Peter Suderman writes at Reason:

After all these years of media scare stories trying to terrify readers with worries about how kids are too sedentary and don’t eat well, I suppose it’s comforting to find a scare story about how teen boys are obsessed gym rats who consume lots of protein and very little fat. The New York Times delivers the goods:

Take David Abusheikh. At age 15, he started lifting weights for two hours a day, six days a week. Now that he is a senior at Fort Hamilton High School in Brooklyn, he has been adding protein bars and shakes to his diet to put on muscle without gaining fat.

“I didn’t used to be into supplements,” said Mr. Abusheikh, 18, who plans on a career in engineering, “but I wanted something that would help me get bigger a little faster.”

Pediatricians are starting to sound alarm bells about boys who take unhealthy measures to try to achieve Charles Atlas bodies that only genetics can truly confer. Whether it is long hours in the gym, allowances blown on expensive supplements or even risky experiments with illegal steroids, the price American boys are willing to pay for the perfect body appears to be on the rise.

Peter adds:

Yes, the same paper that recently warned that overweight teens who don’t exercise were at increased risk of diabetes and likened teen obesity to smoking, and which in 2009 published a lengthy piece on how teen obesity led to early death (sample expert quote: “We know that health behaviors are established early on in life.”) is now concerned that large numbers of teenage boys are exercising, and experimenting with diets that will help them build muscle.

The whole post here. Do read the part where the Times blames Paul Ryan for all of it.

Public health menace?

Two week ago, we saw something unprecedented in American politics.

Four states voted in support of the radical redefinition of marriage which makes men and women, husband and wife, mother and father become merely optional for families. This view of family is quite radical and contrary to how humanity works. But do these victories mean it’s all over for natural marriage? Not even close.

We must understand some important realities about the races in these four states: Washington, Minnesota, Maine, and Maryland.

1. They are deeply blue, largely liberal states.

2. The protect-marriage forces were dramatically outspent by the redefinition crowd, at least 4 to 1 in each of these races.

3. The final vote margin in each was very thin, which was remarkable given the first two points.

These are important to keep in mind.

Natural marriage still has very strong support in our nation and that can continue if we don’t get discouraged and throw in the towel. The National Organization for Marriage (NOM) reports that scientific, nationwide polling conducted on Election Day revealed that 60 percent of all Americans voting across the country that day stated they believe marriage should be protected and remain a relationship between a man and a woman. This is even a tad higher than the same finding this past September where 57 percent of voters expressed their support for natural marriage.

One of the growing beliefs fueling the mainstreaming of homosexuality is the assumption that homosexuality is just as natural as heterosexuality, that one is just born that way. I hate to call Lady Gaga out on her facts, but there is not one shred of scientific evidence that people are simply “born that way.” Even though scientists have furiously been looking for such proof for many decades now, it simply does not exist. It is mere hopeful belief, resting singularly on unchallenged rhetoric and cultural pressure. Repeating something often enough doesn’t make it true.

Here is a fact that all must face: Homosexuality as a personal or social identity is thoroughly a political construction, no more than 60 or 70 years old by the most liberal measure. Does that sound strange? Let me explain.

Sure, same-sex sex has existed since the most ancient of times. But it was simply understood as an act — something someone did to another person. And in nearly all cultures throughout time, it was taboo to varying degrees. It was there in ancient Greek culture, but this was only between a man and boys or slaves, as even The New Yorker noted last week. Such acts between men of the same status in society were viewed as shameful. Romantic, emotionally-based same-sex relationships were unheard of. Bronislaw Malinowski in his book, The Sexual Lives of Savages from his studies of Polynesian natives in the early 20th century, suggests that this social revulsion is more natural than culturally constructed. “Sodomy is repugnant to natives” and it was so disdained that “it would be an insult thus to assume that any sane person would like to commit” the act. Malinowski sarcastically notes: “The natives are perfectly aware that venereal disease and homosexuality are among the benefits bestowed on them by Western culture.”

