Bring It On or Let It Go?

Obviously I have some differing opinions than many people I know. Yes, hello, I am Catholic, and many people I know are not.

So a cousin of mine posted a "news article" about a topic upon which we disagree. She noted that it was an "excellent article written by a conservative lawyer" supporting her point of view. I read through the article, to the end, and did my best to stay objective. I failed. I will never get those five minutes of my life back. I don't miss them terribly, but I still can't decide if I should say something or not and lose another five or ten minutes. I guess pointing out that the lawyer was "conservative" (whatever that means) was supposed to say something like, "Look a liberal (whatever that means too) likes this article!" The problem was, the article had nothing in it that actually addressed the concerns of the opposing viewpoint.

I have learned that the way to show objectivity is to actually present the opposing argument in a way that a person who holds that point of view would actually recognize as his or her own. In the film, "Listen to Me" about a group of debaters, there is a wonderful scene where their coach makes a young woman switch sides of a debate after making her opening statement. The subject? Abortion. It was an excellent movie. A really well informed debater can do it without anyone knowing where he or she stands.

This wasn't that kind of article. This was the kind of article known as a "strawman argument." It means that you build a false picture of your opponent's point of view and then proceed to knock it down. Then for the kicker, you claim victory.

I try to keep away from strawmen. I think one of the ways to do so is to actually view your opponent as an intelligent person who came to their beliefs through careful study, faith beliefs, or legitimate experience. I have often said to an opponent, "I get where you are coming from. If I had your same experiences, I would probably hold the same point of view." So my job, I believe, in getting the word out on authentic marriage and authentic sexuality is to present the side they haven't considered and then Let. It. Go. Walk away, and take my soap-box with me. I fail at it far more often than I care to mention, but that is still my job.

We all want victory. If what we hold as important really is The Truth, then victory would really mean no one actually lost. But, we are all fallible humans. We will make mistakes. We will misrepresent the Truth eventually, accidentally of course. But we still have an obligation to interact even when we are slightly misguided. We aren't on this big chunk of dirt and water alone. We have to live together. We have to communicate and not just talk around each other. We have to know when to remain silent and be thought the fool instead of opening one's mouth and removing all doubt. A huge piece of of this is knowing when to bring it on and when to let it go. As of right now, I still don't know. Please pray for me.

That Old Feelin'

Through much prayer and waiting we have discerned that God has called us to a small family. We are still leaving the door open if God has another plan for us, but everything has pointed to being called to be done having children. The reasons are many, and all are valid, some even extremely important, but it doesn't take away the hurt.

It is that old feelin'. Am I just falling back into a contraceptive mentality? I hope not. Do I just want more children on principle to prove a point? Very possible. Or am I just really having all of my maternal instincts in high gear? Most likely. It is so natural for a woman to want to have babies. But in recent decades it seems that our culture has tried to condition us out of our instincts.

Women want marriage and family and all of the trappings that come with it. For years there was a faction of people trying to convince society that women really wanted "freedom." They were right on one point. Women were enslaved in one way or another. But it wasn't our precious babies who enslaved us. It wasn't even really men, although they were the ones bore the responsibility for the outcome. No, it was and has always been we women who have kept ourselves enslaved.

I deep look at human history shows that every time women sought "sameness" with men is when men made their bad decisions. We have always been equal, since the dawn of time. What we have never been is the same. And this isn't the struggle of the civil rights movement to have to overcome "separate but equal." No. That was a certainly a battle that needed to happen, because they most certainly were not treated equally, and you cannot live anywhere on this earth and be "separate" from anyone.

No, this battle was a dog digging in his heels at the vet. This is the battle against neutering. Now I am all for neutering pets when needed. They have no self-control. But we humans do. So why don't we show it more often? Of that I have no real answer.

But this attempt at sameness was and is a battle of neutering. If women are less like women and more like men, then where does that leave men? Neutered, unless they dig in their heels and fight back. Every time in history when women stayed women, men did not fight back and our rights were maintained. We are equal simply because we are not the same. We are complementary. It is the universal yin and yang, push and pull, positive and negative. To be neutral has no power. It is through our complementarity that we have balance AND power.

Contracepting Lawnmowers

I wrote at an earlier date about a movie (unnamed here so I don't have to worry about legal issues) where the trailer begins with a young girl saying these words, "Most babies are accidents..." I was shocked down to the tip of my toes to hear that, but now it gets worse.

I saw an ad for a reality show where a couple has decided to try to conceive. So far they have been unsuccessful and are apparently seeking infertility treatment now. This woman is in her mid-30s and says a line that saddens me deeply. She says, "We spend all of our lives trying not to get pregnant and when we go to get pregnant we can't."

How upside down have we really become? Is it really so shocking to society that if you break something that it doesn't magically fix itself? Here's my thought: Let's say I have a riding lawnmower. I decide that it is fun to drive around. I can do fun little quick turns and make fancy maneuvers. But it has that pesky blade on the bottom. I can't go everywhere I want to go because I risk mowing down the daisies. I think the daisies look nice so I would like to save them for now. Maybe when they are not looking so hot I will go ahead and mow them down. But for now I want to drive right where those daisies are, and my blade is just stuck in the engaged position. I can't disengage it. Wherever I go, scattered daisies lie in my wake.

So I flip my mower over and smash the heck out of my blade with a sledgehammer. I keep bending it and smashing it until it will not mow daisies no matter where I drive it. The blade can spin and spin but will never reach the daisies. Now I can drive it wherever I want, on whomever's lawn I want and it will do nothing but make fancy maneuvers.

Then one random day I decide I want to mow. my. lawn. I want the blade to do what a blade was designed to do. I have decided that it is best to stay on my own lawn and stop driving over the daisies. I have decided this because I finally cultivated a good healthy relationship with my very own lawn. I would finally like to have a beautiful, manicured lawn of my very own. But it is too late. The blade is mangled. It will take professional intervention at great cost to straighten out the problem. I have to use precious time to fix what should have never been broken, (by me I might add,) in the first place. Can it be repaired? Well of course. It is just a silly lawnmower blade! Just rip it out and put in a new one! I can just do that so easily so I will.

So why would anyone mangle a perfectly good lawnmower blade just to be able to drive over the daisies? "What a silly analogy!" some might say. No one would do that to a perfectly good lawnmower just to go for a joyride! We see the idea of mangling a lawnmower blade as such a silly idea. So why do we treat our bodies with less respect than a lawnmower? What value have we placed on our human sexuality that we see corrupting a lawnmower as completely ridiculous, but corrupting our own bodies as perfectly reasonable? Word to the wise: Cultivate your own lawn and stop mowing over the daisies! You will be happier in the end. No mangled blade to fix.