Free Republic

Following a recent interview for yet another documentary on pornography, I thought of so many things I should have said about pornography. I had discussed its role as producing impotence, robbing men of their manhood. I had addressed its psychopharmacology as an "erototoxin." I had documented its presence in adultery, divorce, rape, child sex abuse and incest. Civility, humanity, I said, has always hung by the thinnest of threads. We allow ourselves to be coarsened at the greatest risk. Life in the last five decades should have proven to us all – or at least to any hominoid with a...

How's this for a clever rhyme? "Jews are here, Jews are there | Jews are almost everywhere | filling up the darkest places | evil looks upon their faces." Originally published as a column in The Times of London. I've always distrusted both a) cretins who believe in the inherent goodness of children, and b) people who write poems. So imagine my delight when I read in the singularly excellent newsletter of the Middle East commentator Tom Gross about a piece of verse published in the new collection "Great Minds," a collection of poems by 11- to 18-year-olds, which is...

BRUNSWICK, Maine --Firefighters will be allowed to erect a memorial that features a poem with a reference to God and language that some town councilors viewed as sexist. The poem, "A Fireman's Prayer," was written in 1959 by Kansas firefighter A.W. Linn and is found on memorials across the country.

The scholar who exposed fraud and exploitation in the work of sex researcher Alfred Kinsey is blowing the whistle on the E! cable channel's new "reality" show about Playboy founder Hugh Hefner and his three live-in girlfriends. Judith Reisman, author of "Kinsey: Crime and Consequences" and a soon-to-be-released new title, "Kinsey's Attic: How One Man's Pathology Changed the World," says "Girls Next Door" is Hollywood's latest and boldest attempt to normalize pornography in our culture. The author, who served as a consultant to the U.S. Justice Department on obscenity issues, is angry the network is investing so much time in...

Now that the hints about joining a convent don't seem to be gaining any traction (seemed like a perfectly logical alternative to me) we are confronting the issue of a teenage girl going out with boys. In case you haven't been following the news, it is a scary prospect. Oh, right, you say, like there hasn't always been some drinking and sex in high school. And that's true. What I don't remember is having an ambulance gurney show up at a high school dance to wheel out a student suffering from alcohol poisoning, as happened recently at Albany High School....

Disputed Questions. A Catholic Philosopher Argues for RelativismIt's Dario Antiseri. He explains his theses in the official magazine of the Catholic University of Milan. And he is criticizing, at bottom, Benedict XVI's positions on relativism, nihilism, and the natural law by Sandro Magister ROMA, November 3, 2005 – After the first few months of the new pontificate, the general impression is that no one within the Church is seriously criticizing the central theses – philosophical and theological – of Benedict XVI’s preaching. But that's not the way it is. One Catholic philosopher has disputed one of the main points of...

Traditional sexuality morality — meaning sexual restraint, particularly for women — was based on that connection between sex and conception: it evolved to protect paternity and patrimony. Now the connection has all but disappeared, as has patrimony, and the less connection, the less restraint and the more empty the morality. For this reason Christian moralists and others are doomed to failure with their quixotic hopes of getting people to say no to sex or to save themselves for married monogamy; they might as well try to put a genie back in his lamp. Because higamous, hogamous we are mostly not...

Efforts to push Western pansexual attitudes and behavior onto African Anglican provinces, is meeting with vigorous resistance and has stalled in at least two jurisdictions. Ugandan archbishop Henry Luke Orombi has vigorously opposed attempts to allow the openly American Lesbigay organization Integrity into his province, and told VirtueOnline when he was in Philadelphia recently, "While Integrity has a beach head in Uganda we have cut off Bishop Christopher Ssenyonjo for organizing the group here. He has been banned from preaching and we will not let him function with us." Other African archbishops including Nigerian Primate Peter Akinola and Kenyan Archbishop...

During Israel’s dramatic eviction of its settlers, it went almost unnoticed that on Aug. 15, armed men in Gaza kidnapped a soundman who worked for a French state television station. I’ll bet you’ve already assumed the kidnappers were Arab Muslims. Shame on you. And yes you’re right, they were. The week before, three foreign workers were kidnapped by members of Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat. “Fatah” means “conquest by means of holy war.” No matter what our political views, we all agree on two things: 1) Israel and the West on the whole follow the norms of civilization;...

During Israel’s dramatic eviction of its settlers, it went almost unnoticed that on Aug. 15, armed men in Gaza kidnapped a soundman who worked for a French state television station. I’ll bet you’ve already assumed the kidnappers were Arab Muslims. Shame on you. And yes you’re right, they were. The week before, three foreign workers were kidnapped by members of Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat. “Fatah” means “conquest by means of holy war.” No matter what our political views, we all agree on two things: 1) Israel and the West on the whole follow the norms of civilization;...

