Tea at Trianon: Men, Abortion, and the Sexual Revolution

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, October 24, 2016

Men, Abortion, and the Sexual Revolution

From Patti Maguire Armstrong:

In the abortion drama, men’s pain was overlooked for a long time. Dr. David Russell is one of those men. He actually overlooked it himself for a time. But death is not nothing. So one cold February morning, he started to remember. Outside an abortion facility with one-hundred-and-fifty other people, the past became the present. Russell had converted to Catholicism, became a veterinarian, and is now a permanent deacon for the Archdiocese of Santa Fe, N.M. But before all that, he had come to that very facility before, and not to pray. In 1983, Russell had gone inside with his girlfriend for an abortion. That is how his son Matthew died. Russell was an agnostic, yet, he tried unsuccessfully to convince his girlfriend not to abort their child. He numbly sat in the waiting room during the procedure. No one spoke to him. The relationship soon ended and he stuffed the abortion experience away, but a light went out from him that day. The whole flashback was entirely unwelcome. Russell didn’t even want to be outside the abortion facility that morning. He thought only fanatics did that, but it was assigned to participate in a prayer vigil for his church class. Emotions and memories broke out of hiding and Russell filled with regret. If only he had known that fatherhood cannot be erased! If only he had realized he had a son and not a blob of tissue, he would have tried harder to convince his girlfriend not to choose abortion. (Read more.)