Mother's Day, Mary, and Midterms
Moms are leading a potent political response to how their children are taught and treated, and to protect families. It is spiritual in nature and their force will be felt in the midterms.
Happy Mother's Day!
First, a few words about my Mom, Angela, who brought seven lives into this world and, with my Dad, loved us unconditionally – even when we weren't so lovable. They loved having a big family and having all those babies.
As an obstetrics nurse, and then as head nurse of the OB wing of our hometown hospital, my mother helped hundreds of young women bring new life into this world.
Mom marveled at the divine power and the beauty of God's design in men's and women's bodies. She helped young mothers appreciate the physical processes of birth – mysteriously powerful -- to help women bring forth the miracle of life and nurture it.
She was and still is a champion for prenatal care. She couldn't stand the taste of eggs, but gagged them down, and other nutrients while pregnant with each of us. “Good health is your birthright,” she would tell us.
When the on-call obstetrician couldn't make it to the maternity wing in time, mom caught the babies herself, with the help of the moms and dads (she insisted dads be in the delivery room), just like she did with some of her own grandchildren. Quite a few of those moms named babies after her, they were so moved by their experience.
Mom and Dad could see how off the rails our culture was becoming in the 1970s, and the damage it was doing to the sanctity of the family – the original unit of democratic self-governance in American society. She was and is a tireless and generous supporter of the pro-life movement that followed the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision, which took regulation of abortion out of the states in 1973 and legalized it across the nation.
As an early pioneer in the use of ultra-sounds and sonograms in prenatal care, she knew the ideology of calling a baby a "fetus" or even making up out of whole cloth a "right" to an abortion could not stand.
I share this about my mom in light of the growing political movement, with mothers (and dads) who are at the vanguard of a powerful – and yes, spiritual, battle to assert their rights as parents to oversee the health and education of their gifts from God: their children.
She would be equally inspired to see a growing movement of young women and men who have become leading voices for life, for policies that help family formation — and for parental rights in education of their children.
Now, with the reaction to the leaked draft of the Supreme Court's opinion that would overturn the Roe v. Wade decision and send the issue back to the states, babies, children and the family unit are firmly at the center of our cultural and political debate.
The left is apoplectic about the opinion draft, so much so they are targeting Moms, and now, Our Lady of the Catholic Church, Saint Mary.
After the leaked draft opinion in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which "signaled that Supreme Court justices are poised to overturn Roe v. Wade," write Catholic News Agency's Katie Yoder and Joe Bukuras, should Catholics take these threats seriously? Catholic churches and dioceses in the Washington, D.C. region and around the country certainly are.
Warning notes to flocks urged them to "remain peaceful, and recollected" but to "not confront the protestors in any way" if they target their church, or try to vandalize it. In many parishes around the region, police were on standby, albeit in a low-key way.
"Why, you might ask, disrupt Catholic church services, and not Baptists or other pro-life Protestant denominations?" asked Steven Hayward of Powerlineblog.com, who picked up on the news.
Because hatred of the Catholic Church has become a core principle of the left, full stop. The reasons for this go beyond the coincidence that that the five Supreme Court justices who (may) form the majority to overturn Roe are Catholics. To quote Whittaker Chambers (a Quaker), “the Catholic Church is the only fully consistent conservative position.” That’s why.
The threats "are the poisonous fruit of an ideology of hatred for life that has deeply wounded our country for two generations," wrote Fr. Jay Scott Newman of Saint Mary's Church in South Carolina in a note to his flock (per Hayward's post).
Fr. Newman added: may God grant wisdom and courage to the Justices of the Supreme Court, in their decision on behalf of a nation "built on the self-evident truth that all men are endowed by their Creator with the unalienable right to life."
Politico reported in its exclusive: “The draft opinion is a full-throated, unflinching repudiation of the 1973 decision which guaranteed federal constitutional protections of abortion rights and a subsequent 1992 decision – Planned Parenthood v. Casey – that largely maintained the right. “Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” [Justice Samuel] Alito writes.
[See the full draft opinion here.]
“We hold that Roe and Casey must be overruled,” he writes in the document, labeled as the “Opinion of the Court.” “It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”
This is why the progressive left is freaked out: That the issue would be left to the democratic process.
If the decision holds, it could also call into question the authority that bureaucracies have asserted by way of "emanations" and "penumbras" that infringe on individual liberty and civil rights.
It could embolden more challenges to an administrative state that asserts it can force whole swaths of the population into taking an experimental vaccine without their consent, while ignoring troubling safety data that the federal government tried to hide, and is now coming out. Overturning Roe would be a blow to the bureaucracy's power grab.
The media now has a new narrative to push about these moms, and parents organizing ahead of the 2022 primary elections and November midterms to protect their children from indoctrination in schools. They are scary right wingers!
Take NBC's recent story about "a new report on the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack by …researchers at George Washington University [that] detailed the role women have played in American far-right extremism over the past century, including how many are leaning heavily into their identities as mothers to justify their engagement and to recruit and mobilize others." One in 10 women were arrested as part of the Jan. 6th rally that turned into a riot. Many of them, like hundreds of the defendants, are charged with non-violent offenses such as “parading” in the Capitol. They left peacefully — yet the Department of Justice is treating them as dangerous felons.
The treatment of moms is of a similar piece.
The response in the progressive-aligned media, if one can follow the logic, is to ignore voter fury over the highest inflation in 40 years, a 36% annual increase in gas prices, drug cartels that have taken over the open southern border, a woke ideology in schools that forced masks and vaccines on kids that does more harm than good; and now, the creation of “Department of Disinformation” from the Department of Homeland Security to label any dissent from this as “disinformation.”
It's those moms, you see, who are a part of a "far-right extremism" breaking out across this great land.
This is the same media that reflexively calls facts about already proven fraudulent balloting in the 2020 election "lies," all while a new movie, "2000 Mules" details devastating proof of ballot trafficking in battleground states that few if any in law enforcement are addressing.
The difference now is that people are done complaining about this unhinged politicized and biased coverage. They are taking action to form new media networks organically, like the moms and dads did in Virginia. Fed up about progressives forcing extreme gender ideology, and sexualization materials, on their kids in schools, they got organized and helped get Republican Glenn Youngkin elected governor to stop it.
They did their own reporting, their own Freedom of Information Act requests, and they let the people know what was going on in their schools. Where the media failed to do their job, they stepped up. And it's happening still.
They are a force that, like an ascendant America First movement, and an energized election integrity movement around the country, are putting guard rails of democratic governance back after they were ripped off in 2020.
Which brings me back to my mom and the symbolism of Mother's Day itself. As a lifelong Catholic, she remains devoted to the Virgin Mary.
“Talk to Mary," she would tell me in response to whatever tribulations were before me. She will intercede as our mother, as in the Greek word "Theotokos" ("God bearer"), to bring us closer to Christ.
Like my mom's devotion to babies and to nurturing life, there is something deeply spiritual about these mom movements, as much as it is visceral. As more Americans are discovering, they have always been in the vanguard, because they are moms.
Like many in the electoral integrity movement, they are respectful of all faiths, and will be a force in the midterms.