Leftist hatred of stay-at-home moms is not what it seems.

There was a brilliant post yesterday about writing techniques in political propaganda. The article it discussed involved leftist disdain for stay-at-home moms. One normally thinks of a mother as the most wholesome of images, so convincing a majority of the population that stay-at-home moms are somehow devious and evil would seem to be a difficult goal. Why bother? Why do leftists want us all to hate stay-at-home moms so much? I have a few theories:

• The modern left is based on individual desires taking precedence over sacrifice for others. Be yourself. Don’t conform to society. Let your freak flag fly. Such people don’t believe in sacrificing one’s own desires for the benefit of someone else, like one’s children.
• Acknowledging the importance of stay-at-home moms would tend to undermine Democrats’ support of abortion. If raising kids is good, then perhaps killing them is bad.
• Modern feminists believe that men are bad, and women are best when they act like men. (It’s complicated.) Anyway, it’s more manly (and thus more desirable) to not get tied down at home.
• Feminists view motherhood as a submissive role (they obviously never met my mother). And no woman should be submissive to anybody.
• Leftists view paid labor to be important, and housework to be relatively unimportant. Like Marx, they consider money to be the ultimate measure of value – nothing else matters. So women should not limit themselves to low-paying jobs.
• Modern feminists feel guilty about abandoning their own families so they could pursue meaningless degrees and jobs nobody cares about. They hope to alleviate their guilt by pointing out the evils of stay-at-home motherhood.
• Feminists view marriage and motherhood as forms of slavery, which can be avoided by women earning their own money, separate from their husbands.

A few of those rationalizations make some sense, to a degree. Although, remember that I’m not writing about why it’s important that women have the opportunity to work outside the home – I think all of us agree on the benefits of everyone in society having the same opportunities. And this is not about families who decide that it would better if both parents worked, to improve their situation. That’s not at all what this is about.

This is about why leftists think that no woman should be a stay-at-home mom. Modern feminism is not pro-choice. Not in this realm. They think that any woman who chooses to be a stay-at-home mom is a failure or, even worse, a Republican. So I think all of those reasons above play some role in their extreme distaste for traditional stay-at-home moms.

But I suspect that there is one other reason, that may be more important than all the others:

• For a woman to be a stay-at-home mom, she needs a good husband, who works and sacrifices to provide for his family.

I think this may be the main problem with stay-at-home moms to Democrats.

Leftism is not about hope and love. It is about resentment and hate.

Democrats are known for raising taxes on the wealthy to pay for social programs for the poor. Those social programs usually make things worse for the poor people they ostensibly were designed to help. Sometimes MUCH worse. But that doesn’t matter. They keep doing it.

Because Democrats don’t love poor people. They just hate rich people.

This is similar, I think. I’m not sure that feminists hate stay-at-home moms as much as they hate the husbands who make such decisions possible.

I can understand why Democrats view stay-at-home moms as such a threat. They symbolize much of what is right with conservatism, and much of what is wrong with leftism. In many different ways, as I listed above.

But I’m beginning to suspect that hatred of stay-at-home moms is more about the dads. Down with the patriarchy. It takes a village to raise a child, not two parents. The state is more important than the family. An independent family unit doesn’t need government, and is less likely to care what government wants them to do or think.

To the left, fathers are the real threat.

And this is just one more way to attack them.