Kansas Republican Responses to Plea for Women's Rights

A friend of mine recently sent an email to several of our “representatives,” both at the state level and at the federal level, urging them to respect and honor women’s right to choose to be pregnant.

State Senator Steve Fitzgerald stated in an email reply: “Killing children is wrong. Advocating that mothers should be allowed...and even encouraged...to kill their children is beyond wrong - it is evil.”

To which my friend replied:

Who encourages women to kill their children? Are men like you encouraging men to kill their toddlers--a phenomenon that is a direct result of more young women deciding to give birth when they are not ready?

Your religious views should not determine your actions toward women. Allowing your religious views to determine your actions as a representative of the people means you are advocating for a few, not everyone. This nation is a democracy, not an oligarchy.

Roe vs. Wade ensured that women should have access to legal, safe abortions. Surely you agree that it is better to terminate a pregnancy than it is to murder a living, breathing child! Don't you? Child abuse and neglect is NOT an better alternative to allowing women control of our own bodies.

Considering the fact that natural abortions occur quite often, are we women who have had them murderers? Are you going to start arresting those of us who have miscarriages because you assume we're baby killers?

Your duty as an elected individual is represent everyone, not a select few. Your duty also includes thinking through the entire ramifications of making a law, as well. Do you desire to fill prisons with women who have had abortions--natural or otherwise?

Ask yourself: why do you fear allowing women to make their own choices? 

Senator Jerry Moran sent my friend an email stating: “Science demonstrates that life begins at conception, and I support legislation that protects the rights of unborn children.”

His remarks make me wonder whether he has ever studied science, since his sperm are just as alive as any zygote that results from conception, but I don’t see him advocating for laws against male masturbation.

Representative Lynn Jenkins, who has yet to enter the 21^st century, wrote my friend a letter using her congressional funds on postage—apparently in an earnest effort to keep the post office afloat, states in her reply that we should be pleased to learn (I am not) that she supports an act, HR 1179, “The Respect for the Rights of Conscience Act of 2011,” which has yet to see the House floor, that allows a health provider to ignore medical science and provide services based on “the provider’s religious beliefs or moral convictions.” 

So much for the Hippocratic Oath. This bill, if ever made law, would mean a physician who is a practicing Jain would not have to administer life-saving antibiotics because s/he feels that all life is sacred, including microbial life. Or allow a physician who is a Jehovah’s Witness not to have to provide a life-saving blood transfusion. Even if a physician orders these treatments, a Jain nurse or Jehovah’s Witness phlebotomist would be allowed—by law—not to follow the physician’s orders.

The goal for all these “representatives” is, of course, to limit women’s freedoms, and they are seeking any method of doing so, even at the cost of writing laws that will create more problems.

It is not a secret that all these politicians are Kansans who classify themselves as Republicans, but who are actually fundamentalists as extreme as the Taliban. In fact, they do not do much to hide the fact that they are fundamentalists on a rampage to take America and women’s rights back 50 years. 

Why do they feel justified in limiting women’s rights by not supporting Roe vs. Wade and ensuring that all women have access to medical abortions, instead of having to have backstreet abortions—which kills hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of women and sterilized or even crippled hundreds of thousands of others prior to Roe vs. Wade?

This article, “A Plutocracy Ruled by Self-Centered Jerks?” relates information discovered by two university studies regarding why congressional representatives follow the dictates of wealthy citizens, such as the Wichita’s own Koch brothers, instead of seeing to the needs and concerns of their less wealthy constituents: http://billmoyers.com/2013/08/27/a-plutocracy-ruled-by-self-centered-jerks/ .

We can safely assume that these “representatives” do not truly represent most Kansans’ views on abortion rights, since poll after poll has demonstrated that more than 60% of the people favor allowing a woman to make this important decision—to be a mother or not to be a mother—on her own…even in the last trimester of pregnancy!

The simple fact remains: not allowing women to exercise our rights to make our own decisions about our own bodies strips us of the fundamental rights promised to us in both the U.S. Constitution and in the U.N.’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/ which states that “everyone has the right to life, liberty, and security of person.” And by “everyone” they mean: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” 

The rights of the Born should be held sacrosanct. The unborn have yet to prove their viability, after all, since as much as 10% of all pregnancies end in spontaneous abortion.

I demand my rights and the right of all women to choose what happens to and in their own bodies! 

Do you?

Prejudice Disguised as Religious Freedom

Jerry Moran’s “Kansas Common Sense” newsletter is anything but common sense. In his Feb. 13, 2012 edition, he claims that the Department of Health and Human Services is mandating that many service providers in “Kansas will have to cover services they consider immoral.”

What services does Moran believe are immoral?

Contraception, sterilization, and abortion-inducing drugs—health care
necessities for many Kansans, especially Kansas women.

Here is what Moran is really saying: if a pharmacist, who chose her profession and was not forced to become one, decides that she does not want to fill prescriptions for contraceptives or abortion-inducing drugs, she doesn’t have to, and can claim religious grounds for refusing to do so.

Let’s substitute other, similar factors and see where this road leads us.

Let’s assume that the pharmacist decides she cannot fill prescriptions for life-saving medications because her religion won’t allow her to “play God.”

Or, let’s say, she refuses to fill life-prolonging prescriptions for terminally ill patients because only God can decide who will live or die.

Or, let’s say, she refuses to fill prescriptions for American Indians, Hispanics, or anyone of “color” because her religion does not recognize them as “chosen” people.

While Moran attempts to say that these people should not have to compromise their personal religious beliefs in the fulfilling of their professional duties based solely on their religious preferences, he’s opening a whole can of worms that will eat away at the fabric of our democracy, allowing prejudices of all kinds to rule so that discrimination is encouraged, not penalized.

Whose religious, not to mention health, rights do the Ultra Conservatives (UC), for whom Moran has become a spokesperson, really want to violate? Yours. Mine. Ours.

His attempt is another clumsy attempt by the Ultra Conservatives to control women’s sex lives, and, in the process, remove women’s rights.

And he want us to believe it is okay to do so because of his twisted interpretation of religious freedom.

Instead, how about we put a big sign on every UC pharmacist’s store, on every UC medical personnel’s medical clinics and hospitals to show that they refuse to serve everyone equally, so we’ll know what places to avoid.

What sign should we use? A swastika would be appropriate, don’t you think?

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.