Women matter, so change anthem

Re: “Thy sons know not what they say,” Andrew Coyne, June 16

This column does — finally, toward the middle — mention the salient point in the debate about changing the lyrics of our national anthem.

Andrew Coyne writes: “But son does not mean daughter.”

Exactly. He hides this point in the middle of digressions on how language is evolving, how slang sometimes blurs gender, how people react toward the word Christmas. All of that is irrelevant. The word “children” refers to both sexes, but “son” is male and “daughter” is female.

So, how would the columnist feel about singing, “True patriot love in all thy daughters command?”

When the anthem was written, the use of “sons” didn’t matter because women didn’t matter. They weren’t even persons in the legal framework of the time. Brenda Wegmann, Edmonton