BOND AND FREE
— By Robert Frost
Love has earth to which she clings
With hills and circling arms about–
Wall within wall to shut fear out.
But Thought has need of no such things,
For Thought has a pair of dauntless wings. (more…)
IN A previous entry, many readers who have more than two or three children wrote of the rude comments people make about their large families. Ironically, some mentioned that they are also the recipients of compliments for their children’s good behavior in public. A reader describes his experiences in this regard below.
Terry Morris writes: (more…)
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THE Republicans utterly failed to respond head on at their convention to the Democrats’ claim of a “war on women.” Instead of the pandering “We Love You, Women” address by Ann Romney, which was essentially a form of capitulation, the Republicans should have hosted something like this fantastic speech by the media figure Star Parker.
IN 1862, the British painter Augustus Leopold Egg painted this wonderful and humorous picture of two girls in a train traveling through Europe, with the Italian coastline in the background. It’s called Travelling Companions.
In his book Victorian Painting, Christopher Wood wrote, “It is difficult for us now to appreciate how ugly the Victorians thought the dress of their own age; to our eyes it seems both elegant and picturesque.” I would think most of the Victorians liked the dress of their age or they wouldn’t have worn it, but Egg seems indeed to be making some fun of these parachute-like dresses, and he has a point.
Still they are beautiful, billowing constructions. There is a sense of blissful detachment, with one girl asleep and the other absorbed in a book, both with their hats perched on their laps, ready for the signal to resume the life of elegant tourists. But then that was the age when women were denied everything and did not have the opportunity to participate in slutwalks.
THE Baltimore Catechism defines mortal sin as a “grievous offense against God:”
To make a sin mortal three things are required: a grievous matter, sufficient reflection and full consent of the will.
Is it not a “grievous matter” to be an accessory to abortion, same-sex “marriage,” mass contraception and the organized, unconstitutional redistribution of property, which is arguably a form of theft? And, if it is a mortal sin to vote for a politician who believes in all these things, what does it mean for the Church if thousands of Catholics continue to receive Communion after having cast a vote for Obama and failed to repent?
PENNY writes:
Frances Parkinson Keyes, who died in 1970, was a popular author in the early 20th century. I confess I’ve never read anything by her myself, but I’ve seen her books for years – first in the library and then in used bookstores.
This past weekend I picked up a copy of her Senator Marlowe’s Daughter (c.1933). Have yet to read it, but the plot seems to be that Faith Marlowe, only daughter of a New England senator, leaves America for Europe and has some kind of unhappy romance there. What really interested me while flipping through it, was this passage from the end. (Yes, I am one of those terrible people who read the ends of books before buying them – though not mysteries, that wouldn’t be fair): (more…)
THE MAIN subject of this video by a reader named Kimberly is “ecological breastfeeding,” a way of naturally spacing one’s children which also, and more importantly, is the best way to feed an infant and young child.
Kimberly also does a great job in the video of explaining why she prefers to call herself a housewife, instead of a “stay-at-home mom.” She was radicalized by this website. (more…)
JAMES P. writes:
Here’s a way to respond to people who make snarky comments about large families. Hand them this article, “A quarter of women ‘wish they’d tried for children earlier’” in The Telegraph by Stephen Adams. (more…)
DANA LOESCH at Breitbart.com writes about the buttons worn by women at the Democratic National Convention. The great thing about modern feminism is that it has elevated political discourse and brought out the very best in women, in ways that male oppression never could.
We should also thank the suffragettes for making it possible for political conventions to become the War of the Wives. Last night, Michelle beat up Ann Romney and made her own “Women, I Love You” Speech, in which she sang the praises of the heroic single mother. We were also treated to more tantalizing details about one of the most serious political issues of our time — the romance and marriage of Michelle and Barack, whose idea of romance and marriage includes men marrying men. Obama was weeping offstage. Unfortunately, he is not smart enough to laugh uproariously at it all. Little did he know that that first kiss would set the course of an entire nation.
