Tag Archives: Topic: Feminism

WSJ Video: Author Helen Smith on why men are boycotting marriage, fatherhood and the American Dream.

Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO:Abortion is an act of violence of the most intimate sort. The more we accept it as “sacred ground,” as Pelosi put it, as some kind of sign of liberation, the more we fail to see the culture it ingrains, where men are disconnected — with no shame — from their children, where women submit to being used rather than cherished, and where babies — whom we know to be babies, not mere tissue or cells — are discarded. There’s an exploitation happening here, ending some lives and ruining others.

Gary Bauer and Daniel Allott at USA Today: Legally, a woman’s reproductive decisions are hers alone. But outside the courtroom, men — boyfriends and husbands — hold a lot of influence over those decisions. And that influence often manifests itself violently. Consider cases from this year . . . Beyond these recent cases, there is evidence that many men resort to intimidation and violence to coerce women they’ve impregnated into aborting . . .

AP: Women may be able to start training as Army Rangers by mid-2015 and as Navy SEALs a year later under plans set to be announced by the Pentagon.

Kathleen Parker at USA Today: My argument that men should be saved is that, despite certain imperfections, men are fundamentally good and are sort of pleasant to have around. Most women still like to fall in love with them; all children want a father no matter how often we try to persuade ourselves otherwise. If we continue to impose low expectations and negative messaging on men and boys, future women won’t have much to choose from. We are nearly there.

Telegraph: Openly gay clerics will be questioned about the intimate detail of their sex life on behalf of the Archbishops of Canterbury or York before they can be considered to be a bishop, the Church of England has disclosed.

The Hill: The House on Friday passed a new defense bill that that seeks to reverse an increase in sexual assaults in the military. The sweeping $638 billion bill strips commanders’ ability to overturn guilty verdicts in sexual assault cases, and establishes a minimum sentence of dismissal for sexual assault offenders. It would also expand legal counsel to victims of sexual abuse, and remove service members who have inappropriate relationships with the people they train.

John McCormack at Weekly Standard (includes video): Asked what the moral difference is between what Dr. Kermit Gosnell did to babies born alive and aborting those same infants moments before birth, Pelosi refused to answer. “As a practicing and respectful Catholic, this is sacred ground to me when we talk about this,” Pelosi said. “I don’t think it should have anything to do with politics.”

Religion Clause Blog: In Israel, government-appointed judges of rabbinical courts have jurisdiction over issues of Jewish marriage and divorce in the country. The rabbinical court judges are chosen by the Selection Committee for Rabbinical Judges.

Times Union: Kelly Cummings, the top spokesperson for Senate Republican Leader Dean Skelos, issued a statement accusing Gov. Andrew Cuomo of playing to “extremists who want to expand late-term abortion” with the last provision in his just-introduced Women’s Equality Act.

Philip Cohen at the Atlantic: Public policy should catch up with the reality that fewer and fewer children are being raised in homes with two married parents

Washington Times: Feminists in the past told us that abortion would empower women, that we need it to achieve our educational, relationship and career goals. Live Action’s videos, however, show what abortion really is — what it does both to women and to their children. Now we can call out this idea for the lie that it is. Our bosses tell us that if we want the promotion, we can’t have another baby. We need that abortion. Is that empowerment?

LifeSiteNews: The recently appointed archbishop of Vilnius, Gintaras Grušas told the country’s parliament to beware of laws imposed by the European Union that act as a “Trojan Horse” to undermine the hard-won Lithuanian independence and the family by pushing “gender” ideologies.

World Net Daily: SAVE has published a list of 13 organizations that have issued letters calling on the department to rescind its sexual assault directive, including the American Association of University Professors, the American Council for Trustees and Alumni, the National Association for Scholars, Tully Center for Free Speech at Syracuse University, eight civil rights scholars, Accuracy in Media, the Heartland Institute, the Alliance Defending Freedom and Feminists for Free Expression.

LifeNews: Anna Maria Chávez, CEO of Girl Scouts USA (GSUSA), offers this pithy saying as her favorite quote. In order to figure out who the Girl Scouts are, I suppose we must follow Ms. Chávez’ logic and look at the organizations that GSUSA associates with.

C-FAM: Abortion was rarely mentioned by dignitaries on stage during the international webcast portions of Women Deliver, a global conference on family planning. The non-webcast breakout sessions, however, featured late-term abortionists, radical activists describing how to skirt abortion laws, and World Health Organization experts promoting their how-to-do-abortions manual.

Reuters: The Church of England published a plan on Friday to approve the ordination of women bishops by 2015, a widely supported reform it just missed passing last November after two decades of divisive debate.

LifeSiteNews: While Prime Minister Stephen Harper and mainstream media have said that Canadians do not want to reopen the abortion debate, MPs have presented the government with more than 70 petitions from constituents since January that say otherwise.

