Save the whales, er, males that is!

Men have been domesticated to within an inch of their lives, attending Lamaze classes, counting contractions, bottling expressed breast milk for midnight feedings – I expect men to start lactating before I finish this sentence – yet they are treated most unfairly in the areas of reproduction and parenting.

Very funny paragraph in that excerpt from the Times piece, which is an extract from Kathleen Parker's book, Save the Males.

I expect gender issues to come up a lot more over the next couple of decades. How societies--here in America and elsewhere--deal with that will have profound impacts in a number of ways. There is something happening here.

All the more the reason to be reminded of a piece that was in Slate a long time ago--well, in 2004--that reviewed Bastards on the couch. An excerpt: The bastards' stories make clear that they know better than to believe in quick, across-the-board fixes. Nor do they seem to set much store by a one-size-fits-all diagnosis of the problem. There's plenty of tinkering, not just talking, ahead for all us—and aren't men famously good at that?

If you liked that, then read the other piece on The Bitch in the House. Excerpt: "Every woman I know is mad at her husband, just mad mad mad at everything," a friend informs Cathi Hanauer, the editor of the best-selling anthology The Bitch in the House (subtitled 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage) .... "Why … hadn't I been warned of this—the loss of identity, the potential claustrophobia, the feeling of being utterly trapped?"

The Pastor Rick Warren exam at Saddleback

Kathleen Parker has a good argument in her WaPo column:

At the risk of heresy, let it be said that setting up the two presidential candidates for religious interrogation by an evangelical minister -- no matter how beloved -- is supremely wrong.
It is also un-American. ...

Her closing lines are great ...

For the moment, let's set aside our curiosity about what Jesus might do in a given circumstance and wonder what our Founding Fathers would have done at Saddleback Church. What would have happened to Thomas Jefferson if he had responded as he wrote in 1781:
"It does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."
Would the crowd at Saddleback have applauded and nodded through that one? Doubtful.
By today's new standard of pulpits in the public square, Jefferson -- the great advocate for religious freedom in America -- would have lost.