I Feel Like I'm A Person. Am I Wrong?

An article ran in the NYT this week that said that churches with women pastors were being kicked out of the Southern Baptist Convention. The “thinking” is that women are a slippery slope, if they’re given a leadership role what’s going to come down the pike next? Ideas about acceptance, equality, peace…Jesusy stuff? Defiance of male authority, refusals to obey, an upset in the whole convenient hierarchical structure that puts men first and claims that God said so? Where the large category of women goes down, every other group identified by race or gender goes down too.

It chilled me, as do all the setbacks women are experiencing right now all over the world. In April, the ERA once again failed to achieve 60 votes in the senate—incredible, right?—so no amendment to the Constitution exists that sets the precedent of equality. Also this week I read articles about the THOUSANDS of young women who are MURDERED in India every year over dowry disputes, and thousands more forced to live in poor conditions amounting to slavery in the households of their in-laws who double as extortionists, never to see their husbands again after the wedding.

And there was an article about a case that might come before the Supreme Court contesting laws that prohibit convicted domestic abusers from carrying guns. It seems the founding fathers didn’t say domestic abusers shouldn’t be allowed to own firearms in the Constitution. Seriously. This is the kind of case that is catnip to the current court.

And the erosion of women’s healthcare across the board. If bodily autonomy isn’t obvious, and it isn’t, then why care for our bodies? Why research women’s diseases? Who cover medicines women need? We become replaceable tools.

It makes me begin to wonder if I have somehow misunderstood what I take as a basic premise of my existence—that I am a person. Am I wrong? How can I not wonder at this moment as women’s rights are eroding and hatred toward women is growing more blatant (if it’s even possible that there be more.) I have been aware since I was two of how women and girls are treated differently, how our bodies are subjected to constant violence that comes in many guises, how we are kept in line by learning early to hate ourselves, police ourselves, starve ourselves, fear walking the streets freely, blame ourselves for events where the outcome was a set up all along, and on and on. How we are leered at, flashed at, grabbed at, pushed, name-called, bullied, incested, date raped, underpaid, all with no consequences in most cases except to us. Not to mention the many hundreds of images that bombard us every day about the badness and treachery of women that encourage us to fight among ourselves rather than band together to change the power structures and messages that are relegating us to the status of domestic pets. Laws restricting our rights have been repealed but the fact is they were there, and they can come back. They are coming back.

Why do I think I am a person? Why do I feel and sense that I am a person? Language, the opposable thumb, the ability to plan, a sense of the future? These are traits that have been used to subjugate the other persons we call animals. Women were long believed to be unable to reason, and I know from experience we are still believed unable to feel pain; insurance companies won’t pay for anesthesia for many excruciating medical procedures that occur in the uterus. Yes, it isn’t possible to feel the pain of others but it is possible to imagine it, and yet imagination fails when it come to women, babies, and other animals. As a society we conscience horrendous business and activities in which pain is foundational. The powers that be don’t believe a poor mother feels the same pain at the shooting death of a child as a mother whose child is in a great prep school. One life is worth more than the other and the pain should be proportionate. I have been in the vicinity of cows when the day olds are removed from the mother. The grief of their bellows is soul piercing, yet it is brushed off as mechanical and insignificant.

I have given a lot of thought to why I think I am a person, and why I think animals are persons, and how every living thing manifests personhood. It comes down to this: I don’t want to be controlled. Control and attempts to control me offend my life force and cut to the quick.

I have a sense of a self, I have a sense of volition,I have a sense of preference, and I have a sense of freedom. All of that is expressed in the sentence I don’t want to be controlled. But the truth begins in a far deeper place. My essential knowing is that freedom is the meaning of life. It is life. All attempts to set the terms of freedom interfere with the very natural path to self actualization, integrity, and enlightenment. We are here to be whole. Is that really so terrifying that so many laws and religions and attitudes and institutions have to be invented to prevent our freedom? It’s such a waste. If there is a higher plan, this is not it.

This is a father’s day message.