A War On Women? No. A War On Mothers? Oh Yes.

The news media is beating the America public over the head with their invented notion of a "War on Women", a war of course perpetrated by evil conservatives as opposed to the war on unborn women waged by liberals. I digress. What the past 24 hours or so has shown us is that there is indeed a war going on in the culture but the target is not women in general but mothers. The internet is all a twitter (pun intended) over the intemperate and ugly remarks made by one Hilary Rosen at CNN.

“Guess what, (Romney’s) wife has actually never worked a day in her life,” Hilary Rosen said Wednesday evening on CNN.

These foolish comments, made by a lesbian and homosexual advocate who adopted two children with her now ex-girlfriend, making her an expert on motherhood, suggest that Ann Romney, a stay at home mother of five children, doesn't know the first thing about working. Since Ms. Rosen has had an illustrious and prestigious career, it can be assumed that her children have spent much of their life in the care of professional care-givers while she went to work to do Super Important Stuff like defending huge music corporations from illlegal file sharing. What is raising kids compared to that? Given that reality I can step in and assure her that stay-at-home moms work far harder with fewer breaks than any high powered executive or lawyer or whatever else. As Mrs. Romney has also battled multiple sclerosis and breast cancer, she should be commended for her diligence as a mother, not chastised by someone like Ms. Rosen. Ms. Rosen has finally come out and apologized for her foolish comments but not before she penned an angry screed for CNN.

Spare me the faux anger from the right who view the issue of women's rights and advancement as a way to score political points. When it comes to supporting policies that would actually help women, their silence has been deafening. I don't need lectures from the Republican National Committee on supporting women and fighting to increase opportunities for women; I've been doing it my whole career.

The irnoy of those comments is obvious to anyone. Who made things like government mandated birth control and funding for abortion providers part of the political battlefield? Here is a hint, it was not "the right". For a woman who can with a straight face call abortions on demand and subsidized by tax payers a "women's health issue", reality is not really relevant. I am not sure how aborting tens of millions of tiny women is "increasing opportunities". I guess those women who have their lives snuffed out in the womb won't compete for jobs with other women.

These comments are ignorant but they expose an important worldview. While liberals across the board have been tripping over themselves to repudiate what she said, the underlying view of motherhood and women was exposed for all the world to see. Certainly Mrs. Romney, the wife of a very wealthy and influential man, did not have some of the same concerns that the wife of a bus driver would have but all of the money in the world cannot change the very difficult and often thankless job of being a mother. There is an ugly, unstated but assumed view that women who "just stay home" are somehow "letting down the team" and settling for being "just a mom". Even the cultural assumptions are biased against mothers. We call women who stay home and raise their kids "stay at home moms" but we don't refer to mothers who leave their kids in the care of someone when they go to work as "leave home moms". To stay home and raise your children rather than subcontracting that task out to someone else requires a woman who has the strength, humility and conviction to do something sneered at by a small minority of vocal and influential women, standing against the overwhelming weight of our culture to do what women for thousands of years have done without complaint, namely being the primary caregiver and molder of the next generation.

Millions of women stay home with their children but it has become harder and less common over the last few decades. Many social observers have noted that being a stay at home mom is rapidly becoming a status symbol reserved for precisely the sort of women, like Ann Romney, that Ms. Rosen takes shots at. We cannot have a society where choosing to be a mom rather than an employee is a luxury reserved only for the wealthiest families. If feminists and their allies on the left truly cared about women in general and working mothers in particular they would work to enact policies that make it easier for women to choose to stay home. After all, isn't "choice" the demigod of the left?