I task all my readers to ask their feminist friends how they would rate the following hypothetical woman:

While a housewife, having only been elected to local office, this woman helped expose the corruption and/or end the political careers of three white male Republican politicians holding statewide office.

Ask them if they believe such a woman should be celebrated for her achievements, perhaps even a candidate for higher office.  Make sure to take down their responses.  Once they have expounded on this (supposedly) hypothetical woman, you can tell them that she’s not so hypothetical.  For such a woman does exist.  She is currently (more…)

In his short biography on the greatest man of the century just concluded, British historian John Keegan writes:

It is now often thought that Churchill became prime minister because of the success of the German blitzkrieg, which produced the strategic catastrophe against which he had warned throughout the appeasement years.  It is ironic, in retrospect, to perceive that the appeasers were brought down by their mishandling of the comparatively insignificant sideshow in Norway, leaving Churchill to inherit the catastrophe he had argued so long to avert, during the first hours of its unrolling.

Emphasis added.

In May of 1940, Wintson Churchill inherited a crisis far worse than would Barack Obama nearly sixty-nine years later.  Not just that, repeatedly throughout the 1930s, that great man had warned of just such a catastrophe and had urged his colleagues in Parliament to take action to avert the crisis–on numerous occasions.

By contrast, while then-Senator Obama did write one letter expressing concern about the mortgage mess, he never proposed (or even signed onto) legislation designed to avert the financial meltdown.  Churchill thus had more reason to whine about the crisis he had “inherited,” but never did. Churchill warned repeatedly before the catastrophe.  Obama whines repeatedly after he was elected in large part because Americans had better confidence in  him to deal with the consequences of the catastrophe.

Maybe Obama should ask our friends across the pond to return the bust of Churchill he recently returned to he can ponder the last lion‘s lesson of leadership.

Back in the late 1970s, just after Howard Hughes passed, people would regularly come forward saying with fantastic stories detailing how they  met the reclusive billionaire, with him promising them part–or all–of his fortune.

Most, if not all of those stories turned out to be fabrications.  As I read the various (and often conflicting) stories on Michael Jackson’s final days (with one report say he was too feeble to rehearse for his upcoming London concerts, while others saying that he was performing in practice at the same level as he had danced in his heyday), I suspect we’ll be subject to the same sort of storytelling about the late King of Pop.

It seems the eccentricity of certain celebrity icons inspires stories even more outlandish than the actual facts of their lives.

CREDIT WHERE IT’S DUE:  This idea came to me the other day when reading Jim Geraghty’s, Michael Jackson and the Birth of Celebrity Culture.

I’m ambivalent about gay marriage in part because, in studying the history of the institution, we learn it is defined by gender difference.  Up until the 1990s, those cultures which have recognized same-sex unions either called  them something different than marriage or, if they did call them marriage, required one partner to live in the guise of the opposite sex.

And while today, we do not define gender roles as strictly as did most societies until the second half of the century just concluded — and as do many nations around the world, particularly the Islamic world, we can still see differences between the genders, particularly in the gay community.  Just contrast how gay men and lesbians relate to one another.

Despite these noticeable differences, the politically correct voices in academia and the gay movement, balk at acknowledging the reality of this experience.  In one breath, they tell us gender is a social construct, but in the next, they tell us sexual orientation is predetermined, it is, so speak, encoded in our DNA, leading blogger Gregory of Yardale to ask:

How is it the left can simultaneously claim that gender is a purely social construct, but homosexuality is determined by genetics?

Gender differences are more than just physiological, and our sexual orientation may well develop from a great variety of factors, some nature, some nurture.