Fem Speak

The Solution To The Gay Marriage Issue

by Pat Gundry

Historically, marriage has been many different things. The only thing it has consistently been is a more or less personal relationship between two people, usually a man and a woman.

It has usually been a secular legal agreement between the marriage partners, or between two families.

Not until relatively recently, as time goes, has it been considered a religious ceremony, with vows made before God.

Therein lies the problem, and the solution.

If we allow marriage to be a legal agreement for the purpose of protecting the persons involved and any children they might have, and their property, then the solution is to require marriage to, again, be, first and foremost, a legal agreement with certain minimum requirements set forth to qualify for entering into the agreement.

If we create a basic marriage contract that all must agree to in order to have the legal protection of marriage, we could eliminate the present conflict about whether people of the same gender should be allowed to marry.

If persons desiring to have the legal protections of marriage could simply go to a courthouse and prove their identities, meet reasonable and minimum requirements set forth for everyone, and sign the marriage document, the problem is solved.

And, if those persons desire to have a religious marriage ceremony, of any kind whatsoever, they are free to do that also.

Or, if the marrying parties want to create their own invention for an auxiliary marriage ceremony, they are free to do that.

Let those who want to marry women marry them, and those who want to marry men marry them.

And, this seems to be lost on the majority of opponents to gay marriage, inter gendered people should be free to marry whomever they wish without having to choose a gender and then be restricted in their choice of a marriage partner to a declared opposite gendered partner.

Gender is on a continuum, all the way from what we might think of as totally male to what we might think of as totally female. Many people think they are one or the other gender when they are actually a mixture to one degree or another.

Insisting that we must know the gender of a person and then restrict them to what we may erroneously think of as the opposite gender is forcing individuals to comply with a very out of date understanding of what gender is.

Allowing all adults to choose who they want to marry, not asking them if they are one gender or another, allowing that to be private, as it should be, will solve not only the problem of the gay marriage issue, but that of discriminating against and invading the privacy of inter gendered people.

The Sexualization of Girls

Yesterday I happened across something on TV that I didn't watch long enough to learn the name of the program, nor who was speaking, but it was interviewing experts and others about the problems young girls have who sexually mature early.

They said the effects on those children were multiple and affected them at school and at home, causing both their school mates and the adults in their lives to treat them differently than if they had not developed early.

They were teased and resented at school by their peers and subjected to inappropriate sexual attention from older males. Their parents tended to expect more of them than would be reasonable for children their age because they looked older than they were. Girls who developed early were more likely to become depressed than those who had not.

Recently the BBC news web site, USA Today, and other sites have featured items about the damaging effects on girls of commercial efforts to sexualize them.

Among the contributing elements to sexualize young girls are sexually suggestive dolls. Everyone knows that Barbie is a sexualized doll, but now we also have the very popular Bratz doll series.

Linked to the Bratz dolls are suggestive clothing for girls that match up with Bratz doll clothing.

Let's allow our children to be children.

And let's allow all females to be fully human persons, not objects.

Don't buy the dolls.

Don't buy the clothing.

Write or email companies that sexually exploit children, even if they do it indirectly, and object.

Treat children like children, even if they have developed early.

It is their right.

Domination Cults: Fundies, Jeffs, Cybelians

by Pat Gundry

After posting a link from my new War Against Women blog to a blog that features quite a bit of anti-woman rhetoric I was taken to task and denounced on the linked to blog. If you go there to read about it be sure to also read the comments. I posted a comment, but it never appeared. In my comment I simply thanked them for the link, said I was puzzled about why they linked to FemSpeak instead of the blog they were commenting about, and provided a link to it and my Noodling blog.

Though I hadn't been reading that blog, only went there because someone had forwarded the link to me of the offensive post, I've done a bit of searching and reading on it since then. It's not going to be a regular read for me, though, because I've heard all that before and don't need to read it again and again. And I have no personal need to try and convince women haters to learn to love us.

But, thinking about what I saw there, and something I happened across late last night searching Google for images relevant to a friend's forthcoming book (I'll share it here when it is released) made me notice the similarities between the fundie extremes of female restriction and oppression evidenced on the blog I linked to originally and the practices of the Mormon fundy Warren Jeffs who has just been captured by law enforcement and is being extradited to Utah for trial.

