

“I’m here because I believe the common cold is caused by auto emissions,” said Jane Blankenhorn, a schoolteacher from Brooklyn, who said she had one cold that lasted for five years.

Cold marches were held across the globe on Sunday, from Paris to Papua New Guinea, where no one has ever been known to sneeze, and with world leaders gathering at the United Nations on Tuesday for a rhinovirus summit meeting, marchers said the timing was right for the populist message in support of limits on transmission of germs. Marchers are also asking that all Western countries immediately transfer their national treasuries to countries where the common cold is relatively rare. The signs that marchers held were as varied as the movement: “Colds Are No Fun,” “I Have Tried Everything But I’m Still Coughing” and “Health, Justice, Clean Noses.”

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  DAN writes: Hmm, I wonder where Al Sharpton and the media boys are for this one? Oops, wrong race, my bad! Pathetic!

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

According to liberal discourse, one in four college coeds will become victims of sexual aggression during their four-year matriculation. What campus codes call sexual harassment, a term that feminist misandry has rendered entirely subjective, is so terrible and so totally male that college men accused of the infraction find themselves in the condition of being presumptively guilty; furthermore, campus policy systematically deprives them of due process. Feminists, good liberals all, routinely deplore the sexually demeaning representations of women in popular culture. But a liberal judge in Texas has said that a law criminalizing “upskirt” photographs” snapped by perverts with miniature cameras deprives the accused of their constitutional protections to free speech.

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  "WHAT begins in desire liberated from the moral law ends with power liberated from the moral law as well, as the strong force their desires on the weak." --- E. Michael Jones, "Truth of Desire: A Manifesto for Counter-Revolution," 1994

HENRY McCULLOCH writes:

In the post USAF Denies Atheist Re-Enlistment, Buck noted the Air Force’s denying re-enlistment to airmen who refused to swear the full enlistment oath by refusing to say “So help me God” and asked:

Is the USAF provoking a religious test because they want God removed? What other reason could there be?

In reply, I wrote: (more…)

O FOOLISH world, will you ever pay attention? Will you ever wake up? Today is the Feast of Our Lady of La Salette, who appeared to two shepherd children on September 19, 1846 on a mountain near Grenoble in France. This is from Plinio Corrêa de Oliveira’s essay on the meaning of the apparition to the two shepherds, who in their photos radiate that same innocence and profundity seen on the faces of the children of Fatima:

There have been three major apparitions of Our Lady in the last 150 years: La Salette, Lourdes and Fatima. In all of them the Church accepted the authenticity of the apparitions and endorsed them by making special feasts to commemorate them. In each of those three apparitions Our Lady left a secret.

In all of them, Our Lady manifested herself as profoundly sad because of the state of mankind, and predicted an enormous chastisement that would come at a chosen moment. Therefore, in the last 150 years Our Lady has adopted a position very similar to that of counter-revolutionaries.

You all know members of the High and Low Clergy as well as Catholic lay people who are very happy, who think that everything is going very well. If you tell these people that a chastisement is being prepared for mankind, they respond that it is absurd. They affirm that Religion is experiencing an extraordinary progress.

Next to such persons, we look gloomy and sad. We play the role of the pessimistic hypochondriacs who do not fit into the joyful, carefree atmosphere of our days, which always disseminates an optimistic and positive opinion about everything. (more…)

THIS ESSAY was written by an anonymous correspondent:

I took the train up to New Haven yesterday to admire Yale’s architecture, which I haven’t done in nearly ten years. It was a lovely day and everything looked perfect.

I was lying on the grass in the main court of Branford College just as the late-afternoon sun was pinking the towers, wondering how anyone could fail to be inspired by such beauty to defend the culture that had created it. Then the answer came to me: modernism, whose true significance is that it destroyed people’s emotional, aesthetic attachment to existing society.

It was also crystal clear to me, wandering about Yale (and I walked all the way from the train station to the Divinity School), that this is the architecture of a specific race and culture. Modernism, of course, which used to be called quite frankly the International Style, is the opposite. Yale’s architecture is far more specific in this regard than the Italian Renaissance campus of Columbia University, which alludes strongly but vaguely to the general Western humanist tradition. Yale is unmistakably Anglo-Saxon and Christian, and frankly, certain human types just look ridiculous wandering its campus, as if you had planted a palm tree in front of Stirling Library. Such aesthetic harmonies should be part of our instinctive emotional equipment, and I suspect they once were. (more…)

ARTHUR H. writes:

I have a question about something that really bothers me and makes me feel very threatened and ashamed.

What is it about white women who go after black men?

I live in Chicago, and the stereotype is that black men chase after the white women, but what I see in public is that white women have this stare, this gaze at black men. I am white and have a good job. I am a blonde and blue-eyed athlete. When I pass a white woman walking by, chances are she won’t even look at me because she is already staring at the black man walking behind me. The multiculturalist and feminist advertising has created a really bad mixture in Chicago; it’s in commercials, billboards, on buses, and ads everywhere, even public service announcements. There’s this encouragement and social pressure for people to date interracially, especially the white female and black male pairing. In TV and movies, black men are always hypersexualized and depicted specifically as sexy and always in the presence of white women. The advertising agenda targets toward the younger crowd under 18, but it’s had an influence on the older crowd 18-30 which is my demographic. (more…)

  JOHN G. writes: I just finished reading The Awakening of Miss Prim by Natalia Sanmartin Fenollera, and I thought it was excellent. Just the sort of thing you might write if you went in for light fiction instead of essays. The author is clearly a traditional Catholic, which makes it even more notable that the book has become an international bestseller. I wonder if that is a sign of a yearning for traditional values among the generation of young women? I think your readers would enjoy reading the book, and in addition it might come in handy as a fun and not heavy-handed introduction to traditional Catholic values for secular friends and acquaintances who find our way of thinking and of life incomprehensible.

A RIVER of migrants flows into the towns of Sicily. So far this year 120,000 people from Africa and the Middle East have been picked up by Italian ships in the Mediterranean and 2,800 people have died in transit in poorly equipped, overcrowded boats.

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STARTING at minute 25 in this interview in New York, Alice von Hildebrand, the Catholic author, teacher and wife of the deceased German philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand, refutes the premises of feminism. “Feminism is the greatest enemy of femininity,” she says. At the age of 90, von Hildebrand remains a woman of great charm and eloquence.

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