The Dying Throes of Patriarchy in the House of the United States by Caryn MacGrandle

The other day I wrote on the Mother Well feed section of my app my disappointment about the new House Speaker Mike Johnson. 

Mike has proposed and supported bigoted and racist filled legislation. He is against same sex marriage, abortions and even was accused of making changes to legislation to allow clergy to refuse to perform marriage for interracial couples. 

Yes, you read that correctly.

Yes, this is 2023.

He is a supporter of an archaic belief called ‘covenant marriage’ making divorce difficult. He has said that LGBTQ people are living an “inherently unnatural and dangerous lifestyle.”

You can read more about him in this Popular Information article. 

And yes, he was just chosen for one of the most powerful positions in the entire world.

And yes, I had to think twice because I wrote about my disappointment in this choice on the Mother Well feed. The divine feminine app is more popular than ever before. With our new affiliate program and weekly email of local and online divinely feminine events, our free registrations have increased 60%.

But no one comments on the Mother Well feed section pretty much ever.

So I feel rather free to say whatever I want.

And that’s a big responsibility.

I think of the deep irony that social media, blogs, and other features of the internet have given more people than ever before ‘platforms’. 

But what it led to, thanks to some nasty algorithms and trolls, is this horribly divided world where we’re all living in our separate caves on our laptop zoom calls.

We’ve got to get back to that place where it is okay to disagree.

I don’t wish Mike Johnson any harm. I’m not going to spit in his face or yell obscenities at him.

I just pray that since the time he proposed and supported this horrible legislation that he has grown.

Mr. Johnson, you may have a ‘covenant marriage’ where you stick together no matter what, but have you ever been repeatedly belittled, screamed and physically hit?  Have you ever watched your children cower and wilt a little more each day before an abusive spouse to the point where you were willing to give up your financial security to show them some small amount of love, joy and peace in their home?

The goal in your mind might be a man married to a woman, two kids, a white picket fence and a forever marriage, but life for the large majority of us is often filled with much harder choices, struggling and suffering.

And the way we wade through that, the way we make our choices and find our joy and empowerment is so very important. 

In a grown up world, we have the ability to make our own individual choices and walk our own pathways.

I am in the midst of reading Women’s Sovereignty and Body Autonomy Beyond Roe V. Wade by Girl God. I did not want to read this book as historically I have been morally opposed to abortions. I even was stubbornly proud of the fact that my refusal to babysit for a friend’s abortion, married and with three kids, led to her actually having the baby. 

Was I there each day to observe the financial and emotional stress this added to her family? At my age I now understand better the nuances and false moral superiority of my judgement on her.

One of the stories in the Women’s Sovereignty book speaks of another married woman in the military, stationed in Japan, four months a new mother already finding herself pregnant and choosing to have an abortion.

She speaks of the difference in having an abortion in a country that culturally accepts that abortion is sometimes a ‘necessary suffering’. In Japan, there is even a ritual, the Mizuko Kuyo which is an acknowledgement of sorrow and an intention of the faith that the child will be reborn.

This is a different belief system: a far different belief system than the one that Mike Johnson adheres to. 

How have we gotten to a place in America, the Land of the Free, that we do not support each other’s belief systems?

After being called a ‘despicable bigot of the highest order’ for proposing a bill to permit anti-LGBTQ discrimination, IBM which was building a technology service center slated to employ 800 people reached out to Mr. Johnson opposing the measure because they said they would not be able to attract talent to Louisiana if the bill passed and was enacted to law.

Those executives at IBM knew, no matter what their personal belief system was, that they would not be able to hire the most talented and intelligent talent if they did not support the world that is coming.

My children regularly look at me with disappointment when I ask certain things, such as what color a person was. “They look at me and ask why does it matter, Mom, really!”

Well, you see it mattered in my world. And I am doing my darndest to be an ally and examine and dismantle my bigoted and racist thinking.

This is the thing that Mr. Johnson and the majority of the House may not know: 

The Tsunami is coming. Hard as they try, they cannot stop the future and our children being born into a far different world.

And we must keep talking about it.

“The women are activated, and their love cannot be stopped.”  Dale Allen