What happens when feminism meets Marxism

This:

Virginity, by definition, is simply the state of a person who has not engaged in sexual intercourse. But we all know that there are many more implications to it than that, especially for women. Most traditional societies, cultures and religions place a high value on a woman’s virginity aka her chastity. So much so that it is tightly bound to her worth and her perceived self-worth.

With this archaic notion of “value” placed on a woman’s virginity comes the belief that exclusive rights to her womb should be saved for the highest bidder; that it is a commodity to be bought (in most cases by her husband) and sold (usually by her father). And if she gives it away or, God forbid, it is taken from her, she loses value as a woman and as a human being

Because we all know a young lady’s self worth is improved by sleeping around at random?

The  argument above, penned by Alexandra Gekas writing at “The Frisky,” illustrates the marriage of feminist and Marxist thought. Why can’t a woman choose not to commodify herself? Is it somehow different if she doesn’t want the free dinner and drinks beforehand?

The cause of this angst on parade? An Olympian speaking out about the challenges she faces maintaining her virginity.  

I guess Lolo is just too counter-cultural to make the Wheaties box. Patrick Archibold comments:

But it makes some people very angry when you speak like this. Not because of some silly notion of “exclusive rights to the womb” nonsense. It makes people angry when someone ascribes such value to something they themselves gave away without any thought. They don’t want to think about what they threw away.

If you gave away a Babe Ruth signed baseball because you didn’t think it had any value, you certainly wouldn’t like it if someone kept talking about how priceless it was would’ya?

True enough.

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Celebrate mom by helping others avoid motherhood.

This rivals a suggestion on Facebook when a former schoolmate asked others to donate to NARAL in lieu of wrapping up a gift for Christmas. Saves paper and bows! Besides, what says joy of infant Jesus like the slaughter of the unborn?

Kirsten Gilibrand stuck her foot in it today. Via Hot Air, behold:

“This Mother’s Day, I can’t think of a better way to honor all the mothers in the country — past and present — than with a contribution to EMILY’s List,” Gillibrand writes. “They’re the ones working tirelessly to elect the pro-choice Democratic women who are making sure that our freedoms are protected for generations to come.”

“So, this year, join me in commemorating Mother’s Day with a contribution to EMILY’s List to help elect the Democratic women who will continue to secure our rights,” the senator continues. “On Mother’s Day, let’s get women involved and make sure they know who is truly fighting for them – the pro-choice Democratic women EMILY’s List is working each day to elect to office. Make this Mother’s Day extra special. Honor mothers around the country with a contribution to EMILY’s List.”

Feminist liberals cannot honestly celebrate mothers without first thinking mothers should have the right to murder their offspring. How enlightening.

A parent’s worst nightmare…?

Oh what a tangled web we weave, when first we ad-lib to conceive…

From LifeSiteNews

Single mom wants baby.

But she’s on a budget, so sperm donor is out of the question.

So she goes the way of “ex-boyfriend with benefits” – sorta – she pays him $1400 for his “service”
– you know his guy friends were fist bumping, “Duuuuuddddeee! Score!”

For the next three years, she allows her daughter’s father (ex-boyfriend with paid benefits) to visit his daughter.

When her daughter is three years old, mom dies of cancer. Absolutely  horrible for such a young child to lose a parent…but because of her non-traditional family, insult is added to injury as an ugly custody battle ensues: (emphasis mine)

The ex-boyfriend of the deceased single mother then entered the scene  to make a parental claim for the young girl, arguing that he was her legal father. The case appeared before a Quebec court. The ex-boyfriend won a paternity ruling from the Quebec Court of Appeal last year, and that ruling was upheld last month when the Supreme Court of Canada declined to hear an appeal of the case.

Michael Lubetsky, the lawyer who represented the girl’s grandparents at the appeal court, told the National Post that it is a parent’s “worst nightmare” that a biological parent can “show up and start asserting rights over the child.”

“That’s incredibly disruptive…. It’s an attack on the family structure,” he said.

I had to read that a few times and wonder, “Have we gotten to the point that we are saying that with a straight face?” An attack on the family structure? WHAT FAMILY “STRUCTURE” ARE WE TALKING ABOUT HERE?

Structure,  loosely defined,  is something made up of parts, held or put together in a particular way.

Structure

Not stucture

This is what happens when we start tinkering with a STRUCTURE that has been in place and worked for thousands of years.  When we embark in a DIY “structure” it all comes crashing down on us, sooner or later.  And the children are the ones who get crushed.

