* Nine Scared Crows

The Supreme Court, 1973

Letter to the Editor

Yale Daily News

August 24, 2012

Dear Editor:

Senator Todd Akin’s  political blunder into the world of gynecology has taught politicians a much needed lesson: The time has come for men to stop talking about women’s bodies in public. Nearly four decades ago, Roe v. Wade  taught legislators a variation on the same theme: the time has come for men to stop legislating what women do with their bodies.

In 1973 Roe v. Wade  castrated American men from their phallocentric role as dictators over women’s bodies, but like Moby Dick rising from the depths, males blindly rise in brutish fury over their impotence. The scene in an Ohio court-room yesterday  of a  6’5 high school basketball star Tony Farmer fainting after the judge sentenced him to three years in prison for robbery, assault, and kidnapping of his former girlfriend who he was caught on video-tape dragging by the hair like some prehistoric Fred Flintstone across a hallway floor, is but symptomatic of the worldwide presumptive ownership of women which men feel in the marrow of their bones to be their gonadal entitlement.

Ever hear of the Napoleonic Code, in which a woman and her assets became the “property” of the male she married, well into the 1900’s, even in America?

Bully for the Supreme Court and Roe v. Wade which told the Fred Flintstone mentality in America you can no longer legislatively drag your woman to the birthing center  by the hair after having your way with her.

What drives religious right crazy about Roe v. Wade is not so much the violation of the sanctity of life, as it is the violation of the phallocentric tyranny American males  traditionally exerted over women’s bodies under the rubric of  Jesuic or Mosaic religions

 Until 1973, that is, when nine men, dressed as scared crows (two of whom dissented)  told all American males to mind their own business.

Some, like Senator Akin and Tony Farmer,  still haven’t taken the cue.

Paul D. Keane

M. Div. ‘80, 

M.A., M.Ed.