VANESSA writes, as part of the ongoing discussion about Catholicism and feminism:

In response to Kimberly’s statement:

Another traditional priest I used to confess to told me that at times, it’s even okay to lie to your husband! The example he gave was that if my husband hates my mother and says she is not to be allowed in my home, and yet she comes to visit me and I allow her in, that it would be fine to tell him that she was never there if he were to ask. Makes sense to me. But then, I know my own husband,

I can only say that the priest was in grave error.

It is one thing to be disobedient if your husband asks you to commit a grave sin. It is another to be willfully and spitefully disobedient in such a manner. If your husband doesn’t want your mother in his house, that is completely within his rights and should be respected. (more…)

  A REAL MAN shares some beers and a few jokes with his friends on the eve of his wedding. The faux guy, who marries on the cusp of middle age, searches out the best and most expensive roasted fennel, as well as potatoes cooked in duck fat.

EXPANDING ON the theme of courtesy, N.W. writes:

I seem to recollect Faulkner once saying that a true gentleman treats every woman like a lady whether she is or not. Given the scarcity of ladies nowadays this is a tall order. On the contrary, many women I’ve dated have been offended when I’ve paid for dinner or held the door or walked on the traffic side of the walk. Hillary Clinton used to bawl out the Marine guards for holding the door for her. 

On the matter of colorful language, it really is a convoluted state of affairs these days. I went to a small, conservative (in the Burkean sense) Catholic liberal arts college, graduated ’06. Most of my class went to Mass regularly and was relatively conservative and most everybody in my class was rather free with their language, men and women alike. I never minded, the girls all carried themselves with a classy and vaguely scandalous sort of style, like a 1930s Hollywood actress, or Brett Ashley in “The Sun Also Rises.” Now, my sister’s class, ’08, had a higher density of sheltered homeschoolers in it and the girls were a bit more restrained in their language. My sister, however, was rather free in her use of certain words, most likely owing to my influence. (more…)

JOHN writes:

I wanted to thank you for your excellent analysis of “John Paul II and the Phony Feminine Genius.” I have spent a bit of time studying these topics, and I believe you are 100 percent correct. 

Those who try to defend JPII by pointing out some remarks that may have resonance to conservatives are missing the bigger picture which you are able to see, perhaps because of your work with this website. What is more important than individual statements of one sort or another is the complete absence of what is most crucially required: the traditional Catholic teaching on marriage. Not one word of traditional Catholic marital teaching has been allowed to escape the complete blackout in place for the past 50 years.  (more…)

KILROY writes:

This is a poster advertising the Australian military which appears on the side of a kiosk at Martin Place in Sydney. It struck me as odd that motherhood and military service were somehow equated as difficult on the same level, as if there is no distinction between the ultimate service to humanity that a women can embrace by giving life, and the ultimate sacrifice of men on the field of battle in defending it. Both are sacrifices, and both are selfless. But there is a difference on a fundamental level that makes posters like this just look ridiculous. (more…)

LYDIA SHERMAN urges Southerners to take their children out of public shools. She writes:

The question is often asked, “How can we help the South to rise again? Where are our Southern folk, ready to take a stand; ready to guide the South back to the old paths, where the good way is?” The answer is: they are in their cribs, talking baby talk, waiting for Southern mothers to teach them the right ways. That will never be accomplished until we get our children out of the public schools. Even if public schools were to suddenly become “good,” they are not safe places for our children. We need to shelter them and teach them ourselves, so that they will grow in the right direction. Farming them out to someone else will not make a great nation.

Read the following quote from “A Nation at Risk,” published in 1983:

If an unfriendly foreign power had attempted to impose on America the mediocre educational performance that exists today, we might well have viewed it as an act of war. (more…)

N.W. writes:

After three long months of almost no reading it was nice to come home from boot camp and peruse your blog. The only trouble is that between you and Mr. Auster I’m so far behind I don’t know where to start. (All suggestions welcome.) 

The Marine Corps is strong as ever. One aspect of the Marines which I especially admire is their dedication to defending not only our country and Constitution but also the common courtesies which are the foundation of a great society. (more…)

  THE TRUTH about the experiences of individuals conceived with donated sperm is finally being told, as if common sense were not enough. Karen Clark and Elizabeth Marquardt write: Listening to the stories of donor-conceived adults, you begin to realize there's really no such thing as a "donor." Every child has a biological father. To claim otherwise is simply to compound the pain, first as these young people struggle with the original, deliberate loss of their biological father, and second as they do so within a culture that insists some guy who went into a room with a dirty magazine isn't a father. At most the children are told he's a "seed provider" or "the nice guy who gave me what I needed to have you" or the "Y Guy" or any number of other cute euphemisms that signal powerfully to children that this man should be of little, if any, importance to them. Elizabeth Marquardt, by the way, is the author of one of the best books about divorce, The Inner Lives of Children of Divorce.

