Happy Mothers' Day

If you're alive, you should be grateful to your mother.

According to U.N. statistics, every day around the world over 135,000 mothers kill their unborn babies. Every day in America about 4,000 lives are ended prematurely. I'm grateful my mother weighed the temporary inconvenience to her against the 80-or-so years I hope to live, and decided in my favor.

John Adams, Signer of the Declaration of Independence and Second President of the United States, described the cultural significance of my mother:

From all that I had read of History of Government, of human life and manners, I had drawn this Conclusion, that the manners of Women were the most infallible Barometer, to ascertain the degree of Morality and Virtue in a Nation. All that I have since read and all the observations I have made in different Nations, have confirmed me in this opinion. The Manners of Women, are the surest Criterion by which to determine whether a Republican Government is practicable, in a Nation or not. The Jews, the Greeks, the Romans, the Swiss, the Dutch, all lost their public Spirit, their Republican Principles and habits, and their Republican Forms of Government, when they lost the Modesty and Domestic Virtues of their Women.

The foundations of national Morality must be laid in private Families. In vain are Schools, Accademies and universities instituted, if loose Principles and licentious habits are impressed upon Children in their earliest years. The Mothers are the earliest and most important Instructors of youth.... The Vices and Examples of the Parents cannot be concealed from the Children. How is it possible that Children can have any just Sense of the sacred Obligations of Morality or Religion if, from their earliest Infancy, they learn that their Mothers live in habitual Infidelity to their fathers, and their fathers in as constant Infidelity to their Mothers.
John Adams, Diary and Autobiography of John Adams, ed. L.H.Butterfield, Belknap/Harvard, 1962, IV:123, quoted by John Eidsmoe in Christianity and the Constitution, Baker Book House, 1987, p. 272.

Feminists would criticize Adams as a proponent of "patriarchal" "oppression." Adams acknowledges that it is largely women that hold together a Patriarchal society.

Who Counts the Most Important Things?

A prosperous Free-Market economy can flourish under a "patriarchy" even in the absence of the institutions of church and state, as long as virtuous mothers train children in Christian morality.

Social Order Without "The Government"

I will probably be most grateful for my mother's "de-programming" me on the way home from church. Our family attended a liberal (but socially respectable) Presbyterian church, with which my mother disagreed theologically and politically. Decades later she still subscribes to the Presbyterian Layman, but often cannot bear to read the latest issue, and discover which lesbian goddess will be substituted for Jesus Christ in the latest Sunday School curriculum. It wasn't this bad when I was a kid. But I remember being taught in Sunday School that none of the miracles in the Bible were true. It was "just an east wind" that dried up the Red Sea and allowed Israel to cross. Evolutionary science is right and Genesis is "merely poetry." Etc., ad nauseam. My mother always told me I could believe the Bible. "Don't listen to that Sunday School teacher."

(Why were we there? My parents were born in the Ozarks and left for California to begin climbing the social ladder. Bible-believing churches were too much like the Ozarks to them, I guess; built on a foundation of ignorance and/or emotion. Liberal churches were more sophisticated. More "scientific." More "intellectual.")

The seeds my mother planted in my early years began bearing fruit in high school. I discovered that evolution was no more scientific than creation, and was born out of a climate of hostility toward Christian ethics. I read Aldous Huxley admit that a universe based on random chance was preferable to him over a universe which had God's meaning imprinted on every atom, because he did not want to be subject to God's morality, political or sexual:

There was one admirably simple method of confuting these people and at the same time justifying ourselves in our political and erotic revolt: we could deny that the world had any meaning whatsoever.
Aldous Huxley, Ends and Means, 1937

The "creation vs. evolution" debate became for me the "free-market vs. socialism" debate, as well as the "family vs. abortion" debate. The respectable "science" of the liberal presbyterians became the "military-industrial complex," and I became a pacifist. Their "progressive" politics became the welfare state, and I became an anarcho-capitalist.

That's a label that undoubtedly never entered my mother's mind as she contemplated her son's future. But it's the inevitable and logical conclusion of the Bible-based faith she gave me. She taught me in these subtle ways to question earthly authority in the name of a Higher Authority. And yet this questioning was never done in an angry or mean-spirited way. I've still only developed a fraction of the humane and Christian character traits my mother tried to teach me, but I'm blessed by the head start she gave me. I'll never be able adequately to thank her.