Unshockingly, the National Review Online was quickest to leap into pearl-clutching position. After deeming the image “as bad as it will ever get,” Glenn T. Stanton pronounced that “This poor boy may be diggin’ life now, but will soon be forever teased as the Got Milk? boy that Time magazine and his indulgent mom made infamous.” And in the Contra Costra Times, Tony Hicks decided that all the mothers who appeared in the story’s photos did so “simply to have something really embarrassing to use against their kids when they become teenagers.”

Most of us who live in some degree in the public space – whether it’s our Facebook photo albums or the cover of Time magazine – grapple with how much of our children’s lives we share. The little babies whose adorable smiles are posted swiftly turn into teens who’d like you to cut it out already, Mom. The contract that we have with our children to protect them and respect them is one that has to be constantly renewed as they grow and change. But it’s not the same for any two families, and the boundaries are incredibly varied.

The complicated reality is that our experiences are entangled with those of our loved ones. A woman should have every right to write and talk and present herself to the world. But if we’re going to talk about our lives, there’s no way we won’t be bringing our families along for the ride. That’s not automatically a traumatic thing. If a child, like Grumet’s, grows up in a family that’s very open about itself, and the child’s own nature is of that bent, he may well think nothing of it. The hang-up isn’t his; it’s the journalists transferring their own discomfort onto him. To assume he’ll be mocked about that Time cover is to assume that the image of him breast-feeding is something to be embarrassed about, that there’s something inherently wrong about it.

That’s not to say that profound sensitivity isn’t required. Our children aren’t props for us to use to boost our careers – or even, for that matter, our Facebook statuses. They’re human beings, and when they can’t give consent, it’s our duty to make reasonable choices on their behalfs. Would I appear on the cover of Time, breast-feeding one of my kids? I’m not sure I’d appear on the cover of Time with my kids, period. But that’s my choice and my family’s. Frankly, I’m way more unnerved when I see a soon-to-be ex-Facebook friend post a photo of his toddler’s first poop in the big boy toilet or announce her daughter’s first period than I could ever be by a woman nursing her preschooler. We’ve all got different boundaries.

Last evening I was at an event on motherhood and writing, and the novelist Martha Southgate spoke about how she’d written a very personal essay about her son when he was in elementary school. Now that he’s 18, she wonders if she should have done things differently. And in Tablet last winter, columnist Marjorie Ingall declared that after years of chronicling her life with her family, she was giving her two daughters “the greatest gift of all: I’m not going to write about them anymore.” In my own life I’ve moved, with each passing year, from simply writing abut my children to collaborating with them on what they do and don’t want revealed about their personal lives. I’m grateful when they’re generous and open with their experiences, even though I know they may second-guess that openness later.

On Facebook Thursday, Grumet wrote that “My mother posed for similar images (not as big as TIME obviously) and was a public advocate of breastfeeding. I am so proud of her and loved my upbringing.” So why would her son’s future mortification be a fait accompli?

None of us has a crystal ball. If we did, we’d probably still find ways of making choices that our children will be telling their future shrinks about for years. Life isn’t always about what your child is going to feel when he’s in college. More significantly, isn’t how the child is now a much more tangible and important issue? Was Grumet’s son comfortable when the Time photo was taken? Did he want to nurse then? Was he coerced? Or was he simply doing something that felt comfortable and acceptable? Was he content to pose for the photo? Because if we can allow for the possibility that he didn’t give a damn when the picture was shot, who’s to presume he will in 15 years?

In a feature on the not-at-all-incendiary subject of “why attachment parenting drives some mothers to extremes,” writer Kate Pickert takes on motherhood and its “guru,” attachment parenting author William Sears. Sears’ work and the practice of attachment parenting have come under heavy scrutiny since Elisabeth Badinter’s button-pushing “The Conflict: How Modern Motherhood Undermines the Status of Women” became an international hit, and you get a sense where Pickert’s piece is going as soon as she fires the opening shot. “Joanne Beauregard is nothing so much as she is a mother.” Then there’s the story’s cover girl, 26-year-old Jamie Lynn Grumet, who admits she was breast-fed herself until she was 6.

