Sermon

INTRODUCTION: Robert Fulghum, the author of the best-selling book, All I ever needed to know, I learned in kindergarten, writes in one of his later books, that he resisted preaching at his Unitarian Church about Mothers Day. He felt that not observing the day was something of a personal statement of concern that such an important date had been co-opted by the floral and greeting card industries. It was also a protest against the skyrocketing costs of a dozen red roses and a simple Mothers Day card. Plus, Mothers Day seemed to avoid totally the issues that women had struggled over for centuries.
So for two years, he didn’t preach on the topic of mothers, even though it was Mothers Day. Then the year following his two years of abstinence, in late April, he received a letter from one of his members. It read:

“This Mothers Day, I’m bringing my mother to church with me. Your sermon had better be on Mothers’ Day. And it had better be good.”

Now, I’m not sure what the criteria are for a good Mothers Day sermon. But I am well aware that the calendar dictates that certain days, such as Mothers Day, require acknowledgement, regardless of how crass the commercialism around them has become. And Mothers Day has more than anything, been a commercially successful observance for almost 100 years; actually, since May 1914. And the floral and greeting card industries depend in large part upon its observance, as well as their success in enticing us into buying flowers and cards on this day.

It all started in 1872, when Julia Ward Howe, who wrote the “Battle Hymn of the Republic”, attempted to establish a Mothers Day observance. She held the first one in Boston. But the thing unique about her proposal of Mothers Day was seeing it as a protest of war. She saw Mothers Day as a peace statement for the mothers of the half million Americans who died in the War Between the States, and the millions who were wounded and devastated economically.

Coincidentally, she also was a member of the Universalist Church, which is one of the two antecedent bodies of the Unitarian Universalist Association, in which I am a minister.
            But the modern day Mothers Day that we know actually centers on Anna Jarvis, who was successful in getting the day set aside by the governor of West Virginia in 1907. It was so popular, that other governors jumped on board, which led President Woodrow Wilson to declare it a national day of observance, in 1914.
            The interesting historical item though is not that process; rather, Ms Jarvis was so turned off by the instant commercialism that engulfed the observance, that she filed a court suit in 1923 to stop the whole thing – unsuccessfully, of course. In the years following, she spent significant amounts of her own money trying to undo what she had started. By 1948, the year she died, she told a reporter she was sorry she had ever had anything to do with creating Mothers Day in America.
            Despite all of that, I must admit that I like to buy flowers and all the sugary sentimentality that goes with it. I sent flowers this Mothers Day to my two daughters and to my daughter-in-law. And I can still remember as a small boy picking flowery weeds and taking them to my mother, and her acting like they were the prettiest flowers she had ever seen.

So maybe it’s syrupy…maybe it’s sentimentality…but in a nation at war…when we have more than 5,000 American mothers who’ve lost their daughters and sons…when we’ve been part of devastating tens of thousands of Iraqi homes and their mothers, all in a war of choice which we initiated and now can’t get out of…maybe honoring mothers is not all bad. And although the progress women made in the 20^th century had nothing to do with Mothers Day, the gains in measuring up to the Constitution’s guarantees are impressive.

I’m sure some of you can remember way back in 1968, the Phillip Morris Tobacco Company produced and promoted a new cigarette, named “Virginia Slims.” What distinguished this new tobacco product was that it was designed specifically to entice women, not men, into nicotine addiction. Their advertising agency designated a test market and then gradually rolled out the campaign to the entire nation. Its slogan was an instant hit, namely, “You’ve come a long way, baby.”

I don’t have a clue whether those cigarettes are still sold, and certainly the slogan is no longer used. It tapped in to a growing awareness about the evolving place and status of women. And without qualification, we can say in America, women have indeed come a long way.
For example, when America was founded as the first representative democracy in the entire world in 1776, common law ruled when it came to women’s rights. That meant that everything a woman owned became her husband's property upon their marriage. Married women could not hold, buy, or sell property once the Constitution became the law of the land, in 1789. They could not sue, nor enter into contracts. And they could not retain their own wages. It was not until 1895 that every American woman gained that most basic of rights – property rights. So when we say, women have come a long way, for certain they’ve come a long way since our founding in terms of property rights.

In terms of exercising their rights over their own bodies, at the beginning of the 20th century, the official perception in the land was that birth control information was obscene. To distribute it in the mail was a federal crime. It was even against the law for physicians to prescribe contraceptives.
It was not until 1936 that a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rendered a decision that legalized the importation of contraceptives into America. And the fledgling clinics that Margaret Sanger opened, which we know as Planned Parenthood today, were finally granted the protection of the law. We have come a long way from those initial struggles to give women the right to know and understand family planning.