WILLIAM JAMES writes: My parents had five children in six years; I'm the eldest. We often elicited comments from strangers. I remember one time we were out shopping as a family, and a woman we had never met came up and said to my mother, "Goodness! Are they all yours?" She said we were, and the woman said, "Well, I'm glad they're not mine!" My mother's response: "So are they."
AN EU directive informally introduced this week would require major European corporations to reserve 40 percent — more than triple the current average in EU countries — of the positions on their supervisory boards for women, thereby mandating discrimination in many cases against men. The idea of quotas in boardrooms is a pet project of European feminists, who have no qualms about instituting the type of employment discrimination they claim has always existed against women and who never lose a wink of sleep over possibly damaging the world economy and accelerating social decline. Companies that did not comply to the mandate would face fines and other sanctions. The directive would not apply to executive board positions — as of yet.
The proposal, to be introduced officially to the European Commission next month, would do nothing to satisfy the interests of the vast majority of women, who are not interested in highly demanding careers of uninterrupted work. A major reason why women are not more heavily represented in top executive positions is that they do not want to be in top executive positions and their personal responsibilities interfere with their competitiveness. See British analyst Catherine Hakim’s study on the issue. She explains why even in Sweden, with its onerous equality legislation, women make dramatically different work choices than men. (more…)
ALAN writes:
If American parents had any sense, they would laugh at the pretentious nonsense “education experts” routinely write and speak. The purpose of school jargon is not to convey information but to create illusions, to make simple, ordinary things appear mysterious, complicated, and expensive. In 1976, Edwin Newman wrote: “In the field of education, the competition in producing nonsense is intense.” His words are as relevant today as ever.
Recently I happened by chance to see a 12-page booklet entitled “Effective Public School Governance,” a “White Paper” published in 2007 by the “Education Funders of St. Louis,” a group of do-gooders who apparently have more money than they can possibly put to good use. They “engaged a team of education experts” to “study urban school governance.” (more…)
STEVE KOGAN writes:
Among the pleasures I experienced in reading the recent post “Gainsborough’s Children” and seeing the portraits was the quote from John Constable on Gainsborough’s works: “On looking at them, we find tears in our eyes and know not what brings them.” Although this moving comment was new to me, I could tell from what I had read in his letters, lectures, and documented conversations that it was just like Constable to speak this way, and I would like to share my thoughts that were prompted by his words.
Unlike Gainsborough, a painter of exquisitely delicate landscapes who made his mark as one of the great portraitists of his time, Constable was almost exclusively a landscape painter whose works leave a lasting impression of dramatically cloud-filled skies and the sheer substance of trees, water, fields, and hills. (more…)
SHEILA C. writes: This video is a perfect summary of a modern church service, what Vox Dei (at Vox Popoli blog) calls "churchianity." I thought you would really appreciate it.
DAVID writes:
In response to your entry on Romney’s egalitarian vision of prosperity, I’ve noted for sometime the absence of men i.e. “Men of the West,” in Islam’s ongoing war on Europe and Christendom.
Why, why, why are men absent? Mostly it is women – Melanie Phillips, Marine LePen, Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, Pamela Geller, Ann Barnhardt, the late Oriana Fallaci, and a few others. As for men, it is just Geert Wilders.
Why have men abandoned the field, the greatest civilization that men created, and gone walkabout, as if they don’t care for their creation? (more…)
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THE FEMINIST writer Shulamith Firestone, a feminist luminary of the 1970s who argued that pregnancy and childbearing were “barbaric” and entailed female oppression, died in Manhattan on Tuesday. In an obituary in The New York Times, Margalit Fox discreetly reports that Firestone was clinically insane.
In addition to her famous 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution, which I read as a college student and in which she advocates artificial reproduction and state-supported childcare, Firestone wrote Airless Spaces, a quasi-fictitious memoir of her experience as a schizophrenic. Fox writes:
In “Airless Spaces,” Ms. Firestone writes of life after hospitalization, on psychiatric medication. (more…)
A READER named Laura sends this story about a woman who thinks she’s a man, has had hormonal therapy to make her look like a man and calls herself by a man’s name. Nevertheless, this woman wants to be a breastfeeding counselor for La Leche League in Canada. (more…)