UPDATE: linked by Lin at No One of Any Import and a Recommended Read of Pundette’s! Thanks!

Planned Parenthood pleads: Pray for abortions!

I missed this earlier this month when LifeNews covered it, but I must say I’m awed at the brazen sacrilege of calling people to 40 days of prayer for infanticide. Today is Day 38:

Today we pray for a cloud of gentleness to surround every abortion facility. May everyone feel calm and loving.

Because gentle, calm and loving is exactly what comes to mind when babies are slaughtered, no?

Some of these are beyond rich. Day 3:

Today we pray for our daughters and granddaughters, that they will always know the power of making their own good decisions.

Who associates a good decision with abortion? Besides our POTUS, of course, who never wanted his girls “punished with a baby.”

Day 25:

Today we pray for women who have been made afraid of their own power by their religion. May they learn to reject fear and live bravely.

I find it telling that the PP crowd associates power with abortion. It’s powerful to kill your own child. Funny, I see it so differently: women do have an awesome, God-given power to create life. Creation, destruction. Good, evil. Life, death. Amazing, isn’t it, that liberals always seem to fall on the, er, wrong side of the equation?

Bryan Preston calls the brochure of prayer intentions “the most repulsive thing” he’s “ever seen.” I agree. But it’s not as ugly as what happens in an abortion clinic.

Day 27:

Today we give thanks for abortion providers around the nation whose concern for women is the driving force in their lives.

What a great defense for ol’Kermit: he was concerned for women.

Preston concludes:

Note also the absence of praying for girls to have families.

Can’t have that. Families are the enemy of the socialist state.

“The days I stay home with my kids without going out, I start to get ill.”

Ah, she gets a headache, too.

So quipped the First Lady in an interview in 2007. The full Monty:

Every year, Michelle Obama considers quitting her job and staying home full-time to take care of her children. “It was a gift having my mother home every day. I want my kids to feel that way,” she says. But having experienced the pleasures of work outside the home, she is reluctant to give up her independence. “Work is rewarding,” she says. “I love losing myself in a set of problems that have nothing to do with my husband and children. Once you’ve tasted that, it’s hard to walk away.”

So difficult to walk away. Why would your children’s problems ever be more important than ones with no connection or bearing to your family?

Then, too, there is that little-discussed fact that staying home with children can be—how else to put it?—less than intellectually stimulating. “The days I stay home with my kids without going out, I start to get ill,” she says. “My head starts to ache.” When she mentioned it to her mother, Marian Robinson told her daughter she didn’t think Michelle could handle the boredom of staying home with kids. Obama was surprised to hear that taking care of her had been boring, but now she embraces the idea of discussing it openly.

The boredom. It’s funny, I’m so busy I’m rarely bored.

Bored? What the hell did Michelle do on sick days? Stay in bed herself? Luckily for Michelle, the family decided they couldn’t live on Barack’s humble salary of $162k. How military families like mine decide it’s in the family’s best interest to have me stay home must be a mystery as we do it for much less than $162k a year. Then again, I do know how to cook. That saves a boatload, I guess.

H/t to Pundette for the illuminating Vogue interview with our esteemed First Lady.

“A woman who does this is a heroine of feminism. A man who does this is a louse”

So writes Instapundit of Rahna Reiko Rizzuto, a mother of two who decided she didn’t want to be a mother anymore and abandoned her family to live in Japan and pursue writing. He’s right, of course. She is a finalist for the National Book Award for her memoir, Hiroshima in the Morning.  From the article at Parenting:

This morning’s TODAY Show featured a segment on a woman who chose to leave her husband and two young sons (ages 3 and 5 at the time) while on an extended research trip to Japan because she realized she didn’t want to be a mom anymore leaves my chest tight and my gut aching. Photos show her boys as pre-school-age angels. I want to hug and kiss them as my own.

[…]

Reiko Rizzuto speaks of her struggles to stay true to herself and admits that she had never wanted children (which begs the question why she had two). “I didn’t want to be swallowed up,” she says on the TODAY Show interview.

Swallowed up. There is a remedy for that, actually, it’s called embracing the life you’ve chosen. With a soon to be four year-old and another on the way, I do understand the sentiment at times. Except I thank God daily for the family that I have and remind myself of that when the going gets tough. I can imagine parenting can be more challenging without some kind of perspective. I’m lucky my faith provides it. As does my sense of life. How incredibly sad for her–and for her sons–to know that she wasn’t thankful. That she didn’t want her life after all.

