AT the website Rorate Caeli, Marcelo González, an Argentinian journalist at Panorama Católico Internacional, gives his view of Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio, who has been elected pope:

HOW rare and refreshing it is to see men in charge, exercising their rightful public authority. Feminism has not conquered all. Whatever may be said about the liberalism within it, the Catholic Church remains steadfastly masculine at the top, as is seen in this image of the papal conclave. No other major institution in the West forthrightly prohibits women from leadership.

How endlessly stupid it is for people to say such exclusiveness is anti-woman. Such charges are an affront to men. They are expressions of hatred toward men because they presume male indifference and even contempt for women. They are based on wicked and hateful assumptions. Such claims are at odds with reality and the inexpressible interdependence of men and women. God made two sexes to elevate us, to bring us closer to the heights. Only a weak and insecure woman —  a woman who is oblivious to her own strengths — takes offense at the sight of an all-male gathering.

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A READER recently sent the following quote  from Father, the Family Protector by James Stenson. Except for his statement, “After God, Mom comes first,” which undercuts a father’s authority, Stenson makes important observations about the love and respect a man should show his wife:

[A] mother’s authority in the home, her ability to teach and lead, depends enormously on the her husband’s obvious respect and support for her. So a good father is above all a loving husband. He is a man who leads his children to love and honor their mother, his beloved wife. Where the children are concerned, he insists that they respect and serve her, exactly as he does. Every healthy family sets rules in place, some standards to direct the children’s attitudes and comportment. But the number one rule among smart, effective fathers is this: After God, Mom comes first.  (more…)

THE Home Renaissance Foundation is an interesting think tank in London that promotes domesticity with a cool, modernist style. Here is the organization’s latest video, part of its “Homemakers Project.” It’s a wonderful thing to see Western academics actually speaking up for housewives as they do here.

There are many worthwhile links on the organization’s website. However, the foundation’s call for the “professionalization” of homemaking is misguided. Only by valuing efficiency above all else can homemaking be considered a profession. Efficiency is not the highest goal of the domestic sphere. Homemaking, like the priesthood, is a vocation, not a profession. Domesticity deserves to be taken seriously and that seems to be the foundation’s main emphasis, but calling for professionalization of homemaking is wrong.

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DANIEL S. writes:

The establishment liberal media never seems to miss a beat when it comes to attacking the Catholic Church as anti-woman and is forever insinuating that the Church is responsible for “institutional” discrimination against women simply for refusing, for traditional doctrinal reasons, women priests. These same feminists and liberals that are full of ressentiment toward the Church on the other hand will defend the the Muslim hijab and support the continued Muslim immigration into Western nations, despite religiously-endorsed violence against women by Muslim men (and women!). (more…)

  LESLIE BELL, a psychotherapist writing in The Atlantic, tells young women who are worried about devoting themselves too much to men in their twenties that they should go ahead and have serious relationships --- and pursue demanding careers too. This is the feminist solution: Be all things at once. In practice, this model boils down for most women to shortchanging private life and marriage. Bell writes: I would never advocate that women return to the stereotype of the single woman pining for romance. But I do believe that young women who are taking risks in so many other important areas of life should also pursue experiences that may, on their face, seem to be at odds with independence and progress. The successful woman who is in a relationship is not the same as the pining woman. She's the one who is acknowledging the full range of her desires. Men are useful for fulfilling women's "full range of desires." Self is all. In a similar vein, Erin Callan, the former chief financial officer of Lehman Brothers, writing in The New York Times, wishes she had balanced her career and personal life better. She is now childless and on her second marriage. She doesn't come to the conclusion that she shouldn't have had a high-powered career at all -- and she certainly doesn't conclude that she deprived a man of an important position or that she deprived others of the children she never…

WHEN Jesus told us to love our neighbors as ourselves, what did he mean? The modern interpretation is that we should love others more than ourselves. At The Orthosphere, Kristor writes:

[W]e are to love the good and hate the bad in other people just as we love the good and hate the bad in ourselves. In order to do that—in order to move closer to goodness and further from wickedness in ourselves, and in our society, and in the creation at large—we must discriminate between good and bad, and choose goodness. That we forgive the wickedness of our enemies does not automatically make them friends; and if they cannot let go of their deadly hatred of us, then in order to control the risk to us of their hatred, we must perforce destroy them with it. In that case, we cannot survive to forgive them except by defending ourselves, and working their destruction, however that may grieve us.

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FRED OWENS writes:

My left-wing buddy, Alan Archibald, is blogging away like hell fire, but you are not able to keep up with him — not that anyone is keeping score.

I’m thinking there are other things going on in your life that are more important than the blog. This is good. And protecting your privacy is a key part of your message.