Then at the turn of the last century, same-sex sex became a condition among some Western cultures. One of the first sexologists (and a very liberal one) — Havelock Ellis — referred to it as “sexual inversion” and later homosexuality. The term “homosexuality” arose around the 1880s and 1890s to describe what was predominantly understood as sexual psycho-pathology — a condition one suffered from or had.

And only a few decades ago in certain developed Western nations did it become an identity — something someone was.

And this was only after the American Psychiatric Association stopped classifying same-sex attraction as a mental disorder in 1973. Don’t think for a moment that this was done as a result of the careful scientific deliberation of the association. It is commonly known they acquiesced to the rambunctious and constant protest of gay activists.

And this brings us to where we are today with the issue: People are just born that way, so accept it. Mark Steyn explains the implications of this social evolution:

One can object to and even criminalize an act; one is obligated to be sympathetic toward a condition; but once it’s a fully fledged 24/7 identity, like being Hispanic or Inuit, anything less than wholehearted acceptance gets you marked down as a bigot. 

And so that’s where we are. Our friends at Chick-fil-A and researchers like Mark Regnerus know this thuggery all too well. Many marriage redefiners — now operating under the focus-group tested and approved slogan “marriage equality” — know that virulent emotional manipulation is reprehensible, but remarkably effective. Who wants to be branded as a hateful bigot? Making sure that all people are treated with love, respect, and dignity is something we all must be tirelessly committed to and most of those who lead efforts to defend marriage strongly believe and practice this.

But to permanently and radically change the fundamental nature and definition of the universal practice of marriage and family founded on the social necessity of male/female complementarity just because some cultural elites slime you as hatefully prejudiced if you don’t is not something anyone should bullied into. This is not what an important social debate should be made of. Unfortunately this one has become that and we are poorer people for it.

Glenn T. Stanton is the director of Family Formation Studies at Focus on the Family and the author of (most recently) The Ring Makes All the Difference (Moody, 2011) and Secure Daughters, Confident Sons: How Parents Guide Their Children into Authentic Masculinity and Femininity (Multnomah, 2011).

Here’s a nicely done little video by two gay dads and their two adoptive children. It’s part of what they call their “Gay Family Values” video series and they’ve made so that those who don’t know a gay family can learn how normal and wonderful a gay family can be. And that they are just like any other family. It features their beautiful daughter Selena singing a sweet song about how much she loves and enjoys having two dads. Who would expect anything different? Her little voice will grab your heart.

But it is not just a song from a precious little girl telling us about how much she loves her family, a song you want every little girl to be able to sing. It’s a sharply crafted social statement to influence the public debate on the nature of family, drafted to explain to us how special it is for Selena and her brother to “have two fathers, two real fathers.” For her — if we are to believe the song comes straight from her heart in her own words — her family is special for the very reason that she has two fathers. And she also wants us to know that, as her song says, “if they ever have to, they both can be my mom.” They do sound like two very special and talented fathers, even if they’ve positioned Selena to the front of the culture war as a gay-family apologist.

But Selena’s song — or actually her two dads’ production and posting of it — raises some interesting questions.

If their family is just like any other family — a normal day-in, day-out family just like yours — then why is their series called “Gay Family Values” and not just “Family Values”? You see, while they want us to see them as a normal family, they don’t want us to see them as just like any other family. And they are quite proud of that. That’s the whole point of the video.

They are a “gay” family with two real fathers who can also be Selena’s moms. (In another video, she does wonder why she doesn’t have a mom like other kids.) It’s just that no one else should call them different, because that would be taken as a statement of judgment, rather than just a mere observation.

If their family and situation is normal, then why make the video? No two families are entirely the same. Imagine the television family, the Waltons, making a similar video with youngest daughter Elizabeth singing to us, “Sure we have lots of kids. My mom and dad work at home and our grandparents live right here with us. And if they ever have to, they can be our mom and dad too.” Or the one of the Douglas family from My Three Sons. Or the Partridge family. Or the Brady family. Or Opie from the Andy Griffith Show.

