Professor Harvey Mansfield of Harvard has just published a book called "Manliness". The Wall Street Journal reviewer wrote:
He would like to return the notion of manliness to the modern lexicon. His new book, "Manliness" (manfully, no subtitle), argues that the gender-neutral society created by modern feminists has been bad both for women and men, and that it is time for men to rediscover, and women to appreciate, the virtue of manliness.
The Boston Globe even deigned to cover it in their Ideas section on Sunday ("The Manly Man's Man"). Trouble is, Mansfield is such a highly respected scholar, the liberals won't be able to dismiss his book. From the Globe review:
While polishing his role as the Last Conservative Standing at Harvard, Mansfield has also built a reputation as a political theorist solid enough that even liberal political scientists see him as a model for how to practice a humanistic brand of political science. His books ''Machiavelli's Virtue," ''Taming the Prince: The Ambivalence of Modern Executive Power," and ''America's Constitutional Soul" are dense, learned, and steeped in classical thought.
''Manliness," which mates his interest in Great Books and culture-war combat, confronts two trends he has long deplored: academic gender studies, which see ''male" and ''female" as fluid categories constructed by society, and feminism, which says there is almost nothing that men can do that women cannot.
And this is a big part of the problem we have in Massachusetts --emasculated men, who have swallowed extreme feminism, which leads to the acceptance and promotion of homosexuality and gender confusion. Where are the real men in leadership anywhere in this state? A few of our state reps -- not surprisingly, older fellows -- have shown real courage, for instance Reps. Goguen and Travis. And we occasionally see someone outside the institutions -- like Bill Cotter of Operation Rescue, or C. J. Doyle of Catholic Action League, or columnists Don Feder and Howie Carr -- who are real men.
But what of Gov. Romney's latest disingenuous speech on why we have homosexual "marriage" in Massachusetts? Romney spoke to several thousand Southern Republicans in Memphis on Friday. He told them that the Mass. Supreme Judicial Court legalized same-sex "marriage"... implying he was helpless to stop it. But the Court did NOT legalize same-sex "marriage" -- it just produced a fraudulent unconstitutional opinion on the issue.
If anyone was responsible for same-sex "marriage" in this state, it was Gov. Romney. He should have issued an executive order to the Dept. of Public Health and town clerks NOT to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples. Period. (Search this blog for more on Romney's failure to uphold his Constitutional responsibilities.) Gov. Romney should have followed the Constitutional instructions on how to be a "manly man". The buck stops with him.
