thoughts in and out of season
James Kalb Social construction, take two: in accordance with a ruling by the European Court of Human Rights, Britain will now allow transsexuals to apply for substitute birth certificates showing their “new gender”. As the responsible parliamentary official explained,
… More ...“Our legislation will enable transsexual people confidently to take up those rights which have been denied
More prophets of a freer and more open tomorrow: Couple launches attack on ‘Christmas hell’. “Hell,” for these purposes, means Christmas as such, partly because it’s commercialized, but more fundamentally because it’s religious and thus exclusive. “Children are taught to worship this white, heterosexual man [Santa] who overeats. I mean, it’s wrong.”
Good point! … More ...
“Free to be you and me,” or maybe “The Way of the Cross Goes Bad”: Man held for German ‘cannibal killing’. A follower of Jeffrey Dahmer decided the easiest way to get a victim would be to place an ad in the gay press, so he did. Someone volunteered, and after setting his affairs … More ...
Some readers might be interested in an essay of mine on human rights, or what passes for them, just published at FrontPage.
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...
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 ...