KATHLENE M. writes:

“Do women make for better news?” I would say no. When I see a glammed-up Dana Perino, Ann Coulter, Michelle Malkin, Sarah Palin, Diane Sawyer or even Nancy Pelosi talking or pontificating on television, I cannot pay attention because I’m too distracted by their appearances. Dana Perino is perfectly coiffed and exceptionally pretty. Ann Coulter’s long hair and long fake eyelashes hypnotize me. Michelle Malkin’s large glossy red lips overpower the screen. (Even my husband agrees on that one.) Sarah Palin is one of those “hotty” moms who dress as young as their teen kids. Diane Sawyer and Nancy Pelosi’s perfectly coiffed hair and flawless skin are preternatural. Diane Sawyer’s fake eyelashes add to the illusion. I imagine that men must get even more distracted by these women and cannot really hear what they’re saying.

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GOVERNMENT subsidies of single mothers are not humane or charitable or compassionate. They are evil. Subsidies for single mothers are a state-sanctioned form of child abuse. Gerry Garibaldi, a schoolteacher writing in The City Journal, describes the world of black pregnant teens and their fatherless boyfriends, a story that has been told so many times for so many years to so many people that chaos seems normal.

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  IT'S IRONIC, but true, that one of the qualifications of the modern librarian is a distaste for books. They take up space, and space, the librarians complain, is limited. The books grow old, too. Their covers fray, the spines crack, the pages go dog-eared. Inattentive student workers stick them on the wrong shelves, where they can practically "disappear" for years. People borrow them and don't return them.... Books are bulky and inconvenient - like rocks, and trees, and rivers, and life. It occurs to me that everything that can be said against the inconvenience of books can be said about the inconvenience of children.                      --- Anthony Esolen, Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child

LAWRENCE AUSTER writes:

Dana Perino is a typical TV talking head female: preciously pretty, with media skills, and with absolutely nothing worthwhile to say. The main message she conveys is, “I am so pretty and I know how to talk; and I am so very special because I’m pretty and know how to talk.”

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JESSE POWELL writes:

In 1900 and before, the rates of divorce, illegitimacy, and working married women were all very low. Indeed, they all had similar levels in the distant past and they all have similar levels today. It is widely agreed that divorce and illegitimacy are indicators of family breakdown but what about married women working? Isn’t a married woman working a sign of “empowerment” and vital to her sense of identity and a necessary part of her contribution to society?

In 1900, certainly, people didn’t think so. A look at family-related indicators from the distant past suggests that this view was correct. Married women working should be seen as just as significant an indicator of family breakdown as illegitimacy and divorce; all three phenomenon were rare in the past and socially stigmatized. Similarly, today, all three phenomena are common and widespread.

 In 1900, the divorce rate was 8.1 percent (only 3.3 percent in 1870), the illegitimacy ratio was about 1 percent, and the proportion of married women working was 3.0 percent (I’m referring to white women here). In 2009, the divorce rate was 50 percent; the illegitimacy ratio was 29.0 percent, and the proportion of married women working was 61.3 percent. This represents about a twentyfold increase in all three measures over the course of 110 years (140 years on the measure of divorce). The annualized rates of growth in the quantity of the three measures are 2.5 percent for divorce, 3.5 percent for illegitimacy, and 3.7 percent for married women working. (more…)

THE ANTI-ABORTION group Live Action sent a man and a woman posing as a pimp and a prostitute into a New Jersey Planned Parenthood clinic. In a lengthy interview, the manager of the clinic advised them how to get abortions and testing for sexually transmitted diseases for prostitutes as young as 14 and 15. The manager also told them how to circumvent mandatory reporting laws aimed at preventing abuse of minors. The video of the interview can be seen here. Lila Rose, the student at UCLA who is president of Live Action, stated in a release, "This proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that Planned Parenthood intentionally breaks state and federal laws and covers up the abuse of the young girls it claims to serve. Time and time again, Planned Parenthood has sent young girls back into the arms of their abusers. They don’t deserve a dime of the hundreds of millions they receive in federal funding from taxpayers. Congress must cease funding and the Department of Justice should investigate this corrupt organization immediately.”

THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:

It came to my attention recently that the current reading assignment in my son’s tenth-grade English class involves Jay Asher’s so-called young adult novel Thirteen Reasons Why (2009).  Asher’s publishers have pushed his book skillfully and have succeeded in insinuating it in high school reading lists across the nation.  Commercially, Asher has scored a hit, with a captive audience of high school students. 

What to say about Thirteen Reasons Why?  The Amazon webpage devoted to Asher’s title cites the Booklist summary of the plot: “When Clay Jenson plays the cassette tapes he received in a mysterious package, he’s surprised to hear the voice of dead classmate Hannah Baker. He’s one of [thirteen] people who receive Hannah’s story, which details the circumstances that led to her suicide.  Clay spends the rest of the day and long into the night listening to Hannah’s voice and going to the locations she wants him to visit.  The text alternates, sometimes quickly, between Hannah’s voice (italicized) and Clay’s thoughts as he listens to her words, which illuminate betrayals and secrets that demonstrate the consequences of even small actions.”  Does it sound like a soap opera in prose?  It is that assuredly, but it is regrettably much worse than that.

