The Garden of Eden

The Garden of Eden was not what I expected. I had heard about the Garden in Lucas, Kansas on television and read about it in newspaper clippings, but neither did justice to the one-man monument to cement, freedom, and Populism.

According to some people in Lucas, S. P. Dinsmoor, who was born in 1843, became enamored with cement because the invention of Portland cement in the 1820s made cement more workable and longer lasting. After he retired from farming, and possibly because he was drawing two Civil War pensions by accident (some say he tried to have the error fixed, but was unsuccessful), Dinsmoor moved into Lucas in 1907 and began construction on his post-rock “log” cabin home.

For those unfamiliar with this area of Kansas, because of a lack of wood for fencing, early EuroAmerican farmers began using the natural limestone rock, easily quarried throughout the area, as posts to support barbed wire fencing. These “log” rocks, some as long as 20 feet, were mostly used just for the fencing, but Dinsmoor used them as the logs for his cabin home.



There are many charming aspects of Dinsmoor’s concrete depiction of the Garden. One of the first that I noticed is that Eve looks very much like a Paleolithic goddess figure—lushly, fruitfully full and round. That aspect of her is best seen from inside the Garden’s arbor, as though seeing her and Adam from a place of hiding, almost devilishly.

Dinsmoor had many opinions about religion. He didn’t hold with Moses’ depictions of what the Garden of Eden must have been like. He even says, in his self-published booklet, Pictorial History of The Cabin Home in Garden of Eden, that “Moses did not give God credit for any kindness toward the human family.” Instead of leaving the humans in the Garden to suffer alone, Dinsmoor has added a hand to catch those who are falling.

Dinsmoor, a registered Populist (I suspect he was also once a Mason, given some of his comments and the Masonic symbol on his coffin), was very open in this long-term artistic effort about his opinions on everything from labor rights to religious and racial intolerance. In his Pictorial History, he defends “heathens,” pointing out that “one man on this earth is just as good as another, and sometimes a darned sight better. They are as good as they act.”

Our tour guide showed us the most controversial part of the Garden just before a visit to Dinsmoor’s pyramid style crypt. The depiction of Labor Crucified is controversial because Dinsmoor chose to depict four groups of people he felt were the leaders responsible for crucifying those who labor for a living: Lawyers, Doctors, Preachers, and Bankers.

Having been raised in conservative, bible-thumping Kansas, I asked the tour guide how many people object to Dinsmoor’s claim that Preachers “eat Labor’s cake” by only preaching to think only of the afterlife (which he said they knew nothing about), not to think about the dilemmas of the present. She admitted that some people get offended, but the group that worried her most had been a group of bankers, especially when they heard that Dinsmoor felt the banker “has the money, takes the interest and breaks up more people than any other class” (Pictorial History). She was thankful that particular group hadn’t hurt her.

In many ways, Dinsmoor’s Garden of Eden, like Frank Baum’s Wizard of Oz, depicts a world of tolerance based not just on Populist labor ideals, but also on more pagan-like beliefs of Theosophy, wherein humanity is part of a sort of universal mind, which was popular about the time Dinsmoor was growing up, and which seems to stem from ideas which rose out of Naturalism and the Enlightenment, at least as it was practiced in America. Theosophists were the New Agers of their time, and I imagine that many super conservative Kansans and Nebraskans (where there were growing numbers of Theosophists, like the Baums) would have predictably been frightened by many of their suggestions.

Dinsmoor felt that everyone should be treated equally, regardless of race, gender, or religion. Sadly, even by today’s standards, he would have been considered a radical. Luckily, he built his monument to free thinking in cement, and it promises to stand the test of time.

For Those Naïve Women

I have met many women who firmly believe that abortion is murder. Absolutely nothing I say to them about how Mother Nature aborts 3-10% of all zygotes and fetuses because there is something wrong with them, or about how much more humane it is to abort an unwanted child than to have her or him suffer from lack of love or nurturance, ever convinces them otherwise.

They’ve seen the videos the anti-abortionists show, but never question how they got those videos, or if they are even real.

