The home is a woman's place, and a man's too

The tired, old comment came up in conversation recently about a woman's place being in the home. It's a comment that has always made me a little uncomfortable. To the casual observer, my wife and I are on the traditional end of the spectrum. Rosemary is a "home-maker," to use the term commonly employed on credit card applications. It's a pejorative title to our broader secular culture, or, alternately, an unquestionable good and a sine qua non to more traditionalist folks. But again, the comment has always made me uncomfortable. The reason? I think both camps fail to see the bigger problem.

The Cranberry Harvest, Nantucket Island, by Eastman Johnson

I am convinced that our society has gotten the whole work-home thing dreadfully wrong since at least the Industrial Revolution. My unfashionable idea is that home life and the family began to disintegrate when men became paid laborers in factory environments wholly separate from their home and the local community. In medieval society, work much more often occurred in and around the home. Living quarters were often above or the back of family-owed workshops. Children played an active role to whatever degree made the most sense given their age. While I don't want to paint any of this as idyllic, the fact is that one's living and one's family were significantly more bound together in previous times than they are today. The result was that men and women alike were necessarily involved in the work and in the more important familial decisions.

Whereas previously women were very close to the major decisions, it became much less so when work, and the men who worked, became wholly separated from women and the home environment. A woman's place may be in the home, but not in a home that is merely the sweeping of floors and the changing of diapers. The Catholic Church teaches that men and women are equal in dignity. Women are not "second-class citizens"; they're not meant to be relegated, so to speak, to rocking the cradle of the next generation of men who will rule the world. Men and women alike yearn for an active role in the making of a family unit, which is the basic building block of the wider society. The problem, therefore, is that we now live in a society where a major component of the home life--work--is something wholly separate from the home.

This is the reason for women who sacrifice their natural desire for a family in order to have a career. Perhaps more under the radar, it is also the reason there are so many men who, though they provide for their families financially, often fail to be involved in the other aspects of managing a household. My argument is that work--shared, economically meaningful work--is the glue that holds a family together. It gives the wife a stake in the family's financial future and therefore a greater sense of ownership. It keeps the husband from being absent from the home and gives him a greater role in the formation of his children. As for the children, it gives them the example of a father at work and caring for his family. And when the children work too, it also gives them a real stake and ownership in the enterprise that is their family. Again, work is the glue that holds a family together.

One of the few remaining bastions where work and home life go hand-and-hand is the small family farm. Philosophically speaking, this is one of the biggest reasons that Rosemary and I made the decision to start farming a few years ago. While our shared work has exposed plenty of rough edges, it has also brought us closer together. We are both deeply invested in the decisions that drive our family's success--the economic decisions, the practical farming decisions, and the decisions regarding the rearing and education of our children. Equally so, I know that my boys feel that they are participants in the creation of this success. Our home, in other words, is not something that we come to at the end of a long day because we're tired, and that we escape from the next day in order to go to work, to school, or to play. Rather, it's everything. It's our center-point and our economic lifeblood.

In conclusion, I have no pretensions to reclaiming some falsely idyllic medieval synthesis of family life and work. But I am convinced that the place of a woman in a home separated from a major part of what makes it a home is demeaning. I wholly understand why, in a society where the home is merely a place to be kept clean, a woman would rather make a career for herself. Yet I am equally convinced that the answer is not "emancipating" women from the home. Rather, the answer is that society find a way to recover the home as a woman's place, and a man's too.

Abuse crisis unrelated to homosexuality, prominent cardinal says*

By GSM News Staff

Vatican City, February 22, 2019 - Despite acknowledging that more than 80 percent of the sexual abuse in the Catholic Church has involved clerics abusing teenaged boys, Chicago's Cardinal Blase Cupich said that he is absolutely certain that "homosexuality is not a cause."

Image from LifeSiteNews.com

Cardinal Cupich was speaking at a press conference Feb. 18 alongside Archbishop Charles Scicluna of Malta as a weeklong Vatican summit on sexual abuse got underway. The two prelates faced a barrage of questions from members of the press as to why the summit was not exploring how the clergy's undisputed homosexual subculture may be related to the church's sexual abuse crisis.

