Category: Social Issues

  • By Selwyn Duke There was a time when boys of easy virtue had to content themselves with sneaking a peek at the girls’ swim team during practice. But social engineers may make this passé with a proposal to allow boys to use girls’ bathrooms and locker rooms. No, this isn’t the plot of a decadent…

  • By Selwyn Duke The word “hero” so often conjures up images of the brash and the bold. We may think of Audie Murphy’s WWII exploits, the Spartans at Thermopylae, or the doomed holdouts at the Alamo. But then there are the quiet heroes, people such as Oskar Schindler. Ever since Schindler’s List hit the silver…

  • By Selwyn Duke By now we’ve all heard about the air-traffic controller who allowed his kids direct airplanes at John F. Kennedy Airport last month. Yes, that’s “kids” — plural. It is now being reported that after the controller, identified as 49-year-old Glenn Duffy, let his 8 or 9-year old son take the reins, he…

  • By Selwyn Duke She is now a healthy baby, bouncing about, playing with bubbles in the bathtub, and taking in everything this mysterious world she entered has to offer. But she almost never was. Or, at least, she almost never was outside the womb. In fact, she certainly never would have been had the aspiring…

  • By Selwyn Duke In this age of media insolvency and newsroom job cuts, I sometimes think that restaurant reviewers are doubling as religion writers.  After all, both today seem to treat their subjects as matters of taste.  In fact, I expect to soon open a modern newspaper’s religion page and read something akin to the…

  • “Outsourcing” charity to the government is not only inefficient, it’s not charity. Worse still, it’s evil. By Selwyn Duke A while back I read about a woman whose college professor had told her not to give to charity. His reasoning? It’s the government’s job. I wonder, would the good professor maintain this perspective were he…

  • By Selwyn Duke God may not have a place in the modern American classroom, but the Devil is a different story. That is, at least in one North Carolina high school. After reading the short story “The Devil and Tom Walker” — which involves a character who makes a deal with Satan but then balks…

  • By Selwyn Duke At one time some would call them “deniers.”  The more generous called them “skeptics.”  But now, increasingly, it appears that they can be called something else: sane.  Yes, the climate has certainly changed. Even in the mainstream media, the less liberal organs are waking up.  There is now a never-ending barrage of…

  • By Selwyn Duke Whenever criticizing grammar and punctuation, you run the risk of being labeled punctilious.  Worse still, since even many good writers involved in Internet journalism disgorge the odd typo, there’s the chance you will come to be regarded as an expert on the glass-house real estate market.  Yet there’s no doubt that the…

  • By Bruce Walker Turner Movie Classics on February 27th showed its viewers My Son John, a 1952 film which Robert Osborne advised his audience had been deliberately put out of circulation since soon after it was released.  In his introduction to the film, Osborne acknowledges that the film’s stars and producers were first rate.  The…