Watching the Larry King show on CNN yesterday evening, which focused on Warren Jeff's Mormonistic cult, and hearing one of the researchers interviewed say that Jeffs commanded women in his cult to produce a baby every year reminded me of the Christian fundy who said the thing he appreciated most about his wife was her fertility. I realized that both the Christian fundy and Jeffs were simply religious cultists. They have in common the use of women as baby machines, the belief in male "authority" over women, and the fortress mentality that many cults exhibit.

Then, searching online to see if there were images of "submissive women," thinking maybe I'd find a graphic or image suitable for a book cover someone was designing led me to a rather surprising site that I don't want to directly link to because it contains nude photos and one in particular that I'm sure would be offensive to many people. But, it's the site for an organization called the Cybelians: First Church of Female Supremacy.

They have everything the above mentioned cultic groups have, in reverse. Instead of forced or coerced pregnancy through unavoidable insemination, their men drink the wife's urine. Sounds really extreme and gross until one realizes that unavoidable insemination has worse consequences than urine drinking and is even more demeaning and more of a dominance act.

I'd realized that the Jeffs group was cultic, and had excused the Christian fundies of a considerable bit of that negative term until I happened on the Cybelians. I had thought the Christian fundies were just people stuck in the Middle Ages, hidebound, some of them obviously women haters, some not. But the Jeffs followers are also throwbacks to the Mormon past. The Cybelians are also past oriented, picking up an ancient religion and bringing it into play again, with innovations.

Interesting what happens if you reverse the genders and see what it looks like that way.

It seems to me that sexual bondage is at the heart of all three groups. Whether one is tied up, dressed in leather, and flicked with whips or not, it's about bondage, and those who practice it are getting their jollies to some extent by having sexual power over the submissive partner or group.

The Cybelians claim their men want it that way, and that the marriages are happy and stable and long lasting. The Christian fundies claim the same thing for their women, and I'd bet that Jeffs group says their women just love to be baby machines, living on welfare fraud money, and unable to protect their teenage sons from being expelled from the community and their teenage daughters from forced marriages to aged inseminators bent on making more Mormonites.

Everyone is happy, except those who get away. And, of course, they were just malcontent troublemakers. Not.

I happened upon just the thing for the Jeffs and Christian fundy submissive woman cultists: special underwear. I hope they are reading this so they can buy some. I haven't seen any for the Cybelians yet.

For the Male Supremacists

For Their Submissive Women

If You're Visiting From The Bayly Blog

A post of mine on my blog War Against Women that contains links to the Bayly brother's blog Out Of Our Minds Too has been reciprocally linked here to FemSpeak instead of to the blog pertinent to their post about my WarAgainstWomen.com item, making it impossible for their readers to see the original material relevant to the diatribe against me on the Bayly blog.

If you'd like to read the original post I made, in its own environment and context, you'll find it at http://www.waragainstwomen.com titled "Complementarian Christian Hate," under the sidebar category Religious Hate.

And if you'd like to visit my other blogs and main website, you'll find them linked from the sidebar of my blog Noodling, at http://www.noodlefactory.net.

Thanks for visiting this blog, come back often.

Pat Gundry

The Coward's Essentials: (Part 3: The "Feminizing" Problem

The Faithful have long been more female than male. In kinder previous times, this was explained by male churchmen as being evidence of woman's more religious nature. They also said things like: woman is more acquainted with the realities of life, birth, and death, so she knows more of the need for God. And, woman is a more sensitive being.

But I wonder if there may be a more down-to-earth reason why women outnumber men in church. The clergy and leadership positions of the church have been pretty much exclusively male for many hundreds of years. The leader of each congregation is an exemplary male who stands before his parishioners each week providing guidance, instruction, and aid. He is a father to them, but not their father. He is gentle and caring, clean shaven, and directorial.

Women growing up in a male dominated society have many wrong impressions about men. They tend to idealize their potential adult relationships with men. And, as a result, they are frequently disappointed and confused by the reality that confronts them when they find themselves in a permanent marriage relationship with their own man. He isn't all those things they hoped he'd be, thought he'd be. Their illusions have been severely damaged.

But on Sundays--here is a man who looks and sounds like the man they thought they could have. They can vicariously take part in a relationship with this man each time they sit in the obedient intimacy of a religious service.

