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The NBC show Friday Night Lights is about high school football in a small Texas community. High-school students are taking part in a class discussion when the brash star halfback, Brian “Smash” Williams crudely argues that monogamy is unnatural for a male. The teacher is puzzled by Smash’s statement. A female friend and classmate, Waverly,
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Childhood exuberance is now a liability. Behaviors that were once accepted as normal, even if mildly irritating to adults, are increasingly viewed as unacceptable and cause for medical intervention. High energy, lack of impulse control, inability to sit still and listen, lack of organizational skills, fidgeting, talking incessantly—these typical childhood qualities were widely tolerated until
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Even if you haven’t actually read a version of the legend of King Arthur, you’ve probably seen one of the movies or TV miniseries about it. I well remember the least serious: the 1963 animated Disney classic The Sword in the Stone, which many children from then on have also seen. We just don’t have
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The American Civil Liberties Union used to be a great institution. Founded in January 1920, the ACLU sought to become, in its own words, “the nation’s premier defender of the rights enshrined in the U.S. Constitution.” Over the decades, the organization fought for civil liberties even when no one else would. The ACLU fought against
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A few years ago, I put together an amusing collection of stories comparing truly bizarre examples of political correctness and bureaucratic idiocy in the United States and United Kingdom. I was especially impressed (in a you-must-be-joking fashion) that a British job placement office got in trouble for discrimination because they sought “reliable” and “hard-working” applicants.
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In “To Lucasta, On Going to the Wars,” Richard Lovelace (1618–1657) writes of a soldier who laments leaving the “chaste breast and quiet mind” of his mistress to embrace “a sword, a horse, a shield.” But he concludes the poem with this thought: “Yet this inconstancy is such As thou too shalt adore; I could
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