Proposition 47, which was adopted by Californians in 2014, has been described as a ballot initiative with ‘unintended results galore‘. It was based on a laudable desire to reduce the number of people in California’s overcrowded prisons who don’t necessarily, […]
Sexuality
Why Didn’t Harvey Weinstein Get His Face Slapped?
My wife’s grandmother, who grew up around the turn of the last century, would tell my wife, “Never be afraid to slap ‘em and walk home” in reference to predatory young men. And evidently such men have existed for a […]
Andrew Sullivan on Trump and Tyranny: A Response
Andrew Sullivan, having retired from blogging and writing after first giving us the idea of same sex marriage and then being lambasted by his followers for wanting to be tolerant to their enemies who lost over that particular issue, has […]
Heterosexual Cohabitation and The Church – After Obergefell
The historic church, evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox, has taken a dim view of ‘cohabitation,’ which used to be called ‘shacking up’ or ‘living in sin.’ The faithful churches in fact generally try to deny the Sacrament to those in cohabitation. […]
Pansies
Why are pansies associated with unmanliness and deviation from heteronormativity? They are some of the hardiest flowers there are. When I took this picture the temperature in Washington D.C. had risen to a high of 34F (1C) and they have […]
The Last Freedom (and its Relationship to the First)
Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World seems, for the most part, to be closer to the future we are facing in the West than George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I do think that parts of Orwell’s vision are still important, however; in […]
California Law and Sex Partner Switch
This is a strange story. A man got a woman to sleep with him by pretending [in the dark, I suppose] to be her boy friend. Now apparently if you impersonate a husband in this way, it is rape under […]
SLAP ‘EM AND WALK HOME – A way of promoting abstinence in our culture
I must start with a word of explanation. Lysistrata was a comic play by Aristophanes in classical Greece, in which the women, in order to stop a war they thought senseless, agreed to not sleep with their men until the […]
Sex-selection Abortion In Asia
The ugly specter of sex-selection abortion is a reality in Asia, and unfortunately not just in China. Modern technology has met old attitudes and made this possible. It is legal here in the USA de facto, but not much practiced […]