When a family has to explain that they are just like any other family, it is a strong sign they are not. And those who feel compelled to explain probably don’t even believe it.

“My eye itches,” eight-year-old Camille said one morning as she rolled out of bed.

“Scratch it,” I said without looking at her. It was a cool March morning, and my husband and I were headed out of town for the Southern Republican Leadership Conference in Memphis, where we were “working” the first presidential straw poll of the 2008 season. Even though it was two years before the election, I’d spent the last few months trying to get people to vote for Mitt Romney. No, not Matt. Mitt. And yes, he’s from Massachusetts. People hadn’t heard of him, so I’d tried my best to persuade them to vote for him instead of any of a number of southern politicians.

“But it hurts,” she protested. I put down a bag of buttons that read “Romney — Yankee Governor with Southern Values,” and looked at her. Her eye was swollen shut.

My stomach sank. Pink eye? I’d planned to take the kids to school, and the babysitter would pick them up afterwards. I didn’t have childcare during the school hours, and I couldn’t send her to school looking like she’d been hit in the eye.

“Well, I guess you’re both coming with us,” I said, as I dropped medicine in her eye.

The next day, my husband and I found ourselves standing in a convention center, handing out tee shirts, pamphlets, and talking to anyone who’d listen about the guy we hoped would be the next president of the United States. “Mitt,” I’d say. “Like a glove.” The kids happily played behind our table, laughing and putting Romney stickers on their faces.

“Want to help me hand these out?” I asked my six-year-old, Austin, who dutifully stood at a busy intersection near the main hall and handed out buttons. Because it was the first straw poll of that election cycle, the press corps was out in full force, and soon Newsweek had a camera on him.

“Who are you supporting, young man?” the reporter asked.

“Mitt Romney,” Austin nervously responded.

“Are you skipping school to do this?”

“Yes, he is,” I interrupted, “but Romney believes in education.”

That was when my kids were thrust into the political realm in which our family has lived for the past seven years.

Read the rest of this article, which is the last of my 2012 coverage for Parents here!

While the bus was driving. . .

Police on Thursday asked for the public’s help to find a man wanted in connection with an alleged rape on a public bus in Culver City, which was captured by surveillance cameras.

An 18-year-old woman with the mental capacity of a 10 year old told police she was raped about 5 p.m. Wednesday after she boarded Bus Line 217 at La Cienega and Jefferson boulevards, according to the LA County Sheriff’s Department.

The alleged aggressor boarded the bus the same time as the woman.

“The suspect followed her to the rear of the bus where she sat down,” sheriff’s officials said. “The suspect, without any warning or provocation, stood and faced her while positioning himself between her legs and sexually assaulted her.”

After about 10 minutes, the man, pictured below on bus surveillance camera, stopped his alleged assault and exited the bus at Sepulveda Boulevard and Slauson Avenue, the route’s last stop.

“She did not scream or shout out. She was too afraid to do so,” said Sgt. Dan Scott with LA County Sheriff’s Department.

Somehow our side — which would probably vote to castrate rapists if such a bill were to come up for a vote — became the party that endorsed rape in 2012. There’s a real “war on woman” out there and the women are in danger.

We took our family to Boston for what we hoped would be a victory celebration. It wasn’t.

While we waited for Governor Romney to give his concession speech, some reporters documented our distress for posterity. Above is our whole family (with my older daughter in the background) minus my four year old who stayed back home in Tennessee

Am I sad that our victory party quickly turned into a “teaching moment?” Definitely. But I’m also glad that we were all together to help each other process the loss.

I’ll let you know once we figure it all out. 

Details here. 

I’ve written on this site several times before about bisphenol-A (BPA), a chemical used in everyday products like baby bottles, storage containers, and in the lining of canned food and the bad science surrounding efforts to ban it.  Now science writer Jon Entine has a must-read article in Forbes that confirms long-held suspicions about the motivations of activists opposed to the use of BPA.

