c. 2000 Religion News Service

(Dale Hanson Bourke is publisher of RNS.)

(UNDATED) If you listen carefully you can hear the footsteps. Tennis shoes thumping, career flats pounding, high heels clacking. From all walks of life women are marching.

It is a quiet movement, but it is beginning to raise its collective voice in anguish. Mothers across America have had enough. They are tired of losing children to guns. They are unwilling to be quiet or even polite anymore.

Together they have united around a movement called the Million Mom March.

I first heard of it a few months ago. Now every time I meet someone it seems I hear the same question, “Are you joining the march?”

Rosie O’Donnell will be there. So will other celebrities. But mostly it will be a crowd of women who have wept over a child they have loved or one they have simply heard about in the news.

Everyday I have e-mail messages from women I know from different times and places, women who seem to have little in common except the desire to stop the violence guns do to children.

Mother’s Day this year will have special meaning because women from across America will trade breakfast in bed for a trek to the Mall in Washington. A million moms want to be heard more than they want to be honored.

It is not an anti-gun movement, which might surprise folks who don’t know much about it. It is more than anything an educational crusade, a no-nonsense approach to keeping children safe and guns out of the wrong hands.

As one organizer observed, a person could be a moderate member of the National Rifle Association and still join the Million Mom March. The key word is moderate.

The Million Mom March is by anti-gun standards quite moderate. It asks for gun registration and licensing, safety locks and waiting periods. It wants gun laws already on the books to be enforced and gun education to be expanded.

It does not ask for a ban on the sale of any type of gun. As part of its mission the group states, “… we acknowledge that guns may be necessary for hunting, law enforcement and national security.”

Its approach is a strong part of its appeal. The Million Moms will be Republicans and Democrats, liberals and conservatives. The mission is right of some, left of others. Yet its common-sense attitude is simply a call to find a few things we can all agree on _ for the sake of our children.

Women are good at that. They are inclined to give up politics and philosophy when children are at stake. They are willing to change their minds if lives can be saved. They are willing to be inconvenienced if someone can be helped.

What women are not inclined to do is forget. When their will has been united behind a cause, women will demand to be heard.

A million moms _ maybe more _ will march on Washington this Mother’s Day. If politicians know what’s good for them, they will take moms’ advice.

Eds: for more information: http://www.millionmommarch.com).

DEA END BOURKE