March for Life in DC 2006

This past Sunday was the 33rd Anniversary of Roe v. Wade. On Monday, the March for Life took DC by storm! I marched it for the first time with my husband and tens of thousands of other pro-lifers from all over the US. You can see the Washington Monument in the background of this picture.

We handed out 3,000 postcards with a picture of our Choose Life magnet. Lots of kids took them thinking they were stickers! Next year, they WILL be stickers.


At least 50% of the marchers (probably more) were under the age of 22. I think this makes sense. Those of us most affected by Roe v. Wade are the survivors - those born after Roe v. Wade became the law. We all spent the first 9 months of our lives as "blobs of tissue" who had no rights. Millions of our generation are dead, buried in garbage dumps.




The march usually starts at the ellipse in front of the White House, but this year the rally was held on the Mall at 7th and Constitution Ave. We didn't read the papers ahead of time and so we ended up at the White House on 16th St instead of 7th. The March traveled from the rally down Constitution Avenue, past the Capitol building.


After the Capitol, Constitution climbs a short hill, the only hill in DC. At the top stands the intersection of 1st and Constitution. A few steps up 1st, and we stand at the steps of the Supreme Court building, which has the words "Equal Under the Law" etched into the stone on its front. I'd like to know who they think is equal and exactly when they become equal.


In front of the Supreme Court Building, several CEC priests performed a memorial service for the pre-born children murdered that day. A CEC priest performs this service every day of the year, because children are killed every day of the year. The priests present included Fr. Terry Gensemer of CEC for Life, Abp. Randolph Sly, and Bp. Philip Zampino. Fr. Frank Pavone was supposed to present the homily, like he did last year, but he was unable to attend. In his place, Callie Kyle, director of Laudate for Life (the CEC's youth for Life group) spoke on the importance of the youth in the Pro-Life movement.



Deacon Fornier of Priests for Life was on hand during the preparations for the memorial service.





After the memorial service, Silent No More members spoke about the sorrow, guilt, and pain of their abortions. As they began, about a dozen Pro-Choice protestors in pink hats tried to intrude on the stage. Silent No More requested 10 men to assist them, but didn't say why. They set the men up between the protestors and the stage as silent protection for the women. The protestors left a few short minutes later. I'm not sure which ran them off, the men or the painful words of the post-abortive women.




Jennifer O'Neill, an actress and spokesperson for Silent No More, spoke about her abortion.






Here's me in front of the Supreme Court building. It was a long, cold day, but well worth it! Check out pictures from the San Francisco March for Life. Their march was a lot more confrontational than ours. We had a few protestors, they had to have hundreds of policemen to protect them! Perhaps the cold weather here keeps the troublemakers away - or maybe it's just California.

Responding to God in Song

God created humankind in His image. The marriage relationship reveals something about the relationship between God and us, where men represent an aspect of God and women represent an aspect of humans.

God is the initiator of our relationship with Him "We love, because He first loved us." Physically, men are (usually) the initiators of a physical relationship between the husband and wife.

People respond to God with love. The wife accepts and responds to her husband with love.

This led to an answer God gave me this week to a question I've asked for many years and never (until this week) had a satisfactory answer to: "Why do we sing to God? We praise Him, tell Him how glorious He is, and He enjoys it and asks us to sing. It makes Him sound egotistical to create us to praise Him. So, knowing that God isn't egotistical, because he's all love, why do we sing?"

The answer I heard is: Because God sang to us first, and He continues to sing to us. He tells us how much He loves us and how special we are to Him.

An obscure minor prophet at the end of the Old Testament, Zephaniah, wrote, "The Lord your God in your midst, The Mighty One, will save; He will rejoice over you with gladness, He will quiet you with His love, He will rejoice over you with singing."

The word singing is the Hebrew word rinnah, which means a ringing cry, in proclamation, joy, or praise.

So God is singing praises over us. I think He sings to our hearts continually. The problem is that we don't listen for it.

