Free Republic

In middle school there were all these cheeky euphemisms for menstrual cycles. You might say that Aunt Flo was visiting, or that the crimson tide was coming in, or that you were riding the crimson wave. God forbid you called your period what it was, or said anything that could make boys aware that you had a body to tend. I was thinking of this, these euphemisms and this body apologia, late into the night of the midterm elections Tuesday. TV pundits remarked with apparent shock that the anticipated “red wave” — the Republican influx expected to overturn control of...

You can always tell how insular a person has become in their politics when a term that has been used regularly regarding a topic that has been in the news for years strikes them as something "new."Of course, people who don't share columnist Monica Hesse's Bryn Mawr value system have actually been using the word for some time.Okay, I shouldn't be so hard on Bryn Mawr. After all, it has a politically diverse student body with only around 42% identifying as "liberal" and the rest identifying as Marxists.

To the men who love “Little Women”: Hello! You are not alone. There are many of you, and you have all been emailing me to confess, as if it were a shameful secret, your deep affection for a 150-year-old story about four girls growing up in Civil War-era Massachusetts, making currant jam and accidentally burning their dresses in the fireplace.

It’s a peculiar feature of our culture that men who behave in predictably masculine ways find themselves chastised and scolded for not being more feminine. This brings me to Little Women, which is not exactly packing in male ticket buyers. Why would it? No one expected women to turn up for Rambo: Last Blood, and no one seemed particularly interested in the male-female breakdown of the ticket sales for that one. Yet op-ed writers keep pitching versions of the same strange thesis, which is that we should be cross with men for not buying tickets to Little Women. “Dear men...

I was in Maine on the day that marriage qualified for the ballot this November. I went to Maine as president and founder of the National Organization for Marriage, which helped local groups organize the signature drive in Maine, as we did in California for Proposition 8. Most of the people in Maine were enthusiastic, but one clergyman asked me, "Shouldn't we live with our neighbors in peace?" His question haunts me for its debased presumptions: Is using democracy to fight for shared values somehow an act of war against our neighbors? "Agree with me or you're a hater" is...