Then again, bioethicists argue for this very reason that abortion should be available as an after-birth option. Because adoption is too traumatic. And some people really do realize after the baby’s born that eh, maybe this life’s not for me. At least Reiko Rizzuto let her children live…

UPDATE: linked by Pundette as a Recommended Read. Thanks!

“The future belongs to the fruitful”

So argues James Taranto of the WSJ yet again in explaning the consequences of what he terms the “Roe Effect.” More:

We have another thought as to why environmentalism seems to have peaked with the baby boom. The key is in that generation’s moniker: “baby boom.” The baby boomers’ parents were unusually fertile, especially when compared with subsequent generations, including the boomers themselves. But the decline in fertility was not evenly distributed throughout American society.

This columnist has posited that the polarization of the electorate around the issue of abortion, combined with the direct effect of abortion itself on fertility, over the long term has a conservatizing effect on the electorate. We call it the Roe Effect. Although environmentalism is not sharply polarizing in the way that abortion is, it seems to us quite probable that a similar and overlapping effect is at work here.

After all, you can’t make a baby by hugging a tree. Attitudes about “the environment” are very much tied up with attitudes about human fertility. The prevailing view on the environmentalist left is, and has been since at least the early 1970s, that to bring a child into the world is an act of violence against Mother Earth. Along with feminism, which devalued motherhood and women’s domestic work, environmentalism motivated left-liberal baby boomers to have smaller families, or none at all.

I’m not sure if I can wait for liberals to make themselves extinct. As Instapundit says (in, admittedly, an entirely different context): faster, please.

H/t: Instapundit. 

UPDATE: Linked by Pundette as a Recommended Read. Thanks!

How disengenous can you get, NYT? This isn’t a battle for *access* to birth control.

From today’s paper, with the ominous headline, Centrist Women Tell of Disenchantment with Republicans (emphasis my own):

As baby showers go, the party Mary Russell attended to celebrate her niece’s first child was sweet, with about a dozen women offering congratulations over ice cream and cake.

But somewhere between the baby name game and the gifts, what had been light conversation took a sharp turn toward the personal and political — specifically, the battle over access to birth control and other women’s health issues that have sprung to life on the Republican campaign trail in recent weeks.

“We all agreed that this seemed like a throwback to 40 years ago,” said Ms. Russell, 57, a retired teacher from Iowa City who describes herself as an evangelical Christian and “old school” Republican of the moderate mold.

Until the baby shower, just two weeks ago, she had favored Mitt Romney for president.

Not anymore. She said she might vote for President Obama now. “I didn’t realize I had a strong viewpoint on this until these conversations,” Ms. Russell said. As for the Republican presidential candidates, she added: “If they’re going to decide on women’s reproductive issues, I’m not going to vote for any of them. Women’s reproduction is our own business.”

Dear Mary Russell,

This isn’t a battle over access to birth control. You can head on over to Target and pay $5 for the prescription. No one’s stopping ya, honey. Go buy it for all your friends, too, and then you won’t even have to go to any more baby showers.

But please don’t tell me that you now fear Republican candidates because they want to “decide on women’s reproductive issues.”

I don’t care what you do. But don’t force me to pay for it. Don’t force the Church to pay for it. Pay for it out of your own damn purse at the Target check out line rather than looking to Big Brother Government to take care of you (and how patriarchal is that?!)

This isn’t a battle for access.

This is a war over who will pay. And if you’re not willing to fund your own sex life, then you have no business telling me that I have to.

H/t: Althouse, who adds:

Man, I loathe this pandering to women! Don’t treat us like we’re stupid. Don’t act like we need your special protection. Don’t buy us things.

UPDATE: a “Recommended Read” at Pundit & Pundette. Thanks!

