The 150-year-old crusade for women’s rights in America has, in the different phases of its history, devoted its energies to diverse causes. In the decades before and after the War Between the States, the principal cause was the right of married women to control their own property. In the early 20th century, the cause was...
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Changing Mottos
Harvard University, in 1959, refused more than $350,000 in money offered for student loans by the National Defense Education Act in the wake of the Soviets’ Sputnik shock because of the requirement that students submit to an oath and an affidavit of loyalty and noncommunist affiliation. Harvard President Nathan B. Pusey stated that the demand...
Anarcho-Tyranny, U.S.A.
While violent criminals are given a pass to victimize and reoffend, the everyday American finds himself under the heel of an increasingly invasive and oppressive state.
The Old Left Wasn’t Very Leftist
While researching a book on antifascism, it became clear to me that the contemporary left has strange ideas about what earlier leftists believed. This is especially true in the ascription of a certain timelessness to intersectional politics, which today’s antifascists are all about. In How Fascism Works by Yale Philosophy Professor Jason Stanley, and in...
The Lavender Baboon
“O comrade lustrous with silver face in the night.” —Walt Whitman I first heard about “brain freeze” from an amiable fellow who was vending Italian ices. He pointed out that, if the ices were not consumed carefully, the freeze would penetrate the palate into the brain. In fact, I did experience brain freeze that way. But...
Wrestling With God
In the prison yard, we’re told, men who sexually abuse children are given special attention, and not the favorable kind. In Euless, Texas, at a public school that bears the unlikely name Trinity, sexual abuse is a celebrated part of the program. In late February, every major newspaper carried the story of Mack Beggs, a...
Uncle Sam’s Harem
The nomination of Sarah Palin as John McCain's running mate (a phrase suddenly suggestive) has reopened the question not only of women in politics but a woman's role in society. I am finishing a book, tentatively titled Thicker than Water, sketching out a political order based more on ...
Young Yuppies In Love
North Dakota—the last place most people ever think of-makes the national news from time to time, usually as part of a survey or study. Sometimes the results surprise those of us who live here, but mostly they don’t. For instance, studies publicized in the past year indicate that we’re the state lowest in stress, that...
Pleasant Words & Ugly Books
“Then shall I dare these real ills to hide In tinsel trappings of poetic pride?” —George Crabbe English must be kept up. It rarely is. But what a splendid collection of offenses against it is in D.J. Enright’s book of euphemism. Those who delight in the instructions for Japanese small appliances will here encounter the...
Where Have the Women All Gone?
“The Queen is most anxious to enlist everyone to join in checking this mad, wicked folly of women’s rights,” wrote Queen Victoria in 1870 to Sir Theodore Martin. “Woman would become the most hateful, heartless and disgusting of human beings, were she allowed to unsex herself.” Pausing only to add “fanatical” and “idiotic” to Her...
Myths of Imperialism
“The day of small nations has long passed away. The day of Empires has come.” —Joseph Chamberlain In a rational world, the term “imperialism” might have been a carefully defined and useful tool of political and social analysis, part of the study of how empires come into being. But the story of “imperialism” is typical...
It Could Have Happened to Anyone
Kobe Bryant, according to heavyweight sociologist Mike Tyson, is a victim of circumstance. “It could happen to anybody,” Tyson explained. The ex-champ referred not to filing for bankruptcy, going Muslim, or biting off a piece of an opponent’s ear, but to getting charged with rape—something apparently as random and undiscriminating as getting struck by lightning. ...
Hollywood and Bethlehem
Hollywood loves Christmas, or Winterfest, or whatever they’re calling it these days. This is because many Americans make it the most wonderful time of the year for the studios, offering them gifts of gold. For example, on December 25, 2015, we gave Buena Vista/Disney $49.3 million for the right to spend 2 hours and 16...
Scholarly Smut
Peter Gay: Education of the Senses, Volume I of the Bourgeois Experience: Victoria to Freud; Oxford University Press; New York When Brantôme in the 16th century wrote a rather spicy Life of Great Ladies, or Samuel Pepys, in the 17th century, wrote his diary, neither intended these works as a history of culture, which is...
King of Pop’s Trial
The Michael Jackson trial is underway, and the media is licking its chops each day in anticipation of all of the lurid details that will continue to surface over the next several months. Jackson, who is 46, has been charged with molesting a 13-year-old boy who was, at the time of the alleged incidents, a...
The Personal Is Not the Political
The Lives of Others Produced by Bayerischer Rundfunk and Creado Film Directed and written by Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck Distributed by Sony Pictures Classics Breach Produced and distributed by Universal Pictures Directed by Billy Ray Screenplay by Adam Mazer and William Rotko Anyone who wants to know what it is like to live in a...
The Rise and Collapse of Fox News
So many Americans, particularly on the right, have taken Fox News for granted over the past 20 years. It has become a fixture as an alternative to what is known as the mainstream media. In confirmation of the old saying, “You never know what you’ve got til it’s gone,” Fox’s abrupt change during the era of Donald...
