Spark in the Darkness

I don't normally post about politics and political agenda, and world events. But I have to let it out. I feel like I have too much to talk about. With the Right to Life marchhappening yesterday, a bill to promote same sex "marriage" in the NJ legislature today, kind of awesome pro-life ads being banned from CNN and NBC, and the latest insidious reaches of Planned Parenthood, which I already addressed, I feel like I am in the middle of a battle for civilization.

Perhaps not "civilization as we know it", which I almost wrote until I realized, stopping myself, that this has all been growing, moving, and creeping into our lives at least through my entire lifetime. But the foundations of a good and just society are certainly being shaken to their core. The idea that men and women of good will know what is right and have self-mastery is nearly extinct. And so we somehow trust that our government (really???) is the adequate cure.

Listen, I'm not going to castigate the people of the 1960s for raging against the machine. I understand that people revolt because they feel unheard and oppressed. I don't know what life was like then, because the history books don't really give us more than facts about policy. And Mad Men, while fascinating, paints a truly miserable picture of false marriages and sexual politics that is alarming. I have to be grateful in some sense for the revolutions of the sixties because they are what allows me to speak, in a certain sense, as a woman on par with men - a concept which should always have been understood and cherished but alas, was stripped bare in the might-makes-right Middle Ages.

But the sexual revolution, and the political ones as well, had severe consequences while buying some freedoms and reforms. One of the greatest miseries of the age was the invention and acceptance of the birth control pill, which taught women that pregnancy is a life-sentence, and taught men they can use women at any time for their pleasure without pause or consequence. I had a second-wave feminist professor who used to say that the Pill was the greatest invention of mankind. But this always left me wondering. How could a woman who was so entirely pro-woman believe that? Now a woman's fertility was ripe for rejection, both by herself and the men with whom she cared to have sex, and also men could far more easily walk away from a casual sexual encounter, confident that pregnancy was not on the table. The Pill (and other birth control) empowers men to take what they want - every part of a woman's body except her fertility- as if that is something objectionable. No wonder we treat pregnancy like a disease. And when we treat people like objects, violence is inevitable.

So we come all the way here today. To this land of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. This land where women are left pregnant and alone, babies are killed every day, violence begins in the home, and in the womb. The heart is violated and covenants are broken. We try to redefine marriage because we don't understand it in the first place- because our parents grew weary and divorced, because they hid their fertility and sexuality in lies. And now these generations cannot see through the cloud to what marriage and sex is and might yet be.

And I know I am ranting a bit here, but my heart hurts. Forty years later, so many of the women I know or run into have suffered the pain of abortion, and keep it inside, because it has been normalized to such a degree that they believe their nightmares and pains and sorrow are only their own. My friends have suffered in failed marriages, and we collectively argue that no one should be denied access to cheap and easy recreational sex. And we are on the brink of being cut off from access to the funds we need to live in a place with options- while we pay massive taxes to the government (especially here in NJ) we have less and less of a voice, it seems, in how civilization is redefined, in how our consciences speak.

I know there is hope for all of this. I know that God created us in love because He is Love. I know that life is valuable and precious, and that if some woman cannot manage to feed herself and her child, there are 2300 crisis centers in the US that can help. There are thousands of infertile couples who would give everything to be parents. I know we were created for one another, and make no sense without each other.

The hope is this: that we are important, and precious, and unrepeatable. That we are made male and female to collaborate and encourage. That we are created in communion so that we can experience a glimpse of that life giving outpouring which is the Trinity. That the efforts of one person do make a difference, but that with the communion of saints and the community of faithful, we can overcome the darkness and bring life back to the world.