Saturday, June 1, 2013

The Rise & Fall & Rise of Motherhood in America, Part 1 of 4 parts

Only Women Can Be Mothers.  Have We Forgotten This Fundamental?

Only a woman can carry in her body an eternal being which bears the very image of God.  Only she is the recipient of the miracle of life.  Only a woman can conceive and nurture this life using her own flesh and blood, and then deliver a living soul into the world. God has bestowed upon her alone a genuine miracle  -  the creation of life, and the fusing of an eternal soul with mortal flesh.  This fact alone establishes the glory of motherhood.

Despire the most creative plans of humanist scientists and lawmakers to redefine the sexes, no man will ever conceive and give birth to a child.  The fruitful womb is a holy gift given by God to women alone.  This is one reason why the office of wife and mother is the highest calling to which a woman can aspire.

This is the reason why nations that fear the Lord esteem and protect mothers.  They glory in the distinctions between men and women, and attempt to build cutures in which motherhood is honored and protected.

In his famous commentary on early American life, Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville explained:  Thus the Americans do not think that man and woman have either the duty or the right to perform the same offices, but they show an equal regard for both their respective parts; and though their lot is different, they consider both of them as beings of equal value. They do not give to the courage of woman the same form or the same direction as to that of man, but they never doubt her courage; and if they hold that man and his partner ought not always to exercise their intellect and understanding in the same manner, they at least believe the understanding of the one to be as sound as that of the other, and her intellect to be as clear. Thus, then, while they have allowed the social inferiority of woman to continue, they have done all they could to raise her morally and intellectually to the level of man; and in this respect they appear to me to have excellently understood the true principle of democratic inprovement.

De Tocqueville contrasted the American understanding of women, with European sentiments: There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make man and woman into beings not only equal but alike.  They could give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights; they would mix them in all things  -  their occupations, their pleasures, their business.  It may readily be conceived that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded, and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women.

America's glory was her women. De Tocqueville believed this when he wrote: As for myself, I do not hesitate to avow that although the women of the United States are confined within the narrow circle of domestic life, and their situation is in some respects one of extreme dependence, I have nowhere seen woman occupying a loftier position; and if I were asked, now that I am drawing to the close of this work, in which I have spoken of so may important things done by the Americans, to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.
  (by Douglas Phillips, Vision Forum Ministries, May 10, 2013, www.fisionforum.com)

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