But I’m hoping that some kind of message of assurance from you would be welcome to your devoted readers, of which I am one.

Thank you for all your work.

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ROBERT HUBER writes in Philadelphia Magazine on “Being White in Philly,” a majority nonwhite city. Huber describes — blandly and without indignation — the squalor and fear that are common in many parts of the city due to black crime and negligence. He says whites deliberately adopt a sunny attitude. They live in denial, never stating the obvious and removing what is disturbing from their thoughts. Huber deserves credit for admitting that many things are left unsaid, but he then predictably concludes that the real problem is that whites and blacks don’t try hard enough to connect. If only whites could manage to engage blacks in “dialogue,” everything would be better.

That’s all liberals have to offer on the subject of race: endless “dialogue,” a merry-go-round of talk that leads to nothing more than dizzying, incapacitating white guilt and confusion. It inevitably leads to one conclusion: whites are to blame in some form or another for black dysfunction. Dialogue is an exercise in escapism.

Huber’s lengthy piece includes an interview with “Jen,” a white woman from Fairmount who criticizes her white neighbors for refusing to send their children to an elementary school that is 74 percent black. In the comments section following the article, we find the honesty that Huber never approaches himself. A reader writes that “white peoples brains would blow up” if anyone spoke the truth about the “overt disdain” many blacks possess toward whites. He writes: (more…)

IN THE Supreme Court case over Proposition 8, the California law that prohibits same-sex “marriage,” the Justice Department has filed a brief arguing that children have no inherent interest in being raised by a mother and father. Thus the federal government defends the most radical social experiment ever conceived.

Terrence Jeffrey from CNS News reports:

So far in the history of the human race, no child has ever been born without a biological father and mother. Now, in the Supreme Court of the United States, the Executive Branch of the federal government is arguing that, regardless of the biological facts of parenthood, states have no legitimate and defensible interest in ensuring that children conceived by a mother and a father are in fact raised by mothers and fathers.

The brief that the Justice Department presented to the Supreme Court discussed children only as items controlled by others, not as individual human beings who have God-given rights of their own. It simply assumes that a child has no inherent right to a mother or father and that the only right truly in question is whether two people of the same-sex have a right to marry one another and that that right encompasses a right to adopt and foster-raise children. (more…)

JESSE POWELL writes:

In January 2013, the most recent month for which U.S. Census data is available, the Labor Force Participation Rate (LFPR) of all women in the United States from 25 to 54 years old stood at 74.0 percent.  This is the lowest rate since July 1991 when it stood at 73.9 percent.  The LFPR for women first hit 74.0 percent in September 1989. The peak in women’s LFPR was in April 2000 when it touched 77.3 percent.

For men in the same age group their LFPR was 91.7 percent in April 2000 and 88.6 percent in January 2013.  This means from April 2000 to January 2013 men’s LFPR dropped by 3.1 percentage points and women’s LFPR dropped by 3.3 percentage points; about the same amount.  So it cannot be said that there is a return to traditional sex roles going on with men increasing their participation in the workforce to match the level of earlier years and women leaving the workforce because now their men are taking care of them; only the women leaving the workforce part is happening.  Still women leaving the workforce on a sustained basis as appears to be happening is totally new.

From 1870 to 2000 women’s participation in the workforce continually increased; a trend of at least 130 years ever since record keeping on the subject began.  Now since 2000 women’s participation in the workforce has declined to where it was in 1991.  This kind of regression is totally unprecedented since 1870.  From 1870 to 2000, every single decade saw an increase in women working; usually of a substantial ratio.  The growth in women working was slow from 1990 to 2000, but was rapid for all the decades preceding 1990, even during the recession of the 1970s.   (more…)

AT New English Review, Nikos Salingaros and Ramray Bhat argue that reductionism has drained the vitality from cities:

A city is a complex multilayered system, teeming with components, very much like a biological organism. Following the Second World War, architects and planners instituted a top-down approach to planning and constructing the city that reduced it to simplistic components (Salingaros, 2000). (more…)

  I HEREBY PROPOSE that the position of First Lady be declared defunct. The role of presidential wife has been trashed. There is no turning back. We should henceforth refer to the woman in the White House as "Most Exalted Wife and Gorgeous Goddess of the Universe."  Please salute her armed guard of female soldiers.

DANIEL S. writes:

The Mohammedan jihad against the Coptic Christians is no longer contained to Egypt. Over a hundred Coptic workers in Libya have been arrested on trumped up charges that they were engaged in Christian missionary work. (Video of the Coptic men is available here.) As to be expected the Egyptian government has done nothing to see to their release. (more…)