HENRY McCULLOCH writes: Sometimes a picture does say it best. Here is a photograph of Gen. Martin Dempsey and Leon Panetta shaking hands after consummating the feminist conquest of the U.S. armed forces. Note who has been carefully selected to oversee the two old white men as they do their duty; there is nothing coincidental about photo-ops such as these. 'Nuff said.

  WESLEY PRUDEN blames Pentagon careerists whose primary objective is not military.

AT Camera Lucida, Kidist Paulos Asrat critiques the inauguration outfits of Michelle Obama. Kidist writes:

It is interesting that these [fashion] designers want a powerful, militaristic Michelle, yet also want her to look innocuously feminine (almost like a small girl), as though to sartorially dampen the former with the latter. And Michelle obliges.

Women who embrace aggression often instinctively resort to the ultra-feminine to temper it. The modern woman is both hyper-man and hyper-woman.

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THERE ARE so many unexamined consequences of the full integration of women into the military that one barely knows where to start, but one of the obvious places is with the fact that the Armed Forces will be increasingly in the business of population control. Pregnant women cannot be deployed.

See this article at Reuters about the many “unintended pregnancies” of servicewomen. According to the piece:

Just over ten percent of women in the military said in 2008 they’d had an unintended pregnancy in the last year – a figure significantly higher than rates in the general public, according to a new study.

Of course, the designation of “unintended” is entirely absurd. All pregnancies are in some sense intended. Human beings cannot reproduce without some degree of intention. However, in this case, “unintended” is simply a term assigned by the woman herself. It essentially means “inconvenient.” But what is inconvenient for a career is not necessarily inconvenient for a woman personally. In other words, the woman’s designation of “unintended” can never be entirely clarified or known by a survey. From the article:

Dr. Daniel Grossman from the University of California, San Francisco, who worked on the study, called the rates of unintended pregnancy “really shocking.”

“Women in the military certainly deserve more than that. This needs to be addressed across all branches of the military,” he said.

So the pregnant woman is now a victim of the military. In addition to providing rations and equipment, troops in combat will need ample supplies of contraceptives — and under this mentality, it will be the military’s responsibility to prevent pregnancy. Given that pregnancies can be, even in the best of circumstances, “unintended,” a woman who becomes pregnant on tour after her unit runs out of birth control pills or condoms will now have cause to blame the military for her offspring’s existence. We will almost certainly see women suing the Army for damages after “unintended” pregnancy. And as a consequence, the military will need to become more and more involved in the effective sterilization of their female troops.

As I said before, women don’t join the military as equals of men in order to defend their country. They join it to destroy their country.  An egalitarian military must embrace socially destructive ideals. What can be more emblematic of our times than a military unit equipped with guns to destroy the enemy and contraceptives to destroy future soldiers?  We have lost both the will to fight and the will to live.

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DON VINCENZO writes:

The most senior Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, Antonin Scalia, is in the news again, but this time not on the basis of a blistering dissent in a Court decision, or some commentary he made about a contentious issue. In fact, the current controversy centers on not what he wrote, but what he wore. (more…)

DEFENSE Secretary Leon Panetta will announce later this week that thousands of combat positions will be opened to women, starting this year, according to senior officials at the Pentagon who informed the Associated Press of the news. The AP reports: “This decision could open more than 230,000 jobs, many in Army and Marine infantry units, to women.”

This is the Obama second term, hitting its stride. The Pentagon has been preparing for placing women more prominently on the front lines for years, at the urging of a small minority of military women, but the process will now be speeded up. For all their rhetoric about the interests of women and the war against women, liberals are happy to see women at war. Mothers who leave their children to go off to war, something all civilized societies have rejected, receive their approval. They have no instinctive revulsion at the sight of a woman in uniform wielding a gun. In fact, the idea of a woman with a gun — and a fantastic military career — is exciting. One can only assume, given this new freedom for women, that they will never be excluded from the draft again. There is absolutely no working principle left for excluding them from mandatory service.

This is the American woman. The effect on the national psyche is immense. Even women who will never serve in the Army will be affected. We are a nation of women warriors.

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IN OBSERVANCE of yesterday’s 40th anniversary of Roe v. Wade, Kate Manning writes about the many gruesome things, such as throwing themselves down stairs and ingesting lye, that women did to themselves to kill their unborn children in the days before legal abortion.

One can have sympathy for the women who thought they could not endure giving birth or having a child and suffered for it, and yet also realize that the Back-Alley Argument for legal abortion, employed here by Manning, is extremely weak. It is shocking how prevalent it is.

Manning fails to note that whatever horrors these women inflicted on themselves, they typically had more severe consequences for the fetuses involved. The same holds true of legal abortion. It is a procedure that always ends in one fatality. Also, these women generally were not forced to injure themselves. Before there was legal, clinical abortion, many women resolved their distress over an expected pregnancy the easy way: by giving birth. The Back-Alley Abortion Argument presumes there is no way out. Third, there has always been a fail-safe way to avoid pregnancy itself. It’s called chastity, which has many positive benefits. Finally, Manning fails to note that women have been physically and psychologically harmed by legal abortion. See the Coalition on Abortion/Breast Cancer’s explanation of how abortion increases a woman’s risk of breast cancer.  Aside from the depression women often experience after abortion, there are indirect psychological consequences. Abortion has loosened the ties and interdependence between man and woman, exposing both to soul-crushing emptiness.

