We lost. I never expected we’d win. Things that are as hard and cruel and widely accepted as abortion arise from despair and despair is nearly undefeatable. Despair develops when there is little to no hope of being seen or understood as a human being, and women have 5,000 years of history to sure up any holes in our despair. It’s ironic that the political movement against abortion spends so much time insisting on the value of every human being and yet they sputter out and shut down at the humanity of the woman.
In the beginning, God gave men a little power boost, for whatever reason. What they’ve done with it is create a world where women despair. Where a sexual assault or a misstep is fatal to a woman’s future, not figuratively, literally. Any hope of being more than a butt-wiper can be gone with the stroke of a thin blue line. And women are profoundly designed as more than butt-wipers. We are all given gifts with which we are supposed to bless the world, but for millennia that fact has been meaningless. To limit the competition and to neatly manage the butt-wiping work, men have used their little tiny power to keep women out of the way and exhausted.
To be human is to express one’s gifts and to be paid for it. Every woman will rate for herself how much her painting, lawyering, teaching, politicking etc. she will balance against her half of the butt-wiping, but every woman should be doubling their talents not burying them in the ground. Poverty should not be the predictable, enshrined story of an early pregnancy. We don’t need to outlaw killing babies. We need to create a world in which they and their mommies can joyfully co-exist. If we could magically remove Prop 3 belatedly it would be of little virtue because the problem isn’t the law, it’s despair.
No comments:
Post a Comment