Why Russia and China Are More Conservative Than the West
Despite their Communist past and present, Russia and China are demonstrably more conservative in many ways than present-day, self-hating America.
Don’t Give Us India
“Don’t give us India,” Samuel Johnson once told Boswell, when the talk was about how widely mankind differed in its view of chastity and polygamy. Montesquieu, he said, the great pioneer of anthropology, was in many wavs a fellow of genius. But whenever he wants to support a strange opinion, he quotes you the practice...
Toward a Secular America
America is finally joining the secularism of the other nations of the West. In this transition to secularism one key lesson emerges: faith is inextricably bound up with family.
A Good Report
Writing to Timothy, his younger brother in the faith, the Apostle Paul listed a number of attributes desirable in a bishop. His final admonition is this: “Moreover, he must have a good report of them which are without [outside]: lest he fall into reproach and the snare of the devil” (I Timothy 3:7). In the...
Credo for Conservatives IV: Abortion
Questions of life and death—abortion, contraception, in vitro fertilization, stem cell research, euthanasia, and suicide—form a fissure in the American political geography, dividing (typically) left from right, but also moral from immoral, and—all too often—sane from insane. In this discussion there will have to a few rules. Since the goal is to discover principles of...
More Anti-Catholic Hysteria
“Eight Hundred Dead Irish Children thrown into the sewer by Catholic nuns.” So charged Rod Dreher last week at The American Conservative. Dreher was referring to the findings of local Irish historian Catherine Corless, who found that 796 children died at a home for unwed mothers and their children operated in Tuam by the Bon...
Compromised Fidelities
Spotlight Produced by Anonymous Content and Participant Media Director by Tom McCarthy Screenplay by Tom McCarthy and Josh Singer Distributed by Open Road Films Trumbo Produced by Groundswell Productions Directed by Jay Roach Screenplay by John McNamara Distributed by Bleeker Street Media In 2000, the Boston Globe hires Marty Baron (Liev Schreiber) to be editor-in-chief. ...
How a Court Can Derail a Culture
Daniel Patrick Moynihan and others have written volumes about how the Great Society destroyed the American family. But the pivotal role played by Republican appointees on the U.S. Supreme Court, in nullifying laws intended to encourage the formation of two-parent families, has gone largely unremarked. The lightning rod for change was a Connecticut statute which...
On Consistency
In the April 30 issue of the Remnant, Christopher Ferrara cites a priest in New York who claims that the percentage of seminarians within his diocese who are homosexual may be conservatively estimated at 60 percent. If this is what Bishop Thomas Doran of Rockford (quoted in “De Profundis,” The Rockford Files, June) refers to...
Santorum, the Supreme Court, and Sodomy
Sen. Rick Santorum is the latest Republican political leader to walk down Trent Lott’s trail of tears. Why do Republicans continue to make these gaffes? Most politicians, after all, have spent their entire lives since elementary school telling people what they want to hear, and they ought to realize that the power they hold in...
Society is to Blame
Patti Davis, Reagan’s little girl whose nude body graced the cover of the July Playboy, has finally settled down, gotten her act together—and written a novel about bondage. Yes, bondage. And it’s titled, well, Bondage. Discussing her book on the NBC Today show with interviewer Katie Couric, who noted that it’s about people “totally out...
Using Howard Stern to Build Hillary’s Dream
As I sit down to write this, on the Sunday afternoon before the second presidential debate, the media feeding frenzy over remarks made by Donald Trump 11 years ago continues unabated. The content of those remarks reminded me of one of the more interesting pieces I’ve read about the improbable rise of Trump, an article...
Opera Without Meaning
Last year, in a January 3 review published by the Daily Telegraph, Hannah Furness made some remarkable assertions concerning the presentation of traditional operas on the modern stage. Furness quoted the tenor Michael Fabiano, then playing the Duke in a Royal Opera House production of Rigoletto, to the effect that “the treatment of women in...
The Eclipse of the Normal
Nearly a century ago, G.K. Chesterton wrote of “the modern and morbid habit of always sacrificing the normal to the abnormal.” Today the very word normal is almost taboo. Perish the thought that there is anything abnormal—let alone sinful, vicious, perverted, abominable, sick, unhealthy, or just plain wrong—about sodomy. (Unsanitary? Let’s not go there.) As...
Acting Up
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....
The Body as Billboard
The blind poet Milton, praying for divine inspiration, tells us what he misses most since losing his sight: Thus with the year Seasons return, but not to me returns Day, or the sweet approach of even or morn, Or sight of vernal bloom, or summer’s rose, Or flocks, or herds, or human face divine. The...
The Realms of Gold
In Vienna, during the decade before the Great War, an astounding concentration of creative genius coincided with the final stages of political collapse. The work of Hofmannsthal, Musil, Broch, Schnitzler, Kraus, Werfel, and Zweig in literature; Mahler, Wolf, and Schönberg in music; Krafft-Ebing and Freud in psychology; Wittgenstein and Buber in philosophy; Schiele and Kokoschka...
