"... this kind of stories shows that there is at least a section of young girls coming up who has looked childbirth in the face, has seen the worst that can be said of it, and still regards it as heroic and central."
You may think it sentimental or even foolish of me, but this sentence brought a tear to my normally cold and unsentimental eye. The heroism of motherhood, which, at one time, had been the inspiration of countless trivial popular ballads and songs and Mother's Day Cards, is a hard sentiment to maintain in a divorce culture.
Love of motherhood is the vulgar sentiment: so of course G.K. Chesterton, and all sane men, should approve of it and adore it.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you speak of divorce, rather than contraception and abortion, as a source of the modern malaise, what (me and other) conservatives call "the attack on family values."
If I was suddenly elected monarch in my nation, I would, frankly, ignore the cries of my fellow Christian Conservatives about trivial things like Gay Marriage, Pornography, Unwed Motherhood. If I were monarch, my first law would be to repeal no-fault divorce. That, nothing else, is the source of the disintegration of the nuclear family. Let the heterosexuals remove the beam from their own eye before lifting the mote from the homosexual eye.
My next act as monarch (should history be so cruel as to elevate a philosopher, lawyer, newspaperman, and novel-writer to the throne-- all professions that should be disqualified from holding power) would be to reintroduce the legal and social stigma attached to the mothers of bastards.
There is nothing wrong, indeed, much that is right and even holy about sixteen-year-olds yearning for motherhood. The wrongheadedness is in thinking that fathers are replaceable, expendable. No, the Virgin Mary herself needed no man to have a son, but even she did not forget or ignore Saint Joseph, patron saint of Fathers.
How cruel is the kindness and convenience of no-fault divorce. Divorce is like amputation. I can imagine it being needed in some rare cases: adultery, abandonment, wifebeating. I cannot imagine it as a good thing.
You speak of the pain and bitterness, the lingering bitterness of divorce. Your words ring true. Have we not seen what it is like to have two or three generations raised with a distaste for marriage, or a suspicion of it? The Culture of Death is also the Culture of Bitterness.
Let me ask a question on a tangent to the original post: do you see a relationship between the reaction to the Pregnancy Pact story, or at least your reader's posts on it, and their religious convictions, if known? I ask because I suspect this is not a conservative-versus-liberal issue, but a Christian-versus-Worldly-'Wisdom' issue.
(I cannot see too many Catholics objecting to the yearning for motherhood, even if they object to the madness of an unwed group of schoolgirls vowing to help each other raise the babies without those and long-extinct creatures myth calls reliable bread-winning fathers.)
Very Interesting essay
You may think it sentimental or even foolish of me, but this sentence brought a tear to my normally cold and unsentimental eye. The heroism of motherhood, which, at one time, had been the inspiration of countless trivial popular ballads and songs and Mother's Day Cards, is a hard sentiment to maintain in a divorce culture.
Love of motherhood is the vulgar sentiment: so of course G.K. Chesterton, and all sane men, should approve of it and adore it.
I think you hit the nail on the head when you speak of divorce, rather than contraception and abortion, as a source of the modern malaise, what (me and other) conservatives call "the attack on family values."
If I was suddenly elected monarch in my nation, I would, frankly, ignore the cries of my fellow Christian Conservatives about trivial things like Gay Marriage, Pornography, Unwed Motherhood. If I were monarch, my first law would be to repeal no-fault divorce. That, nothing else, is the source of the disintegration of the nuclear family. Let the heterosexuals remove the beam from their own eye before lifting the mote from the homosexual eye.
My next act as monarch (should history be so cruel as to elevate a philosopher, lawyer, newspaperman, and novel-writer to the throne-- all professions that should be disqualified from holding power) would be to reintroduce the legal and social stigma attached to the mothers of bastards.
There is nothing wrong, indeed, much that is right and even holy about sixteen-year-olds yearning for motherhood. The wrongheadedness is in thinking that fathers are replaceable, expendable. No, the Virgin Mary herself needed no man to have a son, but even she did not forget or ignore Saint Joseph, patron saint of Fathers.
How cruel is the kindness and convenience of no-fault divorce. Divorce is like amputation. I can imagine it being needed in some rare cases: adultery, abandonment, wifebeating. I cannot imagine it as a good thing.
You speak of the pain and bitterness, the lingering bitterness of divorce. Your words ring true. Have we not seen what it is like to have two or three generations raised with a distaste for marriage, or a suspicion of it? The Culture of Death is also the Culture of Bitterness.
Let me ask a question on a tangent to the original post: do you see a relationship between the reaction to the Pregnancy Pact story, or at least your reader's posts on it, and their religious convictions, if known? I ask because I suspect this is not a conservative-versus-liberal issue, but a Christian-versus-Worldly-'Wisdom' issue.
(I cannot see too many Catholics objecting to the yearning for motherhood, even if they object to the madness of an unwed group of schoolgirls vowing to help each other raise the babies without those and long-extinct creatures myth calls reliable bread-winning fathers.)