Well, here we are, with Mother’s Day safely behind us and a whole year before we have to face it again.

My personal least favorite aspect of the holiday is that it invariably offers an opportunity for people who know nothing beyond their own biography to pontificate about women’s lives. The prime example this year had to be the usually estimable Chicago Tribune’s Mother’s Day essay, “A bit of mutual respect?” by Lauren Fishman Absler.

A quick Google search of Absler’s name turns up exactly two hits – the Tribune article and an interview with her by someone else about how she takes her son, Ethan’s, storybook away when he is bad. Yet the Tribune, which routinely calls on experts from the rich and varied intellectual and political community in Chicago, including its many top flight universities, chose the “Highland Park freelance writer [Google turned up no other articles by her] and mother of two” for its essay on what women should do to attain flourishing lives on this holiday occasion.

Not surprisingly, Absler, who apparently has no particular training in political or social analysis, simply unburdened herself of the usual “why can’t we all just get along” trope that has dominated the msm coverage of the important question of women dropping out of the workplace to stay home with their babies since my article criticizing the decision appeared in The American Prospect last December. If there’s an online version of op eds like the online sermon services the clergy use, surely the Tribune could simply have downloaded the piece from there; it’s so last year. Maybe the Tribune editors think that Chicagoans do not have access to the Internet or the New York Times or any of the hundred television interviews with other mommy experts, in which a veritable chorus of female voices have pled with each other to stop discussing the pros and cons of women’s choices, now that someone is on the scene to stand up for the decision to work.

But I am more interested in the phenomenon of the freelance mother of two expert than the particulars of her statement. Because what it reflects -- like the steadfast refusal to argue about the decision to drop out – is that women’s lives don’t matter. Not even enough to get a real expert to write about them in one of the largest circulation papers in the nation. Imagine the Tribune running an op ed on how we should deal with Iran, written by a freelance mother of two, even from Highland Park. Or whether to pursue nuclear energy or ethanol. Or whether charter schools are better than public schools. Or whether homosexuality is natural or cultural.

When women drop out of the workplace to stay home with their babies, they create tremendous consequences, for themselves and for the society in which we all live. They raise the stakes of mothering and affect all women, including those who have no choice but to work. They strip the workplace of its ambitious and promising women, with the result that the society will be run once again by institutions that are all male. An all male Supreme Court. Law firms that have stalled at around 17% male partners for years, and state legislatures at 23% for the same years. Male TV networks and male Fortune 500 Companies. With women so unproductive, they motivate colleges, as Kenyon College frankly admitted in the Times this spring, to discriminate against female applicants in order to fill their campuses with the men who will bring them glory and donations.

Not only does the dropping out have all these important social and cultural consequences, but it’s a dirty little political secret that working women vote overwhelmingly Democratic and stay at home moms not so much. Does it matter whether the Republicans or the Democrats win the 2006 Congressional elections? You’d never know it from reading the Tribune on Mother’s day. Because the msm, like the stay at home moms who want us to shut up, think that the only thing about women that matters is the private lives they lead up there in Highland Park. So everyone’s an expert.

And that is both disrespectful and scary. But fortunately we have fifty-one weeks to change things before Mother’s Day is upon us again.