Entine explains that University of California-San Diego researcher Michael Baker hyped the results of his BPA research in a press release – a press release that Baker himself now renounces (how convenient for him to backtrack after his specious press release generated dozens of terrifying headlines). 

Baker actually admitted his error to Entine, saying “I have no evidence, none at all, that BPA causes any problems in humans. This was a theoretical exercise, and it would be trumped by what actually happens in the real world. Based on what I know now, neither BPA nor its metabolites are harmful. I am upset that my structural study is misused by some.”

Oopsie. 

Just a tiny little mistake that causes moms like me to gnaw off their fingernails at the thought that we might be poisoning our children with chemicals. But that’s okay; regular moms and dads (already struggling with high food and fuel costs) can just run out and support the cottage industry that has sprouted up in the wake of these terrifying headlines — the BPA-free industry.  Parents won’t mind that these products are much more expensive. After all, isn’t your baby’s health worth it? Surely parents aren’t already cash-strapped with the truck-load of diapers they purchase on a monthly basis along with the toys, books, and other baby items one simply must supply a child with these days.

Of course, what parents won’t hear about is Baker’s mea culpa because if there’s one thing parents can count on from today’s science writers it is an absolute dearth of Entine-esque journalism when it comes to BPA. Baker’s study might not have generated such dramatic headlines if these journalists had revealed, as Entine does, that Baker has zero prior expertise in studying BPA or that his study didn’t include humans or even animals but rather was a computer simulation. Even more stunning, Entine discovered that Baker was unaware of the quite impressive body of research that shows BPA is safe.

In fact, thousands of studies conducted have shown BPA to be perfectly safe, yet those with an evangelical interest in continuing the hand-wringing about BPA cling desperately to any shred of information, no matter how far-fetched, supporting their position. And now, the very researchers who study BPA can’t be counted on to stick by their own findings that BPA is safe. 

Don’t expect anti-BPA activists to be bowed by this latest blow to their religious crusade. Their ideology might still be intact but the science is proving them wrong. That’s a good thing for parents who have grown weary of these alarmist claims and who just want to keep their kids safe without spending a fortune.

A friend and conservative UCLA student sends a report from what her father calls the bowels of the Roman Coliseum. Keep up the good work, Sofia!

I just did one hour of tabling for the Bruin Republicans. We had about seven or eight people with signs and energy and smiles hanging out at the bottom of Bruin walk, the main pathway that everyone takes when going to and from class.

I was pretty hesitant because I knew I was going to be seen by a lot of my friends (I think I have a lot of liberal friends) but it was actually so awesome: There are WAY more Romney supporters than I thought! It was pretty scary having to look people in the eye with your Romney/Ryan sign and smile and shout “Vote for Romney!” or “Fire Obama!” or “High fives for Romney!” But there were a lot of people who quietly and discreetly high-fived us or said “Fight the good fight,” or “Good job, guys” and it was very encouraging. There were also a lot of people who sneered, grimaced, or laughed and shouted “f*** Romney,” but we had some hilarious comebacks. One of the guys in Bruin Republicans has no filter and is not afraid to say the most outrageous things. A group of Latinas would walk by and he would say, “Latinas con Romney!” and they would start cracking up. Or a hippy/liberal-artsy-looking woman would walk by and he would shout “Vote Romney for women’s rights!”

A friend and I noticed that a lot of the “high-fives for Romney” that we got were from good-looking guys. That was very encouraging. I got high-fives from football players, volleyball players, and frat guys! I don’t know if that means they are actually supporters or if they just love high-fives.One older man in a suit walked by and quietly said to me with a big smile, “It’s good to see there are at least some people with sense around here. Good work, guys!” That was really nice. And lots of people just said how impressed they were that we actually had the guts to stand out there in public and be loud and create a scene in front of the hundreds of people that were walking by.