"All you've done is point to a correlation between homosexuality and sexual abuse," Cardinal Cupich explained. "We clerics are well trained in philosophy, and we know that correlation does not equal causation. Ergo, it makes no sense for us to be exploring whether there's a causal connection."

Cardinal Cupich added, "Plus, both the John Jay School of Justice and Australia's Royal Commission have already indicated that there's no causal connection between homosexuality and sexual abuse. And with our intensive training in philosophy, we clerics know that citing an authority is the strongest form of argumentation. I know that Aquinas says  an argument from authority is the weakest form of argumentation, but we've ensured that nobody reads Aquinas in the seminaries anymore."

When pressed that other studies have pointed to a causal link between homosexuality and sexual abuse, Archbishop Scicluna quickly doubled down. "Let me say it emphatically, homosexuality is not something that predisposes one to sin," Archbishop Scicluna said, "Yes, yes, I'm aware that the Catechism teaches that homosexuality predisposes a person toward sinful forms of sexual pleasure. But that doesn't mean that homosexuality predisposes a person to sinful forms of sexual pleasure."

Facing a skeptical follow-up from the press corps that referenced the principle of non-contradiction, Archbishop Scicluna was left scratching his head. "I may have overslept the morning that was covered in my philosophy classes," he admitted.

Cardinal Cupich quickly took the mic from the flummoxed archbishop. "Let me conclude this press conference by emphasizing that we shouldn't inflate our expectations by thinking this summit is actually going to accomplish anything," he said.

_______________________________
*Because humor is what makes sense right now

Another serious note, this one about Hagedorn

Last week I satirized the Wisconsin State Journal's hit piece on conservative Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brian Hagedorn. The gist of their article was that Hagedorn helped to found a Christian school a few years ago that requires its teachers, students, and parents to adhere to basic Christian teaching about human sexuality. Or, as translated by the sensational title of the hit piece, Hagedorn "helped found academy that bans LGBT teachers, students."

The implication, in any case, is that Hagedorn holds such radical positions that he could not possibly be impartial on the state's high court. Never mind that most Christian schools have morality clauses at least for their teachers, including every single diocesan Catholic school. And never mind that the legality of these clauses has been upheld again and again by the courts. The tongue-in-cheek title of my satire? "Breaking News: Court candidate founded a Christian school that required teachers and students to be Christian." Imagine that! 

If there were any mud to rake up about Hagedorn's tendency toward bias, surely the Journal would have exposed it. But of course there is no evidence to be found. So my thought last week was, okay, the Journal is a liberal news organ in the state's liberal enclave. Some editor probably saw the similar smear pieces in the Huffington Post and New York Times about Karen Pence, wife of Vice President Mike Pence, returning to teach at a school with a similar policy and thought, hey, I'll bet that we could run an article about Hagedorn along the same lines that would be well received by our liberal readership.

Naive me, I thought that it was "one and done," a single act of irresponsible journalism, and I had a little fun satirizing it. But this week the Wisconsin State Journal ran a second hit piece, this time picked up from the Associated Press. This week's crime du jour? Apparently Hagedorn delivered a few paid speeches at events for law students organized by Alliance Defending Freedom, which has, according to the article, "supported criminalizing sodomy, likened homosexuality to pedophilia and argued in favor of sterilizing transgender people."

Okay, maybe I'm getting tired of satire, but this is now officially an ongoing smear campaign with such obvious bias and such blatant virtue-signaling that it makes me want to retch. ADF is a highly respected legal organization that has done more than any other conservative group to defend religious freedoms in the courts in recent years. Notably, ADF lawyers have won all nine cases they've argued before the U.S. Supreme Court. They're the firm that won Hobby Lobby an exemption from Obamacare a few years ago. But from the latest hit piece, you'd think that they were an anti-intellectual fringe hate group. After all, that's how the Southern Poverty Law Center has labeled them.

The substance of the SPLC's designation of ADF as a "hate group," by the way, comes from the legal work of ADF's international sister organization, not the work of its lawyers here in the United States. A number of European Union countries had required, on medical grounds, sterilization for the recognition of a person's gender transition. ADF's international organization was involved in the support of the laws on the books, and somehow that support has morphed, in the eyes of the SPLC, into ADF being a "hate group" crusading to sterilize transgender people. It's a designation that has been useful in smearing the work of the ADF, and now it's apparently useful in smearing Hagedorn's campaign. All because he was paid a grand total of $3,000 over the course of a few years for career advice he gave to law students at ADF gatherings.

Maybe we've gone too far down the path of opinions masquerading as balanced journalism for anybody to get up in arms about this. But still, it's so blatant, and so obvious, that the Wisconsin State Journal is out to "get" Hagedorn that I am wondering why there's even an attempt to make these pieces look like journalism. To be clear, I know nothing of Hagedorn. I haven't even done enough reading about him to know whether he'd win my vote. But I do know a little about journalism. And this isn't it.

A serious note on Ocasio-Cortez

These past few days I've pinioned the newly minted U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez with satirical pieces ("Area dairy cows offended by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's 'farting cows' remark" here; "29-year-old Ocasio-Cortez gifted with 'infused knowledge,' liberal theologian argues" here). Today, however, I wanted to offer a few serious reflections.

Ocasio-Cortez's politics trouble me first of all because I'm not a socialist. Although I may resist political affiliation as a matter of principle, I have always been skeptical of ever-increasing

entitlements. I don't think, for example, that a "basic income" would be helpful to solving lower-income folks' economic woes, and I don't think a total government takeover of medical insurance is the answer to our current broken system. But we've lived with socialist politicians in the past, and we're living with them in the present (God forbid a Bernie Sanders presidency, though!), and if all Ocasio-Cortez had were socialist aspirations, I'm sure her aspirations could be tempered when they meet the hard reality of the facts on the ground. That's what politics is about, after all: The Democrats want something, and the Republicans want something else, and they wrangle it out with a compromise that, while it makes nobody happy, does leave the government intact.

In her temperament, however, Ocasio-Cortex shows little inclination toward compromise, and her rhetoric in particular is consistently inflammatory and over-the-top. While campaigning in Kansas, for example, she made an analogy between Kansas voting to join the union as a free state in 1861 and their need to elect the Democrat she was campaigning for instead of his Republican opponent. Later, when members of her own Democratic party sought to block Pelosi's election to the House speakership, she accused them of doing so because they are white and male. She has compared the combatting of climate change to the Allies' fight against Hitler in the Second World War. The list could go on and on.

On the one hand, Ocasio-Cortez's radical temperament is easy to dismiss. Some will say that she is new to politics, and that when she encounters her first real political road-blocks, she'll be forced to tame her rhetoric and learn the art of compromise. That's what has happened to most of the "tea party" Republicans elected a few years ago, at least the ones that survived. Despite his own inflammatory rhetoric, even our current president is usually kept in check--his creative use of executive orders and emergency declarations notwithstanding--by the limits that our Constitution places on the power of the executive branch of government.

Yet, if I am reading the political tea leaves better than Ocasio-Cortez's incumbent opponent did in the Democratic primary, the new congresswoman is wielding a great deal more power than her lowly position as a first-term legislator would suggest. Like the "tea party" Representatives before her, Ocasio-Cortez was swept into office by a wave of public frustration. But unlike the members of the "tea party," whose momentum largely fizzled when it met the impenetrable wall of entrenched career politicians in their own party, Ocasio-Cortez seems to have the Democrats in her pocket. Put simply, they're afraid of being the next Joe Crowley.

We often think of the United States as a democracy, and that is, of course, partially right. But the beauty of a representative democracy is that legislative decision-making occurs at some distance from the back-and-forth waves of public opinion. The biggest problem with Ocasio-Cortez, I think, is that in her very personality she has brought the immediate public discontents directly into House chamber. That in itself isn't the problem, though. The real problem is that her lack of knowledge and her unwillingness to compromise means that whatever she puts forward--however radical, however ill-advised--is going to have a greater chance than it should of actually making it into law.

