Whatever libertarians and Marxists say, human experience is neither the pursuit of self-interest nor is it class struggle. Man is made for the worship of God and for human friendship. Anyone who knew Aaron Wolf knows this truth. Aaron and I shared laughter, conversation, adventure, not a little stress, and an abundance of joy. Writing...
Lackland Air Force Base is embroiled in a scandal. At the Air Force’s one boot camp, male instructors have been preying on their female recruits. The events are only a scandal to Americans who have not been observing the licentiousness of the American Armed Forces for decades. As Brian Mitchell observed in Chronicles many years ago, the...
In June, Brigadier General Loretta Reynolds, USMC, became the first woman to take command of the Corps’s legendary recruit depot, Parris Island. “Lori” is a feminist’s dream. In March 2010, she became the first Woman Marine to hold command in a combat zone, when she served in Afghanistan as commander of Headquarters Group, First Marine...
Today we give special thanks to Our Lady whose intercession led the armada of the Holy League to victory over the Ottoman fleet on October 7, 1571, at the mouth of what the Venetians called the Bay of Lepanto but what we today call the Gulf of Patras. My good friends at Catholic Answers...
My good friends at Catholic Answers in San Diego invited me to be a guest on their excellent radio program last Monday to discuss the tensions between being a “good” American and “good” Catholic. You can listen to the show at their website, although in one short hour, ...
Ruth Miller Besemer of Boulder, Colorado, and I exchanged letters for several months before we met. She sent the first in 1999, when The Rockford Institute held the annual meeting of the John Randolph Club in Georgetown. The Saturday-evening debate topic was: “Resolved: Conservatives in D.C. haven’t done a damn thing.” To a check for...
Wayne Webster’s Rockford abortuary takes the lives of about 35 babies per week. In that same time frame, however, there are two or three “turnarounds”—mothers who decide at the last moment not to execute their children. The most likely cause is the doughty band of Christians who gather to pray outside the slaughterhouse on the...
The murder of children in the womb in Aurora, Illinois, has been stayed, for the moment. Planned Parenthood, the company that encourages and equips teenagers to fornicate so that it will have a steady stream of babies to kill (over a quarter of a million per year), began building a 22,000-square-foot, $7.5 million abattoir last...
On January 22, 1899, Pope Leo XIII addressed an encyclical (Testem benevolentiae nostrae) to James Cardinal Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore, intended “to suppress certain contentions” that had arisen in America “to the detriment of the peace of many souls.” In essence, Leo feared that some American Catholic intellectuals, including a number of bishops, were finding...
On January 22, 1899, Pope Leo XIII addressed an encyclical (Testem benevolentiae nostrae) to James Cardinal Gibbons, archbishop of Baltimore, intended “to suppress certain contentions” that had arisen in America “to the detriment of the peace of many souls.” In essence, Leo feared that some American Catholic intellectuals, including a number of bishops, were finding...
Vice President Dick Cheney’s lesbian daughter, Mary, found a way to impregnate herself so that she and her lover, Heather Poe, whom Mary met while playing ice hockey 15 years ago, can rear a child. Grandma is thrilled. “Dick and I both are very much looking forward to this new baby,” said Lynne Cheney. Mary...
Eight years ago, I sat in the home of Nashville artist Jack Kershaw, drinking whiskey from a Jefferson cup and listening to the story of the burning of Columbia, South Carolina (February 17-18, 1865). Mr. Kershaw pointed to the various scenes in his terrifying painting of the fire: In the center, a drunken Yankee plays...
On February 22, the South Dakota Senate, by a vote of 23-12, approved legislation banning nearly all abortions in the state. On February 24, the vote in the South Dakota House of Representatives was 50-18 (H.B. 1215). Twelve days later, Gov. Mike Rounds signed the measure into law. President Bush criticized the law as too...
Remember “Elisa’s Law”? In 1996, New York Gov. George Pataki signed this legislation, which removed, in the words of then Speaker of the New York Assembly Sheldon Silver, “archaic confidentiality laws” pertaining to juvenile-court and medical records. The law also extended the period during which records of unfounded reports of child abuse were to be...
After five visits, I still get turned around in Rome, but, in Edinburgh, I consulted a map only on the first day. A quick look around from the summit of any one of the city’s hills is worth more than an hour examining a map. By the end of our Convivium, I’ve climbed all the...
Two women marines and a female Navy petty officer were killed, and eleven were wounded, when their convoy was ambushed on the night of June 23 in Fallujah. The Pentagon took several days to confirm the casualties, and media coverage was thin. If Americans took note of the tragedy at all, it was not to...
One side is celebrating, the other rending their garments, but both sides are wondering if the outcome of the November presidential election might signal a springtime for traditional moral values in America. Rappers P. Diddy and Eminem doubtless turned more voters away from Kerry than they attracted, and, in all states where voters were asked...
The current Presidential race has witnessed an unprecedented drive, especially by the GOP, to court the Catholic vote. Democrats, who for decades snookered Catholics into believing that theirs was the party of the laborer and the immigrant, are finding their social-justice platform of little use among Catholics who find Democrat enthusiasm for infanticide and “gay...
