I’m reading Sikivu Hutchinson’s wonderful new book Moral Combat. There’s an apposite passage about Jim Wallis in the first chapter:

Wallis argues that America is suffering from a crisis of values. Progressive religious belief is the antidote to this crisis because “history is most changed by social movements with a spiritual foundation.” [Wallis, God’s Politics, p 24] This view fails to consider the extent to which American social movements – from the white supremacist imperialist spiritual foundations of the Revolutionary War to the patriarchal and heterosexist spiritual foundations of the modern civil rights movement – have been hindered by their “spiritual” foundations. By romanticizing the spiritual foundations of social movements, Wallis demonstrates that he is unwilling to interrogate how

Entirely familiar, nothing new, but heartbreaking all the same. Multiply by X million every year.

“I wanted to get an education but my parents were determined to marry me off,” says Himanot Yehewala, an Ethiopian girl who was married five years ago at the age of 13.

“I tried to run away but my mother said she would kill herself if I did not marry him.”

That’s all – just that. She wanted to get an education, but she couldn’t; she had to stop getting an education and be a premature adult, instead. Her chance of a more interesting and useful life was over, at age 13. Multiply by X million every year.… Read the rest

Someone posted a shoe-fetish shoe (picture of) at Facebook, which naturally triggered a lively discussion of the semiotics of catch me-fuck me shoes. I pondered the agony to the calf muscles that would be caused by attempting to stand on the damn things – the heels look taller than the foot is long, so how is that even possible?

Anyway, some fella came along to straighten it all out with an aphoristic insight into the nature of women.

Great shoes, fancy clothing, cosmetic surgery, lipstick, waxings, hairdos, jewelry, makeup, and perfume are all unnecessary. However, if they were eliminated, I think the gay male population would increase rapidly and the women of the world would all look like the babushka

A puppy of my acquaintance.

… Read the rest

Eric got to Ross Douthat ahead of me, but I’ll duplicate his effort anyway just because Douthat’s piece irritated me so intensely.

He says

the moral case for assisted suicide depends much more on our respect for people’s own desire to die than on our sympathy for their devastating medical conditions.

I don’t think he demonstrates that, and I don’t think it does – I think it depends on both. For one thing, if people don’t have devastating medical conditions, then they don’t need assistance with suicide. Part of what people fear is losing the physical ability to exit; that’s where the “assisted” comes in.

Fortunately, the revolution Kevorkian envisioned hasn’t yet succeeded. Despite decades of agitation, only three states