I’m super excited to vote tomorrow and watch the election (got two different invitations to viewing parties!)!

What are you doing to help at the local level?  There are lots of things you can do. Here is a photo of my husband, making get-out-the-vote phone calls for the local candidate of his choice. 

And, by the way, if you live in Vista, California, and want to know who I am voting for in the local elections, you can go to my personal facebook page and be my friend. You will find my personal choices on my timeline a week or so ago. 

Call it the Mister Rogers Effect: Moms want their kids to grow up in a neighborhood where the adults are virtuous. Whether it’s the baker, the postman, the mayor, or even the President, we want our children to have role models who are kind, generous, truthful. The kind of people your children could safely emulate.

During the most recent debate, some of us sat down with our children to see President Barack Obama and his challenger Mitt Romney discuss foreign policy. They disagreed on many things, particularly on Romney’s auto bailout position. For a few uncomfortable minutes, one accused the other of lying, until Romney suggested people at home should simply look it up.

They did.

For the days following the debate, Romney’s 2008 editorial about how he’d handle the Detroit automakers was the most-read story on the NYT’s website. So, who was telling the truth? Romney was deemed more accurate, but his success in this particular exchange is hardly earth shattering. What is significant is that voters, rather Americans, are realizing the President is not who we hoped he was.

“Here’s what upset me last night, this playing fast and loose with facts,” David Letterman said on his show. “Now, I don’t care whether you’re Republican or Democrat, you want your president to be telling the truth… And so when we found out today or soon thereafter that, in fact, President Obama was not telling the truth about what was excerpted from that op-ed piece, I felt discouraged.”

Of course, “discouraged” is a far cry from the sunny optimism that at one time characterized Americans. Please read my entire article over on Parents magazine here!

Thus saith professor Christopher Tollefsen on The Public Discourse. Tollefsen dissects Mourdock’s theological critics, showing them to intellectual light-weights. 

Perhaps even more egregious was a Washington Post column by theologian Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, former president of the Chicago Theological Seminary, who wrote: “No, God does not ‘cause’ either rape or conception following rape, nor is this ‘God’s intention.’ Rape is a crime.”

(But) Mourdock nowhere suggested that God intended the crime of rape, nor did he deny that rape is “horrible.” On this he and Thistlethwaite, as well as virtually everyone else, are in clear agreement….

But Thistlethwaite is quite wrong, and Mourdock entirely right, as to God’s intentions in the conception of the child….

Mourdock’s remarks presuppose that there is a child, that is, a living human being, when there is conception after rape. This presupposition is straightforwardly a matter of science: contemporary embryology teaches us that the result of the penetration of ovum by sperm is a new living organism, a distinct member of the species Homo sapiens. No one, clearly, would assert that rape changes the science of the matter;…But the admission that the conceptus in rape is a human being is fatal for remarks like the following, again from Thistlethwaite: “When you make God the author of conception following rape, you make God the author of sin. This is a huge theological error, and one that Christian theologians have rejected since the first centuries of the faith.”

The great error here, however, is Thistlethwaite’s, for human life, considered in itself, is no sin, no wrong, no evil. As another theologian John Paul II put it, “life is always a good,” a “priceless gift,” to its possessor.

For pro-lifers, the key thing about Tollefsen’s article is that he is so obviously intelligent! The pro-abortion forces would like to portray pro-lifers as knuckle-dragging numnucks. The pro-death side is the anti-science, anti-intellectual side, and we need to say so.

Read the whole article here.

In their reporting on the financing of the Marriage Amendment in MN, the Star Tribune is treating leftist organizations with kid gloves. 

First off, they treat a Human Rights Campaign press release as if it were a real story. 

A report by the Human Rights Campaign on Thursday said that the Catholic Church has contributed more than half of the funding into efforts to pass a constitutional amendment to ban same-sex marriage in Minnesota.

Look into the tall grass and you will see that this is not nearly so shocking as it sounds: 

Minnesota Catholic Conference Marriage Defense Fund, a political committee created solely to raise money for the effort, has contributed half of the $1.2 million raised to support the measure, the report said.

