What's a Nice Girl Like YouDoing With a Putz Like Me?

Dawn Eden is a nice Jewish girl from New York who has latterly become a Roman Catholic, and enlisted with the Loyalist troops fighting bravely against the debilitating excesses of feminism, post-modernism, and the sexual revolution. I first encountered her through her blog, The Dawn Patrol, and cannot say that I was at first a fan.

Clearly she and I agree on virtually every important social and moral issue. But where she is clever, witty, angry and (this most of all) unrelentingly hard, my approach has generally been (less) clever, (far less) witty, (not nearly so) angry but, most of all, ironic and amused.

Dawn Eden is not amused.

But while she didn't have me from hello, she in fact made of me a devoted follower with a post titled "Cosmo Takes a Stand—for One Night":

Society pretends to frown upon one-night stands — out of concern over AIDS if nothing else — but sex within an unmarried relationship is considered acceptable because of the atmosphere of mutual "respect."

The truth is that no woman can truly be respected by a man who is perfectly willing to make full use of her body and perfectly unwilling to give her a full commitment. That's not respect. It's a transaction: "You give me sex and I will 'respect' you until we get bored of one another." Behind that "ideal" lies a deep cynicism. Whores have a point when they say that the difference between them and other women having nonmarital sex is that they get paid.

I'm not saying this to judge women, but to suggest that any hope of future love is worth forgoing present "respect." It's a subject on which I feel qualified to write with authority — as I've written before, I've had more "respect" than you've had hot dinners.

Later this year her first book will be published: The Thrill of the Chaste: Finding Fulfillment While Keeping Your Clothes On. I have no doubt who wrote the jacket copy (or at least the first draft):

She tells women who have been around the block how to find their way home.

Among inspirational books for single women, The Thrill of the Chaste is a pair of hip Ray-Bans in a field of rose-colored glasses. This isn't a book for dainty damsels in lacy white dresses patiently awaiting their handsome prince. This is for real women who need strong, motivational, and deeply moral messages to counter the ones they receive from a superficial, sex-obsessed world.

Today The National Catholic Register has posted an interview with her. Excerpts:

I was brought up Reform Jewish, which means that I led a highly secular lifestyle with a minimum level of Jewish observance. While people from each branch of Judaism have obstacles to accepting Christ, it seems to me that it’s hardest for Reform Jews, because, unlike the Orthodox and the more Orthodox-leaning Conservatives, they lack understanding of a personal God. The nature of Reform Judaism is that God is out there, but he is hazy and unfathomable, and we can’t make presumptions that he cares about every aspect of our lives.

[snip]

My emotional pain had no purpose that I could see, because no healing came from it — it was always just more of the same. Without faith in an afterlife, I could not see the point of living.

[snip]

I began to pick up everything by [G.K.] Chesterton that I could get my hands on, starting with Orthodoxy. For the first time, it struck me that there was something exciting about Christianity. Up until then, I had been politically liberal and thought that Christians apart from my mom were a faceless mass of white-bread Moral Majority types who controlled the world. I wanted to be a rebel, and part of defining myself that way was to not be a Christian. Chesterton suggested to me that it was the other way around: Christians were the true rebels.

Read the rest of the interview, pre-order the book, and by all means screw up your courage and stop by at The Dawn Patrol, where today's post is quintessential Dawn, from title to subject matter: Planned Parenthood on Crack.