28 April 2014

Must-Read Monday, Week of 28 April 2014

Throughout the course of the week, I'll curate a list of links for y'all to read (if you want! No pressure!), because I wander all over the internets and I may have found something you haven't seen.

Please, please share your must-reads in the comments!
  • I thought this was interesting: dueling posts, hours apart, about the compatibility of the terms "pro-life" and "feminist." First came this one, "Christian women: feminism is not your friend," by Matt Walsh, which argues that "pro-life" and "feminist" are mutually exclusive; and then this one (not in reply to Walsh, just by coincidence), "Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About NWF," from New Wave Feminists, which purports to explain that one can be both. [For the record, I come down on Matt Walsh's side. I believe that feminism has outlived its very limited usefulness. We have the vote, the wage-gap is the stuff of myth, and mostly what feminism has wrought is abortion-on-demand at any gestational age and for any reason (including, perversely, sex-selection abortion, which almost exclusively targets baby girls).]
  • And! Several days later, a response from the New Wave Feminists to Matt Walsh! [It's not going to convince him he's wrong, as it doesn't convince me. Walsh was not claiming that all is right in the world for women, but that the label "feminist" has been irrevocably poisoned.]
  • A large group of gay-marriage advocates published an open letter, "Freedom to Marry, Freedom to Dissent: Why We Must Have Both," over at RealClearPolitics to call for civility in the debate. While I obviously dissent against gay marriage (fundamentally, it is at best as a contradiction in terms), I appreciate the intellectual honesty of the letter; its authors acknowledge that they cannot "wish away the objections of Christian, Jewish, and Muslim faith traditions, or browbeat them into submission," and further remind their more bloody-minded allies that if uniformity of thought could be imposed on a society, they would have gotten nowhere themselves.
  • If the phrase, "Lord, please don't let me become a spiritual fruitchucker" doesn't motivate you to read this article on Catholic Answers, nothing will: Everyone's A Critic.
  • Can irony actually cause a head to explode? This article on the Daily Caller, "Good grief: Now, it's pea personhood!" discusses the fact that Switzerland has laws pertaining to the "dignity" of plants. Nowhere does its author point out that Switzerland is the home of euthanasia tourism, but I think it's fair to say that we live in the world gone mad when it is legal to assist someone with their suicide, and illegal to "decapitate" a wildflower.
  • Amy Otto writes in the Federalist: "How I Made My Peace With Princess Culture." She agrees with my assessment of Barbies (which boils down to: silly body, still just a doll) and argues that trying to shelter little girls from the Disney Princesses could conceivably result in more Lena Dunhams, the star of HBO's Girls, which is a truly insufferable mess and in which Dunham is unattractively naked. A lot.

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