The anti-abortionists are clever folks because they have learned how to manipulate the uninformed emotionally through videos, billboards, and arguments about murder.

Never, however, do they admit that the people who want to maintain women’s rights to choose whether or not to be pregnant also believe that abortion is the last resort choice for any woman. But it is, and always has been, a choice.

Making abortion illegal will never change whether or not women choose to have abortions.

What it will change is who can afford to get one, which means, in the very easy to verify mathematical scheme of things, that poorer women will continue to have children they don’t want or can’t afford to have, either physically, spiritually, emotionally, or financially. Or that these poorer women will, once again, be the ones who become sterile or even die from backstreet abortions.

In effect, the single minded goal to make abortion illegal by anyone is either a miscalculation on their part about what will happen afterwards, or a deliberate calculation—keep women poor and pregnant.

This frightening possibility—that these religious fanatics who want to impose their point of view about abortion on the rest of us—is becoming all too real, even without making abortion illegal.

One of my nieces, who is the daughter of a zealot sister of mine, chose to keep the baby conceived in a one night stand. The conception happened because she did not know the medicine the doctor put her on for a muscle injury would compromise her birth control pill. The doctor should have known better, but never bothered to inform my niece, or she simply chose to ignore the warning. She admitted that she finally decided not to have an abortion (see, she still made a CHOICE) because she knew her mother would be unreasonably angry with her if she did, and because, once she found out it was going to be a boy, she wanted to give her father the son he always wanted.

Personally, I find her reasoning appalling, not because she chose to have the baby, but because she chose to have it for other people’s reasons, not her own.

The pressure anti-abortionists have put on young women to feel even more guilt than they normally would have (and they would have felt a tremendous amount of guilt having an abortion) has created a whole new American culture—a culture based increasingly on single mothers.

These women are raising their children in the most selfish society in the world. While anti-abortionists rail against abortions, most do nothing to help the young women who become trapped in this nearly endless cycle of poverty. Instead, these same conservatives have limited the number of years these single parents can get any kind of social welfare, so that they can’t even afford to get a college education anymore, further preventing them from “pulling themselves up by their bootstraps,” as I’ve heard so many conservatives say.

I’m continually shocked (which shows my determined naiveté) when my students—18-29 years old typically—voice conservative prejudices against people who need welfare or who can’t afford to go to college. They always assume, like their parents probably do, that anyone who wants a good paying job can get one. They always assume that merely wanting something and putting some hard work into obtaining it always means they’ll get it. They assume success is just a matter of CHOICE!

Unfortunately, these young people are from the same generation that has produced the boom in unwed mothers. The fathers, it seems, CHOOSE not to be fathers. And the mothers, it seems, feel they have no CHOICE but to become mothers.

Why didn’t they use better birth control, some ask? Most of the same kids who grow up in conservative households choose not to ask for birth control because of fear of how their parents will react, so they are often the ones who end up getting pregnant. The intense desire to have sex, especially in the quest to become close to someone emotionally, usually comes with no specific planning on either gender’s part. Even if the males use condoms, the chance that someone has compromised the integrity of the latex (see my other posts) is great, which increases the already problematic unreliability of condoms.

Why aren’t they taking that “other option” anti-abortionists seem to think is an easy solution for these young women? Why aren’t they adopting out their unwanted babies? For the same reason they choose to have them to begin with—they sincerely want to do the “right” thing, and they have been told, by these same religious fanatics, that the “right” thing is the responsible thing. To them, being responsible, means raising the child themselves.

Who suffers from all this programmed choosing?

The unplanned children probably suffer most of all, but the mothers suffer, and, typically, her parents bear a large part of the financial burden, which often causes resentment from the child’s grandparents.

Or, as in my niece’s case, they resent their parents’ attempts to help them raise the child, so they completely remove themselves from their parents’ influence, until they need them. The resulting strain in familial relations will be felt for some time to come.

