From all appearances in the mainstream media, the Women's March on Washington was a triumphant event which competently promoted the welfare of women everywhere. According to the organization's promotional ad, voting, reproductive, equality, immigration, LGBTQ, and environmental rights were contended for across the globe. Within a span of days, women and women's rights-supporters rallied in Washington and internationally. The event was intentionally scheduled a day of protest following Jan. 20 and boasted, according to sources, twice the amount of people present at the inauguration. Women including Madonna and Ashley Judd assumed the role of female representation in refuting the terrors of a Trump Administration and its impact on healthcare. To further convey their concerns, hundreds of women dressed as female anatomical parts as Judd decried President Donald Trump a racist pedophile. In a speech laced with obscenities and citing love as her motivation, Madonna confessed to outrage and thoughts of violence: "Yes, I'm angry. Yes, I am outraged. Yes, I have thought an awful lot about blowing up the White House, but I know this won't change anything. We cannot fall into despair. As the poet W. H. Auden wrote on the eve of World War II: 'We must love one another or die. I choose love.'"
The truth is as I'm sure some of you have surmised by now, this isn't your great-great-great grandmother's suffrage. While it is tempting and even seemingly noble to empower women---and, don't get me wrong, there is an appropriate time and place for it---the very figures cited for their movement of suffrage would cringe at the subjects deemed "rights" now. I can't help but wonder what these contemporary women, appealing to feminism and the suffrage movement, would think of the pro-life attitudes conveyed clearly by their historical predecessors. No doubt, Susan B. Anthony and others of her kind would be appalled. Though she is only one of many examples, Victoria Woodhall, the first American woman to lay claim on presidential candidacy, penned a striking example of the real meaning of women's rights. She and her sister, also a suffragette, wrote in an article entitled "The Slaughter of Innocents":
"Wives deliberately permit themselves to become pregnant of children and then, to prevent becoming mothers, as deliberately murder them while yet in their wombs. Can there be a more demoralized condition than this? We are aware that many women attempt to excuse themselves for procuring abortions, upon the ground that it is not murder. But the fact of resort to so weak an argument only shows the more palpably that they fully realize the enormity of the crime."
It is safe to conclude that these first women fought for representation, not a grant of entitlement transcending the laws of nature and reason. To these pioneers, women's rights were not sex or even necessarily gender-related; rather, they were viewed as God-given, inherent, and general. These wise grandmothers and mothers genuinely understood the rights of humanity by recognizing the Creator as the Origin of all liberty. The modern, dominant feminist movement deviates majorly from its Constitutional heritage today in two areas: first, it has embraced a statist mentality of a provisional government rather than a provisional Providence. In the spirit of Lenin's provisional government of 1917, rights are given, not pre-possessed. Secondly, while it is the popular presumption that all freedoms are birthed in the U.S. Supreme Court, it is a historical fact that the Constitution openly distinguished between the role of federal and states' rights.
According to Amendment Ten, all those areas restricted to the Constitution were left to states' discernment. Since life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are conjured by the Declaration of Independence, however, Life is a right requiring federal protection. While this country is far from perfect, women have the right to vote, to employment---to virtually everything a man has access to. Today, American women are governmentally denied no real inalienable rights.
On a widespread scale, people in general confuse governmental intervention with freedom. Rights are not earned by lifestyle or sexual orientation, and human behavior cannot be regulated entirely without impinging on individual liberties. Unless God is seen in His rightful place as ultimate Authority and Giver of peace, however, people will continue to identify the bonds of regulation as beacons of liberty. Womanhood is not something sufficiently defined by misguided women like Madonna and Ashley Judd; for this, they themselves suffer and inflict suffering on others by missing out on the joys of the very things they refute: biblical womanhood. While these women deny objectification of their sex, they, for an inadequate definition of womanhood themselves, unwittingly subject gender to biology.This is because apart from a grounded standard of Truth, people make for themselves a standard which, for the tarnished logic of humanity, always ends in a circular fashion of recycling the same values professed to be hated. Aimlessness leave women to shame other women with decidedly different views---and pro-life women are denied a place in a march ostensibly arranged for all women.
Some might argue that the march wasn't an exclusively pro-life issue; such a claim is perhaps arguable. As Christians, however, we are instructed to refuse any and every appearance of evil. This certainly includes aligning ourselves with the support of lawlessness and darkness. In such cases, patience must trump pride. and death must never serve a foundation for independence.
