As a society we love our Moms. We talk about “Mom and apple pie” as symbols of the goodness of our culture. We love our Dads, too, but Father’s Day will never be the holiday that Mother’s Day is, and Dad understands. Dads love their boys, spending the sons’ youth teaching them sports and taking them to practices and encouraging them to play, but when they get to the big leagues and appear on TV for the first time, what do they say? “Hi Mom.” So, it’s safe to say that motherhood is special to us.
There is a tradition in our country that mothers of sons (and daughters now, too) who die in combat receive a flag with a gold star that they hang outside their home, so that we can all share in their grief and loss and appreciate what they have sacrificed for our country’s sake, nearly as much it seems as their lost loved ones, and give them the honor that is their due. They are an informal (and sometimes formal) sorority called the Gold Star Mothers.
If we love and honor our Moms so greatly, shouldn’t it be unsettling to our nation that we are sending mothers into combat to fight, be captured, and die? PFC Lori Piestewa, a member of the 507th Maintenance Company from which six POWs were taken, was the mother of two children. She died in the attack on the 507th that dead that left so many of her comrades dead and captured. PFC Shoshana Johnson, a former POW from the same unit, is a mother as well. And there are the countless other mothers who were called up for deployment overseas, some of them single moms, others called up along with their husbands. Is this what we want as a nation? To send our Moms into combat, leaving their children behind?
Yes, it is politically incorrect to suggest that there are differences between men and women, but pretending there isn’t doesn’t change that. I suppose that Evil knows that the famly is the domestic church and that Mothers are the heart of the family. That’s why we have seen such an attack on motherhood over the past couple of generations from abortion to contraception to “Sex in the City” sexual libertinism to women in combat.
The proper response is to reject the attempts at family disintegration at the destruction of the cherished role of motherhood. We must deploy our soldiers to protect our mothers and the mothers of our children at home, not send them into combat to fight for themselves.