AP: Israeli police say vandals have spray-panted slogans on the home of one of the leaders of a liberal Jewish women’s group that has angered ultra-Orthodox communities over its demands for equality of worship.

Religion Clause Blog: Today’s Deutsche Welle reports that in Afghanistan’s Parliament, lawmakers have withdrawn a bill that would have instituted a number of protections for women.  The action came after  religious parties complained that the proposed law was un-Islamic.

The Blaze: Mothers and fathers, beware: Your days of honor may soon be expiring. An elementary school in Nova Scotia has made a curious decision to cancel Mother’s Day and Father’s Day celebrations and to, instead, replace them with a more benign “Family Day” commemoration.

Catherine Foster at Alliance Defending Freedom: Are the so-called “clinics” that bad, that an inspection would result in their closure? If so, politicians and bureaucrats are doing women no favors by deliberately choosing not to conduct regular inspections of abortion facilities. Pro-abortion partisan politics leaving women to be herded in for abortions in a “bad gas station restroom”…sounds pretty ugly, doesn’t it?

Chicago Weekly: Ginsburg’s decades-long struggle for women’s rights is likely to prove one of the most persistent endeavors in modern American legal history, but she expressed sadness that the prevailing attitude toward such efforts to advance gender equality remains lukewarm at best: “In some places, the word ‘feminism’ is the ‘F’ word.”

Chicago Tribune: Forty years after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark Roe v. Wade case legalized abortion, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said the case is not her “ideal picture” for resolving the controversial issue of abortion.

Religion Clause Blog: In Israel today, Women of the Wall held their first prayer session since a court decision (see prior posting) vindicating their right to pray at Jerusalem’s Western Wall wearing prayer shawls (traditionally worn only by men).

Think Progress: Since abortion procedures can range from around $300 dollars to more than $3,000 dollars, raising enough money to pay out-of-pocket represents a significant financial strain for the women who need this type of reproductive service. By the numbers, here’s a snapshot of what’s it like to pay for an abortion — the reality that’s forcing most U.S. women to struggle to scrape together the money they need to pay for their reproductive health care . . .

James Taranto at Wall Street Journal: But Myers is making a far broader claim. He is asserting that a woman’s seeking an abortion is sufficient to establish that she is not culpable for any consequences that proximately result from her “choice,” including the deliberate killing, after birth, of the baby she sought to abort. Myers is, in other words, positing that women who seek abortions are categorically free of culpability.
That is the sort of moral immunity we normally extend to persons who lack the capacity to understand . . .

USA Today: A report showing that sexual assaults in the military jumped by more than one-third since 2010 led Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel on Tuesday to order the armed services to take immediate steps to curb the problem among troops.

AP: The sexual battery arrest of the Air Force officer who led the service’s Sexual Assault Prevention and Response unit underscores how far the Defense Department has to go in addressing the plague of sexual crimes in the military, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said Tuesday.

Ashley McGuire at Public Discourse: How appropriate that Justice Alito brought up cellphones in the recent Supreme Court hearings on the marriage cases. Because these days it seems like it is easier to get out of a marriage than it is to get out of a cellphone contract.

Dennis Prager at NRO: In our dialogue, we agreed that her book’s subtitle was accurate, but we disagreed as to the cause. Freitas, who holds a Ph.D. in religious studies, blamed it on peer pressure, the sex-drenched social media of young people, and the ubiquity of pornography. I blamed three other culprits: feminism, careerism, and secularism.

LifeSiteNews: Catholics in Pennsylvania and around the country are outraged after learning that a college student dressed as the pope from the waist up – and nude from the waist down – handed out condoms in an event organized by Carnegie Mellon University’s art department.

Denise Burke of AUL at Washington Times: Sadly, Big Abortion continues to equate women’s health and safety with mere access to abortion. Access to sanitary and appropriately regulated and inspected abortion facilities is simply not part of their political and self-interested calculus.

AP: More women are initiating divorces in Uganda, a conservative East African country where women are becoming empowered to leave a bad marriage in a way their mothers could not, rights activists and legal experts say.

LifeSiteNews: In an astonshing display of gentleness in the face of a vile attack, the head of the Catholic Church in Belgium, Archbishop Andre-Joseph Leonard, remained calmly seated with eyes closed in prayer Tuesday as four topless women attacked him with shouts and curses and doused him with water.

HurriyetDailyNews: “If Atatürk did not establish this republic, would you occupy your position? What country’s citizen would you be? What number would you be among the wives of a sheik?” Genç told Şahin from his ranks April 25, Anatolia news agency reported.