And in 1960, the Food and Drug Administration made a decision with phenomenal consequences for women and for families in general. The FDA approved birth control pills. For the first time, women could decide whether they chose to become a mother. In fact, today is the 50^th Anniversary of their announcement that the pill would be legalized and for sale the following June 23^rd.
That meant that not only was sexual pleasure for both women and men separated from reproduction, but also sexual freedom for women was given a huge boost.

And in 1965, Connecticut, the final state to have laws prohibiting contraception, those laws were struck down.

Then on January 22, 1973, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Roe v. Wade, that women had a constitutional right to a safe and legal abortion. That was 37 years ago.

Indeed, women have come a long way, which is another way of saying that the 20^th century saw precedent-shattering progress made on issues affecting women, especially for women in their role as mothers.

In fact, the 20th century includes all kinds of advances in civil liberties and rights for minorities.

n suffragettes fought for the right of women to vote, resulting in the passing of the 19^th amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1920;

n feminists fought for the right to say when they wished to become a mother, resulting in the right to use contraceptives;

n civil rights leaders fought for the rights of African Americans, and in so doing, the chair of the House of Representatives wrote in women’s rights into the Civil Rights Acts of the 1960s;

n and all together they combined to make the 20th century one in which America did more to live up to the great promise of its Constitution than at any other time in its history.

Parts of the history of those changes were captured in a book, published in 1929, by birth control pioneer Margaret Sanger. The book contained a sampling of the thousands of letters she had received from mothers pleading for information, or as she phrased it, “desperate appeals for deliverance from the bondage of enforced maternity.” Here is a sample of those letters…before contraception was legal…before abortion was somewhat legal.

I am a mother of seven children, four living and three dead. With my last child I suffered everything but death. I have no health now. I have been to doctors and they tell that I am having children too fast, but they will not tell me how to prevent it. The only thing that some say is to get rid of the baby the minute I get pregnant, but that is not the kind of advice I want. Will you please give me some advice, as I need my health and strength to raise the four children I have.”

The rest of the book is filled with equally stirring, heart-felt pleas for help in knowing how one could choose when or not to become a mother…or as a mother of seven wrote, “I hope the day will come soon when women can have the say if they are to be mothers or not.” Or as Ms Sanger put it, the freedom to escape the “bondage of enforced maternity.”

Today, the economics of our society mean that in most homes, it takes two parents working to sustain a household…which means that childcare is critically important. After school programs are invaluable. And leniency in work schedules is requisite.

And sex education is vital. As NYTimes columnist, Gail Collins wrote yesterday, we have the contradiction of television shows where every teen seems to be having sex every day, but we don’t teach sex ed in schools. In fact, one of the under reported news stories about the anti-abortion movement is not only are they opposed to abortions, but also to contraception.

As for abortion, I think most of us thought in 1973, that the right to terminate a pregnancy would become ensconced in stone. Not so. Not only are state laws increasingly narrowing the regulations permitting abortion, but the availability of physicians and clinics providing abortion services is diminishing.

There is a physician in Lee County who provides those services. He also has served as the Medical Director for Planned Parenthood of Central and Southwest Florida. And I had the opportunity to perform his daughter’s wedding. Recently there was a very disturbing piece in the News-Press where anti-abortion foes were picketing his home.

While I certainly respect the fact that modern medicine has significantly advanced the time that a fetus can survive outside the womb, although it is only with significant neonatal artificial mechanism. And that we can do it, does not mean we should do it.

I have no doubt whatsoever that if men were forced to carry a baby in their bodies through 9 months of pregnancy because of unprotected sex, and if abortion were an alternative, there is no question what the law would be. The ability to give birth to a baby is not the same as being able to rear a baby, emotionally, physically, socially, and economically. That’s especially true in our troubled economy today.

When Lee Harvey Oswald was captured for the alleged murder of President John F. Kennedy, reporters interviewed his mother. Guess what? He didn’t do it…according to his mother.

When I read that story, I wasn’t that surprised. Our culture, and the Mother’s Day notions that it promotes likes to think of Mothers as a totally affirming parent. That is not all bad.

I read again recently where physician Dr. Gerald G. Jampolsky contends that total affirmation is a healthy way to live. He asks, "Have you ever given yourself the opportunity of going through just one day concentrating on totally accepting everyone and making no negative judgments?" If we ask, why would we or should we do that? He answers, "Everything we think, say or do reacts on us like a boomerang. When we send out criticisms or other attack thoughts, they come back to us. When we send out only love, it comes back to us, as well."

Love is what makes the world go around. James Freeman has a poem that goes like this:

[1] Given on Mothers Day Sunday, May 09, 2010, at the All Faiths Unitarian Congregation, 2756 McGregor Blvd., Ft. Myers, FL, by the Rev. Dr. Wayne Robinson, minister.

[2] James Dillet Freeman’s poem "How Well Do I Live? How Much Do You Love?"