The Novel and the Imperial Self
Preoccupation with the state of the novel was until about 10 years ago one of the major bores of American criticism. From the early 1950’s well into the 60’s, it was scarcely possible to get through a month without reading as a rule in the Sunday book review supplements or the editorial page of Life—that...
Sodomy and the Lash
Sodomy and the lash, according to Winston Churchill, were the outstanding features of the British Royal Navy. The United States Navy will be at least half-British, if the American courts have their way. The homosexuals’ battle plan to gain acceptance, which includes taking dates to the Officer’s Club, now involves 100 or so discrimination claims...
The Hind and the Panther
No one expects to discover in a drug dealer the character of Johnny Appleseed or Santa Claus, overflowing with compassion and the milk of human kindness, scattering sweetness and light wherever he goes. On the other hand, I suspect even the most hardened undercover cop in his local antidrug unit would be shocked to witness...
The Stuffed Grape Leaf Standard
Danger lurks everywhere these days, even in five gallon plastic tubs of feta cheese. The containers of feta delivered to our restaurant come embellished with sketches of a baby falling headfirst into a bucket of cheese, which is preserved in liquid, and therefore comes complete with grim warnings of possible drownings in English and Español....
Of Death and Birth
Professor Marston and the Wonder Women Produced by Boxspring Entertainment Written and directed by Angela Robinson Distributed by Annapurna Pictures Blade Runner 2049 Produced by Columbia Pictures and Warner Brothers Directed by Denis Villeneuve Screenplay by Hampton Fancher and Michael Green Distributed by Warner Brothers Watching director Angela Robinson’s Professor Marston and the Wonder Women,...
The Old Ways Were Better
Harking back fondly to the standards of half a century go—aah, weren’t those the blithe, happy days?—won’t get you much of a hearing from today’s self-appointed arbiters of college and university moral questions. I don’t care. Let’s do it anyway. The standards of half a century ago concerning male-female relationships were infinitely better—galactically better—than the...
Revolt of the ‘Karens’
Moms for Liberty, a proud group of American parents, is retaking control of their children’s educations from the government leftists now destroying it.
“Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Man”
My father believed in progress almost to the end of his life, when changing his mind would scarcely have made any difference. Like most liberals, he regarded traditional institutions as so many barriers to man’s continued improvement, and yet, like most good men who are liberals, his head was contradicted by his heart: He despised...
Endorsing Torture
Alberto Gonzales’s nomination as attorney general by President George W. Bush makes official what has long been hidden and/or denied: The United States, contrary to her public professions and signed treaties, endorses and uses torture. At one point during Gonzales’s January 6 hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Massachusetts Sen. Edward Kennedy asked about recently...
Who Is One to Judge?
I found myself aghast that, after more or less favorably reviewing Calvary (“Vocation,” In the Dark, November), which sounds like a disgusting and anti-Catholic movie, George McCartney takes the opportunity to declare that “mandatory celibacy in the Roman Catholic clergy is a benighted institution that’s done much harm to the Church.” He credits the recent...
“Family Values”: Illegal Aliens and Their Sex Crimes
Whatever President Bush says about the “family values” of the growing horde of illegal Mexican immigrants, chilling newspaper accounts and cold data tell a different tale. On April 29, 2005, an illegal alien from Guatemala, Ronald Douglas Herrera Castellanos, was power washing a deck at the Nagle home in New City, New York. In her...
Russian Bishop Calls Biden’s Transgender Statement Blasphemous
Propagating gender reassignment among children should be a criminal offence, Bishop Hilarion Alfeyev, the chairman of External Church Relations Department of the Moscow Patriarchate, recently declared on “Russia 24” TV network. His comment was made in response to Joe Biden’s recent statement of support for the supposed right of children to choose their gender. “The...
Sentiment and Sentimentality
Nurse Betty Produced by Gramercy Pictures and Propaganda Films Directed by Neil LaBute Screenplay by John C. Richards and James Flamberg Distributed by USA Films Almost Famous Produced by DreamWorks and Vinyl Films Directed and written by Cameron Crowe Distributed by Dreamworks There’s a crucial difference between sentiment and sentimentality. The first is a direct,...
“Walk Like a Man, Talk Like a Man”
My father believed in progress almost to the end of his life, when changing his mind would scarcely have made any difference. Like most liberals, he regarded traditional institutions as so many barriers to man’s continued improvement, and yet, like most good men who are liberals, his head was contradicted by his heart: He despised...
Honor to Whom Honor
“Render to all what is due them,” writes Saint Paul, “Tax to whom tax is due, custom to whom custom; fear to whom fear; honor to whom honor” (Romans 13:7, NASB). When a zealous Christian offered to help Mark Twain understand the difficult things in the Bible, Twain said something like this: “It is not...
The Post-Christian Moral Order
Wokeness isn’t Marxism. It’s the new moral order for the managerial State.