National Review Bench Memos: Washington governor Jay Inslee yesterday signed into law the last piece of a multi-year effort to rewrite state statutes in something that resembles Orwell’s Newspeak. Reuters notes that 3,500 state code sections have now been “tediously scrubbed” of gender bias . . .

James Taranto at Wall Street Journal: It’s one of the basic contradictions of contemporary feminism: On the one hand, it’s supposed to be about choice for women; on the other hand, some choices are more equal than others–and certain ones, such as marrying young, provoke extreme hostility, as the Patton kerfuffle demonstrated.

Anthony Esolen at Public Discourse: The Boy Scouts are en route to holding that there is nothing to being a boy, and nothing to the boy’s becoming a man; they might as well be the Unisex Scouts, as they are in Canada, where the scouting movement has collapsed.

AP: The legislation also permit an heir to the throne to marry a Catholic, though Catholics would still be barred from succeeding to the throne.

Business Insider: These trends create an even higher demand for education among women. Education is insurance against divorce risk, but it also creates more unstable marriages, which in turn increases demand for more education. And since the marriage market is filled with more educated women, it’s more difficult for uneducated women to find a mate — making the marriage market more competitive.

Yale Daily News: Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor LAW ’79 told a ballroom packed with around 425 women about her grueling work ethic, the importance of not being limited by personal circumstance and even her occasional feelings of inadequacy despite her successes.

Robert J. Samuelson at Washington Post: It’s hard to overstate the breakdown of marriage and the rise of single-parent families. Consider out-of-wedlock births. In 1980, about 18 percent of births were to unmarried women; by 2009, the proportion was 41 percent. Among whites, the increase was from 11 percent to 36 percent; among African Americans, from 56 percent to 72 percent; among Hispanics, from 37 percent (1990) to 53 percent. Or look at the share of children living with two parents. Since 1970, that’s dropped from 82 percent to 63 percent. Among whites, the decline is from 87 percent to 73 percent; among African Americans, from 57 percent to 31 percent; among Hispanics, from 78 percent to 57 percent. Just what caused these changes remains controversial.

Speak Up Movement: This week, a pro-abortion professor went berserk on campus, railing at police officers and pro-life students until she was dragged away in handcuffs.  She claimed that their pro-life display was “profane” and that the images were “swearing” to her.

Robert P. George at WSJ: Sir Robert Edwards, the Nobel Prize-winning British “test tube baby” pioneer who died last week at age 87, devoted his career to developing in vitro fertilization as a technique to enable women afflicted with certain forms of infertility to conceive and bear children. As a result, there are millions of people in the world today—some now in their 30s—who otherwise would not have been born. According to Edwards’s admirers, their lives are his legacy.
Yet Edwards was, and remains, a controversial figure. His critics fall into three categories and are a most unlikely combination.

The Christian Institute: Fiona Bruce, MP for Congleton, said in the debate on Tuesday that if they are to condemn the gender abortion practices of China and India, they must “be ready to condemn and challenge any suggestion that gendercide is taking place in the UK”.

Philip Cohen at The Atlantic: For a few decades, women’s rising share of the workforce probably led to fewer women getting married. But that’s not the case anymore.

AP: Karnamaya Mongar survived 20 years in a refugee camp after fleeing war-torn Bhutan, but died months after arriving in the U.S. in 2009 and seeking an abortion

Asbury Park Press: But there’s also a more strictly economic case. In a paper for Third Way, a liberal think tank, economists David Autor and Melanie Wasserman of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology attribute the decline of marriage — which, like Murray, they say is concentrated among the poorly educated — to the eroding economic heft of men compared with women

Religion Clause Blog: In Hollander v. Members of the Board of Regents of the University of the State of New York, (2d Cir., April 10, 2013), the 2nd Circuit dismissed on collateral estoppel grounds an action claiming that the state and federal governments have violated the Establishment Clause by providing funding to Columbia University which maintains an Institute for Research on Women’s and Gender Studies and a Women’s Studies program.

Breitbart: I consider the phenomenon called feminism very dangerous,” said the powerful Patriarch Kirill in a speech delivered Tuesday and posted Wednesday on the official Russian Orthodox Church website. “Feminist organisations proclaim a pseudo-freedom of women, which should be manifested outside marriage and family.”

Jessica Valenti at The Nation: Conservatives need to understand that what they’re pushing for is an impossible sell: Women’s subservience to the domestic as a cultural grounding force, while men get to work and explore and create? No thank you. We don’t want the good of society on our relationships’ shoulders.

James Taranto at WSJ: But as the Associated Press reports, abortion proponents are especially exercised about a provision “declaring that life begins ‘at fertilization’ ”

S.E. Cupp at NY Daily Post: When Susan Patton wrote a letter to The Daily Princetonian last week, she probably had no concept of the controversy it would create. What she later described as merely “some good advice from a Jewish mother” has earned her the scorn of feminists everywhere. Why? Because in 2013, you’re not supposed to talk to modern young women at an elite liberal university about the value of getting married.