I suggest that the reason, one reason at least, why there are more women than men in any church service is that many women are sexually frustrated and profoundly disappointed with the man in their lives. They come to church, at least in part, to be with a man they can idealize, one who never looks shabby and unshaven, who appears to be forceful, not weak, who smells good and is never dirty or sloppy.

He listens to them and responds to their questions. He cares when they have fears, worries, sorrow, and pain. A sex symbol of the most innocent kind, he can be safely admired from a distance.

They can return each week to reassure themselves about their own basic worth because this man values them for loftier purposes than dark fumbling encounters, hastily eaten meals, and clean clothes thoughtlessly crumpled, or worn and tossed on the floor. They are quality creatures to him--as they had ever been taught they were before marriage negated and shattered those images of themselves in their own minds. The male Domini binds up the self-images of the women in his flock by his simply being there before them each service.

Women who grow up in a society that praises and adores them for chaste obedience find a way to gain comfortable approval from their pastors by chaste obedience, as they gained it from their own fathers--but can gain it no more from them (marriage being the obvious proof of the end of their original chastity and obedience).

Obeying the husband is entangled with many dangers and conflicts that are not present when obeying the pastor. So women find at church a man who answers many needs and fills many empty places in their lives.

But, the cowards who complain that it's a "feminizing the church" problem when there are more women than men in church, not only haven't a clue about women, but trivialize and trash the longings that bring many of them there.

When we allow women equal access to all types of ministry in the church, then maybe some of the adulation toward the pastor will be neutralized as women see "someone like me" before them and are raised up to share an experience rather than idealize a person.

Meanwhile, vote with your feet and your monetary contributions. Scapegoating billy goat preachers don't deserve to have you in their congregations. Go where your presence will be appreciated and treasured.

(Excerpted and adapted from Chapter 35: Why There Are More Women Than Men In Church On Sunday, in my work in progress)

Pat Gundry

The Coward's Essentials (Part 2: The "Feminizing" Problem)

So, why are there more women than men in church on Sunday?

Is it simply because there are more women in the general population? Actually, that's part of it. But, I think there are more reasons than that. Today I'll share one of them, and tomorrow, another one.

I called the clerics cowards who accused women of "feminizing" the church.

And, I think that most of them are, because if they took an honest look at the situation, they'd know that the church hasn't been feminized. It may have been trivialized, diluted, and distorted. But, feminized? Women haven't had the power or opportunity to feminize anything. But it's easier for a coward to find someone else to blame. Since women don't have much power in church, they are safe ones to blame.

Women actually want the same things from church that men do, quality. Mary sat at Jesus' feet, not because she was some weird aberrant female, but because she dared to be fully human. Ministers who are honest with themselves, and give themselves enough thinking and praying time for reality to make it through their schedules should be able to realize that.

If your church is mostly a social club, and you think providing "manly" social opportunities is the way to go, then forget about the whole feminizing thing, because your problem is much deeper than which gender frequents your establishment.

So, why is it, if it's not just gender demographics, that when it's really not very good preaching, women will go to church anyway when men will outright refuse? One reason has to do with what lousy and lazy preachers do when they don't have a good sermon. They put the congregation through an emotional wringer. They substitute jerking the listeners around, which will get them an emotional response, for getting the attentive response they'd get if the sermon was actually interesting. It's a dirty preacher trick.

Christian women, for reasons I explain in chapter 18 of my book in progress, have learned to substitute vicarious experience for the real thing. We've encouraged that by providing them with tons of trashy "christian" books, and plenty of guilt and fear of being fully functioning human beings. There's a lot of sublimation going on, including substitution of manipulated emotion for free and honest emotion.

Women will sit and listen to the tear jerking horror stories of bad preachers because they, unlike men, don't have opportunities to be fully engaged as human beings. It's not nice, might make waves, be unsubmitted, be too brash--and fears that are vague and unformed, but that keep them stifled and fenced in.

Women go because they are hungry, and for more than just emotional stimulation. They are hungry for someone to admire. More about that tomorrow.

Pat Gundry
http://www.patriciagundry.com

Marriage What If

Some food for thought:

What would happen if nobody got married?

What if  people who wanted to made a decision to stay together, a private decision, and wrote up a contract, renewable and/or re-negotiable at intervals they chose?

What if that contract was there to protect the vulnerabilities of both parties and any children that might come to them?

What if everyone invented their relationship as they went along, to please the parties involved?

What if nobody owned anyone else, and no government or religious body had any say about what a relationship between two consenting adults should be like?