On Time’s blog, photographer Martin Schoeller explains of the shot of Grumet, along with similar images of three other breast-feeding mothers, that “I liked the idea of having the kids standing up to underline the point that this was an uncommon situation.” Fair enough. And though my personal feelings on Barry Sears are ambivalent at best, I am all for promoting breast-feeding. I will be first in line to applaud images of mothers feeding their children, both in real life and advertising, and to cry foul when those images are suppressed. But I call massive, massive BS here.

First of all, why, when a breast-feeding mother makes the cover of a national magazine, is it a thin, young one in a tank top? Grumet’s image is so obviously sexualized it’s not even trying to pretend otherwise. But the real problem with the cover story is its obvious, dripping disdain. This is not just an attention-getting MILF shot. It’s a picture of a woman “driven” to an “extreme.”

Sure, extended breast-feeding is unusual – and reliably controversial.  Two years ago, the Daily Mail pondered whether the practice was “horrifying.” It doesn’t, however, necessarily follow that a family that chooses long-term nursing is freakishly challenging anybody else to be “mom enough.” That’s what makes the whole thing gross. The entire Time cover story is framed in a way to make the viewer be simultaneously repulsed and aroused. Congratulations, editors. You’ve added to our already rampant cultural dismissal of motherhood as a kooky cult. And you’ve made a venerable news magazine one big hate bang.

It’s no accident that the president’s change of heart happened to make for a perfect sound bite. Nearly as fast as Barack Obama, leader of the free world, could utter the words “Same-sex couples should be able to get married,” to ABC News correspondent Robin Roberts, @barackobama — the president’s not-nearly-as-popular-as@JustinBieber Twitter account — was announcing “Same-sex couples should be able to get married.” As of Thursday morning, it had been retweeted over 56,000 times and counting.

And just like that, what had been a fuzzy campaign issue for Obama just a week ago became a defiant stance – and an easily forwarded post. The president’s Twitter and Facebook accounts wasted no time issuing a photo of Obama with his statement, under the heading, “history.” The campaign’s main page itself immediately splashed up the quote, along with the ABC News clip and the invitation to “stand up with the president.” And the campaign’s colorful, friendly-looking poster stating that “Every single American/Gay Straight Lesbian Bisexual Transgender/Deserves to be treated equally in the eyes of the law and in the eyes of our society/It’s a pretty simple proposition” popped into a place of honor on the Obama Pinterest and Instagram pages.

Elections can turn on a few provocative words – from “Read my lips” to “It’s the economy, stupid” to, simply, “Hope.” But there’s never been a time when a single sentiment could be parroted across so many different platforms. The Obama campaign knows this, and has shrewdly seized upon the immediate, visceral reaction that one sentence can inspire with impressive immediacy. Watch and learn, Romney. Though we’ve yet to see how the president’s “evolved” stance will shake out into real votes in November, for now, it sure makes for a whole lot of likes and pins. Whatever happens next, Obama’s won Twitter.

“I feel a little queasy that we mothers are often left to be the guardians of culture,” says Cheryl Strayed, author of “Wild” and Dear Sugar columnist for the Rumpus, “because so often mother movements have been associated with a conservative agenda.” It’s true. When a song is too raunchy, a sitcom too full of tampon jokes, a movie featuring real children somehow too raw for children, it’s left to mothers (well, mothers and Kirk Cameron) to step forward and plead, “What about the chiiiiiiildren?”

But today’s conservative mom movement isn’t like its predecessors — either in its tone or in its targets.

When Gore and Baker formed the Parents Music Resource Center, they could bring an entire industry to its knees. Say what you will about Tipper Gore, she knew how to run a successful campaign. (Neither Gore nor the American Family Association, which oversees One Million Moms, responded to Salon’s interview requests for this story.) For starters, in stark contrast to the likes of One Million Moms, the PMRC sold itself as being far more mainstream. It didn’t overambitiously attempt to take on all of culture, instead confining itself strictly to the music industry. And — significantly – it insisted it didn’t want to change artistic expression, but merely flag inappropriate content with a warning sticker so parents could make informed choices. Though the chilling effect the PMRC’s warnings had on retailers and MTV makes Gore’s insistence that she was “a strong believer of the First Amendment” debatable, her manner was velvet gloved. And at a time long before digital editing would make it a snap to roll out the radio and explicit version of any song, the PMRC made its tools of parental intercession seem a reasonable necessity.