I recognize that there is very little chance that Ocasio-Cortez will, for example, bring the aviation industry to its knees in a decade, or, for that matter, eliminate "farting cows." But I'm afraid that whatever she manages to craft legislatively is going to be very much of the confrontational, "us-versus-them" variety. It will most certainly go beyond what the prudence of our representative democracy would ordinarily countenance.

The saddest thing, I think, is that there are very real reasons for the public discontent that thrust Ocasio-Cortez into office, and that what we really need right now is a politician who not only "gets' the public's anger, as Ocasio-Cortez clearly does, but who also has the prudence and the wisdom to broker deals and get laws passed that actually help get our nation back on the right path. My assessment, in short, is that Ocasio-Cortez clearly lacks that sort of prudence and wisdom, and that, with the power she's already wielding, there is little incentive for her to grow in these virtues.

29-year-old Ocasio-Cortez gifted with 'infused knowledge,' liberal theologian argues

By GSM News Staff

Washington, D.C., February 19, 2019 - Two months ago Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was a 29-year-old mediocre cum laude college grad and a barista in the Bronx struggling to make ends meet. Today she is an elected member of Congress hailed by liberal pundits as an expert in everything from economic strategy to foreign relations and climate change policy.

How to explain Ocasio-Cortez's sudden intellectual transformation? It's a clear case of "infused knowledge," argued the Rev. Joseph Josephson, S.J., of the left-leaning Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley, Calif.

"The way it works," Rev. Josephson explained, "is that when a charismatic, young politician enters the fray, there is a sudden infusion of knowledge. It doesn't matter that she doesn't know that our bicameral Congress has two chambers, not three, or that she doesn't know that to pay for $40 trillion in entitlements you have to raise, well, $40 trillion. All that matters is that she's young, charismatic, and liberal. That makes everything she says absolutely brilliant."

"This sort of 'infused knowledge' only works for the liberals," Rev. Josephson was quick to add. "It doesn't work for conservatives. With an ignoramus like Trump, for example, it's okay to laugh and ridicule the missteps. But when Ocasio-Cortez can't string together coherent sentences, it's like poetry. She may not be factually right, but that's okay because she's morally right. She's, um... 'aspirational.'"

For evidence of Ocasio-Cortez's sudden infusion of political savvy, Rev. Josephson pointed to her bold "New Green Deal." "Seriously, how else could she have come up with the idea that providing basic income for people who are 'unwilling to work' would be the boon for the U.S. economy that is so clearly is?" he asked.

"All you have to do is look at the countries that provide a basic income to know how well it works," Rev. Josephson added. "France, Finland, Bulgaria -- these are the type of places that are sparking true innovation and entrepreneurism right now. Sure, we have Amazon, Google, Space-X, etc., in in the United States. But Bulgaria has... well... Okay, let me think for a moment"

Rev. Josephson resumed after a pause, "Now remember: It's less about the facts and more about the aspirations. Surely you can see how aspirations, not dollars, drive the economy."

Rev. Josephson deftly turned the interview to Ocasio-Cortez's amazing ability to build consensus. "I mean, how better to get farmers and the folks in the aviation business on your side than to say that you hope to shut down their industry within ten years?" he said. "And if you can't convince the backward rubes in flyover country to stop eating hamburgers made from 'farting cows,' then you could always send them off to reeducation camps to receive their own infusion of knowledge."

Indeed, true consensus-building, as Rev. Josephson explained, is telling the folks who raise the food you eat that you are going to make doing so as hard for them as possible. And if you want to build the cross-isle bridges that are necessary to get things done in Congress, then surely the best strategy is telling Kansas voters that electing a Republican these is akin to voting to be a slave state in 1861.

"Ocasio-Cortez has a bright future in Congress," Rev. Josephson concluded. "Her bull-in-the-chinashop approach will surely get so much accomplished. Really, all she has to do is continue accusing her fellow Democrats of basing their decisions on being white and male to win them over to her side. It's an absolutely brilliant strategy."

