History of Feminism

In our society, it is a major rite of passage, equivalent to the rituals and ceremonies that cultures all over the world, all through time, have used to mark a child's transition from infancy and total attachment to mother and hearth to integration into the tribe as a whole.

To deny this little boy's mother the complex, mingled pain and joy of this moment is as nasty as it would be to deny her (and the child, too, of course) the uninterrupted and uncontaminated experience of his or her wedding day or the birth of his or her first child.

Those moments are an important part of a human being's psychological progress through life. We need those markers to help us accept the reality that such progress also means deep loss, because all of our passage through life is through loss and toward death.

This milestone is the one that marks the mother's acceptance that her baby is forever gone. The proper use of rituals, and epecially the "tribe's" full participation in the rite of passage and full acceptance of the child, is an essential element, because it is what creates the joy that is strong enough to enable the mother to deal with the attendant loss and the grief that necessarily accompanies it.

This stupid school has caused a wound that is deeper than it appears to be. At this symbolically significant moment in the life of both the child and his mother, the bigoted bureaucrats have rejected the child as a full member of the tribe. They will, obviously, be forced to accept him by law, but that surface acceptance will never carry the weight of genuine ntegration into the larger social group, so the mother's loss of her baby will not be effectively mitigated by the pride and joy that the rite of passage is supposed to generate. Instead, it will be exacerbated by her fear that her child has left her protection without havng found the protection he is supposed to gain from the tribe as a whole.