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Bare Trees in Fog

Banned in Florida . . . Period!

Writer's picture: Marie LaureMarie Laure

I decided to begin a blog the day after the 11 p.m. signing of the Florida six-week abortion ban by Governor, Ron DeSantis, behind closed doors with his puppet legislators. He has been AWOL from this state ever since. Meanwhile, back on the ranch, women have been stockpiling and planning to protect ourselves from future back door legislation that these Neanderthals are surely cooking up.


I chose the title: Banned in Florida . . . Period! A small play on words, you’ll notice, if you read between the lines. I could have written six months worth of weekly blogs on that topic alone after other states followed Florida and that once, illustrious Supreme Court, turned the final “screw” on ALL women. I am considering changing the blog title to: “No Rights. No Sex.” As a strategy this has been tried before with such positive results as ending a war! The ancient Greeks knew something about the power of sex from a different angle than that of mastering control over women’s bodies from the legislative body. Just writing that sentence seems so ridiculous, yet it is its own plot line in a recent tragedy that disempowers all women in 2024!


That ancient Greek story of Lysistrata, is about one woman who organizes her counterparts to withhold sex from their husbands or partners in order to secure peace by ending the war du jour, the Peloponnesian War. The women agree that there will be no sex until that war is over and done. Theirs is a show of nonviolent resistance extraordinaire. We might be tempted to shrug this off as just a myth, but let’s not be so quick. If we go way back to those days of hunter-gatherers (Did I already say Neanderthals?), women gathered themselves in solidarity and said NO to men asserting a different control over their private, reproductive parts. In more recent times, 2006 A.D., wives and girlfriends of Colombian gang members in an attempt to stop violent gang murders, started “La Huelga de las piernas “ or “The strike of the crossed legs.” Their goal was to have gang members give up their guns. Years later, the murder rate had declined by 26.5%. I would call these nonviolent strategies effective in both changing minds and saving lives! So, there’s the rub: The whole issue of women’s reproductive rights has been framed as one of protecting life. The women who peacefully resisted by withholding sex wanted only to protect the lives of their husbands, sons, brothers, fathers. Therefore, an argument over the sanctity of life as the sole reason to ban all women from free choice does not hold up against women who instinctually protect life itself. If the argument had begun and ended over life and not choice, it would never have become the national debate of the past fifty years. It did not begin or end there. Let’s be clear on that fact.


Women walking in peaceful resistance to bans on choice, myself included, know full well that those troglodytes screaming spurious, vile accusations from behind police sidelines as intimidation tactics, have not thought things through: Women carrying a sign that says: Bans Off Our Bodies, once carried them. We are their mothers, sisters, daughters, wives who have proven without a doubt our belief in life by protecting our own sons, brothers, fathers from dying in one more war or on the streets. Women do not wish to send their sons into war or watch them die in the streets. Period! Full Stop.


Let's face it,



all women’s rights from salaries to voting to choice over our own self-care have been challenged, chopped and blocked going as far back as cave man days. There is no power in the club of the barbarians against the simple, non violent act of women’s resistance against unjust, unfair, so-called rules of law aimed directly at women. When Ron comes back after his failed attempt to rule the land with nothing but his tail between his legs, he will learn the hard way about women's resistance to his archaic decisions.




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Guest
Jan 09, 2024
Rated 5 out of 5 stars.

Brilliant!!

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Marie Laure
Marie Laure
Jan 10, 2024
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Thanks for your comment. One word that says it all!

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© 2023 by Marie Laure

​Six Stages of Pilgrimage:

  • The Call:

  • The opening clarion of any spiritual journey. Often in the form of a feeling or some vague yearning, a fundamental human desire: finding meaning in an overscheduled world somehow requires leaving behind our daily obligations. Sameness is the enemy of spirituality.

  • The Separation:

  • Pilgrimage, by its very nature, undoes certainty. It rejects the safe and familiar. It asserts that one is freer when one frees oneself from daily obligations of family, work, and community, but also the obligations of science, reason, and technology.

  • The Journey:

  • The backbone of a sacred journey is the pain and sacrifice of the journey itself.  This personal sacrifice enhances the experience; it also elevates the sense of community one develops along the way.

  • The Contemplation:

  • Some pilgrimages go the direct route, right to the center of the holy of holies, directly to the heart of the matter. Others take a more indirect route, circling around the outside of the sacred place, transforming the physical journey into a spiritual path of contemplation like walking a labyrinth.

  • The Encounter:

  • After all the toil and trouble, after all the sunburn and swelling and blisters, after all the anticipation and expectation comes the approach, the sighting. The encounter is the climax of the journey, the moment when the traveler attempts to slide through a thin veil where humans live in concert with the Creator.

  • The Completion and Return:

  • At the culmination of the journey, the pilgrim returns home only to discover that meaning they sought lies in the familiar of one's own world. "Seeing the place for the first time . . ."

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