Okay, so half of $1.2 million is, by my calculations, about $600,000. Of that, “$180,000 came from dioceses around and (sic) the nation, along with more than $130,000 from the Knights of Columbus, the nation’s largest Catholic fraternal organization. The group’s fundraising includes $150,000 combined from dioceses in Crookston, St. Cloud and Winona.”

Where’s the beef? Catholics giving to a Catholic political-action group. I’m shocked, shocked, I tell you.

In the meantime, according to the story itself,

The Human Rights Campaign, Freedom to Marry and their affiliate groups have contributed more than $1.4 million to Minnesotans United for All Families, the group opposing the amendment.

In other words, these two organizations and their affiliates alone have contributed more than the entire budget of Minnesota for Marriage. As Chuck Darrell, head of Minnesota for Marriage put it: “They are vastly out spending our side and they now have the gall to complain about it? It’s embarrassing to see such whining.”

As for getting some Catholic balance to the story, the Star Tribune does quote the Minnesota Catholic Conference. But the Star Tribune then turns to the Catholic Left, the old stand-by astro-turf organization, Call to Action. Brought to you fresh from the 1970’s, along with a leisure suit and a lava lamp. It’s hard to believe this bunch of professional dissidents is still around.

Get a clue, Star Tribune. Catholics are spending their own money, through their own organizations, to promote their beliefs. Jeff Bezos spent $2.5 million of his own money in the state of Washington to impose his view that marriage is a genderless institution. Catholics are allowed to spend their money too.

I got a glimmer of an answer to this question the other night when I went to a candidate’s night meeting of the Tri-City Tea Party.  Most of the candidates for Vista City Council were present. The two I liked were conservative, smart and articulate.  One that I didn’t like was, let us say, lackluster. Ok, I’m being charitable. He could barely say his own name.

I came to find out after the meeting, that he was endorsed by the public employees union.

Several very interesting points here:

1. The unions care about who is on Vista City Council. The typical conservative has no idea and even less interest in local elections. We have book clubs and debate the finer points of conservative theory.

2. A guy like the one I saw is probably pretty easy for the unions to control. After all, if he gets in office, he will owe it to their support. And, he doesn’t seem like a deep thinker who is going to have his own agenda.

3. A guy like this one can move up through the ranks of city, county and state government. The Left grooms a deeper bench for itself than we do.

4. However, a guy like this one will not acquire IQ points, just from moving up the ladder. Case in point: Joe Biden.

5. Cities and school districts across the country have been governed by Leftists for the past 40 years or more. That is why so many cities and schools are failing.

This is why this post belongs on the Home Front.  Everyone has a back yard.  Conservatives tend not to tend their own backyard, at least where politics is concerned. The virtue of the Tea Party movement is that it got fiscal conservatives off the bench and out on the playing field.  Not a moment too soon, either.

It is high time the more conservatives, especially social conservatives got personally involved in local governing. 

Obama’s newest campaign ad features the talented Lena Dunham (creator of HBO’s Girls) and is about losing your voting virginity. The Cornerites have described this as already as awkward, super uncool, and derivative. But Charles Mitchell, over on Evangelicals for Mitt, addressed the religious aspect of it. He writes:

While very little in politics shocks and enrages me today, it does shock and enrage me that the President of the United States would approve and promulgate an ad with blatantly sexual content (not to mention sexual content that denigrates the traditional ethics of the President’s own faith).

In fact, Lena tweeted this to announce her new ad on behalf of the president:

Wouldn’t you assume a Christian, married president with two daughters would not want an actress speaking about him in this manner? (If you haven’t seen it, you can watch it here.)

Can anyone imagine Mitt Romney stooping to this level?

From the Christian Science Monitor:

Then Jay-Z made the modern daddy announcement that really what he wanted to do was to stay home from work for a little bit and just soak up his baby girl. The moms out there swooned.

