Our president said something better not said—no surprise.
But sometimes these misspeaks (accidentally) reveal what he truly believes, so
they’re worth looking at. Here’s what he said last week at Rhode Island College
on women and the economy:
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| Obama speech on women and the economy at Rhode Island College |
Sometimes, someone, usually Mom, leaves the workplace to stay
home with the kids, which then leaves her earning a lower wage for the rest of
her life as a result. That’s not a choice we want Americans to make. [full
speech here]
We could get rid of some of the indignation here if we assume he
misspoke and meant to say, “That’s not a choice we want Americans to have to make.” In other words, if you
take some years off to care for children, you face the reality of a lower wage,
and he thinks that’s unfair.
That does in fact seem to be what he means, because he goes
on to offer the solution of governmental institutional daycare—to solve the
problem of women having to leave the workforce at all, which leads to what looks like
uneven pay.
But he is, in fact, saying it’s a bad decision to choose to
stay home and raise your kids. It’s bad because it could cost you the wage
level rise you would presumably get if you didn’t take time off to raise those bothersome children. He doesn’t want you to make that wrong choice. That’s revealing.
We might be better off if we had a president who offered
this in a speech instead:
The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers
exist for one purpose only—and that is to support the ultimate career.—C. S.
Lewis
Or there’s this, from the last paragraph of historians Will
and Ariel Durant’s The Lessons of
History about perpetuating civilization:
If a man is fortunate he will, before he dies, gather up as
much as he can of his civilized heritage and transmit it to his children. And
to his final breath he will be grateful for this inexhaustible legacy, knowing
that it is our nourishing mother and our lasting life.
And let’s add this bit of wisdom:
Women who make a house a home make a far
greater contribution to society than those who command large armies or stand at
the head of impressive corporations.—Gordon B. Hinckley
The president seems to misunderstand what life is about.
Certainly he misunderstands what civilization is and how to get there and
then stay there.
The purpose of life is not to achieve some arbitrarily
defined world equity by earning money for yourself that is equal to whatever
anyone else can earn. It is not even to earn a valuable life by doing paid
work. A mother, who dedicated her career years to raising children who have
grown into successful contributing members of society and gone onto provide her
with grandchildren to love—can you imagine this woman, in the wisdom of age, on
her deathbed saying, “If only I’d spent more time at the office! If only I hadn’t
wasted my career years on children—the government could have handled them, and
then I would have made an equivalent amount to the men in my career!”
Life is bigger than that. We want to live a life we can
enjoy with those we love and want to be with, through the good times and trials. There
isn’t a better way to live than in a marriage and family, raising children in
love. Family is the basic unit of civilization—in which people thrive, and in
which social capital is built and passed on. It is possible to live a life otherwise, but civilization only happens when a critical mass live in functional families.
There is an interrelated economic component. We need income
for housing, food, shelter, and all the other things needed for raising and
educating our children. But the most economically sound way for that to happen
is in a family with a mother and a father. No government program works as well.
It isn’t a matter of tweaking policy, or getting the right leaders. It is a
matter of allowing families to do the work of caring, providing, and civilizing—work
that families are brilliantly designed by God to do.
If you care about civilization, you will consider the value
of a parent, probably the mother, doing the long-term daily work of caring for
them. Anyone who has done it knows it’s a lot more than feeding, clothing, and managing the children in a way that keeps them from wandering
into the street or other dangers. It’s about loving them, responding to them as
valuable human beings with their own personalities, gifts, and potentials. No
daycare—no matter how well run—can offer a child what an abundance of time with
a loving mother offers.
Not all women get to offer that. Some can’t make it
financially without working. Some feel called to do a specific life’s work in
addition, and choose to balance the mothering and other career. I do not want
to demean any woman who makes a choice to work when she has children. But it is
absolutely unconscionable to shame women for choosing to mother at home. It is especially
wrongheaded to demean her choice by turning it into a math equation about
earnings she’s expected by the state to work for.
It’s also wrong to blame natural economic laws that reward
continuous years of work in a particular career more than fewer disconnected years in that career. And it’s more than wrong to claim government can or
should override this economic natural consequence by taxing people more to
institutionalize our children at younger and younger ages.
Did the president make yet another speaking gaffe? Yes. But
we can make good progress even with a president who lacks speaking skills.
Moses lacked speaking skills and still managed to free the Israelites from enslavement.
Speaking skills are helpful (see Reagan for many examples). But what is better is
good thinking—and believing the right and true things.
What we need is not a president who manipulates power to
control women’s choices. We need a president, along with the rest of
government, who appreciates the value of mothers and fathers working together
to raise their own children—and gets out of their way.
Stop holding us down with variations of tyranny, poverty,
and savagery. And let us move up to freedom, prosperity, and civilization.
