thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Stanley Kurtz has a generally sensible discussion at NRO of the practical function of sexual taboos, that by defining what is fitting within sexual relations they make it possible to rely on such relations to be something definite and so make family life possible as a social institution. He then says:
… More ...I would rather accept
Money and mainstream cultural radicalism: Nude department store. Selfridges, an English department store chain, capped its month-long Body Craze promotional campaign by paying an American artist a five-figure sum to use its flagship store as the setting for an installation involving 600 nude volunteers. The artist called the work Be Consumed, and explained … More ...
How we live now: Blair’s handlers say “we don’t do God”.
Who says feminism is pro-woman? As the Anti-feminist Page observes, the point is the abolition of “gender”—sexual distinctions—as a principle of social order, and their replacement by bureaucratic and market relations. The abolition of gender means, of course, that women are to be abolished just like men. The latest evidence on the point comes from … More ...
An oddity of modern life is that experts run everything, nothing they do works, and obvious repeated failure makes no difference. Education and liturgy are everyday examples. Students learn nothing and act badly, people abandon the mass and faith, but no matter how bad things get nothing can be done. After all, the responsible way … More ...
A report from the front: The Intimidation Tactics of Homosexual Activists.
Why do so many artists and intellectuals give support to really evil forms of political radicalism? Artists, writers defend Castro. How does one explain the shameless hypocrisy of someone like Garcia Marquez, who says he opposes the death penalty “in any place, for any reason, in any circumstances,” claims to have given secret aid … More ...
40 years after the Church threw open the windows, the better to reach out to Modern Man, a poll shows Catholicism is all but dead among young Romans and the Spaniards seem not far behind. The only encouraging point in the picture is the rather startling absence of happy talk in the first story.
Diane Ravitch has written a book complaining about the system of centralized purchasing and “anti-bias” vetting that now ensures that all school textbooks reflect a single bowdlerized multiculturalist point of view. (The Language Police: How Pressure Groups Restrict What Students Learn.) The reviews by neocon Arnold Beichman and moderate liberal Merle Rubin are … More ...
Libertarians find themselves in a moral quandary: should they vote for the pro-market party or the pro-sodomy party? Duncan Frissell points out the obvious, that if interference in sexual matters and private life is the test of libertarian rectitude, then Democrats lose on that score too—witness comprehensive sex ed, initiatives to abolish the patriarchy … More ...