My niece, like so many unwed mothers, was not ready to be a mother. She definitely tries her best, but she still holds the conservative values of her parents and spanks her son when he misbehaves. His resultant anger—both from the spankings and her threats to remove valued objects from his use, as well as from his resentment at having to be shuttled twice a year across the U.S. to see his father, and also possibly because his mother, too, harbors deep resentments at having her singlehood compromised against her wishes—has made him a rather volatile young man.

The Vatican has, on several occasions, published edicts that predict what will happen to the world if women are given equal rights and if abortion is made legal. Their wildest claims were that 1. people would stop marrying, 2. women would all become lesbians (as priests, they apparently don’t understand women’s sexual needs at all), and 3. the world would plunge into chaos caused by the ensuing economic upset.

While their first prediction seems to be coming true, it isn’t. In reality, both men and women are making choices. The women realize they can survive without men, as much as they don’t want to. But they have also realized that they don’t have to put up with men who only have selfish desires. Government statistics show that fewer people are marrying, but that those fewer marriages are actually lasting longer.

More women have come “out of the closet” since many of the Vatican edicts were written, but lesbianism isn’t on the rise. It’s just out of the closet.

The economy, still largely dictated by men around the world, is still making the wealthiest wealthier and the poorest poorer. The main difference is that, now, among all those poor are millions of American children, born to mothers who “did the right thing.”

The Not So Intelligent Kansas Women

My family recently took an I-70 Vacation—we explored places we haven’t been to before on either side of I-70 as it runs through Kansas. Frequently, we saw anti-abortion signs along the highway. Someone, apparently, believes he can influence others merely by supplying misinformation.

Unfortunately, he’s right. Loads of people in Kansas approve of a recent law that, disguised as an effort to “protect” pregnant women against violence—especially against the kind of violence that would injure or kill their unborn children—elevated fetuses from potential human beings to actual human being status from conception.

Why would so many Kansans approve of such a change—a change which, to most intelligent people, obviously is meant to be the wedge that could completely make abortion illegal again in the state of Kansas?

Most Kansans don’t know their history, especially not history that relates to women’s reproductive rights.

They probably have no idea that contraceptives didn’t even become legal for women, not even married women, to use until the late 1960s.

They probably have no idea that, because contraceptives were illegal and abortions were illegal, women who wanted to terminate their pregnancies did so in back alley or self-help style. They probably have no idea that the vast majority of women who had back alley abortions either became sterile for life or died.

In our town, women wrote into the newspaper in favor of this new bill because, as one woman seemed to tearfully write, they had miscarriages and mourned those losses everyday. The one woman never indicated that her loss was caused by violence, but her concerns over the unborn, potential human beings everywhere undoubtedly convinced others, like her, who either had had miscarriages or who had never been able to conceive that anything and everything should be done to protect those lives.

Forget the women who carry them….

Why should it be necessary for a state to enact such a law, if that state was already protecting its women adequately?

Such a question didn’t seem to enter the minds of the legislators who passed the bill, nor through many of the minds that elected them there.

In Kansas, a man who rapes a boy gets twice the prison sentence that a man who rapes a woman or girl gets. Our law makers couldn’t send a clearer message: males are more valuable than women (so they believe), and now fetuses are more important than the women who bear them.

In Kansas, women are no longer second class citizens; we’re third class, right behind the unborn.

Where are the women (and men) who will protest this violation of our rights? Where are the people in Kansas who Value Women?

I had almost given up hope that such people existed in Kansas, but had been heartened discovery, nearly a year ago now, when, among all the anti-abortion booths that tend to crowd the state fair, I discovered a booth with a banner that said, simply, “Trust Women.” Available at the table were petitions to sign to urge legislators to vote against the proposed laws to limit women’s rights to choose whether or not to be pregnant, as well as pins to wear that said, “Value Women.” Everyone in our fair going group put on a pin, and all the adults signed the petitions.

We weren’t successful in defeating this fool-em-into-believing-we-care legislation, but we did learn we are not alone.

There are intelligent women (and men) who want to ensure women’s rights, and help make abortion scarce, not illegal. There aren’t many of us. But we do exist.