By PAT WICK

©Another Day in the Country

I heard by the grapevine, while I was gone, that the Kansas legislature made a rule about when life begins. (Actually, I checked this out on line.)

In response, I have to say, “You’ve got to be kidding!” Who gives them the right to decide such a thing? Did you? I know I didn’t! I figure that first of all, they don’t really know when life begins vs. the potential of life and second it is really none of their business.

They aren’t any kind of God, last I knew, nor are they women, the real guardians of life, with the responsibility of gestation and all its mysteries.

Don’t they have something better to do? It seems there should be something in their bailiwick more appropriate for them to make rules about, perhaps giving the good old “middle class” a leg up or shushing the gun lobbyists or promoting reasonability and truthfulness. That seems to me to be needed work for politicians in general but give me a minute and I’ll come up with some more specific jobs that are gender appropriate.

I’ve been a feminist for a long time. Instead of it being a negative label (as some tried to convince me), I came to realize feminine was a birthright stolen from us. And here we found ourselves fighting for our rights.

There are some cultures — way too many, by the way — that still try to convince us that women are deficient, less than, weaker, and unwanted.

Are there any who misuse men in this way where they are bartered for with cows, sold into slavery, made into sex machines, abused? Who will speak up?

My grandmother’s generation fought for the right to own property. My mother’s generation took that somewhat for granted. My mother wanted a mate, a peace filled home, and freedom of religion. She’d been convinced already that women were not meant to be equal but subservient. When her music teacher encouraged her to become a musician, she could not imagine such extravagance.

And then I came of age and discovered discrimination against women in the work place, in my church and at home.

Not only did I notice but women talked about it, marched in the streets to right that wrong. I was rather shocked to discover that as a girl, I had not been born with the same entitlement as a boy child. It was, and is most generally still, the male children of the world who receive their sense of entitlement as easily as breath and they don’t even realize they’ve been bestowed this gift.

It’s the news of the world that circulates now around the globe and stirs up things so easily.

Cell phones and internet service, twitters, tweets and texts, circles around the earth and flash out information to the most isolated spots.

The have-nots of the world now see what freedom is enjoyed elsewhere even while they have no real understanding of the responsibility freeness entails.

I actually chuckled when I discovered that there is a lack of girls of a suitable age in China.

They are reaping what they sowed. In their culture, male children were so vital, they thought, that female children were discarded and now they realize the folly of that belief.

Girls are scarce, suddenly desired, needed, to perpetuate their race. Who’s the fool, now, that would disdain a girl child?

This girl is infused by her physicality with the very ability to create (albeit, with help) another human being. (Please remember that the male can only help!)

They have not been given the gift of gestation. Only a woman can shelter life, bring life’s potential to its fullness of time so that it can breathe in this breath of life and become a living being.

In my belief system, it is that divine breath that actually brings life, begins the life span. It is that ability to breathe that sets apart the living from the dead. I have seen with my own eyes the breath of life come into a newborn and go out of the dying. It is amazing to watch the breath come and go. Holy ground.

While there is the POTENTIAL of life all around us, within us, above and below us, even in the muck of the swamp; human life requires the breath as activation, consummation, realization. Anything, and I mean anything, we do to tamper is like playing God and I believe we need to realize we are walking around on holy ground.

Legislators, you don’t belong on Holy Ground! Men in general, you don’t belong there, either. If anyone has the right to choose regarding the beginning or the ending of life potential, it is the woman who holds that spark within her body!

It’s another day in the country and I’m appalled! Legislators, how dare you be so presumptuous, so pompous, to think that you can make a rule, a law about when life begins and it is so?