The New York Times is the PC gift that keeps on giving. Yesterday came the release of its Sunday Magazine lead story about equal “parenting.” Then, late last night, Times blogger Judith Warner instantly won the 2008 Repulsive Blog Item of the Year Award with a long item that somehow began with reports of Muslim women in France having their virginities restored by surgery and then came to this astounding point:

[An article] from The Times, from May 19…featured 70-odd girls, of “early grade school to college” age, with their fathers, stepfathers and fathers-in-law-to-be, at the ninth annual, largely evangelical “Father-Daughter Purity Ball.”

“The evening, which alternated between homemade Christian rituals and giddy dancing” – and which culminated, for at least one father and his daughters, with a dreamy walk in the night around a lake, “was a joyous public affirmation of the girls’ sexual abstinence until they wed,” said the Times article.

“From this, it’s only a matter of degree to the man in Austria,” I’d scribbled across the first page.

The “man in Austria,” of course, was 73-year-old Josef Fritzl, who was around that time also making headlines after it was discovered that he had kept his daughter, Elisabeth, 42, locked up in a cellar for 24 years, during which time he’d raped her regularly, and had her bear him seven children.

Fritzl, a self-described “man of decency and good values,” had imprisoned his daughter after she began staying out all night and drinking. “I had to create a place where I could keep Elisabeth by force if necessary, away from the outside world,” he confessed.

“Fathers, our daughters are waiting for us,” Randy Wilson, one of the ball’s organizers, said at the Colorado Springs “Purity” event. “They are desperately waiting for us in a culture that lures them into the murky waters of exploitation. They need to be rescued by you, their dad.”

Yes, a man who imprisons his daughter and grandchildren and rapes her for a quarter century resembles in some way men who believe their daughters should abstain from sexual behavior and are attempting awkwardly and a little foolishly to substitute something else for the lure of sex.

Perhaps recognizing that she has journeyed far beyond the pale, Warner attempts to walk it back a little.

“I don’t want to take this analogy too far,” Warner writes. “I don’t mean to imply that there’s any equivalency between Josef Fritzl’s acts and the Purity Ball. Fritzl’s actions were uniquely horrific, and I am not accusing the men who danced in Colorado Springs of any crimes. But there is nonetheless a kind of horror to their obsession with their daughters’ sexuality.”

There’s no putting this genie back in the bottle, Judith Warner.

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This entry was posted on Friday, June 13th, 2008 at 7:22 AM and is filed under Contentions. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.