  THOUGH NEW YORK state already has a devastatingly high divorce rate, with one divorce for every two marriages, the legislature is contemplating making marital dissolution easier by allowing spouses to unilaterally terminate a union after swearing to six months of unhappiness. Michale Virtanen, of the Associated Press, examines the proposed bill here purely from the perspective of women, ignoring the negative effects on men and children. He raises the specter of domestic violence by men repeatedly and profiles a woman who testified about the hassles of divorcing her husband. There is no effort mentioned to seek comment from the husband and no reference to the well-documented psychological harm to children.

In a column in The Philadelphia Inquirer yesterday, Rachel K. Sobel writes:

I joke with my other mommy-career friends about the best places to pump. The Chicago airport has amazing bathrooms with lots of space. The toilets have seats covered in plastic that rotate. You know it’s clean when you sit down to pump.

The phenomenon of mothers hooking themselves up to funnels and mechanical pumps in offices or toilet stalls to extract milk for their babies is chillingly inhuman. The breast pump is hideous. Yet, in the unwritten laws of feminism, this contraption is a hallmark of progress and enlightenment, a necessary inconvenience for the normal woman, not simply for the mother facing illness or weaning. A practice that seems to come from the pages of science fiction is now widely accepted as normal.

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I WAS rooting around this weekend for a poem to post on Father’s Day and, as I was meditating on this, I remembered a verse I once read by the modern poet Anthony Hecht about divorced fathers hanging out in Central Park with their children on Saturdays. I looked it up. Reading it again was unbearably sad, as sad as it was the first time. Obama did not speak of these fathers in his proclamation this weekend.

The experiences of the men I have known who have been unwilling participants in divorce have changed my life. I cannot quite explain why this phenomenon has affected me more than it has others. These are terrible injustices, some of the greatest instances of injustice I have personally encountered, but I know many people who are entirely unmoved. 

These men are not perfect people.  But most of them are not more imperfect than, say, I am. Not a single one of them committed adultery; they were all tried and convicted on the grounds of insensitivity. “The punishment is incommensurate to the crime.” I have said that many times. I have said that to friends and family members. Whatever flaws they had as husbands, these men did not deserve the exile they received. (The same, of course, can be said of many women who have been left under no-fault divorce. I just don’t know many women who fall into this category.)

These men are not whiny people, although some have been occasionally enraged. They are loving fathers, and they have all, with one exception, worked hard to stay involved in their childrens’ lives despite rejection by their childrens’ mothers. Those who are rich have found it easy to remarry if they wanted. Those who are poor, less so. (more…)

A READER recently asked me to compile a homeschooling reading list. It’s a good idea, but I haven’t completed it as there is so much to include from both my own experience homeschooling one of two sons (as well as supplementing my other son’s education), and from the recommendations of others. I still hope to post one soon, but in the meantime, here is a list of the books my 16-year-old son read this year. It does not include science and math textbooks, reference works and a few odds and ends. As is noted in the list, not all of the works were read in their entirety.

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Larry B.  writes:

Here’s the White House release on Father’s Day. I found it to be a poorly written thing, and so I have sent a copy with my parenthetical comments. Here’s the original.

Presidential Proclamation–Father’s Day

FATHER’S DAY, 2010

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

A PROCLAMATION

From the first moments of life, the bond forged between a father and a child is sacred [Not his child?]. Whether patching [Bandaging? Patching is for torn fabric.] scraped knees or helping with homework, dads bring joy, instill values, and introduce wonders into the lives of their children [It’s not Dad’s Day, it’s Father’s Day! Father’s instill values, dads throw footballs.]. Father’s Day is a special time to honor the men [Shouldn’t this be ‘man’?…I wonder where this is leading…] who raised us, and to thank them for their selfless dedication and love. (more…)

  IT'S THE petty things that are often the most difficult. Leo Tolstoy, the great observer of family life whose own domestic relations were often turbulent, wrote this in a letter to his son, Ilya: "In order to love people and be loved by them, one must learn humility, gentleness, and the art of bearing with disagreeable people and situations, the art of always behaving in a way that will not hurt anyone... and this is the hardest work of all, work that never ceases, from the moment you wake up in the morning till you go to sleep at night. But it is the most joyful work, because day by day you can rejoice in your growing success and receive the added reward, unnoticed at first but very gratifying, of being loved." (My Father: Reminiscences, Ilya Tolstoy)

  ON BEHALF OF FATHERS everywhere,  contact The Atlantic magazine and complain about its cover piece this month, "The End of Men," which does not exactly celebrate the takeover of the world by women but does suggest this takeover is inevitable given that women are just so darn smart.  See the excellent insights here by readers Brendan and Alan Roebuck.

KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI, the Presiding Bishop of the Episcopal Church (appearing second to left in this photo), has unerring fashion sense. Particularly fine examples of Schori-wear, which has elevated liturgical garb in America to new heights, can be seen at  Bad Vestments, a hilarious website dedicated to “subjecting particularly awful Christian liturgical vestments to the ridicule they so richly deserve.”  Here is Schori in what the dry-witted author of the site calls an oven mitt.

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FOR a probing and erudite look at ancient Gnosticism, see the recent three-part series by Thomas F. Bertonneau in The Brussels Journal. It can be read here , here, and here . Bertonneau looks beyond the work of Eric Voegelin for evidence that the religious fervor and irrrationality of modern liberals have their precedent in Antiquity. (more…)