Kansas Republican Party’s bloody fire arrows on Mother’s Day ignite culture war | Opinion
Imagine if you just finished Mother’s Day dinner and one of your kids gave you a greeting card showing blood streaming down your back after being shot with burning arrows.
You’d probably take that child to a therapist to try to find out what’s wrong.
That’s what someone should probably do with whoever’s in charge of the social media accounts for the Kansas Republican Party these days.
The state GOP’s official Mother’s Day greeting on Facebook was an artificial intelligence-generated image (at least I hope it was AI, if not we have bigger problems) showing a woman with six arrows sticking out of her body as she balances a shield, studded with another four arrows, behind her child’s back. Four of the 10 arrows are on fire.
She’s smiling and holding a book in front of the toddler. You can’t see the title, but the strong implication is it’s a Bible and not “Heather Has Two Mommies.”
The caption on this work of “art” was “Happy Mother’s Day to all the moms trying to protect and raise their children right in a world where evil is celebrated and good is mocked! Thank you for being so strong!”
I mean was this really necessary? Couldn’t the party leadership have just said “Happy Mother’s Day” and left it at that?
You’d think they would have learned a lesson on Easter, when President Donald Trump caught flak all over the place for celebrating the resurrection of Jesus with a demented online tirade about his own political adversaries, judges, law enforcement officials and his disproven theory of how the 2020 election was stolen from him.
The sad(der) part of this is that when new leadership of the state Republican Party took over in March, it looked like they were planning to let up on the gas a little from the opportunistic weirdness that marked the tenure of former GOP state chairman Mike Brown.
Apparently not.
For some reason, GOP leadership can’t seem to ever just take a day off and act like more or less regular people.
Since 1944, the slogan of the Hallmark greeting card company has been “When you care enough to send the very best.” The GOP’s version is “When you care enough to own the libs, even on holidays.”
But on this particular holiday, the libs weren’t in a mood to be owned. The GOP post drew more than 700 comments as of this writing and they were still flowing in steadily Monday evening.
The overwhelming majority were negative. Here are some of the more printable examples:
“You are the ones celebrating and collaborating with EVIL. Get your story straight. As a mother, we deserve better than this Republican Party. You all are an embarrassment to every REAL Republican. Shame on you and shame on you for posting this on Mothers Day.”
“I wish you morons would do more to shield kids from bullets and hunger than you do the imaginary arrows.”
“And don’t worry the GOP will do everything in its power to make sure your chance of dying during childbirth goes up, the cost of raising your kid goes up, and the chance your kid dies from an easily preventable disease goes up.”
I have to admit, I did get a good chuckle when one commenter pointed out that whoever posted the picture seemed really unclear on the operational details of archery:
“Why is the wrong end of the arrow burning? How do you even shoot an arrow with the nock and fletching on fire?”
Of course, there were barbs from the other side in response, like these:
“Hey liberals.... you all kill babies or try to turn them trans. You all have ZERO room to be in this discussion. Leave the mom’s here to protect their children how they see fit. At the end of the day, liberals hate children and anything normal. This is why your party is falling apart.”
“The dEvil and lack of moral compass of the leftists always shines thru on conservative sites. Never ceases to amaze.”
And of course the usual accusations of pedophilia and perversion flew back and forth from both sides.
So congratulations Kansas Republican Party. You managed to take probably the most benign, nonpartisan, nonpolitical holiday in existence and turned it into a nasty pitched battle online.
I can’t wait for Father’s Day.
This story was originally published May 13, 2025 at 4:45 AM.
