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.

JULIA ANN writes:

DANIEL S. writes:

Liberal pundits such as the repulsive Piers Morgan have spent quite a bit of time over the past few weeks casting Britain as some sort of violence-free paradise due to its draconian gun control legislation, in contrast with America which is supposedly overrun with mass shooters and the like. Meanwhile, reality in gun-free Britain is something else entirely. Muslim rape gangs have been forcing through the most brutal of methods (including assorted forms of torture) white British girls as young as eleven into sexual slavery and prostitution. In other parts of London radical Muslim thugs have been enforcing a de facto shariah regime in Muslim majority areas, with those who imbibe alcohol or wear clothing not in accord with Islamic law receiving threats and harassment.

Britain is now a dystopic, crime-ridden, multicultural, surveillance state (think Nineteen Eighty-Four meets The Camp of the Saints), but at least it has banned assault weapons.

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DANIEL S. writes:

Judie Brown of Life Site News wants to know what is the exact nature of the relationship between Archbishop Timothy Dolan and the “Catholic” governor of New York Andrew Cuomo, notorious for his aggressive promotion of both abortion and homosexuality. Dolan and other bishops in New York have been emphatic about not denying Cuomo and other pro-abortion, pro-homosexuality “Catholic” politicians Holy Communion. To make the matter more troubling, Dolan seems to enjoy a chummy relationship with Cuomo according to Brown.  (more…)

ONE OF THE interesting things about used books – that is, books bought secondhand — is that they often bear traces of their former owners. On the negative side, there are the underlinings and notes on the pages themselves, sometimes revealing personal obsessions or preoccupations in the passages marked with exclamation points or double lines. I find these distracting, a form of literary graffiti that is often a desecration of a book.

There are also book plates and dedications on the first pages or inside the cover, such as “To Cindy — Merry Christmas/ Love, Aunt Margaret, 1962.” These dedications are charming and seem to leave a book with traces of living affection.

Then there are bookmarks or other papers, such as store coupons, left in the books themselves. Recently a piece of paper flew out of a used book when I picked it up from a shelf. I absent-mindedly put the paper on my night table. I then came across it later and read it. Written in a trembling hand, it said:

A Possible Prayer

Please, Please Lord heal me, let me live for I have much I desire to do, but if I must die, let it be peaceful and let me go this path with great love.

The page was dated January 19, 1997. As I read it, I felt an uplifting connection with the person who had held the same book, whomever he was and wherever he is. Alive or dead.

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AT Camera Lucida, Kidist Paulos Asrat writes about the Golden Globe Awards:

None of the films sounded attractive, imaginative, interesting, beautiful, thought provoking, educational, or any of the normal reasons one goes to the movies. Instead, they sounded like horror movies with grotesque story lines, or with over-the-top sexually active characters, or just plain boring. Also, it costs about $15 to watch a movie these days, which is about 2/3 the price of a dinner in a restaurant, which [is] preferable to sitting in a dark room being terrorized by a sadistic film director.

So, I was surprised when all (98%) of the women came to the Golden Globes dressed in classic – and I mean those classic Golden Ages of American Cinema – gowns. I shouldn’t be surprised, though, since this has become the standard actress persona: make ugly films, but dress up in beautiful gowns in public appearances.

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