I'm going to open the ears of my heart and listen to His song. "My beloved spoke, and said to me: 'Rise up, my love, my fair one, And come away.'" (Song of Solomon 2:8)

Real Femininity for Real Women

70% of mothers work according to a book I'm reading that's written by a feminist, Elizabeth Fox-Genovese. Does radical femininity state that all women need to stay home, cook, clean, and mind the children?

NO.

Radical femininity changes the heart. If changing your heart makes you realize that God wants you to do those things, then wonderful! If changing your heart improves your relationship with God, your husband, and your kids, but doesn't put it in your heart to quit working, wonderful!

Femininity is not about actions. It's about the heart. Your actions will change when your heart changes. The Bible says, "faith without works is dead". Works flow naturally from a righteous heart. When your heart seeks God's will, as a feminine heart does, then the things you are supposed to do to be feminine will become obvious to you.

Many women feel the need to work because money is tight. For our family, I don't work and God provides. Customers of my husband's business have given us furniture, clothes, and gift certificates to grocery stores. In other families, God doesn't ask that sacrifice. Another woman's sacrifice, like my friend Michelle, is to leave her newborn in daycare and go to work. Single women and single moms don't have a choice. They have to work.

The perfect housewife isn't necessarily feminine, although she has domestic skills. Femininity is a relationship with God that affects every other relationship in your life.

Gaining Equality or Serving Dreams

Many feminists have written that femininity is an oppressive social construct created by men. They believe that if women throw off the chains of femininity, then they will be equal with men.

I believe that God places things in our hearts. I belive it's a joy to be feminine (and try not to use it to manipulate). Although I love jeans most of the time, every once in a while I love dressing up and going out girly. I don't find it oppressive to be beautiful and seen as attractive.

What makes me equal to my husband is not my brain (his IQ is higher), my education (I have a master's degree, he has an associates), my beauty (no need to compare myself to my husband there ;-)), my strength (he's way stronger), or any other physical or mental attribute. My husband and I are different from each other and from every other person on the planet.

What makes us equal is that we're both humans created by God. We're both beings of equal worth. We both have equally important goals and dreams. We work together to help each other follow our dreams.

My dreams have changed, because of the responsibilities of marriage and family. My husband encourages and sometimes even forces me to chase after my dreams when I want to give up. We both had to pray through our dreams and agree on them together.

My biggest dream is to make a difference in a lot of people's lives, in some way that hasn't happened yet. My husband's dream is to become a priest. We're working together to get him through seminary. We're working together to make my stay-at-home businesses to work.

It isn't what we human beings do that matters. It isn't whether or not my businesses make a lot of money or whether my husband finishes seminary.

It's that we're doing it with the right heart. We love God, and we're working for Him. We're raising our family for Him. I'm writing for Him. Bill is going to seminary for Him. We support each other in our walks towards the Lord and the plan He has for our lives.

Being a woman isn't about having equal power. Being a man isn't about power. Satan was about power when he was an angel who wanted to be like God. Adam and Eve sought power when they ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. I don't want to be like them.

I want to be like the Christ who served and died and rose to the right hand of the Father. I want to be a servant of God.

Under the Arm, Next to the Heart

"Behind every good man is a good woman," goes an old saying. Serita Ann Jakes changed rewrote the saying in her book Beside Every Good Man. Her version says, "Beside every good man is a good woman." And she's right.

God created us to be at a man's side. "And the Lord caused a deep sleep to fall on Adam, and he slept...Then the rib which the Lord God had taken from man He made into a woman." (Genesis 2:21-22) The rib isn't dragged behind a man by a chain. It isn't even located in the pelvis or some other area at a man's back. Ribs go under the arm and over the heart. God created women to live there.

When we are hugged by our husbands (who are usually taller than us), we are under their arms and over their hearts, like a rib. We rest in a place of security and love. Our heart lies next to his, and we are both next to and under our husbands. It's a position of mutual adoration,love, and peace. No one's insulted, no one's demeaned, and no one's oppressed.

Baby Ava: The Picture of Life

Baby Ava was baptized this past Sunday. She's the daughter of a girl who spent quite a few months of her pregnancy in a home for unwed mothers.

