Culture
Peggy Noonan gets it exactly right in her recent musing about modern media’s effect on children: For 50 years in America, whenever the subject has turned to what our culture presents, the bright response has been, “You don’t like it? Change the channel.” But there is no other channel to change to, no safe place…
Ian Donnis rather wryle points out that “one of the country’s top evangelicals, Kentucky-based Albert Mohler, has suggested that pre-natal treatment to change homosexuality in the womb would be biblically justified.” Donnis also directs us to a recent piece by Mary Ann Sorrentino on the same topic. Writes Sorrentino: The same gang that for decades…
There are probably more than a couple reasons why this is just not a good idea: Require health-insurance policies to cover infertility treatment regardless of a woman’s marital status. State law requires that insurers cover 80 percent of the cost of such treatments, with no limit on the total treatment cost. But they are currently…
In the so-called “culture wars”, this is low-hanging fruit: The Easter Bunny was to have made a stop at a craft fair at the Tiverton Middle School tomorrow, appearing for photos with students as part of a fundraising effort sponsored by the school’s Parent-Teacher Council. But Schools Supt. William Rearick called a halt to the…
James Lileks (via Glenn Reynolds) thinks he needs to have a talk with his daughter: Something’s wrong with my daughter. There’s not a single cartoon character on TV that doesn’t exactly mirror her own experience, and she doesn’t seem bothered by it. But she should. We’ll have to have a talk. After he surveys the…
Talk about cognitive dissonance. That’s about all I can say (via NRO) about this story: A Boston woman who gave birth after a failed abortion has filed a lawsuit against two doctors and Planned Parenthood seeking the costs of raising her child. he complaint was filed by Jennifer Raper, 45, last week in Suffolk Superior…
An idea that I’ve seen floating around the ivory tower is that America is more of a symbol than a nation, meaning different things to different people. Thus, citizens with opposite ideologies can be equally patriotic — even nationalistic — because they cast their own goals and preferences as the True America. There’s clearly something…
In part by the stark contrast to one of our newest state senators that it presents, Rev. Edward Wilson’s defense of his parish school’s lunch policy (which recently slipped across the national wires for its lunchtime behavior policy) is remarkable: At its frenzied peak, news coverage and commentary defaulted to cultural stereotypes of ruthless Catholic…
Glenn Reynolds notes another incident of the sort that, in aggregate, have led me away from Google when I, um, google: The Google property has recently banned the popular atheist commentator Nick Gisburne. Gisburne had been posting videos with logical arguments against Christian beliefs; but when he turned his attention to Islam (mirror of Gisburne’s…
In the end, the Massachusetts Legislature ignored governor Duval Patrick and decided to listen to the voters–or perhaps the Massachusetts Supreme Court–and voted to allow a vote on a State Constitutional ban on gay marriage. Lawmakers in Massachusetts, the only state where gay marriage is legal, on Tuesday voted to advance a proposed constitutional amendment…