Mothers unite to fight for their children

As a child, I loved watching Mutual of Omaha’s “Wild Kingdom.” As I recall, it came on after Mitch Miller, the show that had the bouncing ball on the screen which let you “Sing Along With Mitch.” I had no particular interest in singing along with anyone, let alone a bearded stranger named Mitch, but I did love the seeing animals in the wild doing their thing. My favorite episodes, narrated by Marlin Perkins, focused on baby animals with their mothers, especially when the babies appeared to be threatened by some large predator and the mother would protect her little ones with warrior courage.

There is nothing that matches the power of a mother who sees her child in jeopardy. Not being a mother myself, I can’t say what it is that triggers the protective mechanism, but I do know that it’s instinctual, and transcends race, religion, political affiliation and as Marlin Perkins taught me, species. That’s why I am absolutely not surprised at what happened in Virginia this week and to a lesser extent, New Jersey.

When I first saw those mothers standing at podiums during school board meetings earlier this year, my thoughts turned to Sarah Palin. Her speech at the Republican National Convention in 2008 included the now iconic comment, “You know what the difference is between a hockey mom and a pit bull? Lipstick.” At the time I laughed, as did many of the people who watched this hurricane from the icy Alaskan climes blow through the stale atmosphere of traditional American politics. It was both funny, and predictive of the kind of in-yourface attitude she’d assume during the presidential campaign. But it was also so true, so purely representative of what a mother is. And the mothers at those meetings channelled that spirit and that energy.

Some continue to insist that the anger and protective instincts were based on a fallacy, namely, that no one is teaching critical race theory in schools. The women are being called racists, in some ways directly and in others more implicit, as when the elite intelligentsia complain about “dog whistles” and failed gubernatorial candidates scream that voters are “better than that!” And then you have the Department of Justice poised to treat these women as domestic terrorists at the behest of triggered school board members. The fact that our Attorney General refused to acknowledge the radical departure from sanity and legal precedent that this represented is proof positive that progressives have lost whatever is left of their collective minds.

Whenever someone tries to peddle the idea that critical race theory is a law school pedagogy, my first reaction is that it wasn’t on the curriculum at Villanova circa 19841987 when I attended. But more importantly, I get really angry at the attempt on the part of my interlocutor to play me for a fool, a simpleton who doesn’t understand that CRT is more dangerous than any single subject. It’s a way of teaching based on the premise that everything and everyone is motivated by race, and history/literature/politics/math/ science and whatever else is on the academic menu must be viewed and presented through that threshold lens. It’s a distortion, toxic and dishonest and deeply divisive, of the world we inhabit.

And if I get enraged at this attempt to school me in CRT, I can just barely imagine how a mother who has one or more children vulnerable to this tainted attempt at indoctrination must feel. These lionesses sense the threat, and crouch, ready to attack.

But since we live in “lily white suburbs” and not on the African savannah, they don’t use claws and fangs to defend their defenseless Cubs. They use their voices. They use their organizational skills. They use social media.

I find it incredibly ironic that these women, these mothers with the native, instinctual intelligence of she-wolves (with or without lipstick) are being attacked for waging the most important battle of all on behalf of their children: The right to grow up without an albatross of race shame hanging around their necks. These mothers are fighting to give their sons and daughters a birthright that should never have been questioned in the first place, the right to be treated as individuals, not representatives of some “oppressive” regime.

If the races were reversed and we were back in the era of Jim Crow we’d be praising mothers who fought to protect their babies from toxic societal forces.

And those who just voted for Gov. Youngkin know it. So do we all.