One last thing about that Kersten column

Don't everyone go telling this to Spotty, but I don't always make it to the end of a Katherine Kersten column. I know, I know, I ought to read them to the bitter end so that I get the full effect, but sometimes I just can't do it.

I have now resolved to end this short-cutting of Katie. What brought this on was the last line in her latest coumn, wherein she misses the everything there is to miss about the faculty of St. Thomas choosing a classic dystopian text. I'll leave it to others to explain to Katie why it's no surprise that the faculty of an institution whose administration is lurching right back to the middle ages would choose to express their displeasure this way. Others can point out that the reason the book was chosen was the very same reason it was written: A warning of what may come to pass.

My beef with her today is her insistence that such books are so last century, so old school. Arguing that the women of St. Thomas have moved beyond such trite notions of yesteryear like equality and the oppression by the pariarchy, Kersten points out the great strides women have made in society. But then she ends with her true message, that all that is meaningless in the face of why women really are sent to college:

For many female college students, the challenge is going to be, not resisting male tyranny, but finding an equally well-educated man to marry.

Living a full life? Intellectual and professional challenge and success? Happiness in what you are and what you contribute? No, dear, your greatest challenge is to become joined to a man.

"There is more than one kind of freedom...Freedom to and freedom from. In the days of anarchy, it was freedom to. Now you are being given freedom from. Don't underrate it." ---Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale