Advice from my mother: Never marry a Republican; never marry a county commissioner

I begin with the advice of my mother. Born in 1915, she was a politician back in the 1950s when women didn't do that sort of thing. A yellowdog Democrat from Little Dixie (southeast Oklahoma), my mom remembered driving voters to the polls at the age of 12, steering the car propped up on a Montgomery Ward catalog. During the Great Depression her dad had a state job--cotton gin inspector--a step up from being a guard at Big Mac, the state pen. She went to college with funds provided by FDR’s New Deal, and her loyalty to the Democratic Party ran deep.

She became mayor of our small town and was pretty busy. She didn't spend much time doling out advice to her daughter. Instead she was busy with a progressive agenda for the community--writing zoning laws, protecting our water source from polluters (before we even knew there was a problem called pollution), and fighting for civil rights. So when she passed along wisdom I tended to pay attention.

Her advice not to marry a Republican was based simply on her perception that Republicans lacked any redeeming ethical core. The typical Republican, in her mind, had one goal: to get even richer. She divided people into two categories: Big Fat Republicans and the rest of us. I well remember the newly televised Republican convention in 1952 when my mom sat me down in front of the television and explained just whose fault it was that Ding Dong School was not to be televised. By 1956 I spent my after school hours on a bright new blue Schwinn campaigning for Adlai Stevenson. I was nine.

As I grew up my mom explained more sophisticated reasons never to marry a Republican. Under Big Fat Republican administrations, the rich got richer and the poor got poorer. How did this happen? By cutting their own taxes and shifting the tax burden to their inferiors—the poor. BFR’s believed in preserving their wealth by using the government to grease the skids of economic opportunity, this at the expense of the least powerful, the children. For example, Republicans ALWAYS cut funding for children--the WIC program for example and free immunization programs. Sound familiar?In my family, immunization was HUGE. Remember FDR had polio? And then Eleanor Roosevelt helped begin the March of Dimes to eradicate the disease. My mom revered Eleanor Roosevelt and thought that she had, after all, practically invented the Salk vaccine. For my first decade of life, each year for the March, I stood tall with back against the wall and measured my height. A strip of tape was measured out to equal my height, and then, along with the rest of all baby boomers, I stuck my carefully saved dimes to the tape, matching my height with the shiny images of FDR. When the Salk vaccine was distributed--I was in the second grade--my mother came to school to help with the compulsory vaccination. She was sort of Eleanor's personal representative I believed. So of course when Republicans failed to fund routine childhood vaccinations, it confirmed all her beliefs. Did I need more evidence?

I trusted my mom on this one. Though I have known Republicans that were not the embodiment of pure evil, for the most part I find my own "family values" tend to include funding public education for all children; providing health care (and free immunization) for all children; providing maternity care for even the poorest members of our national family. I have chosen friends and men friends who share that ethical core because I wanted to have children and I wanted men that seemed, you know, to like them and seemed to want them to survive to adulthood. Not to support that seems somehow mean and small.

My mom's advice about county commissioners may seem somewhat esoteric. What even is a county commissioner anyway? Well she explained simply, they are all crooks. Now I don't want to cast aspersions on all county commissioners (and trust me there are quite a few out there). I am sure many are mostly hardworking and honest. But soon after I married a non-cc, most of Oklahoma's county commissioners did a stretch in the aforementioned Big Mac for accepting kickbacks. Dare I say, my mom was right.

Sometimes I imagine that our mothers were right about everything. I lost my mom in 1981, and each year I find myself understanding this complex woman better and better. And I think her advice about marriage material is perhaps even more relevant today. What do you think?