I love it - the LW gets physically pushed aside by a group of men and posters are telling her to stop being so high-drama. How about this: arrange for a group of black men to try to get into the building while your new Orthodox neighbors are coming home one night and see what happens. I can assure you the same forbearance won't be extended.

I know, I know - every generation thinks the generations that follow are much worse off than their own. The internet divide, however, is an enormous one. Had I made a sexual mistake in high school, it would've traveled, perhaps, throughout my high school. Maybe somebody from my high school would've leaked it to somebody at my college. Chances are, it would've stopped when I graduated high school. Nowadays, that's it. Your mistakes are suspended in amber in perpetuity. It's truly, truly frightening. I will probably be even more protective of my daughter than my mother was of me because the stakes are so much higher and the consequences so much more far-reaching.

This child is at risk, whether the LW wants to admit it or not. Is it risk of getting shoved down the stairs or burned on purpose with boiling water? Of course not. The child will, however, bear entirely the burden of his parents' (I include the father here b/c he is, after all, the father and b/c he's utterly abdicating his responsibility as a parent) belief that they, not teachers, not doctors, not friends, always know what's best for their child. This is narcissism masquerading as care at its worst.

I do not advocate calling CPS (that is its own hell and may end up doing more harm than good), but I do think being firm and serious is warranted. The friendship, if it is strong, will recover. Even if it doesn't, the LW should do right by this child and speak up. I understand that being autistic, or delayed, or whatever isn't the worst thing in the world, but shouldn't the child be given the option of a diagnosis and/or treatment? We bear enormous responsibility as adults for children.

Playswithsquirrels, you took the words out of my mouth. The Clintons protected Chelsea, but did they really need to? That girl has walked the straight-and-narrow from the day she was born, despite the incredibly public shaming of her mother and father. Ditto the Gores (sans shaming). Republicans would, undoubtedly, tut-tut about the Palin children's shenanigans as the result of their working mother and diluted "family values", but they somehow managed to spin it into the ol' "regular folk" standby. Fortunately, this time it didn't work.

From what I can tell, Caroline Kennedy is a very intelligent woman who has, essentially, never had a job. She has a J.D., yet has never deigned to actually practice law. Sure, she's published some books (most having to do with her own family) and she's done good works, but she's never had a job from which she could have been fired or heavily criticized. This is where she differs from Clinton and Obama. The way I see it, she had nothing to opt-out of in the first place.

I'm not even going to address the ludicrous notion of opting-in/opting-out as it applies to, perhaps, .03 percent of the population.

Lost in Berlin - all excellent points. Our fascination with the exception to the exclusion of the rule is borderline immoral. Schindler's List, Life is Beautiful, Mississippi Burning - all movies that focus on the redeeming rather than the usual. I never thought of Hotel Rwanda in the same way, but you've got a point with that. It's like people who avoid the news because it's "too depressing." The news (and history, for that matter) is intended to educate, not uplift!

I, too, was nonplussed by Harding's misunderstanding of Lepore's (to my mind) fascinating article. Lepore was merely pointing out the nefarious aspects to the push for pumping and the practice of "letting" women pump at work while abdicating responsibility for paid maternity leave. An apt point.

Lepore touches upon it, but I'd like to see a lot more about non-elite/professional/high-earning/whatever you want to call it women and breastfeeding. If you work the cash register at Wal-Mart or work any low-wage job, as I see it it's damn near impossible to breastfeed your child. At my last job, the firm provided three months at full pay to lawyers who had children. Staff? Two weeks which increased to six weeks if an employee had been there 5+ years. I was appalled when I found that out. And I can assure you the staff would not get patted on the back for heading off to the "mother's room" to pump.

If breastfeeding and early bonding truly is better for children, the freedom given to high-earning, highly-educated women and denied to other women essentially says "Yes, we know this is better for the child, but rich women's babies are more important than everybody else's babies." The whole breastfeeding debate truly is one that resonates only in the top strata of earners (or the wives of top earners). Yes, I'd love more maternity leave, but I know my less fortunate sisters have far, far more to complain about than I do. When ALL women in this country (not just "top talent" or "valuable" workers or whatever the code word is for well-to-do women these days) have access to respect for mothering, that will be a victory.

Make no mistake - mainstream Catholics like myself think Williamson et al. is a nutjob and disgrace to he religion. The Vatican has issued him an ultimatum with a promise to drop him should he continue to deny the Holocaust. The Vatican DOES NOT support this guy. I've seen many posters note the Vatican's tolerance of this kind of thinking. Clearly, that's not the case.