The PMRC also had something else going for it that few other organizations have ever had. It was run by the wives of a senator and the secretary of the treasury. As Rob Tannenbaum, co-author of “I Want My MTV: The Uncensored Story of the Music Video Revolution,” explains, “These were not just mothers. These were power brokers who had privileged access to the ear of the U.S. government because they had privileged access to the penises of the U.S. government.”

Despite achieving its goals, however, the PMRC set the bar for how despised a mom-led campaign could be. Tipper Gore gave rock ‘n’ roll one of its most enduring nemeses, and she endures as the inspiration for Catherine Zeta-Jones’ pearl-clutching activist in next month’s “Rock of Ages.” And it left a permanent bad taste in America’s mouth about what happens when moms get their collective knickers in a twist.

Two and a half decades later, some mothers, like the 46,628 members of One Million Moms, have drawn a curious lesson from the era: that all of popular culture represents a bullet aimed at their children that they must constantly throw themselves in front of. But others, the same girls who weren’t going to let some dumb sticker stand between them and a masturbatory Cyndi Lauper lyric, are moms themselves. Now we’re the ones figuring out how to navigate the often muddy, expletive-laced waters of popular culture when you’re not a conservative hysteric.  As Cheryl Strayed says, “I remember I used to say, ‘Oh for God’s sake, kids are going to listen to whatever they want.” Then she found herself asking her Facebook friends for suggestions for age-appropriate hip-hop for her 6- and 8-year-old children. “I said, ‘Suddenly, I’m Tipper Gore.’”

She says, “I am preventing my kids from being exposed to certain kinds of music, but I don’t think that’s about art or censorship. It’s a two-way conversation. A lot of times there’s a line, and we’ll talk about it together. I don’t think it works to just create a taboo.” After all, childhood isn’t all Barney singalongs. Strayed recalls that when her children read “Pinocchio” when they were younger, they were “riveted and curious” about it. “They were aware there is a darkness out there, and they were ready to know about it.” So why wouldn’t her son be equipped now to play a video game and tell her, “Mom, I know I’m not supposed to kill people”? Somewhere out there on the line we parents struggle to stay on the right side of in the music and movies and games we give our kids, there’s the safe outlet they need to explore their own complicated feelings and questions. And often, there’s the stuff that we, too, treasure.

Peggy Orenstein, author of “Cinderella Ate My Daughter,” says, “You have a million things coming at you all the time that you’re trying to sift through — for yourself and your child. That’s part of living in this culture. You can beat yourself up all the time, or you can sometimes say, ‘I really love this song,’ and deal with the consequences.”

That’s one of the biggest challenges for many of us. It’s not finessing, as Tipper Gore called her 1987 book, “Raising PG Kids in an X-Rated Society.” As Rob Tannenbaum says, “The only way you can raise PG kids in an X-rated society is by putting them in a cave.” The hard part is often dealing with the fact that parents are not always directly in opposition to the popular culture, that we’re often R-rated people ourselves. My 8- and 12-year-old daughters don’t know what “Jersey Shore” or “Grand Theft Auto” are, because those are influences I don’t want them to have — and that their parents aren’t interested in. But it’s also possible that my children could — should you ever make the request — sing you all the words to “Baby Got Back” or “Rehab.” And if you’re wondering where they got their obsession with Nirvana, it’s not their Gen-X mother but, of all things, “The Muppets.”

“You can and should limit what your children are exposed to,” says Orenstein. “But the goal is not to censor your way through life. I try really hard to protect my daughter from being assaulted by negative images, but to also be a critical thinker. It’s about helping children become aware of the messages that are aimed at them.”

