OHIO STATE Senator Nina Turner is the first recipient of this website’s Helen Kendrick Johnson Award. Johnson was one of many nineteenth century and early 20th century female anti-suffragists who believed women should not be given the vote or hold major office. The Helen Kendrick Johnson Award goes to a woman who proves that Mrs. Johnson was right.

Turner, a Cleveland Democrat, recently proposed a bill in the Ohio senate that would require men to see sex therapists and obtain notarized affidavits attesting to impotence in order to receive prescriptions for Viagra. The reason for the bill is not to protect the health of men or to reduce use of the potentially harmful drug. It is a spiteful response to a Ohio bill limiting abortion rights. In Turner’s view, abortion is a matter of “reproductive health” and any bill protecting the unborn is an assault on women’s health. Thus she has responded with a bill pertaining to the reproductive organs of men.

Turner told Business Week:

We want to make sure that men, vulnerable, fragile men, who are not capable of making decisions for themselves, understand all of the side effects and the implications of these types of drugs.

Turner is a living, breathing argument for the all-male franchise. The more she speaks, the more she damages the reputation of women everywhere.

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J.K. BALTZERSEN writes:

If a man desires that his wife cooks him food, irons his clothes, does the dishes, cleans the house, etc., one need not look far for those who decry him as pathetic, sexist, disrespecting of women, in need for a replacement mom, doomed to be forever single, etc.

However, if a woman desires that her husband does the work with the hammer, the wrench, the saw, etc., lifts the heavy stuff, fixes the car, etc., why is there not a similar decrying of her as pathetic, sexist, disrespecting of men, in need for a replacement dad, doomed to be forever single, etc.?

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  AT City Journal, Laura Vanderkam writes about the online math tutorials of Salman Khan, which can be found at KhanAcademy.org. The lessons are free. With the Internet and video and audio technology, parents now have a remarkable number of low-cost alternatives to traditional schooling. It is possible to receive a first rate education, from kindergarten through college, for very little money at home.

SAGE McLAUGHLIN writes:

In keeping with your repeatedly-stated theme that feminism brings “glitter and drama” to a fortunate few, but only personal and material impoverishment to most women, here is interesting commentary by James Taranto, copied in full.

He wrote:

Marriage and male responsibility for families were once the norm at all levels of American society. Feminism was supposed to liberate women from dependency on men. Instead it has helped to create a two-tiered culture in which the norm is for women to be “chained to a desk,” but those who hit the jackpot in the mating game can realistically aspire to escape that status. Nice going, ladies. Happy International Women’s Day.

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VINCENT C. writes:

  KRISTOR writes: Over at The Orthosphere, in response to a request from a reader, Svein has a post where people can sign up for a registry so that where there are two or three traditionalists in a given locale, they can if they wish use Orthosphere as a means of contacting each other and arranging meetings.

ALAN writes:

In an essay about small communities and local culture, Wendell Berry wrote of how it was once common for people in farming communities in Kentucky to visit each other and talk in the evening: (more…)

ALEX M. writes:

I very much enjoy reading your website and the discussions you have with your commenters.

I felt compelled to pass along the following news item that appeared in yesterday’s morning paper. The article (actually the second photograph shown) was on the front page of the National Post (a national newspaper here in Canada). (more…)

ANOTHER pilot in the British Royal Air Force responds below to the two previous posts, here and here, on Flt. Lt. Kirsty Stewart, the first woman to join the elite Red Arrows aerobatics team. Stewart was reassigned recently due to stress.

The pilot, who prefers to remain anonymous, writes:

I do not usually contribute to these sorts of discussions online but feel that I must take issue with both your post on Kirsty and the contributions by Mr McCulloch. (more…)

KIRSTY STEWART, a pilot with the elite British Red Arrows, has received enormous acclaim since she became the first woman pilot to join the famous Royal Air Force aerobatic flying team in 2009. When she was reassigned to ground duty due to stress recently, she was the object of universally sympathetic treatment in the British press. The reports could not have been more understanding.

However, when I raised the point that it is no surprise that a woman should find high-risk flying and the accidental death of two colleages stressful, I received nasty mail from other British pilots, one of whom had many unkind things to say about domestic women and neither of whom seem to be aware of the widespread praise and sympathy for Stewart. If they were aware of it, why would they be concerned about one obscure blogger’s dissenting comments?

I omitted the one pilot’s more scathing insults. In short, he believes housewives are “parasites.”

Of course, if there had never been a long tradition of devoted mothers and wives in Great Britain (parasites to varying degrees) and if that tradition had not looked unkindly upon women performing aggressive and risky tasks such as flying fighter jets, it’s fair to assume the Royal Air Force would never have come into existence in the first place. Britain would have remained in the Bronze Age. It is precisely because the world needs empathetic mothers and wives that women should not be flying fighter planes, or at least the world should not celebrate it when they do. And that’s true even if Kirsty Stewart is a better pilot than 90 percent of the pilots who have ever flown.