Area dairy cows offended by Rep. Ocasio-Cortez's 'farting cows' remark

By GSM News Staff

La Crosse, Wis., February 18, 2019 - Dairy cows here in Wisconsin and throughout the nation were quick to condemn U.S. Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's call last week for the elimination of "farting cows."

Image from Wikicommons

"This has really affected our moo'd," said Bessie, an offended La Crosse-area dairy cow.

Ocasio-Cortez, a 29-year-old, newly minted Democratic congresswoman from the Bronx unveiled a "New Green Deal" that was received enthusiastically by many left-of-center pundits and politicians. Among other radical proposals, Ocasio-Cortez's plan calls for "net-zero" carbon emissions within ten years. An accompanying "talking points" that has since been deleted elaborated, "We aren't sure that we'll be able to get rid of farting cows and airplanes that fast."

"Thank goodness for that," said Bessie. "I really don't plan to become hamburger quite that fast. I'm always telling the humans to 'eat mor chickin.'"

Although Bessie readily acknowledged the science indicating that cows emit more methane than humans, she was adamant that there is more to farts than methane. "Do you know of anyplace on earth where more hot air is produced than Washington, D.C.?" Bessie asked.

The rest of Bessie's herd was unanimous that the days when the wind blows from due east are by far the stinkiest. "Just read the latest Farm Bill, and you'll know what I mean," said Buttercup.

"I may emit seven pounds of methane per day, but I'm also producing 70 pounds of milk," Buttercup said. "In her proposal Ocasio-Cortez wants to provide 'economic security' to those who are 'unwilling to work.' Does she know what happens to those who are unwilling to work around this place?"

Bessie chimed in, "Maybe in the Brox they're sent to Congress, but not around here!"

Breaking News: Court candidate founded a Christian school that required teachers and students to be Christian

By GSM News Staff

Madison, Wis., February 15, 2019 -- Local experts and Madison area residents alike are expressing shock at learning that Wisconsin Supreme Court candidate Brian Hagedorn, a committed Christian, helped to found a Christian school that actually requires teachers and students to be Christian.

Image from https://www.judgehagedorn.com/

According to a Wisconsin State Journal exclusive, Hagedorn and his wife Christina helped to found Augustine Academy, a private K-8 school in Waukesha County in 2016. The school's code of personal conduct bans "immoral sexual activity" by teachers, staff, parents and students, which it defines as "any form of touching or nudity for the purpose of evoking sexual arousal apart from the context of marriage between one man and one woman."

Tyler Hendricks, the spokesman for Hagedorn's opponent, suggested that Hagedorn's radical beliefs may influence his judicial decisions. "Wisconsinites will need to decide whether Brian Hagedorn can set aside his personal partisan views and be a fair, impartial judge on our state's highest court," he said.

Wilber Wilberson, of Madison, said she was shocked by the report. "Is someone with a point of view that is different from mine even allowed to run for public office?" she asked. "How could he possibly be an impartial judge if he has strong opinions that are different from my strong opinions?"

UW-Madison political scientist Dr. Scott Scottie said that even if Hagedorn can set aside his beliefs, the candidate's political philosophy is troubling. Hagedorn is a constitutional originalist, or textualist, Dr. Scottie said, a judicial philosophy holding that the Constitution should be interpreted as originally written. So even if Hagedorn doesn't let his own Christian beliefs influence his decisions, Dr. Scottie argued, he may inadvertently let the Founders' Christian beliefs do so.

"This is very dangerous," Dr. Scottie said. "We need to have justices who will ensure that the Constitution is interpreted according to the prevailing opinion, and the Founders' views on marriage, for example, or abortion, or pretty much any of these hot-button social issues are decidedly not the prevailing views here in Madison."

Martha Marthowski, also of Madison, said the solution is to pass a law banning public officials from having any opinions of their own at all. "We simply can't have people with beliefs in public office right now," she said. "With so many unenlightened rubes and rednecks still against gay marriage outside of our enlightened Madison enclave, it's just too dangerous."