What if marriage as it is now were to end tomorrow?

What if you retrofitted your own relationship?

What if you stopped thinking about marriage as a real thing, and focused on the people involved and their own needs?

What if you respected and loved yourself so much that you'd never be in slavery to a concept, a person, or a religious or cultural construct again?

Pat Gundry
http://www.marriagewire.com

How To Walk Through An Open Door

One of my favorite informational resources is an unabridged two tape audio of the book One Door Closes, Another Door Opens, by Arthur Pine. The book is read, very speedily, by Wayne Dyer. It is an inspiring and encouraging listening experience to hear story after story, all true, of people who had opportunity doors slammed shut, thought they were sidelined, out of the game, or seriously set back, only to have new doors of opportunity open for them.

Listening to another audio, by Bill O'Hanlon, titled "Let Your Soul Be Your Pilot," about how to detect what you are meant to do, which I downloaded from his site a few days ago, and the apparent dilemma of someone I know who is faced with a seemingly closing door, set me thinking about doors, walls, obstacles, and options.

When I began writing my first book, Woman Be Free, on the controversial subject of equality for women in the church I had great fears and doubts about the project. Not about how important it was, but because it was important and I was inexperienced, and as they now say, had no "platform." That is, nobody knew who I was, and hardly anyone would have had reason to think what I'd say about anything was worth reading.

However, I had a strong push to do it, a divine urge, a conviction that it needed to be done, and that I was to go ahead and do it even if I was unknown and unaccomplished. The conviction that it needed to be done, and the doubts about my fitness for doing it fought back and forth until, one day, in my writing space in the basement of my Chicago suburban home, near the furnace, sitting on my five dollar chair at my five dollar typewriter on my five dollar desk (Did that make me a five dollar writer?) I took out one of my blank sheets of paper and wrote down all the taunts that filled my thoughts: "Who do you think you are? Nobody will publish it. No one will read it. What makes you think you can write? You're wasting your time. This is foolish. You're unqualified," every fear and haunting doubt I had.

When I'd written them all, I looked over the page, considered it for a long moment, and announced to me, "I am going to do it anyway," wadded up the paper and threw it away.

Walking through that open door presented other doors, some painful, some lovely, some for me, and some for others in my family.

My husband eventually faced the closed door of employment at Moody Bible Institute, fired as a result of a complex set of circumstances, but if I'd not written the book, he would not have been out of a job, sitting in the big wing back chair feeling depressed and almost hopeless. He did not know that there was an open door coming up, one he would not have knocked on, or dreamed would present itself, unless the other door, the one to doing what he loved most, teaching, had not slammed in his face.

Sometimes the actual closing of one door is the opening of another, in disguise. For example, the closing of the door that I witnessed and experienced, of service in the church for women, was, in disguise, the opening of the door to write about it. And my going through that door opened opportunities not only for me, but for many readers, as they let me know from time to time, even now, over 25 years later. Someone reading this may find too that the actual shutting of a door provides a writing/action set of opportunities along with the motivating fire to set the words alight.

Open doors are sometimes not noticed at first, and in fact, may seem like they aren't open at all, but, a gentle nudge will reveal that they open slightly, and then when action is taken, a bit more. It's important to know that you do not need to leap through an open door without peeking inside, and need only go as far and as fast as you have ready resources to take you.

Sometimes going through a new and open door is frightening, or looks like big, bad WORK. But, taking it slowly, and putting one foot into the open space, and then, carefully, another one, can let you know what you need to do next. I'm reminded of what Michael Neill said in his book, You Can Have What You Want. He said he's found that if he focuses on the benefits of what he's doing and not the process to get there that it transforms his experience.

My suggestions, when a door seems to be closing, or has obviously closed:

1. Take a deep breath, a nap, a vacation, if you can, and allow yourself to mentally and physically regroup.

2. Just be curious, a very useful state, curiosity, about open doors that may present themselves, whether disguised or obvious ones.

3. Notice when open ones present themselves, and seriously consider them, even if they are astoundingly different than what you would have sought on your own.

4. Just because the door opens doesn't mean it's right for you, or that you should step into it. And, stepping into it doesn't mean you have to keep on going. Be free to change direction again, if you want to or need to.

5.Respect and honor your own needs. Take care of your physical and emotional needs. Don't sacrifice you or anyone else to step through an open door.