Still, during a recent interview with Cleveland, Ohio radio station Z1079, Mr. Obama said that he had told Jay-Z to make sure that he was doing his part to be a hands-on dad.

“I made sure that Jay-Z was helping Beyonce out and not just leaving it all to mom and the mother-in-law,” Obama said. This isn’t because the Dad-in-Chief — father of Malia, 14, and Sasha, 11 — has any worries about Jay-Z. It’s just what he talks about with his guy friends, he explained.

“I’ve gotten to know these guys over the past several years,” Obama said about Jay-Z and Beyonce. “We talk about the same things I talk about with all my friends. We talk about kids, and they just had a new baby, they have a new daughter.”

Get that? They talk about “the same things.”

Like, how to coordinate six nannies?

Or the latest designer bedazzled” baby shoes?

Maybe they talked about the recent tragedy in Jay-Z’s life: losing the trademark war for “Blue Ivy?“

Then there’s the $1700-per-night “maternity suite” where Blue Ivy was born. Does Obamacare cover that?

And with healthy eating in the news, I’m sure how Beyoncé lost her baby weight in record time with the help of a personal trainer must have come up in conversation.

But the important thing to take away from all of this is that Barack Obama is just a regular guy with regular friends who have a firm grasp of what the middle-class is going through.

I had to take my son to the pediatrician the other day for what should have been — and what used to be — a ten-minute-maximum follow-up strep culture.

It took an hour.

Why? The office has gone digital. Parents are given iPads to fill out their information, nurses are entering vitals into iPods and doctors and front-office personnel are entering their notes directly into computers.

And there was at least four techies on staff to help the parents, nurses, doctors and the front office accomplish all this.

I guess this is what to expect in the early-adopter phase, but if the delays continue, I’m switching doctors to one that’s not so fancy.

I liked Atlas Shrugged Part II more than Part I, and in fact, more than the book. I know this will be heresy for Rand Followers, so let me explain.

The weakness of Ayn Rand is that her characters are abstractions. Each character stands for an idea or a type. In a way, this is odd for a champion of individualism: Her characters are not actual individuals, but stereotypes, archetypes, or caricatures. The heroes stand up, give long speeches, and the other characters actually listen. Not too realistic.

The characters of Atlas Shrugged II are more human than either the book or the first movie installment. The second movie has a completely different cast, older and less classically beautiful than the cast of Part I. (I imagine there is a story behind the recasting partway through a trilogy, but I haven’t discovered what it is.) The more mature Dagny and Hank of Part II are more appealing as people, precisely because they are more individual. In fact, the only person in the movie who was really movie-star handsome was the revolting and phony James Taggart.

The camera work of the newer movie contributes to the more humane look too. There are more close-ups, more lingering shots of human faces. This movie is filled with people, not archetypes.

You can care about these characters because they are your fellow human beings. When Hank Reardon makes his dramatic courtroom speech the applause from the courtroom audience is totally credible in the movie. In the book, not so much.Rand wanted you to respect her characters for their achievements. But you could care about the Hank Reardon and Dagny Taggart of Atlas Shrugged II even if they got hit by a truck and were in a coma.

This brings me to one serious misstep in the film. In the closing sequence, Dagny crashes her plane in Atlantis where the Randian supermen live. They do not run to the wreckage to help her. They walk, deliberately, slowly. I suppose we are meant to think that they are calculating their own odds of survival or perhaps the moral worth of the people who might be trapped in the wreckage. And when John Galt finally makes it to the plane, (which appears to be in no danger of blowing up) he extends his arm to Dagny. She extends her arm to him. It is all very dramatic, but honestly, it looks like he is going to drag her out of the airplane by the arm.

Uh, wait a minute. This is not very good emergency medical care. EMT professionals would run, not walk. They would reassure the victim. They would not move her, until they had a team of people on hand to move her without further injury. They would do all of this for any person, no questions asked.So we are meant to think that this secret island of incredibly capable super-heroes cannot execute even minimally competent EMT procedures.

