There is a fun debate going on over at the Modesto Bee Opinion pages. ModBee.com is running a series of letters about abortion, health care, Hobby Lobby, the right of a parent to kill their own child etc. I contributed my two cents worth with a letter written with tongue firmly planted in my cheek that garnered over 100 comments. I like that - it means people are talking and trying to understand the other person's point of view. I doubt I changed any minds, but I stayed consistent which is something the opposition had trouble maintaining throughout the discussion.
The discussions always circle back to the idea of Women's Health. I must admit, this confuses me as the people who usually bring up my health and the need for the government to protect it are talking about artificial birth control and abortion.
These "medicines" we are describing are killing us in droves, causing us to have fertility problems, attacking our very femininity and overall doing their best to destroy women. Described as third class carcinogens by the World Health Organization (hardly a bastion of mean evil conservative white men going to war 'on' women rather than 'with' them), artificial birth control is the Dalkon Shield of the 21st century. Women have been duped into believing the proper way to treat a heavy and painful menstrual cycle or endrometriosis is to slam their bodies with enough artificial hormones to cause their breasts to fill with tumors and basically rot them from the inside out.
Abortion has been link, albeit tenuously, to breast cancer and FMS. It has been linked strongly to depression and anxiety. An abortion is in the medical history of almost 88% of the women who seek treatment for alcohol and drug abuse according to government statistics.
Why are we so stupid?
Women reacted to being told they could not participate in certain things by trying to discover why they were being excluded. A lot of the early feminists came to the conclusion that women were being banned from participation in everything from education, sports, religion and politics because we have a menstrual cycle. Since it is our very nature (biology = destiny, anyone) to have a menstrual cycle, perhaps the best way to advance the social cause of women would be to eradicate it all together.
That is my theory. I have no idea if it is a truth or not...it is a theory.
But let's think about it for a minute or two:
We were kept out of Harvard, Yale, Princeton and The White House,. Our numbers were restricted in medical, dental and law schools. We were told we could not play certain sports or attend luncheons in certain buildings. All this was done because we are women and quite frankly I believe it was an extension of the old 'unclean' laws of so many cultures. I believe we are considered unclean because we bleed every month. We bleed every month because we can become impregnated and we can carry a child without our bodies. If we can eliminate that aspect of ourselves, we can fully participate in life without making the men around us uncomfortable.
The fact that eliminating that aspect of our nature might KILL us or make us SICKER or cause us to hate, doubt, fear and mistrust our own female SELVES is not important.
Our natures make men uncomfortable. In order to be successful we must do everything men do. In order to be able to do that we must make men accept that we can do everything men do. Men will never accept that as long as we have our true natures. We must, therefore, minimize that nature at the least and eliminate it all together at the MOST in order to be able to fully participate in life.
If it turns out that, God forbid, we CANNOT do everything men do (and they cannot do everything WE do) but that we are just as valuable, just as important and JUST as necessary to life and the world that means we may have to readjust our present ideas of what exactly we mean by EQUALITY between the sexes.
Granted, we are in danger of falling back into the mind set of women not be valued for being women. My mother was a victim of domestic violence for years. The family witnessed it. The neighbors witnessed it. No one ever called in the authorities because the authorities never truly took such behavior seriously while today men AND women will end up behind bars for trying to MAKE someone do what they want them to do with either their nasty, filthy mouth or the big ugly fists. We do not want to give up our progress.
Instead, I think, we need to be honest about what we call equality and why the inherent dignity of the human person must be the foundation of any discussion about the roles of men and women in the world.
In other words, I think we need to look to Truth for our ideas regarding how we want the world to regard females.
I am ready to give it a try....You?
1 comment:
Leslie,
I hopped on over to the Bee to read some of the opinion threads running on about the Hobby Lobby thing. If I was an alien who just arrived from the planet orbiting Alpha Centauri B, I would have to conclude that pregnancy is an undesirable somatic illness that we humans are attempting to control, if not eradicate. It is a scourge of females that destroys their lives, threatens their equality, and bars them from true happiness, health, and prosperity.
The whole argument seems to rest on the assumption that pregnancy is “bad” and that the LAW will address this inequality in a way that borders on the magical. Every ill known to man is traced back to pregnancy, and if only we could control it, we could end misogynism, war, and the incredible damage caused to businesses that employ these disease carriers.
Health Insurance has so many mandates that it ceases to be the risk-management entity it once was. It is now part of a government run perpetual motion machine that takes a bit of our money via premiums, mixes them together with good intentions, taxes and SCOTUS, then pops out a service. It is like trying to explain how a refrigerator can work while not being plugged in. It is in effect a transfer payment machine. Viewed like this, it is not hard to understand that premiums are a “token” of our good will to keep believing in the magic machine. The LAW will keep it running, at least as long as the revenue stream keeps running. So why have premiums at all? Why not have marginal taxes for everybody, where we are taxed 100% for every dollar over the first $10 we earned? Then it would look like we were writing a check for services.
There is something very wrong going on, where we routinely place women at risk, so that they may not be at risk. Am I off base for thinking that this looks like the Nuremberg Defense? After all, the LAW said it was ok, assuming you bought into the cover story constructed by a chain of logic that is possible to believe only while in a blackout. I am not sure I answered your question “why are we so stupid?” Your other challenge to look to Truth will be interesting and terrifying for us as a society. Up is down, liberty is slavery, and Groupthink reigns. I believe we are in the Outer Darkness, and that our happiness is really weeping and gnashing of teeth. We need to move to the light and experience the transformative happiness that defies description.
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