6. Consider that you may have more to you than you've realized, and that a new direction, new career, new way of expressing your own thoughts, of contributing to the world what you have been gifted with is not at all unreasonable.

7. Enjoy what you do, where you go, how you contribute from who you are.

8. Take the good from where you've been. Don't leave parts of yourself behind, unless you can also take them with you.

Pat Gundry
http://www.enjoyville.com

A Gentle Wake Up Poke in the Ribs for All Women

I'd like to riff on Stephanie's previous post, "The Harsh Wake-Up Ahead for Young Women."

Stephanie wrote, "....in dealing with some of these gorgeous, oblivious women recently, it started to hit me: Young women are absolutely unprepared to deal with the consequences of becoming an older woman."

Aging isn't what it used to be. In fact, it never was what it used to be. I know because I used to be in a position to observe what it was, and am in a place now to read the research. I'll not say how old that reveals me to be, because there are still mega amounts of ageists afoot, and I don't want to get stepped on.

I noticed the increase in likelihood for getting stepped on when I stopped coloring my hair. Suddenly people who had exclaimed, apparently seriously, that I was much too young for my grandson Paul to be other than my son, didn't exclaim anymore. Not only that, but I became rather invisible. I'm remembering my mother in law complaining when she was in her seventies that dress shop employees ignored her, didn't offer to help her, or ask what she was looking for. She said they lost sales that way, and that her money was as good as younger women's, which it certainly was. She would routinely change clothes in the middle of the day so she could wear more of her dresses.

I'd found my first gray hair when I was 22 years old, not even a year after getting married (did that have something to do with it?). Eventually, my dark locks became salt and pepper, and it didn't really look good on me, so I went for the henna. But, after awhile I got tired of pasting odiferous sludge on my hair every month or so, and experimented with going gray. I didn't like what happened, the sudden shift from person to not quite person, so I went back to the henna. Eventually, I let the whole thing go, as you can see from my photo on http://www.marketmaid.com's header.

But, it costs me. I know it does, and every woman who's let her gray or white hair show knows the same. Why?

Because the USA is an ageist society. It's so pervasive that even flaming feminists (and the merely smoldering ones too) do it without batting an eyelash, without a quiver of regret at what they've just said or done. I know that by now it shouldn't surprise or shock me, but it always does. And then I feel a gentle sadness at their not noticing. It's particularly evident online where readers often don't know the writer's gender, build, ethnic origins, nor age. I'll read something ageist and think, "Do you have any inkling of who may be reading this?

We don't know what real aging actually is. Researchers are discovering that increasing amounts of what was commonly thought to be the result of aging is actually neglect and misuse of the body. You've probably heard the saying, "Sixty is the new forty." Well, by the time many of you reach eighty, it may be the new fifty. We just don't know. But we do know enough to prompt a shift away from thinking that being past a certain age creates certain disadvantages.

Knowing the reality of relative age can be freeing, as can be seeing examples of women who are "of a certain age" (meaning of an uncertain age) and who are gorgeous, smart, energetic, savvy, and comfortable being who they are.

Those women are all around us, we just don't know who they are because they aren't revealing their numerical age. They are smart enough to know that ageists will disadvantage them if they know. When Gloria Steinem announced that she was now fifty years old and was told she looked too young to be fifty, she said, "This is what fifty looks like."

From my vantage point as an observer, I'd encourage all women, not just lovely to look at, delightful to hold, and heaven to kiss women, to:

1. Be less time conscious. Time is relative, in so many ways. Don't be a slave to time whether it's how much you can get done in an hour or day or week, or where you may be next year, or in ten years. Let the use of time concepts be a mere convenience to help you have a birthday gift ready when the next one is needed or not make your dinner companions wait for you.

2. See yourself as a precious, valuable commodity. Invest in your life for the whole of it, without reservation.

3. Always be becoming more and more of who you are.

4. Do good to you because you love you, not in order to gain other people approval.

5. Always look as good as you can with reasonable effort and expense, not to impress others but to provide the best for yourself because you love you and because you're worth it.

6. The approval of men is nice, and yummy, but your own approval of you is more important. Make sure you have your approval hierarchy in proper order.

7. Men learn, the smart ones do anyway, that women become better over time, like a good wine. These are the men you want to invest your love and attention in.