Christopher Danze is a hero of Texas proportions. The Austin concrete supplier has shut down construction of a Planned Parenthood abortuary by rallying his colleagues and competitors in the construction industry to boycott the project. Without concrete—to say nothing of plumbers, electricians, and carpenters (even the porta-john vendor has pulled out)—the project’s general contractor, Browning...
The future of Christendom, according to the Population Reference Bureau’s 2001 annual report, is likely to be pretty bleak. The report’s chief conclusion is that population growth in the West has ground to a halt, while the Third World is reproducing like gangbusters. Tire numbers: “Of the 83 million people added to the global population...
DESFIREX, the Desert Firing Exercise, is a semi-annual celebration of cordite, steel, white phosphorous, and sand held at the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center in Twenty Nine Palms, California. During the weeks before, the howitzers and trucks are prepared for the field; They are rushed through a maintenance pipeline that at all other times...
Embarkation is the business of puzzling large weapons and vehicles, and the Marines that go with them, onto a ship that is run by a man who insists he does not have enough space for all that you need to take in order to do your job once he takes you where you need to...
“Eight is Enough” was a popular television show, but can eight be too many when they come at one time, as they did recently to a Nigerian couple in Texas? Professional pro-lifers have praised the courage of mothers who, faced with real threats to their health or the health of their unborn children, have rebuffed...
Pope Paul VI, whose encyclical Humanae Vitae turned 30 this year, predicted that the proliferation of artificial contraception would bring “conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality.” It’s hard to argue with him: The Pill may not be the only reason that Americans tolerate a 22-year-old tramp providing fellatio (but not sex!) to our...
“The poor you always have with you” is a law that the best efforts of all the king’s social workers have failed to revoke. The most ambitious welfare scheme to date may be the Comprehensive Child Development Program (CCDP), a research project involving some 4,000 households across the country. After nearly a decade and 300...
The Congressional Medal of Honor (CMH) is our nation’s highest award for valor under fire. The criteria are stiff: a deed of such exceptional bravery that failure to do it would draw no criticism; two eye-witnesses; and, above all, the risk of life. In our nation’s history, we have awarded only 3,427 such medals. Of...
Archbishop William Levada, the Roman Catholic ordinary of San Francisco, and the city’s leftist mayor, Willie Brown, squared off last February, and though the debate may continue over who drew more blood, it’s clear who was left staggering at the bell. Archbishop Levada sought an exemption for his diocese from San Francisco’s new ordinance (which...
Okinawa’s Governor Masahide Ota has learned what it means to be governor of a Japanese prefecture; precious little. When Mr. Ota stood up for Okinawans who no longer wish to lease their land to the American military, he was asserting an ancient Okinawan belief in private property: “It’s yours, do with it as you see...
Hillary Clinton probably deserves all of the hostile criticism she has received for her silly new book, It Takes a Village. Her ghostwriter, Barbara Feinman, has the prose style of Barney the dinosaur, and, as reviewer after reviewer has noted, much of the book consists of dumbed-down versions of all the nanny-state policy proposals—socialized medicine,...
Homeschooling is one of the many fronts in the state’s war against the citizen. Despite the efforts of organizations such as the Home School Legal Defense Association, the Rutherford Institute, and Eagle Forum, as well as longstanding laws that protect family autonomy, homeschooling parents are still viewed as neglectful if not downright abusive. With methods...
Americans who hoped that the United Nations’ Convention on the Rights of the Child would be stuffed in a drawer with its predecessor, the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, got a jolt in February when Mrs. Clinton announced (at the funeral of UNICEF director James Grant) that the Convention...
Devil Dogs forced to watch their Corps become a corporation—Total Quality Management, affirmative action, sexual harassment awareness training—will draw inspiration from E.B. Sledge’s book, originally published in 1981 and soon to be reissued. More than any tactical manual, With the Old Breed reveals what success under fire is all about: fortitude, loyalty, discipline, determination—no matter...
Licensing Parents, a new book by University of Wisconsin psychiatrist Jack C. Westman, bewails a recent surge in “incompetent parenting,” a phenomenon which he defines as depriving a child not only of sufficient food, clothing, and shelter, but also of “affectionate holding, touching and talking,” all the while displaying an “insensitivity to a child’s initiatives...
Bill Bennett seems determined to illustrate the old saw that generals are always fighting the last war. As the infantry struggles to arrest the invasion of special privileges for sodomites, now comes the order from the rear to give up the current battle and engage a “new” enemy; divorce. Speaking to the Christian Coalition in...
Faithful Roman Catholics are routinely criticized (this book is no exception) for their unwillingness to condone the use of contraception. Although it is commonly believed that opposition to contraception is unique to Catholic doctrine, it was only recently that Protestants gave up the same fight. As recently as the 40’s and 50’s, the Anglican C.S....
Marines are a direct lot, not much given to subtlety. Their simple nature enables them to spot a ruse from the 500-meter line, and, on the issue of sodomites, they have quickly identified as nonsense Mr. Clinton’s doublespeak about “status” and “conduct.” Marines, well known for advertising their “status” by their “conduct,” know that the...
The Archdiocese of Milwaukee is keeping pace with the rest of the Church in America as it embraces the usual causes and crusades under the banners of “community” and “equality” while all but shedding Catholic inconveniences like Mortal Sin and Sanctifying Grace. Apparently salvation now depends more on the sincerity of your handshake of peace...