JESSE POWELL writes:

Your readers may be interested to know that there is a huge patriarchal movement in South Africa today, and it is growing. I am referring to Mighty Men, more officially known as Shalom Ministries. This movement has as its charismatic leader the evangelical Christian Angus Buchan.  Buchan is a white farmer of Scottish descent, originally from Zambia, who moved to South Africa in 1977. He and his wife, Jill Buchan, started Shalom Ministries in 1980. In 1998 Angus wrote a book about his life, Faith Like Potatoes, which was made into a movie with the same name in 2006. In the late 1990s, Angus Buchan spoke to a crowd of 35,000 people in a stadium in Durban. The crowd came to hear him and to join in a prayer for rain.  (more…)

  HERE'S a fascinating piece by a female copywriter who was unable to make much money until she changed her name to James. It could be true.

POPE JOHN PAUL II wrote beautiful and profound meditations on sexuality and the human family in his famous work Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. It is impossible to reconcile most of these philosophical reflections aimed at modern hedonism and radical individualism with the cultural movement we know as feminism.

Paradoxically, John Paul II has also been a major inspiration for feminism in the Catholic Church. In two works, Letter of Pope John Paul II to Women and Mulieris Dignitatem, John Paul embraced feminism in all its misbegotten glory. He encouraged Catholic women to see traditional society as inherently oppressive, to view themselves as victims, and to bask in self-adulation. At a time of declining fertility and destructive careerism, when millions of women were leaving their children in the care of strangers, daycare centers and assembly-line schools, or not having children at all, John Paul proclaimed in the 1995 Letter:

Thank you, women who work! You are present and active in every area of life – social, economic, cultural, artistic and political. In this way you make an indispensable contribution to the growth of a culture which unites reason and feeling, to a model of life ever open to the sense of “mystery,” to the establishment of economic and political structures ever more worthy of humanity.”

He speaks of the “feminine genius” as the unique gift of women to nurture and love, but he does so with the sort of bloated rhetoric that clearly suggests female superiority and that degrades the very meaning of “genius.” In a third work, Evangelium Vitae, on the Value and Inviolability of Human Life, John Paul speaks of a “new feminism.” He writes:

 In transforming culture so that it supports life, women occupy a place, in thought and action, which is unique and decisive. It depends on them to promote a “new feminism” which rejects the temptation of imitating models of “male domination,” in order to acknowledge and affirm the true genius of women in every aspect of the life of society, and overcome all discrimination, violence and exploitation.

Unfortunately the rejection of masculine behavior for women is incompatible with campaigns to remove discrimination. Traditional sex roles achieve their sustaining support from customs and habits of discrimination. New Feminism attempts to reconcile the irreconcilable, and some Catholic women now proudly wave its banner. The movement aims for nothing less than what Catholic convert Elizabeth Fox-Genovese called “a new model of the way to be human.” Sound familiar?

New Feminism is Old Feminism without abortion rights and with less promiscuity. It still rejects the traditional role of women as a moral imperative and promotes the feminist myth that women can pursue money and power while fulfilling their feminine duties. It sees male domination of the public sphere as an expression of contempt for women.  New Feminism seeks the same radical transformation of society as Old Feminism and promotes the same calculated neglect of children. It has no basis in Catholic doctrine or theology, no matter how much affirmation it received from John Paul II, and I write as a Catholic. (more…)

TIME magazine also had a recent piece hailing the lesbian “mother” as the parental ideal. The study that was the basis for this glowing report, as well as the one cited in a recent article in The Atlantic, involve statistically insignificant samples and highly questionable methods of evaluation.  The study in Time, which first appeared in Pediatrics, the official journal of the American Academy of Pediatrics, looked at 84 “families.” Its findings were based on interviews with the mothers, their lesbian partners and the children, including an “online questionnaire” addressed to the children at age 17. Alice Park writes:

Data on such families are sparse, but they are important for establishing whether a child’s environment in a home with same-sex parents would be any more or less nurturing than one with a heterosexual couple.

In other words, there is not reliable data to draw any conclusions but we are going to draw some anyway, and use them to influence public policy. (more…)

AS DISCUSSED at VFR, Rush Limbaugh recently effused about his wedding and marriage to his fourth wife:

I’ve had people come up to me, guests there that were former producers for major networks, movie theaters, studios and so forth, “I’ve never seen a production like this. (more…)

BRENDAN writes:

I think that the piece from Alan Roebuck is quite on target in asserting that the current regime of holding tolerance, non-discrimination and personal autonomy as the new “gods” does not provide men with any real basis for motivation to achieve, to invest in themselves and in family life.

I think a closely related issue is the more or less complete destruction — in theory — of the male familial role. Of course, this role was, in our culture, largely based on religious ideas about the “roles” of men and women in family life — ideas which liberalism sees as oppressive, arbitrary (in being handed down from above rather than being the product of personal autonomous choice) and restrictive. However, if men do not have a defined role to play in family life — if, in fact, the role of men is irrelevant, as the spate of recent articles has claimed, or that men have no role at all to play, in essence, in family life, other than as a kind of “less competent woman” — they will simply not invest, either in themselves or in family relationships. The reasons for this relate to men and women alike, albeit each in a rather different way. By and large, men will not invest if there isn’t really a return, and if the “return” is to be considered a somewhat dysfunctional woman/mother who “helps” the “real parent” with tasks she delegates that he perform under her supervision and who is merely tolerated as a kind of court jester or sex/emotional needs provider for women, men will continue to flounder and fail to invest in themselves and their relationships, on a large scale. (more…)

ALAN ROEBUCK writes:

At first I viewed Hanna Rosin’s essay “The End of Men” as simply an attack on men. And indeed it is an attack on men, though largely couched in a journalistic, just-the-facts-ma’m tone. The author, despite a few semi-obligatory sentences admitting that all is not well when men are down, clearly approves of the latest developments, and only wishes men would get with the program, that is, cheerfully accept their inferior status. (more…)

CAROLYN WRITES:

I sent a small donation to you via Paypal today. Keep up the good work. I hope you get lots of donations.