In that entry, Henry McCulloch, a former fighter pilot, writes:

What neither Rivett nor Bosworth can see – and those who rule their country now want to make damned sure they never do see it – is that putting Kirsty Stewart in the Red Arrows is not some grand gesture of British patriotism, but a profoundly subversive social message. Whether she meant to be or not, Kirsty Stewart was being used as a tool of Britain’s cultural Marxists, doing her bit to upend normal social understandings in once-Great Britain.

He also quotes from Taylor Caldwell, who many years ago saw that when society puts women in men’s jobs, it brings glitter and drama to a few and drudgery and single motherhood to the many. That’s exactly what has come to pass in feminist Britain, where the illegitimacy rate is roughly 50 percent. While elite women bask in praise for breaking barriers, ordinary women struggle with the confusion of sex roles and work in subordinate dead-end jobs in uninspiring bureaucracies. For every woman pilot testing the limits, there are millions of feminism-created drones.  (more…)

AT HETEROSEPARATIST.COM, Mantronikk, a blogger who says he rejects all hatred for and from homosexual activists, defines his terms. Heteroseparatist:

a: A person who wishes to separate [himself] from homosexual acts and stand apart from those who engage in such acts.

b: A person who rejects homofascism, homosexuality, and homophobia.

 c: A person, entity, or organization that respectfully declines to associate with any or all divisions of the gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender community, but does not hate, fear, or persecute people that are GLBT.

 d: A person who quietly shuns people and environments that are anti-hetero. (more…)

  SUNNY at the cutting-edge show, Sunny TV, provides trenchant commentary on Sandra Fluke and world news. Sunny speculates that Miss Fluke is voluntarily sterile and has no need for contraception.  

  LAST WEEK, the story of Barbara Johnson, a lesbian denied Communion by a priest, was plastered on the front page of the Washington Post. Read the back story by Thomas Peters at CatholicVote.org. Johnson is a self-professed  Buddhist and longtime lesbian activist. Johnson told the priest, "[Y]ou will pay dearly on the day of judgment for judging me."

TRADITIONALISTS are often accused of seeking to resurrect the past. The implication is that they are in need of a psychological crutch, that they are not manly or courageous enough to face the uncertain future. There are many problems with this charge. For one, traditionalists don’t honor all things past. For instance, they rarely speak of resurrecting polygamy or slavery.

The constant references to the past traditionalists often make should not be confused with wholesale approval of everything foregone. The real aim is not the past itself, but truth and the good. It is the attainment of God’s kingdom on earth, a project which can never be fully achieved.

Nostalgia, in this sense, is reverence for what our predecessors got right. Everyone must look to the ideal. Everyone does look to the ideal. The difference between a traditionalist and a liberal is that the liberal looks to some ill-defined possibility that is a radical departure from everything that ever existed while the traditionalist adheres to what has already been done. The liberal is the escapist. He seeks emancipation from life itself. The traditionalist is the realist, provided he is always instilled with some degree of disillusionment with everything human, with everything in this world, and provided he keeps in mind what his predecessors got wrong and the necessity of change. This detachment is essential to judgment of the past.

As Donald Davidson wrote in his 1957 book Still Rebels, Still Yankees:

‘You cannot turn the clock back!’ is the commonest taunt of our day. It always emerges as the clinching argument that any modernist offers any traditionalist when the question is: ‘What shall we do now?’ But it is not really an argument. It is a taunt intended to discredit the traditionalist by stigmatizing him a traitor to an idea of progress that is assumed as utterly valid and generally accepted. (more…)

PAUL writes:

I agree you were not mocking the Marines in your discussion of the photo of a Marine embracing a man. Marines are doing themselves in by sitting back and not resigning en masse. I am afraid we are approaching the point where many traditionalists are going to have to sacrifice to a large degree in a similar or more severe fashion. If I were to see two men kissing at my workplace, I would expect myself to file a complaint even if it meant I would end up on the street. If nothing were done about it, I would expect to resign in protest. It appears to me that we are in danger of heading back to the catacombs. (more…)

SARAH S. writes:

I am puzzled by the apparent truth in what some housewives of my acquaintance claim — that their husbands want to help them with the laundry, the dish washing, the folding of clothes, sweeping and mopping, etc. when they arrive home from work. I say this is apparently true, because these men do participate in housework on a daily basis. Why on earth would they do that if they didn’t want to? My husband, on the other hand, wants to come home to a tidy house, a decent meal, and children who are pleasant to be around. (more…)