Boobi Americani

"Our culture is anti-family, anti-woman, and anti-children. It is oversexualized and depraved." - Grace Beane

This was my dear wife's reaction to our over-coffee discussion of this recent article in Mothering Magazine.

She's absolutely right. What other conclusion can be drawn when states must explicitly exempt nursing mothers - mothers for God's sake - from indecency laws that could send them to prison and force them to register as "sex offenders" for the rest of their lives - for doing nothing more than feeding their babies?

This, in a society where you will see more skin of the female breast at the mall, at the beach, or even in public schools than you will ever see at a La Leche League meeting. It is almost impossible to find a movie made these days that doesn't include exposed female breasts - but women who are actually using them for their God-given purpose, women who are feeding their babies - must fear bureaucrats and neo-Puritans who want to put them in jail!

My goodness.

One of my wife's friends was nursing her eighteen-month old at a pool and an elderly woman scowled and told her: "You're raising a pervert."

Lord, have mercy!

The article includes the story of Emily Gillette and her daughter River who were removed from an ironically named "Freedom Airlines" flight (operated by Delta) for breastfeeding. It also includes the disturbing story of a Texas case from 2003 in which a couple (the Mercados) who lost custody of their two young children because the father took a photo of his wife nursing their one-year old and sent the film to a drug store. They were charged with, get this: "sexual performance of a child" (breastfeeding!) - which could have landed them in jail for 20 years and branded them as child molesters. It took six months (six months, for the love of God!) for the charges to be dropped and for the Mercados to be reunited with their children.

Someone ought to go to prison for this.

This happened in America. Have we become a bureaucracy of total idiots? Does anyone in authority have common sense any more? Or is it that we've just been so inundated with sexual images of breasts that we've forgotten why they are there? How is it that those who march for "choice" in matters of abortion and who decry modesty as backward and oppressive suddenly become iron-fisted totalitarians and Victorian prudes when it comes to nursing mothers?

Of course, it goes without saying that God Himself, our Lord Jesus Christ, nursed at the breasts of His mother. Isn't it interesting that Mary lived in a time and place where women would never wear low-slung pants with exposed thongs, bare midriffs, and exposed cleavage. In fact, Mary is typically depicted in a veil - the appropriate and traditional modest covering for a lady - especially at worship or in prayer. And yet, I feel comfortable in conjecturing that no-one ever scoffed at the Blessed Virgin informing her that she was "raising a pervert" or threatening to send her to prison for nursing her Child.

But this is 21st century America - a place where women are scorned unless they have a high-powered career, where feminism is openly treated like a religion and where any criticism is treated as virtually a thought-crime, where nursing moms are made to feel inferior by bottle-moms or by twisted and perverted gutter-crawling men who lack the maturity, not to mention the chivalry and common decency, to see something beautiful and godly about a nursing mother (rather than simply an object to ogle). Any man who does not instantly rise to the defense of a nursing mother is a coward and a cad. It is our Christian duty to protect women and children. The feminists have so emasculated men that they are no longer protectors of women, and the men have so perverted the women that they are content to be nothing more than pieces of meat on display.

Of course, it has become politically incorrect to point out the natural and divine superiority of breast milk to chemical powders. It goes without saying that nursing is a commitment - one that is at times challenging. It makes it very difficult for a mother to work if she must (though not impossible if she is committed). The nursing mother is the symbol of all that is hated by feminism, the kind of maternal lifestyle that prompted Hillary Clinton's condescending mockery a few years ago of mothers who actually are the queens of their homes and cook ("bake cookies") for their families. After her stupid remark, Senator Clinton's handlers yanked on the bit in her political mouth, prompting her to eat a little crow lest certain demographics within the voting population be offended. But her initial revulsion to traditional motherhood is still the norm among the elite of our culture.

That's the real ire against nursing moms. It's not worry that someone might catch a glimpse of some "white meat" - or a rare and very fleeting flash of some nipple. For if that were the case, the feminists would be marching in the streets in protest against erotic Super Bowl halftime shows, Hollywood films, rap concerts, comic books, Cosmopolitan Magazine, and the Sears catalog. No, indeed! The furor is about hatred of women, hatred of mothers exercising their "right to choose," hatred of the imposition of children upon our otherwise untethered lives of materialism and unfettered selfishness.

Satan hates motherhood (Rev. 12). The Blessed Virgin Mary and the Baby Jesus are most loathsome to the devil's legions. For every mother and child is a reminder of the Incarnation, a veiled image of the Madonna and the Infant Christ. Every child that is procreated by a mother and father is an icon of the coveted creative power that Satan can never have. Even mere humans can share in the creative work of God, whereas Satan and his hordes can only mock from the sidelines. They can only attempt to devalue sexuality and motherhood into something unworthy and shameful. One day, radical feminists (especially the haters of nursing mothers and traditional families) and their cultural allies, the "American boobs" who uncritically hang on their every word, will wake up to learn that they have been nothing more than dupes and useful idiots of the evil one.

Hopefully, they will repent before it is too late.

Meanwhile, mothers, take heart! You are doing the Lord's work (1 Tim 2:15). Men, take courage, for you are given authority so you can be a protector of women and children, defenders of that which is right and just and true. The Breastfed One who uses fatherhood and motherhood to expand His Kingdom has already defeated the one who bitterly covets that which he will never have.