If the ongoing attention to the “mom wars” – both the genuine and highly exaggerated, mainstream-media variety – have proven anything, it’s that mothers don’t speak with one voice. We don’t magically fall into a single ideological camp the minute we hold our babies for the first time. That’s why successful contemporary campaigning  has become more loosely and narrowly structured. A Change.org petition here, a Twitter campaign there — often largely spontaneous groups that will rally around a single issue or incident rather than attempting to take on the whole of modern society. Orenstein says, “We live in a time of protest and boycott and petition. Sometimes there are things that I celebrate about that, and sometimes, pressure is brought to bear in ways that infuriate me.” It can be as positive as Spark getting the ear of Lego over its ultra-girly line of toys. Or it can be as wrongheaded — and easily fizzled out — as One Million Moms, who thankfully haven’t been able to get much traction for their agenda against the “filth” of a lesbian couple posing happily with their daughter in a clothing catalog. Their agenda against everybody from shopping mall department stores to Disney is too broad, their “fed up” rhetoric too much the stereotype of female hysteria, to be taken seriously. Also, their Twitter presence is lame.

As parents, we have an obligation to protect our children from material that we find objectionable – because it’s cruel or exploitative, or because it’s simply not age-appropriate. How we define what that is differs from family to family, and even from child to child within a family. That’s our job. The adult world doesn’t owe it to our children to be family-friendly, to go along with the idea that because something might be objectionable to a second-grader, it therefore shouldn’t exist. It especially doesn’t need fellow grown-ups who hide behind their children, using them as an excuse to push out ideas or images that make us uncomfortable. As Rob Tannenbaum says, “Using children for emotional moral leverage for your own agenda is disgusting.”

We have a right to speak out about images and ideas that are destructive. Yet we have a deeper imperative to teach our kids to make their own nuanced distinctions. We mothers are still the moral gatekeepers. But it’s not a culture war, led by avenging troops of mothers outraged over Nicki Minaj lyrics. It’s just small, shifting battles we fight every day, in our own homes, and with our own Cee Lo Green-quoting kids.

Bishop Martin Amos alerted the Prince of Peace school staff last week that “We cannot allow any one or any organization which promotes a position that is contrary to the teachings of the Catholic Church to present at a diocesan institution.” The Eychaner Foundation describes itself as “a non-profit organization committed to promoting tolerance and non-discrimination.” Tell us, Bishop Amos, exactly how that conflicts with Christianity?

The $40,000 scholarship to the University of Iowa is named in honor of gay college student Matthew Shepard, who was brutally murdered in 1998. This year’s recipient, Keaton Fuller, will still be acknowledged – by a school staffer – at the ceremony. But it’s a huge dis nonetheless to block the very organization that’s honoring the kid from handing him his prize. And it blatantly pulls of the rug out from under Fuller, after the school board’s president himself says that the presentation had already been discussed at a board meeting with no opposition.

In an open letter to the school, Fuller says that “Being the lone openly gay student in a small, Catholic school has not always been easy” but that he’s been honored by the “acceptance and respect” he’s received. And he says that the moment he learned he’d won the scholarship was “one of the happiest of my life.” Now, however, he writes, “I have never felt as invalidated and unaccepted as I have upon hearing the news that the scholarship that I have worked so hard for not just in the application process, but also in my deportment and actions over the years, would not be recognized in the way that it should at the graduation ceremony. It is difficult to understand how after I have spent thirteen years at this school and worked hard during all of them, I would be made to feel that my accomplishments are less than everybody else’s. This whole ordeal has been incredibly hurtful, and I am even sadder that this will be one of my last experiences to remember my high school years by.”

It’s an articulate, impassioned plea for support and basic courtesy. Oh, and I have a letter too. It’s from Jesus. It says, Bishop Amos, you’re doing this wrong.

Sure, one could argue that you wouldn’t expect an outpouring of gay pride at a Catholic school. But it’s worth noting that Fuller’s school was supportive of him, and proud of his accomplishment. It’s Bishop Amos who should grok that it’s called Prince of Peace for a reason. The values of tolerance that name represents are the same values that the Matthew Shepherd scholarship represents, a scholarship created in the name of a young man who died horribly simply for being who he was. And it would be a terrible shame if the last thing Fuller learned at his school was that his church is too cowardly to applaud him for being who he is.