Cathy Young has filed her final weekly column with the Boston Globe. This minor tragedy silences one of scant few rational, objective voices writing for that publication. Quoth Jeff:

Young is one of my absolute favorite columnists, a woman whose even-handedness and integrity are unassailable, and one whose willingness to buck orthodoxies that need bucking places her among a vanishingly small number of public intellectuals whose opinions, though we may not always agree with them, are at the very least always worth serious consideration—because the only agenda behind them is that of one committed to pursuing truth and fairness.

Cathy is possessed of a courage and objectivity that are sorely lacking in the mainstream media, and now they’ve lost her too. In the blog addendum to her Globe column, she tells us that this was not her decision but that it also had nothing to do with political bias or the content of her columns. My instinct initially leads me to skepticism about that, but the primary reason for Cathy’s departure appears to be cost cutting measures imposed by the parent New York Times Corporation. While that certainly makes sense in the face of declining circulation and ad revenues, it is curious that the ax falls on the only true centrist on the Globe’s Op-Ed page. And given that Jeff Jacoby is single handedly holding down the right side of the fort, it seems that maintaining any sort of balance was not a priority for the Globe’s management. Well, we’ll always have Scott Lehigh, won’t we? In other words, we won’t be seeing anything like this:

Gender issues from a “dissident feminist” perspective—pro-fairness and equal treatment, anti-gender warfare—have long been one of my areas of interest. The “Mommy Wars” of full-time motherhood versus career are likely to remain intractable, with some feminists accusing stay-at-home mothers of letting down the sisterhood, some conservatives accusing working mothers of letting down their children, and people in the middle calling for freedom of choice. If we can even begin to resolve this often acrimonious debate, it is by moving toward more genuine choice for men as well as women to scale down careers for family.

While feminists have called for more male involvement in child-rearing, the women’s movement has also championed blatant favoritism toward mothers in child custody disputes, often to the point of vilifying fathers. This seems to be a clear case of putting solidarity with women over equity. While the fathers’ rights movement has often been depicted as a patriarchal backlash, it is in many ways more faithful to the true feminist legacy than are the women’s groups which endorse maternal chauvinism.

Cathy, not surprisingly, closes sagely:

As I say goodbye, I’d like to conclude with an issue that has become a subject of overriding concern for me : a tendency toward polarization and mutual demonization in American public life. I have often been embroiled in debates on whether the right or the left is more responsible for the politics of hate. This is fruitless. Things will not get better until people on both sides forget about the blame game and start ostracizing the hate-mongers in their own camp.

Thanks for the guts, the class, the vision, the wisdom and for your amazing ability to put it all together on the page, Cathy. Here’s hoping that some smart publisher will soon find a place for you in his newspaper. *cough*Boston Herald*cough*