I'm so thankful that Ava's mom, Tiffany, chose not to abort this beautiful girl.

I have to smile every time I see Ava. She's about a month old now and sleeps most of the time, but you can still tell that she has a sweet disposition.

What could be more appropriate a few weeks from the March for Life than the baptism of a girl who, unlike many other unborn children of unwed mothers, survived. This girl is already a survivor! Jeff Probst, give her the $1,000,000!

Thank you to the many generous donors of time and money to maternity homes for unwed mothers. You're all going to receive a special blessing for what you do for babies like Ava.

The Island

The Island - starring Ewan McGregor and Scarlett Johanson
Five stars (with caution for gore essential to the plot)

If you haven't seen "The Island", you should. I'm going to include a spoiler here, so click to my previous post if you don't want to know. I remember when the movie came out last year, because it's premise reminded me of a short story I wrote a few years ago.

Like good science fiction, The Island takes a controversial issue, asks "What if this were possible in the future? What would society look like?" Specifically, it asks, "What if cloning were legal and successful? What would the business of cloning look like?" By extension, it also conquers the issues of stem cell research and abortion.

Buyers of the "product" are told that the cloned tissue is never conscious, it grows in sacks, and there's nothing human about a batch of tissue. But in reality, full-grown human clones are grown, made aware (because emotions and life are essential for good organs), and told that wonderful things await them in their future.

Clones are harvested for the organs and other tissues their wealthy human originals need. During one particularly gorey scene, a physically strong clone wakes up just as harvesting begins and runs down the hall with his torso cut down his sternum, yelling that he wants to live. He's shot in the legs with mini spear guns (b/c guns and other weapons would damage the organs) and dragged back to the operating table.

This movie should have caused a furor in the media, but instead they ignored it completely. They didn't want anyone to see this movie. Cloning and stem cell research sound great when you're talking about a few cells for quadraplegics, but when you talk about growing clones for organ transplants, a natural evolution of the procedure, the true ethics of the issue - life and death - become readily apparent.

When we're talking about stem cells and killing embryos when they're only 8 cells, it's one thing, but when you're watching "The Island" and see doctors in lab coats slitting open large sacks containing embryos grown as full-sized humans and jabbing syringes filled with death into their necks, the appalling nature of abortion shocks our sensibilities.

Filled with action sequences, chase scenes, and people shooting nails into other people's hands, this movie is designed for teens (and other lovers of the action genre). What better way to show this audience the real meaning behind the liberal drivel they get from university professors than a movie.

For a longer and more thorough analysis of this movie, visit ChristianAnswers.net.

Feminism vs. Femininity

I'm starting to learn more about Feminism. It's been a while. I took a woman's studies course in college 10 years ago. Something I read the other day struck me, because it's very similar to something Pope John Paul II talked about.

One of the goals of feminism is to have women seen as human beings (like men are) instead of objects.

According to Pope John Paul, that's something every human being has wanted since Adam and Eve sinned in the garden of Eden. In the beginning, they were "naked without shame". There was nothing between them. Their physical bodies were an expression of their spiritual beings. Adam never said, "ooh, la, la, that Eve is HOT!" But, I bet she was. He loved her for her.

When Adam and Eve sinned, part of them died. There was something that was damaged in them that day. Bodies meant to live forever began to decay. Eyes that could see each other's spirits saw shame.

Through our salvation in Christ, we can begin to see each other as human beings again. Lust and self-interest give way to loving the other person. You see the love in the eyes of a couple still married in their 80's, and you know that lust has nothing to do with their emotions. They see each other's souls. They know the good and the bad in each other's hearts and love anyway.

That's what feminists want. That's what femininists have. (no typo there, I'm making up my own word). We give up control to another (Christ first, then our husbands) and simultaneously, our spouse gives up his control to Christ. We work together to serve Christ and His church. We live a difficult life of self-denial and service.

If you're a Christian and you've never denied yourself for Christ or served Him, you can't be a Christian.

Femininists refuse to be an object by "being" for Christ, and this unlikely humility forces men to see them as beings created in the image of God.