During Israel’s dramatic eviction of its settlers, it went almost unnoticed that on Aug. 15, armed men in Gaza kidnapped a soundman who worked for a French state television station. I’ll bet you’ve already assumed the kidnappers were Arab Muslims. Shame on you. And yes you’re right, they were. The week before, three foreign workers were kidnapped by members of Fatah, founded by the late Yasser Arafat. “Fatah” means “conquest by means of holy war.” No matter what our political views, we all agree on two things: 1) Israel and the West on the whole follow the norms of civilization;...

"Utopians are people who dream about ensuring for mankind the position of pensioner and who are convinced that this position is so splendid that no sacrifices... are too great to achieve it," he writes. But the communist fantasy can be realized only through ruthlessness, and this is always so: There is no "reason to expect that it can ever come true, except in the cruel form of despotism," he explains, adding, as somone with firsthand knowledge of communism at work, "and despotism is a desparate simulation of paradise." "Evil, I contend, is... a stubborn and unredeemable fact," he avers. Why...

PERHAPS genius can be perceived no way but kaleidoscopically, with interpretation endlessly rearranging the same bright shards. Who was Nietzsche? ''Listen!'' he shouts at the beginning of ''Ecce Homo,'' and the italics are naturally his, he being the emperor of vehemency. ''For I am such and such a person. For heaven's sake do not confound me with anyone else.'' The chapter titles then explain even more about him: ''Why I Am So Wise,'' ''Why I Am So Clever,'' ''Why I Write Such Excellent Books.'' Our immediate reaction, as he might have intended, is to suspect the wisdom, cleverness and excellence...

"And yet for my husband and me, it seems that marriage simply adds a new category of potential suitors: the couple with a crush on us." -- David Valdes Greenwood ------------------------------------------------------ COUPLING Four's a Crowd Breaking up with one person is hard enough. But when it's a couple you want to avoid, it can get ugly. By David Valdes Greenwood | July 24, 2005 Once you marry, you think you are safely removed from the perils of dating. And yet for my husband and me, it seems that marriage simply adds a new category of potential suitors: the couple with...

Woody Allen (liberal) and Natan Sharansky (conservative) are celebrity Jewish intellectuals who offer radically different worldviews for your contemplation. Allen's is more popular with intellectuals worldwide. Sharansky's whole life says that Allen is wrong. Allen recently explained his view of history to the German magazine Der Spiegel. And Sharansky was interviewed by Jay Nordlinger of the National Review. If you understand their disagreement, you will grasp the main spiritual question facing Americans today. Allen, 69, is a filmmaker from Brooklyn, N.Y. Sharansky, 57, was a political prisoner in the Soviet gulag; today he is an Israeli politician. Allen got famous...

What kind of man is this? He is fastidious about his appearance, his home and his possessions. He wants as much sex as possible and chooses sexual partners mostly on the basis of appearance. He is self-absorbed and doesn´t want emotional involvement or commitment. He thinks a woman would stifle him and children would be a burden. Does this sound like gay behavior? It is also the masculine ideal purveyed by Playboy magazine to men since the 1950´s. At the End of Time, when they open the envelope labeled “What is the essence of manhood?” I suspect it will ...

Contrast Tocqueville with Justices Harry Blackmun and Anthony Kennedy. Blackmun wanted to create a constitutional right to homosexual sodomy because of the asserted "'moral fact' that a person belongs to himself and not others nor to society as a whole." Justice Kennedy, writing for six justices, did invent that right, declaring that "At the heart of [constitutional] liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life." Neither of these vaporings has the remotest basis in the actual Constitution and neither has any definable meaning other than...

Even as a lad, Alfred Charles Kinsey was not quite what he seemed to be. A perfectionist, he could be hard on himself, both figuratively and literally. Perhaps as a way to punish himself, he inserted objects – ouch! – in his penis, graduating from straws to the handle of a hairbrush. After two years of training as an engineer, Kinsey enrolled in Bowdoin College in Maine as a biology major, the first love of this budding naturalist. Indeed, his high-school yearbook had projected him, in a worthy bit of prophecy, to become "a second Darwin." As a graduate student...

THE MATRIX TRILOGY AND CULTURAL TERRORISM James F. Burke The blockbuster science fiction film Matrix: Revolutions stands as the preeminent example of post-communist socialist realism and Nihilistic cultural terrorism. "Cultural terrorism" is a significant underground political phenomenon in the Western world, complete with self-proclaimed "cultural terrorist networks" and manifestos to this ideology commonplace on the Internet (typically in news-groups that are also connected to "radical underground" and left-wing run "rave" scenes). It is a Euro-Left "philosophy" rooted in Marxist Anarchism and political Nihilism, which extends socialist realism (the creation of cultural foundations for a new socialist order) into the realm...

I was three months pregnant and engaged to be married when I met him. (Read the rest for all the nauseating details...)