Iran Scores a PR Point
Apparently they can’t pay their bills to Russia for nuclear fuel, but they did figure out a great PR stunt. Sadly, I find myself agreeing with a small part of his statement:
He had criticised Britain for deploying Mrs Turney, mother of a three-year-old daughter, to the Gulf.
“Why was the difficult task of searching the seas given to a mother thousands of miles from home?” he demanded.
“Why is there no respect for motherhood, for the love of her child? How can you justify seeing a mother away from her home, her children? Why don’t they respect family values in the West?”
I’m friends with a lot of pro-Bush Republican people (and technically speaking, I’m a Republican as well, though I despise the cowardice of most Republican leaders). There’s almost a mythical worship of all things military among these folks, and I guess a big gaping hole in most social conservatives’ agendas is this issue of women in the military.
Maybe it’s a dead duck politically, but there’s something wrong with a civilization that sends women to fight. As Al Mohler has said, the future belongs to the fundamentalist “extremists”. They’re the only ones having babies. We in the West had better develop a fundamentalism of our own to counter that of Islam.
April 5th, 2007 at 1:03 pm
People these days seem unable to distinguish between a Christian notion of masculinity and the secular ethic of machismo. From the Biblical point of view, men have a certain natural authority which is strongly tied to notions of duty, meekness, and humility. Machismo, by contrast, simply states that men should be powerful, that powerful men should flaunt their power, and that the most attractive females are the property of the most powerful men. There is no better illustration of this secular machismo than Rap and Hip-Hop “culture.”
April 5th, 2007 at 2:27 pm
I think the better question would be, “What mother would choose to enlist or have children while in the service?” The military is damn if you do, damn if you don’t in this. The feminists would be up in arms if women were not allowed to go off to war! Good grief!
April 6th, 2007 at 3:58 pm
My mother, who taught for over 20 years in a military town, commented on this. She said that even with the moms off to war and the dads at home doing the caretaking of the children, it was the moms STILL doing the detailed caretaking- from Iraq. How were their kids doing in school…what was going on with this…or with that… The dads in general just were not covering the same ground their wives were- from thousands of miles away.
I think that the culture not respecting motherhood and families leads those who really do not know any better to mirror this disregard. Very unfortunate.