The miracle of life (and the choice of barrenness)

Two things caught my eye today (because I sat down long enough to read!) In the first, via Pundette, Mark Steyn contrasts the miracle of life as witnessed in Luke’s Gospel to the barrenness-by-choice of today’s society. He writes:

That bit of the Christmas story doesn’t get a lot of attention, but it’s in there — Luke 1:13, part of what he’d have called the backstory, if he’d been a Hollywood screenwriter rather than a physician. Of the four gospels, only two bother with the tale of Christ’s birth, and only Luke begins with the tale of two pregnancies. Zacharias is surprised by his impending paternity — “for I am an old man and my wife well stricken in years.” Nonetheless, an aged, barren woman conceives and, in the sixth month of Elisabeth’s pregnancy, the angel visits her cousin Mary and tells her that she, too, will conceive. If you read Luke, the virgin birth seems a logical extension of the earlier miracle — the pregnancy of an elderly lady. The physician-author had no difficulty accepting both. For Matthew, Jesus’s birth is the miracle; Luke leaves you with the impression that all birth — all life — is to a degree miraculous and God-given.

Oh, how we have squandered what God has given, and as a result find ourselves in a desperate pinch. pjHusband and I were able to catch a little of Steyn hosting for Rush yesterday as we hunted for our Christmas meal the modern way, among the hordes at Costco. (I bet more lives have been lost duking it out for that last pie–or pair of ugly sneakers–than in the woods of late, but I digress). We were both struck by Steyn’s assertion that enviro-wackos wage war against life itself. Steyn’s analysis went a little like this: Life is time. The more time we have not running down to the stream to wash the laundry, the easier life becomes. Those who would have us use less–because the light, the energy, the time we save to make life easier isn’t in their estimation of “best interest”–wage war against life. It’s really a beautiful bit of reasoning.

But it goes further than that. An illustration: this Chinese mother dared to defy the government after becoming pregnant with a second child. That the child has lived is a testament to a mother’s love and sheer grit. But the family still faces stiff financial penalties after the loss of both well-paying jobs. When everything flows from the government, the punishment is severe. That a government would wage war against life in such fashion is baffling, especially given the predicaments faced by countries with failure-to-replace birth rates. But China will crumble much like Greece, this time in the face of its forced barrenness.

Read the rest.

H/t: Hot Air headlines

UPDATE: linked by Pundette. Thanks!

Is premarital sex today less “evil” than it used to be?

Walter Russell Mead says yes. He writes:

The core truth is that premarital sex is less evil today than it used to be.  It remains, as moral theologians say, wrong in itself, we Christians believe, and that is a quality that does not change.  But premarital sex is less of a sin against other people than it used to be.

It’s an intriguing premise, no? That premarital sex isn’t as damaging to others now than it has been historically. What’s to blame? Ah, the almighty Pill that helped separate fertility from sex–with a healthy dose of antibiotics on the side.

More Mead:

In the old days, for example, before contraception, every act of intercourse outside marriage carried a substantial possibility of ending in pregnancy.  For women, the consequences of pregnancy out of wedlock were life shattering: disgrace, the loss of any hope of a good marriage, economic and social marginalization.  It was very foolish and wicked for young girls to place themselves and their families at risk of all this for a moments’ pleasure; it was much worse for young men to attempt to persuade and cajole girls they did not plan to marry into sex.  Young men who behaved in this way attracted the deserved moral censure of the community, and parents were vigilant to protect their daughters from unscrupulous seducers.

Premarital sex under these circumstances was not just a moral crime against God’s law; it was a selfish act of personal gratification that endangered the well being and happiness of whole families.

If we add to that the devastating consequences of sexually transmitted diseases in the era before antibiotics made them treatable, premarital sex becomes an even more dubious phenomenon.  Insanity, death, sterility, defective offspring: unchastity brought all these consequences in its wake.  The casual seducer who infected a young woman with syphilis might be condemning her, her unborn children and her future husband to madness and death.

He’s right. As a result of the devastating consequences, parents cared enough to warn their children against the dangers of premarital sex. No more. It’s seen as a right of passage. Um, beware too many late-night hookups, dear. You might never learn to properly commit yourself to multiple partners later.

This helps to explain the diminished concern that parents and educators feel about the 88 percent.  It does not mean that a society in which marriage steadily weakens, abortion is commonplace, and millions of children grow up without a father in the home is a healthy place.  But it explains why many parents in particular are more concerned with their children’s grades than with their sexual activities in college and why tuition-paying parents no longer demand that their daughters be kept in sex-segregated dorms with curfews and parietals.

Mead concludes that more is as stake beyond our collective morality–it’s the very idea of life centered around family at risk of becoming endangered.

Read the rest.

P.S. Where is Stacy? With “Christians Are Still Having Sex” as a tantalizing headline, I expected The Other McCain to be hot on the trail.

UPDATE: linked as a “Recommended Read” by Pundette. Thanks!