Culture/Society

It was an obvious contrast in demeanor last week, Eliot Spitzer's lapdog interview of the president of Planned Parenthood and his aggressive sparring with social conservative Tony Perkins. Spitzer simply let Planned Parenthood president Cecile Richards air her spin on the organization, but went after the Family Research Council's (FRC) Perkins from the get-go on CNN Thursday night. Consider…

It must be what's known in the military as "mission creep." Why else would an organization of professional librarians come out in support of the soldier alleged to be responsible for the largest security breach in U.S. military history? When it meets for its annual conference in New Orleans June 23, the American Library Association will vote on a resolution calling on the Secretary of the…

“Cuban Cinema to be Celebrated at the Academy,” gushes a fresh press release from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “The Academy will present “A Celebration of Cuban Film” tonight at 7:30 p.m. at the Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. Hosted by Los Angeles Film Festival artistic director David Ansen, the program will feature film clips, an onstage discussion with…

The headline at Michael Gormley's Associated Press story on the status of New York State's legislation legalizing same-sex marriage ("NY GOP tables gay marriage; showdown looms") does not reflect the bill's status in the legislative process as described in his underlying report. Additionally, Gormley had either the ignorance or the gall to characterize an official with Common Cause, an…

In a statement released Friday, President Barack Obama declared that "LGBT persons are endowed with" what he called "inalienble rights," but omitted the word "Creator" from what clearly was an allusion to the famous language of the Declaration of Independence. The president's June 17 statement was in response to a U.N. resolution on human rights, sexual orientation and gender identity.

In the wake of the largest security breach in U.S. military history, the mainstream media have struggled to report all the facts about Bradley Manning, the Iraq war soldier in the middle of the Wikileaks scandal. In an effort to pursue political correctness over truthful journalism, ABC, CBS and NBC ignored uncomfortable facts about Manning's sexual orientation and history of "emotional…

Via USA Today comes word of the splashy comics company Image putting out a 9/11 Truther comicbook titled "The Big Lie" (h/t to Four Color Media Monitor): In The Big Lie, the heroine is a woman named Sandra, who lost her husband, Carl, during the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City. A particle physicist working at the Large Hadron Collider, she figures out a practical…

As the New York state legislature debates authorizing same-sex marriage, some Republican legislators want to ensure that Empire State business owners in the hospitality industry, such as caterers and florists, could refuse to lend their services to a same-sex couple hoping to hire them without being wrung out to dry in court for discrimination. In response to this development, USA Today's…

The National Labor Relations Board (NLRB) apparently thinks itself qualified to judge how religious a college is. So far in 2011, the NLRB declared two Catholic colleges not Catholic enough to be exempt from federal labor law. This controversial labor union attack on Manhattan College and Xavier University has gone virtually unnoticed by the national news media. The Washington Times was the…

These are tough times to be an American dad, and indeed, an American man. The recession, or "mancession," as it's been called, hit men harder than women; male unemployment was 8.9 percent compared to 8 percent for women in May. Adding insult to injury, leftwing journalists have sniggered about the plight of the "beached white male." In 2010, women became the majority in the work force for…

Reese Witherspoon thinks Hollywood has changed, and not for the better. At the MTV Movie Awards June 5 Witherspoon won the "Generation Award", and in her speech she commented on the changes over her time in Hollywood: "I just want to say to all the girls out there, I know it's cool to be bad. I get it ... but it's also possible to make it in Hollywood without a reality show. When I came up…

It's Sunday evening. What better way to wind down the Lord's Day than tuning into National Public Radio's "All Things Considered" for an unbalanced story on the "ordination" of four supposedly Catholic women "priests"?  Yesterday evening, NPR's Lily Percy profiled two of four women "ordained" in a "Roman Catholic Womenpriests" ceremony on June 4 held at St. John's United Church of Christ…

"Every man, by the nature of his being, is called to generate love." So the Rev. James A. Wehner tells his seminarians, from his perch as rector of the Josephinum, a pontifical college and seminary in Columbus, Ohio. His is a message necessary to the training of priests to a calling that has been marred by scandal, but also to a society that has been afraid to talk frankly about how essential…

It's so ironic that in the very midst of the Anthony Weiner Twitter scandal, television's most shameless channel, MTV, is working overtime to make any notion of sexual restraint obsolete. This year's MTV Movie Awards aerobically established a new low. Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis are starring in the upcoming summer comedy "Friends with Benefits," yet another movie exploring the "dream…