Marine Corps Times: Two more women have washed out of Marine Corps Infantry Officer Course, putting a quick end to the latest iteration of an experiment into which roles female Marines might be able to fill in combat.

Catholic Culture: Metropolitan Hilarion, the Russian Orthodox Church’s chief ecumenical officer, has urged the new Archbishop of Canterbury not to support female bishops or same-sex marriage.

U.S. Courts: In 1981, there were 43 full-time women appellate and district court judges, 7.3 percent of the total. According to the Federal Judicial Center, whose web site provides biographical and demographic data on all federal judges, women now make up 235 of the 772 full-time judges in the U.S. District Court and Courts of Appeal—30.4% of the total.

C-FAM: The tiny island nation of Malta has been singled out as a human right abuser by legal experts in Europe in preparation for its next review by the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva. Malta’s unforgivable offense is protecting human life in the womb.

LifeSiteNews: A parliamentary committee will announce its decision on the fate of Tory MP Mark Warawa’s gendercide motion on Thursday. The non-binding motion states: “That the House condemns discrimination against females occurring through sex-selective pregnancy termination.”

Anthony Esolen at Public Discourse: Lust perverts language itself, calling sex “safe” or “protected,” and cohabitation “honest,” and relationships “mutual,” which are nothing but forays into a jungle, where the strongest and most cunning survive.

Erika Bachiochi at Public Discourse: Both sociological evidence and the teachings of Christianity show that religion is a powerful ally for promoting the equality and dignity of women. Adapted from remarks delivered at the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women.

James Taranto at Wall Street Journal: Today’s Times reports on a new Third Way study that is highly important–no sarcasm here–and that picks up on some of this column’s frequent themes. Here’s the abstract . . .

CNSNews: Calling it “The Great Crossover,” a report by academics and social activists shows that for the first time in history the median age of American women having babies is lower than the median age of marriage – 25.7 and 26.5, respectively.

Thomas White at Baptist Press: But we haven’t told our kids about all the consequences — emotion and physical. Abortions leave one dead and one wounded. Extramarital sex (and pornography) leaves emotional scars that affect intimacy in marriage for years to come

International Business Times: Researchers from the University of California-San Diego School of Medicine have just released a study in which they declared that the cultural preference for sons over daughters is even more of an intractable problem in Nepal than …

C-FAM: The Agence France-Press reported on March 5, the second day of the Commission, “Much has been made at [CSW] of a World Bank report which estimates that more women aged 15-44 are killed violently than die of malaria, HIV, cancer, accidents and war combined.” The statistic is used by multiple UN agencies and appears on the official UN resources for speakers. On March 13, it was cited in a New York Times editorial criticizing the Holy See and its allies for holding firm against feminist efforts to turn the CSW meeting into a call for global abortion access.

NY Post: The charter ‘opposed’ discrimination rooted in gender, race, color, creed, political belief or other grounds, with the ‘other grounds’ expected to include gay rights and equal rights for boys and girls to ascend to the throne.

LifeNews: On International Women’s Day, the United Nations is coming under criticism for a report claiming that nations that fail to allow legalized abortion are allowing the “torture and ill treatment” of women.

AP: Government statistics in South Sudan show half the girls there aged 15 to 19 are married, with some brides as young as 12 years old.

Christian Science Monitor: However, International Women’s Day originally commemorated the working rights protests led by female garment workers. Many seem to forget the holiday’s ties to the working rights movement in the United States and the Socialist Party.

Turtle Bay and Beyond: Placing women in combat is touted today by the Obama administration as its primary accomplishment on International Women Day. Inserting women into the most violent situations in the world turns a War on Women into a War With Women. US [Ambassador to the United Nations] . . .  of State Susan Rice released this statement today.

AP: Sensing a political advantage, Senate Democrats offered an expanded law that specifically protects gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender Americans and gives tribal authorities the power to prosecute non-Indians for abuse committed on tribal lands.

Leslie Grimard at Public Discourse: No one wants to return to the 1950s as Betty Friedan characterized them, where women felt blocked from pursuing interests outside the home. At the same time, to insist that stay-at-home moms are trapped, desperate, and unhappy is naïve, insulting, and even damaging to the roots of society.

Roll Call: The Senate voted 51-41 to end debate on the nomination, nine votes shy of the 60 needed to move forward. Alaska’s Lisa Murkowski was the only Republican to cross party lines, voting to invoke cloture.

AP: Germany’s foreign minister says Berlin will fight a European Union proposal to introduce mandatory quotas for the number of women on the boards of private companies.