CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 15
A CONVENTION,
A WINTER STORM
AND A WEDDING
It is a dark winter morning. The hemlocks outside my window sag with snow, and the driveway is covered. I have just called Mr. Tognzaai to make sure he still has my name on his list for plowing. I shoveled three times yesterday, but only succeeded in clearing the flagstone walk and the steps, and this morning it was hard to tell I had done anything at all.
But I love being shut in with snow. There is a quietness and a more deliberate pace to life. The cars move more quietly and more slowly on the road beyond the hemlocks. MacDuff, my Scottish terrier, limits himself to a few trails he has made in the backyard, and often just sits motionless in a saucer of snow, letting the falling flakes frost his ragged black coat and beard.
This winter morning is a space of peace between two very attention absorbing events. One took place several weeks ago in Houston. On one side of town the International Women's Year (IWY) convention was being held. People like Bella Abzug, Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem and Margaret Mead were there, along with thousands (reports ranged from 8,000 to 18,000) of others, some of them delegates elected in the state IWY conventions held earlier. Betty Ford, Rosalynn Carter and Lady Bird Johnson were there, too-but can they have fully apprehended what the convention was about? Did they read the small print of the amendment? The IWY was asking for the passage of the Equal Rights Amendment, for lesbian rights (which would include the right of homosexual couples to marry and/or to adopt children), for federally funded abortion and other related issues.
Across town 15,000 people packed the AstroArena, built to accommodate far fewer, and several thousand were turned away. They were there for a Pro-Family Rally, an orderly attempt to register in the mind of the public an awareness that the IWY was not a true representation of American women. Bella's crowd has a right to speak their piece, but they had no right to speak for all of us. I was one of many speakers at the Pro-Family Rally, and I had been given eight minutes in which to present a Christian view of womanhood. Phyllis Schlafly of Eagle Forum, dedicated to stopping the ERA, spoke, thanking those who had organized the convention, and then thanking her husband Fred for letting her come (italics hers). She went on to explain why the ERA was neither necessary nor desirable, e.g., all the legislation needed to give women equal employment opportunity and equal pay has already been passed; ERA will infringe on the rights of women to be protected from military service and supported as wives and mothers.
Representative Clay Smothers called for "segrega- tion"-from perverts and misfits-in our educational system; Dr. Mildred Jefferson, the first black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, spoke eloquently against abortion. Banners bore such slogans as don't represent women! ERA is a turkey! Family rights are women's rights, and a father carried a baby who was holding up a sign, I was a fetus once. A band played, a group of girls dressed in red, white and blue and carrying big black Bibles sang, a soloist wearing a dazzling yellow suit with a red shirt sang, "When you pray, pray for a miracle." And another soloist led the entire mob in singing "God Bless America."
It was my first convention that resembled a political one, and to see the Bible being waved and to hear the shouts of Praise the Lord! that punctuated the speeches surprised me. It even moved me nearly to tears. Where is our country going when the notion of "equal rights" can mean the introduction of homosexual literature into public schools to give children options in sexual preference? Somebody from IWY called it a "low blow" when the Pro-Family group ran an advertisement headed, "Mommie, when I grow up can I be a lesbian?", yet it is a true and sobering illustration of what could happen in the kind of world the IWY seeks to create, a murky wasteland, a hideous anarchy where God-given distinctions are obfuscated or even reversed.
When I returned to my hotel room that evening I watched some of the television coverage. There were hours of IWY, with now and then a minute or two of Pro-Family. Viewers could only conclude that the Pro-Family rally was a fringe group of dissidents, far outnumbered by the allegedly representative group at the IWY. What view President Carter and the lawmakers of the nation will take of what happened in Houston remains to be seen. Many thousands of American women pray for the defeat of the Equal Rights Amendment and the preservation by law of sexual distinction so essential to freedom of religion, freedom to build Christian homes and freedom to be whole men and whole women under God.
The snow has turned to freezing rain now, and the trees bend with the weight of the ice that forms on their branches. Every twig is glazed; every frond of evergreen is cut crystal. I hope my pink dogwood and my two poor little peach trees, so sounded by last year's storms, will not be done in by this one. A small hope and a trivial fear by comparison with my hopes and fears for this beloved country of ours, but I bring both kinds to Him who alone can do something about weather and human nature. Psalm 147 is a song of praise:
Ice, hoarfrost, snow. The Earth, its realms, its cities. The wounds and broken spirits of His people. All of these subject to His command, affected by the word. He who heals and binds up, who brings peace and sends His command, who scatters crystals of ice like breadcrumbs and then speaks to melt them-He is still in charge.
He is in control of the other event that absorbs my attention with more urgency now than did the Houston convention. It is a wedding. And the wedding is mine. One week from today in a small Gothic chapel with a few friends and family members I will be entering into what the 1662 Prayer Book calls "Holy Matrimony, signifying unto us the mystical union that is betwixt Christ and his Church ... not by any to be enterprised, nor taken in hand, unadvisedly, lightly, or wantonly, but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in fear of God."
And, may I add, with unspeakable thanksgiving. For me it is the third time-for me who was sure she was a one-man woman, for me who thought it a miracle even the first time that any man would want her. But God, whose judgments are unsearchable, gave two and took away two in death, so that his giving a third seems beyond all imagining. I will be making those vows advisedly and soberly, to be sure: "To obey, serve, love, honour, and keep him in sickness and in health; and, forsaking all other, keep me only unto him, so long as we both shall live." Even for the third time, there are thrills; because it's the third time, there is also a deeper solemnity.
I know why vows, not pleasant sentiments, are required. G. K. Chesterton said they are "a yoke imposed by all lovers on themselves. It is the nature of love to bind itself, and the institution of marriage merely paid the average man the compliment of taking him at his word. Modern [Chesterton wrote more than 70 years ago] sages offer to the lover, with an illflavored grin, the largest liberties and the fullest irresponsibility; but they do not respect him as the old Church respected him; they do not write his oath upon the heavens as the record of his highest moment. They give him every liberty except the liberty to sell his liberty, which is the only one that he wants. . . . It will not work. There are thrilling moments, doubtless, for the spectator, the amateur and the aesthete; but there is one thrill that is known only to the soldier who fights for his own flag, to the ascetic who starves himself for his own illumination, to the lover who makes finally his own choice. And it is this transfiguring self-discipline that makes the vow a truly sane thing."