I love reading your site. Your voice is refreshing in a mixed-up world. I think many of us have lost our ability to think clearly and express our true opinions. I have walked both paths. I was a working girl with a big executive career job for 19 years. Then I came home to my family and have been home tending the hearth for six years. Let me say clearly that even after six years home, it continues to be a struggle. (more…)

 N. writes:

I’m surprised no one has mentioned that these two articles in The Atlantic, discussed here and here, are in the June issue. So the editors of that magazine went out of their way to publish an article declaring men to be losers and another stating that fathers are inferior to lesbian mothers just in time for … Father’s Day. Or, as modern advertising refers to it, “Dad and Grad’s Day.” (more…)

  HAVE WOMEN ever been written off as a class of people in a leading journal of opinion with the sort of summary disdain that appears in The Atlantic's latest piece, "The End of Men"? Certainly, men have publicly expressed exasperation with women, stating that they were more sentimental than men, and not as smart. Sometimes these statements have been extreme and contemptuous. But has any prominent journalist ever broached the idea in any serious journal that women were unnecessary, that they served no useful social function? That's the difference. Male intellectuals have expressed scorn and exasperation with women but as far as I know they have not seriously presented the idea that they were useless.

JESSE POWELL writes:

As you know, South Africa is basking in the glow of the World Cup, the biggest sporting event anywhere and the first in an African country. PBS recently aired a disturbing profile of Cape Town, South Africa’s second largest city and one of the cities that is hosting the World Cup. The segment, aired on the Newshour on June 8, 2010, describes the gangsterism, drug addiction, and violent crime that is plaguing the city, where crystal methamphetamine is a big problem.

I thought your readers might like a view into family life and social statistics in South Africa. (more…)

LYDIA SHERMAN writes:

In the past, Southern ladies were always looked to as an example of propriety, hospitality, and femininity. It is sad to see them losing their culture. It was a culture that led the way in manners and religion. (more…)

AS IF its piece "The End of Men" didn't get the point across, The Atlantic also has an article this month on the superfluous father. Pamela Paul writes about the lesbian mother, who turns about to be the long-awaited maternal and paternal ideal. Paul writes: The quality of parenting ... is what really matters, not gender. But the real challenge to our notion of the “essential” father might well be the lesbian mom. On average, lesbian parents spend more time with their children than fathers do. They rate disputes with their children as less frequent than do hetero couples, and describe co-parenting more compatibly and with greater satisfaction. Their kids perceive their parents to be more available and dependable than do the children of heteros. They also discuss more emotional issues with their parents. They have fewer behavioral problems, and show more interest in and try harder at school.  Our intellectual luminaries have been laying the groundwork for matriarchy for a long time despite the misery of the average woman. There is no effort to disguise it anymore.  

A READER writes in response to this entry about a 97-year-old man who remarried.

Mrs. Marie Smith writes:

Marriage is about merging through sex, let’s not fool ourselves. A 97-year old can’t have sex, with or without the artificial assistance and often-disgusting methods of stimulation that are unfortunately commonplace today among people half that age.

I can think of two reasons why post-sexual old people would get married: either for legal and financial reasons or because they are senile – they are thinking and acting like adolescents. (more…)

THE ENTIRE WORLD order now favors women over men. Such is the conclusion of a new article, “The End of Men” by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic, which comes right out and states that women are not only better at most of the jobs that keep the modern economy running but are also more suited to leadership. Men were a good idea when the world needed immature, aggressive,  reckless, “overemotional” brutes who could hunt and plow. But those days are over. According to Rosin, “innovative, successful firms are the ones that promote women.”

Rosin writes:

What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we are all imprinted with adaptive imperatives from a distant past: men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, and that shows up now as a drive to win on Wall Street; women are programmed to find good providers and to care for their offspring, and that is manifested in more- nurturing and more-flexible behavior, ordaining them to domesticity. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order. But what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?

It’s funny how after years of government-enforced affirmative action and propaganda promoting the idea that women are naturally good at everything, the economy just happens to be “more congenial” to women than men.

(more…)

IN A highly sexualized culture, incestuous expressions of love are inevitable. Here is teen star Miley Cyrus with her father, Billy Ray Cyrus.

The possibility of Miley Cyrus ever having a healthy relationship wth a man is almost nil.

(more…)

  GIVEN THE choice, which would you rather have? An invitation to a party with great food and interesting people in a modest home? Or an invitation to a party in a fabulously appointed home with lousy food and deadly-dull guests? The deadly-dull party with lousy food and deadly-dull guests is a common feature of modern society. That's because people spend so much time earning the money for granite countertops and big-screen TVs, they create a vast social wasteland. They cannot converse. They cannot offer the rudiments of hospitality. They can only offer products on display.