8. Don't be ageist. Notice what you say, how you say it, body language, actions, and eliminate all ageist behavior. Subtle ageism is still ageism.

9. Work to get rid of age discriminatory practices, laws, restrictions, and cultural ways. Learn from cultures where age is respected and admired. Import the good that you learn from such cultures into your own personal and group culture.

10. Do not compliment people for their age. Compliment them for the specifics of what they do, how they think, what they say or write, and their own personal worth.

I am fortunate to have known several great women and men who were older and were not ageist with themselves or others. My father said, "Stay away from old people, they make you old." He meant, rather than making an ageist statement, be who you are, disregard the ageist stuff and don't hang out with people who have bought into it. At 89 plus years old women were getting into fights over him.

His mother, my grandma Dicy, was running races with me when she must have been in her seventies, and would take me exploring barefoot in the creeks that bounded the farm. She walked home after dark without a lantern saying she didn't need one because if anything caught her it would let her go when daylight came. She lived almost ninety seven years, making her garden, doing her own thing.

Mr. Frederick, our California landlord when we first married, was 80 at the time, or thereabout. His next door neighbor lady was obviously sweet on him, hanging on his every word over the fence. He drove his Volkswagen bus to visit us in Washington State years later, still lean and fit. He is the one who introduced me to nutrition, giving me the gift of an Adele Davis cookbook back when she was not well known and relatives made fun of me for putting wheat germ in my cookies. It took a broadside automobile accident to kill him. I have no idea how old he was at the time, at least ninety.

Reject ageism, invest in your future, enjoy the present, always, and notice the possibilities in knowing that by the time you get there, one hundred and twenty may be the new sixty.

Pat Gundry
http://www.pamperville.net

Why I Am Anti Abortion and Pro Choice

Abortion is an issue like no other. And because it is like no other, comparisons with other issues are simply misapplications of analogy.

The way I answer the question of whether I am anti abortion or pro choice is that I'm both anti-abortion and pro choice. I think every woman is anti abortion. Nobody wants to destroy their baby, nobody wants their body invaded and messed with. But, I'm wise enough, as are a growing number of both women and men, to recognize that criminalizing abortion, providing no choice to women, is not the solution to the abortion problem. Simplistic solutions do not solve complex problems.

Making abortion unnecessary is the answer. Abortions cannot be eliminated, they will always be required. But, rather than try to limit them arbitrarily by law, we need to put our efforts toward making them unnecessary even though we can never completely succeed. We need to change the way we educate our children, equipping them to make better choices both before and after pregnancy begins.

Not long ago I wrote a post on my blog Noodling about replacing sex education courses with courses on responsible reproduction. We have it wrong, as a society/culture, regarding sex and its results. Reproductive problems need to be faced as the complex and intricate problems they are, not shoved aside with slam bam thank you ma'am laws.

I consider the "make it illegal" attempt at a solution an insult to women and children, a typical male-dominant trivialization of women's reality. Women need to recognize that making abortion illegal is an inadequate and discriminatory dismissal of their true needs.

If I were running for office here in the USA, I'd tell questioners that I'm anti abortion and pro choice because it's not a clear choice between pro or anti. I'd say that I would make decisions based on fairness and respect for life, the life of the mother and the life of the child, and the lives of future mothers and children, and that there are many tasks to be done and changes to be made before abortion will diminish without harm. I'd tell them what some of those necessary tasks and changes are.

Then I'd list several changes I'd be able initiate and expedite if elected. And, I'd be sure to challenge them to do what they can do, not just elect me, but begin laying the groundwork for changes that need to take place in their own environments. I think it's important to enlist citizens to act, not just vote. John Kennedy did that very well in his "Ask not what your country can do for you..." speech.

So many women know what it's like to be faced with unwanted pregnancy. We need to hear their stories, learn what compelled them to make their decisions to continue or abort. From their experiences we can determine what we need to do, what we need to change, so that the absolute minimum number of women will have to make the painful and sorrowful choice to abort.

Women are well equipped and positioned to set change in motion and carry it forward. We need individual women, and women in groups to provide education, support, innovation, and practical solutions that do not create victims.

This is our country, our home, our shelter, our protection. The Bible says a wise woman builds her house, and a foolish one pulls it down with her hands. Let's take the abortion issue out of the streets, out of the political tug-o'-war game and get to work.

Pat Gundry
http://www.makeabortionunnecessary.com