IS it possible to draw a clear line between modern anti-Semitism and reasonable criticism of Jewish leftism? In this excellent 2005 piece, Lawrence Auster wrote:

It is essential to distinguish between anti-Semitic attacks on Jews and legitimate, rational criticisms of Jews. For example, to say that many Jews fear some fictional white evangelical anti-Semitism more than they fear Islamic anti-Semitism, and to say that this belief is both wrong in itself and harmful to society, as Stephen Steinlight has argued, and I expanded on the argument, is a legitimate criticism. It does not demonize Jews as Jews. (more…)

THE AUSTRALIAN government announced today that passports will be changed to offer three gender options: male, female and indeterminate.

Here’s my question.

Given that being of “indeterminate” sex is purely wishful thinking, why don’t passports add more options? What if you consider yourself an angel? Or a goddess? (more…)

JEANETTE V., who is a professional photographer, writes:

Regarding the wedding dress, it is the “fashion” these days to do a “trash the dress” shoot after the wedding. I suppose a bride will ask me eventually to photograph her doing this to her dress. I don’t get it, I took great care to save my dress for my future daughter.

Another fad is the “cake smash,” where a child is photographed destroying his first birthday cake. (more…)

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

The Chastity/Chaz Bono topic has a personal resonance with me. Decades ago, I was a grocery-store worker in Malibu, where I grew up. Occasionally my boss asked me to deliver groceries to celebrities who did not want to be bothered by fans and preferred not to come into the supermarket. One of them was Cher, who used to answer the door with her toddler-daughter in hand. The distance between that distinctly female toddler-daughter and the hulking weird pseudo-male of today is one measure of how utterly perverse the project called postmodernism really is. (more…)

JOHN E. writes:

Megyn Kelly seems to be a sign, one of many, of women who are out-of-place. She is doing what women excel at, and accomplish so beautifully in the proper context, which is to accept another unconditionally. The problem is that there are circumstances, many circumstances in our day, for which unconditional acceptance is among the last things that are needed, and Bono’s are such circumstances. Ms. Kelly is thrusting her womanly strength onto a situation in which it has no place, and in so doing, demonstrates how this strength becomes a weakness. (more…)

THIS IS a Charles Cushman photo of three homeless men in Battery Park in June 1941. By today’s standards, these men are dressed up. It seems even homeless men once had wives to take care of them.

Looking at these other photos of New York in the 1940s, one sees how dress dignifies ordinary life.

(more…)

  READING THE NEWS, you would think our economy was dead, as if America had nothing. Fred Owens writes about visiting an olive orchard in the Ojai Valley of California. It has not rained in the Ojai Valley since May and yet the olives are doing fine.

FACED WITH girls wearing skirts too short and revealing, some British schools are resorting to bans on skirts. One headmaster told the LA Times that he had no choice but to change the dress code. “It just means that teachers can concentrate on what’s important in education.”

But what could be more important?

The answer is not to ban skirts. But to make girls girls again.

(more…)

THE EDMONTON SUN ran this photo the other day with the following caption:

A light-hearted photo by the Edmonton’s Sun chief photographer Tom Braid is the Photo of the Week choice. The trend of destroying the wedding dress as part of a bride’s photo album has emerged within the last decade, and this very bubbly, fun photo will no doubt become a centrepiece of this bride’s memories for years to come. (more…)

  AT VFR, the commenter Gintas writes the following about the Center for Gender and Sexuality and its well-paid commissars: The sexual revolution is a sexual boot camp--tear down the old man, rebuild him in a new image, a new man totally obedient to new masters. The goal is to sweep away all virtue, truth, beauty, and turn man in every way into a rutting animal with no thought above his immediate urges. Does not Katherine Franke herself talk like that, but with the obfuscating Cultural Marxism of a modern educrat? And does not the faculty of the Columbia Law School Center for Gender and Sexuality look like the drill instructors of the sexual boot camp?

A READER, Joe, sent this note today to Megyn Kelly of FoxNews:

At lunch, I got bored watching CNBC and Fox Business so I flipped the news channels to your program. Your interaction with [Dr. Keith] Ablow was astounding. Mind blowing. 

You militantly argued with him, invoking that damnable “hater” terminology of the Bolsheviks, about Chastity Bono and (her) appearance on some dancing program.  (more…)

  FROM British Paintings.

ERIC writes:

If Columbia Law School Professor Katherine Franke thinks “the public sphere may be the last refuge for sexual liberty,” she must never have seen the Folsom Street Fair. And if she ever tells me that our discourse needs to be any raunchier, I will tell her to [obscenity deleted.] I bet that line would make a schoolmarm out of her. (more…)

MODERN DENTISTRY is remarkable. Everytime I go to the dentist – and lately I have been there a lot – the instruments of torture have been streamlined and updated. It’s true that the jackhammer used to blow a tooth to smithereens is not much quieter than the jackhammers of yesteryear. But many other things are different. (more…)

HERE is the faculty of the Columbia Law School Center for Gender and Sexuality. Eleven full professors comprise the center’s staff, easily totaling more than a $1 million in annual salaries. The center doesn’t feel the need to mask its partisan agenda with a token white male. There is one male and he is, of course, black.

By the way, Katherine Franke (pictured to the far right) is director of the Gender and Sexuality Program. She recently called for a new frontier in homosexual activism: public sex. She worries that the legalization of same-sex “marriage” in New York has stigmatized promiscuity. Therefore, homosexuals need to be more publicly and openly sexual. She writes, (more…)

WHAT nation has the most egalitarian workforce, with the least occupational segregation of men and women? Is it one of the many countries that have tried to accomodate mothers in the workforce with family-friendly policies, such as paid parental leave? Is it Sweden or Norway with their enlightened equality policies? (more…)

THIS boy is one of six students listed as a plaintiff in a lawsuit against a Minnesota school district accused of a dismissive attitude toward “antigay bullying.” The Anoka-Hennepin school district, the largest in the state, refuses to teach “sexual diversity” to its students. (more…)