is the curse of her sex; illegal abortion is deserved suffering. But
illegal abortion also serves her because it puts abortion out of sight.
No one has to be confronted with another woman making a choice,
choosing not to be a mother. No one must face women openly with
priorities other than marriage and conformity. No one must face a
woman refusing to be bound by pregnancy. The women who rebel
against their function must do it secretly, not causing grief, embarrassment, or confusion to other women isolated in their own reproductive quagmires, each on her own, each alone, each being a woman for all women in silence and in suffering and in solitude.
With illegal abortion life or death is up to God: each time, one
submits to the divine hand, divine finger on divine revolver pointed
at the already bloody flesh of a woman, divine Russian roulette. It
is a final, humiliated submission to the will of a superior Male who
judges absolutely. Death is a judgment and so is life. Illegal abortion is an individual hell; one suffers, does penance: God decides; life is forgiveness. And no one need face it until it happens to
her— until she is the one caught. This is the w ay in which women
are moral idiots in this system: ignoring whatever has to do with
other women, all women, until or unless it happens to oneself.
Right-wing women also believe that a woman who refuses to bear a
child deserves to die. Right-wing women are prepared to accept
that judgment against themselves; and when they survive, they are
guilty and prepared to pay— to m artyr themselves for an act of will
to which they had no right as women. There is no better measure
of what forced sex does to women— how it destroys self-respect
and the w ill to survive as a self-determining human being— than
the opposition of right-wing women to legal abortion: to what they
need to save themselves from being butchered. The training of a
girl to accept her place in sex in marriage and the use of a woman
in sex in marriage means the annihilating of any will toward self-
determination or freedom; her personhood is so demeaned that it
becomes easier to risk death or maiming than to say no to a man
who will fuck you anyw ay, with the blessings of God and state, ’til
death do you part.
4
Jews and Homosexuals
A minister from Oklahoma, dressed in a shiny brown polyester
suit, hair greased down even shinier than the shiny suit, smile from
ear to ear even shinier than the shiny hair, was picketing, leaf-
leting, and preaching outside the Sam Houston Coliseum in
Houston. He was full of love for the Lord, love for his neighbors,
the love of Christ; it was sin he hated, especially when it was embodied in the filthy lesbians who had come to Houston to destroy the work of God. He kept preaching to the feminists converging on
the Coliseum that nothing was as loathsome as homosexuality; but
in women! to contemplate the abomination in women whom God
commanded to obey their husbands as Christ was so repugnant to
this minister that he predicted God might call down the walls of
the Coliseum then and there. I approached him alone to talk as
other women ignored him entirely. I asked him what he thought of
the high-spirited, vital women going in: did they all seem evil and
loathsome? could he tell which were lesbians and which were not?
what kind of harm did lesbians do to other people? if lesbians did
no one harm (for instance, did not murder, did not rape), w hy was
he, a minister, called on to denounce lesbians? was not this particular sin, so singularly lacking in malice, better left to God to judge?
why did lesbians provoke not only God’s judgment but also the
minister’s wrath? He referred to these passages from Romans: *
*The translation quoted is the King James Version. However, the phrases
Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools,
And changed the glory of the uncorruptible God into an
image made like to corruptible man, and to birds, and four-
footed beasts, and creeping things.
Wherefore God also gave them up to uncleanness through
the lusts of their own hearts, to dishonour their own bodies
between themselves;
Who changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped
and served the creature more than the Creator, who is blessed
for ever. Amen.
