Human Rights at FrontPage
Some readers might be interested in an essay of mine on human rights, or what passes for them, just published at FrontPage.
Year: 2002
More growing pains for inclusiveness
It’s not just libraries that have a problem with the “atypical behavior” of skid row types: in Northampton, Massachusetts it’s the whole town.
Barbarians sack libraries
A reader sent in the following article by the dean of the library school at Indiana University. It was published in the November 15 Library Journal and gives a sense of how things work out today in public-service organizations. I rather liked the idea of seminars on how to deal with “atypical patron behavior” in … More ...
Racism confronted!
Quite a remarkable story that’s worth passing on: How I Was Smeared, by Harry Stein. The man gave a talk in which he told a story about his son and an English teacher who thought Huck Finn “a ‘racist’ book … the word ‘nigger’ appearing with appalling frequency.” Because of the presence of the … More ...
Dottiness in high places
New Labour is New Age, at least in the person of their First Couple: Ev’rybody must get stones (neolithic stone circles, that is). Cherie Blair does come off from the story as a bit of a crackpot. Is this a weakness of women in politics? Saul went off to see the Witch of Endor, but … More ...
Comments on the Latin Mass
I love the Tridentine mass more the more I attend it. In part it’s because of its clarity. If someone who had no idea what was going on saw it the only way he could make sense of what was happening would be to assume that everyone there thought there was something enormously important going … More ...
I have a song to sing, O
It does bother me that American Catholics won’t sing at mass no matter what the hymn. A priest I know with Polish and German conections blames the Irish. On the Continent, he says, it’s not like that. I dunno—there are lots of Italian-American parishes in Brooklyn, and so far as I can tell they’re the … More ...
ALI proposes abolition of marriage
The American Law Institute has urged states to update their family law by abolishing the family. Basically, what they propose is to abolish marriage by treating all “living together” arrangements the same, and to redistribute wealth by treating the breakup of such arrangements as an occasion for equalizing the wealth of the parties. The first … More ...
Promoting democracy in Dar-ul-Islam
International politics as therapy: U.S. Pledges to Push Democracy in Muslim World. We’re going to work with the regimes in Muslim countries to help them work through their problems. Am I the only one who finds the language in this article bizarre?
Sex and human rights
In the course of writing an article on the “human rights” movement I ran into this report from the good folks at Human Rights Watch, a prominent “watchdog” organization: Ignorance Only: HIV/AIDS, Human Rights and Federally Funded Abstinence-Only Programs in the United States. The conclusion of the report: “Federally funded abstinence-only programs interfere … More ...