I have often thought that everything good and decent in Ayn Rand came from Aristotle, while everything dark and creepy came from Nietzsche. The emphasis on reason and its connection to human happiness comes straight out of Aristotle. The triumph of the human will, and the measuring of moral worth by achievement, all comes from Nietzsche.

Since Rand wrote her book, we have seen a different type of hero: the hero who runs into burning buildings on 9/11. The firemen didn’t ask any questions about the moral worth of the people they were saving. Rather, they were living out their vocation as public-safety officers, a vocation that from the beginning involved the possibility of self-sacrifice.

Rand’s variety of individualism cannot comprehend self-sacrifice. But there are varieties of individualism, just as there are varieties of heroism.There is such a thing, for instance, as Christian individualism. Each and every person came into existence because God willed and loved that person into existence. Each and every person has intrinsic value, independently of their ability to produce anything. Christians believe that each and every person is morally accountable to God.

And even more deeply, Christians believe that God has a personal plan for each and every person, uniquely tailored for that person. To be the very best person you can be, to achieve your greatest “value,” the individual has a responsibility to discover and to follow this plan that God has devised for them. It simply will not do to blindly emulate others, or to do what you are told, or to be the “best” as some particular human endeavor. No second-handers. Your path is far more unique than the intellectual achievement held up by Rand, or the economic equality held up by egalitarians. No Nietzsche-styledÜbermenschen either.

So this is why I liked Part II of the Atlas Shrugged movie more than than the book. It preserves what is good in Rand’s vision. The movie captures Rand’s dystopia of an economy gone off the cliff from stifling and finally inhuman over-regulation. The movie sparks the moral indignation that I think Rand hoped we would feel. But the movie version avoids the worst of Rand’s excesses.

Until that final sequence. Maybe they’ll get it someday.

I get a little lump in my throat every time I see military men and women at the airport . . . even though I sometimes travel with one! It always reminds me of the reality of war and the fact that so many sacrifice on our behalf. The Navy men’s lacrosse team recently encountered some very brave military folks too, when they were flying back to BWI airport after playing a game against Notre Dame.

While at the airport, the team encountered 67 World War II veterans. According to the Navy Athletics Facebook page, the team visited with the veterans, thanked them, and wished them well. Afterwards, as they watched the veterans leave the airport, the team lined up and saluted. They wrote, “It put the entire trip in perspective.”

My advice is to hire a private investigator. Abby writes otherwise:

DEAR ABBY: My wife and I have been married for eight months. She has an occasional habit that makes me wonder whether we got married too young. (She’s 23, I’m 27 and we’re both in graduate school.)

She likes to go out with a group of her friends from high school or with her sister and her sister’s friends, get drunk and stay the night. It doesn’t happen all the time — several times a year — and I’m not worried about her cheating on me. I try not to be the controlling husband and say she “can’t” go out. But it bothers me that she wants to spend the night with her single friends and get drunk. If I try to talk to her about it, she gets angry and says she doesn’t get to see her friends very often.

I don’t understand why her socializing always has to involve drinking and staying out all night. Her sister is my age and has a career in education, but still likes hosting these parties. I wonder how long it will take my wife to outgrow this phase. Am I being controlling? What should I do? — GETTING FRUSTRATED IN PONTIAC, MICH.

DEAR GETTING FRUSTRATED: Your wife appears to be trying to hold onto her carefree single days, and it’s a shame she can’t do that without getting herself soused and staying out all night. On the other hand, if she’s in no condition to get behind the wheel, then it’s better that she not drive until she sobers up.

I don’t think saying what’s on your mind is “controlling.” I suspect your wife becomes angry because she is defensive.

Her behavior is immature, and how long it will take her to outgrow this “phase” is anybody’s guess. I recommend that you both widen your circle of friends so you spend more time with other married couples who are more mature than your wife’s sister and high school friends appear to be.