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  TWO lesbian students were cheered as they walked into a Minnesota school assembly as a couple. They were permitted to partake in the "royalty court procession" after the Southern Poverty Law Center and a lesbian rights group threatened legal action if they were denied. A mother of one of the girls praised her daughter's courage.

A PETITE, 34-year-old blonde who worked as a corrections officer at a Washington State prison was murdered on Saturday while she was on guard alone in the chapel, according to The Seattle Times. The Monroe Correctional Complex houses 2,400 men. Jayme Biendl, who was named officer of the year at the prison in 2008, was 5 feet three inches tall and weighed 130 pounds. She was unarmed when she was strangled by a 200-pound rapist sentenced to life without parole. He had once doused a woman with gasoline and set her on fire.

Guards at the prison do not carry any weapons, not even pepper spray or batons. Scott Frakes, the prison superintendent, told the Seattle newspaper that women guards are seen as “equal and just as valuable” as men. (more…)

GEORGE WASHINGTON was famous for his finely-honed manners, which combined the polish of a European aristocrat with the democratic simplicity of a colonial farmer. Some of this  refinement was apparently inspired by “The Rules of Civility and Decent Behavior in Company and in Conversation.” This set of 110 social maxims originated with sixteenth-century French Jesuits and was translated into English in 1640. Washington copied out the rules in his student exercise book when he was under 16.

“The Gestures of the Body must be Suited to the discourse you are upon.” That is rule #20, one that can lead to many hours of fruitful reflection.

Some of the rules, such as the prohibitions against drumming one’s fingers, humming and bedewing the faces of others with spittle, deal with small matters. Others concern iisues of the highest morality, such as #21, “Reproach none for the Infirmaties of Nature, nor Delight to Put them that have in mind thereof.”  Deference to others, even those equal or below in rank, is central to this ethical system. Rule #34: “It is good Manners to prefer them to whom we Speak before ourselves especially if they be above us with whom in no Sort we ought to begin.” (more…)

IN VIRGIL’S epic poem The Aeneid, the hero Aeneas leaves the smoking ruins of Troy with his aged father on his back and his young son by his hand. His destiny is to found a second home for his remnant people in Italy and to give birth to a new civilization. Not long after the Trojan armada embarks, Aeneas’ father, Anchises, dies and is buried in Sicily. A year later, after a sojourn in Carthage, Aeneas returns to the shores of Sicily and there observes the anniversary of his father’s death.

Ever conscious of his place in the chain of generations, bidden to undertake a dangerous and daunting task, Aeneas finds beauty and meaning in his duty toward the dead.

He is not a mere warrior or adventurer. As he stoops to his father’s grave, he pledges to remember forever. The Trojans have lost everything. They have only their will to survive and their few ships. Even so, a new world will be founded on the old, intermingled with the past as spring earth with the dust of the dead.

Here is the scene from Book V of the Robert Fagles translation:

When, in the following Dawn, bright day had put the stars
to flight, Aeneas called his companions together,
from the whole shore, and spoke from a high mound:
“Noble Trojans, people of the high lineage of the gods,
the year’s cycle is complete to the very month
when we laid the bones, all that was left of my divine father,
in the earth, and dedicated the sad altars. And now
the day is here (that the gods willed) if I am not wrong,
which I will always hold as bitter, always honoured. (more…)

HOW IS IT possible that we live in a world where some women, infertile after years of career advancement, arrange to have surrogates provide babies for them while other women, even married women who already have homes and husbands, abort their children?

One reason we live in such a world is that women are not told the most basic facts of fertility. They are routinely lied to about the consequences of delaying childbirth. What college teaches women that with every passing year after their mid-twenties, their fertility declines significantly? What college really impresses this information on the minds of the young?

The information that many thousands of infertile couples are eager for unwanted children is also withheld. The hopes of the infertile should be widely recognized and they are not. Supporters of abortion never state the obvious: that nine months of pregnancy is not a great hardship. It is painful to give up a baby for adoption, but not life-ruining. As a reader wrote in this entry, these simple facts “cut through all the intellectual meanderings that we are subjected to when faced with abortion.”

Our world is infused with hostility toward motherhood and life. No amount of focused childrearing nor the very real love mothers have for their children can hide this fact. 

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A READER, Bill W., at VFR also writes:

  …. [T]he forced nature of the welfare state colors everything. This form of “charity,” rather than really helping people, creates dependence, undermines thrift and hard work, and destroys people spiritually, both by undermining what is good, and also by creating a sense of wounded, resentful expectation–the idea that the world owes them something. I’m a doctor. And having worked with Medicaid patients in emergency rooms before, I can tell you that they are far more demanding, suspicious, complaining and overall “entitled” than any other group. (more…)

AN ARTICLE in The New York Times about a survey of college freshmen makes this point:

Women’s sense of emotional well-being was more closely tied to how they felt the faculty treated them…. It wasn’t so much the level of contact as whether they felt they were being taken seriously by the professor. If not, it was more detrimental to women than to men.

The idea that a woman’s sense of well-being might be tied to how she treats others is not seriously considered.

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