Did You Know?

Watching tv church sermons tonight/this morning (my sleep schedule is all off, and I've been up since 3 this afternoon and will probably just stay up till I go to bed at a regular time tonight). As tomorrow/today is Mothers' Day, you can guess the topic of many a sermon. As a feminist, I was surprised to learn the following facts about feminism, child rearing, and life in general:

• feminism is, in fact, all about worshipping the feminine. Christians thought God was the measure of all things; Humanists came along and said man was the measure of all things (never mind, of course, that humanists came before Christians!); now feminists are saying that Woman is the measure of all things. We should worship Her (for examples of this insidiousness see the United Methodist Church and The da Vinci Code).
• when feminists become pregnant, if they do not abort (which most do), they immediately "dump" their kids in day care because their careers are the most important things (men, of course, are perfectly fine if they go to work the day after their child is born.)
• feminism=evil=Satan
• "current psychology" says that having a mother (rather than going to a daycare center) makes a child more empathetic. People are kind of doomed if they didn't grow up with a stay-at-home mom. oops.
• Dads won't do just as well. No, this pastor insists, it is female contact that does the trick, not parental/loving/caring contact in general. hmm. (too bad it's not true)
• the current increase in school violence is directly correlated to mothers working outside the home. (I wish I could send this to that pastor) (and I won't go into all of why this is wrong *sigh* you are all better social scientists than this)
• married women have longer, more fulfilling lives than unmarried women (Actually, this is untrue, married men have longer lives and rate their lives more satisfactorily than unmarried men, while the opposite is true for women).
• women who don't have kids are sort of useless and unfulfilled (implicit in many sermons). There was no mention of this for men.
• Christian couples have more and better sex. (Where he got his data, I don't know, but I can't say that it's wrong. It is interesting.)

Anyway, I was wondering why all of these sermons were talking about women. Now I realize that the role of women is important in many of these churches, and they'll probably talk about it alot. But three of them? Giving almost the exact same sermon on the exact same day? And then it hit me: it's Mothers' Day.

It's funny to think that Mothers' Day was originally begun in order to protest for peace. Ahh, what is has become. No longer is it a celebration of women and their capacity to change society. No, it's a celebration of their continued, subordinated place in patriarchal society.