The progressive impulse to politicize everything, which led to stories during the Obama years about how to turn Thanksgiving dinner into an Obamacare seminar, is now being applied to Valentine’s Day. The Women’s March account says they are “reclaiming” Valentine’s Day as a “Day of Revolutionary Love.”

We’re reclaiming #ValentinesDay as a day of #RevolutionaryLove! Sign the declaration to reclaim February 14th: https://t.co/679ZBID8yN pic.twitter.com/RaURSb5jkH

— Women's March (@womensmarch) February 13, 2017

What is revolutionary love? From the website, it seems to be a rather grandiose effort to oppose Trump’s executive order on immigration [emphasis added]:

We vow to oppose all executive orders and policies that threaten the rights and dignity of any person. We call upon our elected officials to join us, and we are prepared to engage in moral resistance throughout this administration.

We will honor our mothers and ancestors whose bodies, breath, and blood call us to a life of courage. In their name, we choose to see this darkness not as the darkness of the tomb – but of the womb. We will breathe and push through the pain of this era to birth a new future.

It’s curious that progressives, whose biggest priority at the women’s march was support for abortion, are using birth as a metaphor for their movement. In any case, the agenda for the “Day of Revolutionary Love” does eventually get more specific. There’s a 3 point commitment which includes calling your representatives in Congress (sample script: “I’m calling to ask my Senator to oppose the President’s executive orders…”), participating in events organized by 1 Billion Rising or writing a letter and posting it on social media with the hashtag #RevolutionaryLove is.

In her own call for this, activist Valarie Kaur explains why Valentine’s Day needs to be reclaimed. She writes, “In the decades since the civil rights era, love has been captured by Hallmark cards and sidelined as purely personal and romantic, far too fickle and sentimental to be a political force. But in this dangerous new era, we reclaim love as an action.”

The idea of Valentine’s Day as a day set aside for the celebration of romantic love goes back quite a bit before the civil rights era. In any case, the assumption that Valentine’s Day is flawed because it’s insufficiently political says a lot. For most people it’s a day for celebrating their closest personal relationships. The idea that it must be made part of “the resistance” to have real significance is a bit sad if you think about it. Here’s hoping this exercise in partisan rebranding goes about as well as the previous efforts to ruin holiday gatherings in the name of the progressive agenda.