Mean Old Mom

 Do you ever hear your kids grumbling and complaining about how their mom is the meanest mom in the whole world?

Well, first of all you can dig up this verse, which we used in easily remembered song format, stopping halfway through the sentence, for convenience’ sake:

“Do all things without complaining and disputing…"

~Philippians 2:14

It is very handy as a standalone solution when you need to get on with life. But behind it all, there are great truths to uncover.

I was a mean old mom when my kids were growing up. Here are just a few examples of policies we had that reflect upon my meanness:

We didn’t watch network TV, which is pretty much all we had back then. This even included Saturday morning cartoons. However, in the case of an Olympics, or a general election, or a national catastrophe such as 9/11, we would plug in the TV to the large antenna that loomed over our house, and turn to the clearest news station. 

We always went to church, and nobody even brought up a child’s right to Freedom of Religion. It’s just what we did on Sunday.

We never giggled at a child’s sass or cute lying. We actually greatly discouraged (punished) both disrespect and dishonesty.

We avoided McDonald’s and Disney and Holiday Inn for their evil corporate policies.

We never allowed Harry Potter in the house, and never sent our kids around trick-or-treating. 

There were always times when these mean policies would be challenged. 

“Isn’t this (or that) a gray area?” 

“There’s a birthday party at McDonald’s—you won’t make me stay home, will you?”

When it came to Disney, this was a tightrope walk. Nobody likes being told that cute children’s movies are evil. But look at the progression. 

Disney produced animated films that glorified sorcery from the get-go. They scared kids with their very darkness. At times, the “bad guys” were overwhelming in their badness. As you undoubtedly guessed from my short list above, Harry Potter was also not allowed in our house because of the sorcery. (Duh!)

We have known for at least thirty years that every children’s movie produced by Disney had at least one inappropriate gem that was a bone for the homosexual lobby. It was first noticeable by us in “E.T.” It was a cute movie with a rude comment. So we only watched those Disney movies that had been family-friendly filtered by VidAngel, until Disney was able to win the court challenges and protect all of their content from filtering.

That progressed to controversies over whether Elsa in Frozen was a lesbian and whether she should have a girlfriend, and about how significant or insignificant the homosexual moment in Beauty in the Beast was. These controversies were both significant, in that they caused people to talk about the controversy and then flock to the theaters.

Now all the kids’ shows, not just Disney, from Blues Clues to Arthur to Sesame Street, are teeming with openly homosexual characters, or even heroes. Kellogg’s is also on our black list. Even Legos had to come out with the accursed rainbow flag colors.

And Disney, with a rich heiress named Abigail, is leading the charge by openly defying Florida’s new anti-grooming law banning inappropriate discussions of sexual perversion with little children, and it is all-in to glorify homosexuality, injecting as much of it into all the Disney children’s products as possible. It is war, and the nation’s children are the casualties.

Was I right to deny our children the privilege of watching Disney? Now can we all delete the Disney+ app from our phones? (Hopefully the Netflix app is already gone.)

We always went to church and all our kids went with us. There was never a question about that.  Our kids went to Sunday School, learned the lessons, sang the songs, sang in all the Christmas and Easter programs, and they were all saved early and baptized once or twice. Church camp was a given, or else homeschool camp, where we knew and trusted the leadership.

But we wouldn’t let our children even sit in on classes in the government schools. We were very careful about who taught our children besides ourselves, so classes at the homeschool co-ops were pre-screened. All the parents were like that. Once a proposed music class I offered to teach was canned because I told the group of parents that I would be teaching various rhythms, including my plans to bring my African drum, the djembe, to class. Some parents didn’t approve of African drum beats. 

Now parents have to fight against the Emotional Social Learning and Critical Race Theory (Marxism) that is frighteningly prevalent in the government schools. It crept in uninvited and unwittingly through the teacher colleges, and parents only discovered it when their children had to stay home during the Covid lockdowns.

The fight is real. Our Republican supermajority in Indiana sat on its hands and allowed an anti-CRT bill to be amended (gutted) so that the legality of CRT is now unquestionable. The Republican governor of our state vetoed a bill protecting women’s sports from male competitors. The evil teachers unions are turning the nation’s children into little morally confused Marxists who are convinced that their parents are too old-fashioned at best, or racist at worst, and so they must keep their new values secret from those parents and reject the teachings of their church.

Was I right? Now will massive numbers of concerned parents finally understand and homeschool their children, and bring them to church, and resist their sass?

Here’s the rest of the passage I quoted out of context above:

Do all things without complaining and disputing, that you may become blameless and harmless, children of God without fault in the midst of a crooked and perverse generation, among whom you shine as lights in the world, holding fast the word of life, so that I may rejoice in the day of Christ that I have not run in vain or labored in vain.

~Philippians 2:14-16

This, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is a crooked and perverse generation, if there ever was one. When the Occupant of the White House tells the world that his administration is in favor of mutilating children’s genitalia, that is perverse. When what used to be a conservative cable network (Fox News) tells the world they are hiring gender-confused Bruce Jenner as a contributor, that is perverse. When the Time Magazine Woman of the Year is actually a man, and the Babylon Bee is banned from saying it on Twitter even in satire, that is perverse.

It was about twenty-five years ago that we informed a friend that the schools were all teaching perverted sex education. He pooh-poohed that, and said not in his daughter’s school. Then to prove his point, he called his daughter over to question her about what we’d told him.

“Hey, J--, did you ever hear anything inappropriate in your sex ed classes?”

“No … ”

“There, you see?”

“Except we did have to put a condom on a banana … “

He was shocked, but by that time, she had already graduated. It is too late if you find out after your daughter has already been exposed to the perversion. As you can imagine, this has only gotten much, much worse.

I knew someone who was directly involved in the beginnings of the Title IX legislation, which established fairness in women’s sports and allowed women to receive college scholarships for their achievements. Fortunately for her, she passed away very early last year—before mediocre men began to grow their hair long and infiltrated women’s sports, winning so many trophies and scholarships. I say fortunately because she will never know how all her efforts are now wasted because of militant perversion, and she was spared that anguish before she passed.

If there ever was a time to stand firm against the powers of darkness in the world and be a “mean mom,” otherwise known as a “Mama Bear,” it is now. Will you fight the influences of the world and hold fast the Word of Life? More importantly, will you teach your children how to hold fast to it as well, to be markedly different from their peers and not ashamed of it, and to be God’s lights shining in the darkness?

If your children are grown and you are a grandma now, can you be a Grandma Bear on their behalf?

And if you don’t have any children or grandchildren in the home, can you “adopt” a neighbor kid or a kid in church being raised in a single-parent home and think of them as your own?  Could you be a Sunday School teacher who can help offset the public school brainwashing at least once a week with the good news of the Gospel of Jesus Christ?

If you do stand up to evil, then you can rejoice in the day of Christ that you have not run in vain or labored in vain. Make a difference in the life of a child! They will not always be small. 

“Our dear Heavenly Father, You care about the little ones and what they are taught.  You ask us as believers to teach our children at all times during the day. You want us to delegate responsibly when necessary, to only qualified teachers.  And you want us to protect our children from content and people they should not be exposed to.

“Give us the endurance to teach our children for the long haul, to hold forth the Word of Life, to stick to our guns about Biblical values, and to not shrink back in fear. Let us always hear the voice of the Holy Spirit speaking into our lives so that we may speak it clearly to our children.

“These things we ask in the powerful Name of Jesus, Amen.”