Pregnancy is never simply a physical event. It is a spiritual event too.

At the blog Like Mother, Like Daughter, Leila also writes about the Roe v. Wade anniversary:

Know that when you raise your children to love and respect marriage by treating their own bodies as a temple of the Holy Spirit, you are fighting abortion with all your might. Every watchful, protective moment you spend guarding your children’s purity is a blow against the scourge of abortion.

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ANNY YENNY reports at the website Politichicks that her eighth-grade son was given extra credit by his Catholic school religion teacher for fasting on the first day of Ramadan. When the mother complained, the teacher objected and “lectured [her] on the superiority of Muslims to Christians.”

The principles of ecumenism put forth at Vatican II lead with irrevocable logic to teaching Catholics how to be good Muslims.

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  TIBERGE at Galliawatch reports on François Hollande's reaction to the huge rally ten days ago against marriage rights for homosexuals. According to Le Figaro: [O]n substance, the president will not give in at all. No chance that he will erase the word marriage from the law and replace it with civil union, as the representatives for the Manif pour Tous are demanding. Nor does he have the slightest intention to hold a referendum demanded by the Right. "He will reaffirm his determination to pass the law. The principle will not change," insists a spokesman for Elysée.

HOW LONG did it take Obama to mention slavery in his inaugural address? He restrained himself. He waited until the fifth paragraph. How long did it take him to mention the greedy rich? Twelfth paragraph. And the mothers, daughters and wives in chains because they do not make as much money as men? That was way down there: nineteenth. As were our enlightened forebears at Stonewall.

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LISA BELKIN in her Huffington Post column in November wrote about a woman lawyer at a Washington, D.C. firm who left her job because of the demands of motherhood. She departed the firm with the folowing note to her coworkers:

“I…have chosen to leave private practice, and the practice of law (at least for now),” she concludes. “I truly admire all of you that have been able to juggle your career and family and do not envy what a challenge it is trying to do each well.”

To Belkin, this was another instance of how the workplace is unfair to women and has not been magically altered to accommodate parenthood. No matter how much evidence there is that the workplace will never, ever accommodate motherhood, the laws of physics preventing anyone from being in two places at once, the dream will never die in the mind of an ideologue like Belkin.

The blogger, The Elusive Wapiti, writes about the Belkin column:

For my female readers out there, would any of you be able to tell me what the positive cost-benefit calculation is for this? Why would you have kids only to pawn them off on a min-wage, doesn’t-care-about-them-as-much-as-you-do, probably-doesn’t-share-your-values caregiver from 9 AM – 6 PM (after a 1 hr commute each way), go through the pain of daily chore negotiation (a weakness of equalitarian marriages that reject gendered marital behaviors), and generally run yourself ragged? (more…)

DANIEL S. writes:

I was today reading Fr. Seraphim Rose’s wonderful book God’s Revelation to the Human Heart and came across a few passages that I thought I should share. In the chapter on suffering Fr. Seraphim speaks about the Russian author and then anti-Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn and how his suffering in the gulag purified his heart and prepared it for Christ’s grace and revelation. He quotes Solzhenitsyn on what his suffering revealed to him as to the true nature of evil:

Gradually, it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties-but right through every human heart-and then through all human hearts…. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil. (more…)

TERRY MORRIS writes:

So-called “consensual parenting” would be more accurately termed “abdication parenting.” I assume that is the point, at bottom, for parent figures who adopt this (non)parenting model. As with most other liberal/progressive ideas, abdication parenting is self-centeredness taken to its extreme. No authority equals no responsibility, and vice versa.

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DANIEL S. writes:

The New York Times published an opinion piece on Friday by a certain Wendy Button, a single, middle-aged woman and Democratic operative (i.e. the model feminist). Button was the victim of a home break-in at one point and said she considered buying a gun to defend herself in the aftermath. She reconsidered after suffering from a bout of depression in which she apparently struggled with suicidal impulses. The entire point of her column from what I could discern is that she wants gun control so that people who suffer from depression will not be able to commit suicide by shooting themselves (as if someone determined to end their life would not find some other method).

The message that I took away from the article is that the feminist lifestyle leads to depression, the progressives want the state to micromanage their lives (and ours!), and that liberals will find any weird or absurd excuse to abolish the Second Amendment.

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LYDIA SHERMAN writes:

I think your readers would be interested in this video.

It is full of personal testimonies about the results of gun control in Australia, which instituted a ban in1997 which required all ciitizens to turn in semi-automatic and assault weapons. The law also requires that homeowners keep their guns locked up and unloaded.

It shows that “the cost of lost liberty can be measured in the loss of life.”

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  THIS IS a charming portrait by the American artist Thomas Sully of the actress Charlotte Cushman. Here is some background by the Library Company of Philadelphia: Charlotte Cushman (1816-1876) was a Boston-born actress who became the leading American stage actress and immensely famous in both America and England. Cushman was the stage manager of the Walnut Street Theater in Philadelphia from 1842 to 1844, and this portrait was painted during that time. She was acclaimed for her strong and dramatic performances in roles such as Lady Macbeth. Cushman was also fond of male roles, particularly Romeo in Romeo and Juliet. In this portrait, Sully captured Cushman in character as Beatrice in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. The style of the painting is direct and emotionally expressive. Upon viewing the painting, Cushman would remark that it “established in my mind as a settled fact that I am beautiful.”[2] This painting remains an example of not only Sully’s skill but also as a record of a talented and successful female artist.