There are many places, good, bad and indifferent, where religion and politics blend. Public policies like civil rights, health care, and war have moral implications. Religious judgments, like ones that define homosexuality, contraception, miscegenation as evil, have political ramifications.

As part of the political structure, religion operates at an advantage. Tax exemptions allow churches and their officers to engage in political activity, to be paid for lobbying, to provide space, supplies and advertising for those who want to turn their theology into law. These same religions demand a share of public money in the form of school vouchers, in the form of commandeering public services and space for their parking lots, segregated housing developments, in taking over sidewalks in front of clinics or closing several streets for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Anti-choicers will sign a girl up for welfare rather than sign a pledge to pay for the woman’s health care or for the child they demand she bring into the world.

My family has been active in the anti-choice movement for years. That the core of the “pro-life” movement is religion gone rotten is not a surprise. The Catholic Church has supported anti-choice, anti-contraception, anti-sex organizations in for years. Birthright, an organization that markets itself as an alternative to abortion, is a front for a group whose thuggish tactics include offering to take pregnant women to the doctor, then take the woman – or girl – to a doctor who scares and humiliates her.

I was trained to do just that.

I wasn’t any good at it, so I didn’t last. The women who were good at it rose to near the top – men are always at the top - of groups like the National Right To Life Committee and the secretive, reactionary Opus Dei, which claims Justice Alito as a member. These same women made jokes saying the joy of being pregnant was that you didn’t have to have sex for nine months.

If sex is, like childbearing, a duty, it is not only no fun, but a requirement of marriage and marriage a required status. If sex is a service for reproduction, then women are servile to men. Men are not limited by pregnancy, so, to follow the logic of the procreation popularists, it would be moral to fertilize as many women as often as possible and to end a marriage when the woman is no longer fertile.

Having a child for God instead of choosing to have a child can’t be healthy. It must separate mother from baby. The baby is, from the get go, a command, a demand, a burden not a joy or a chosen responsibility.

There is something anti-human and inhumane in organizations that intentionally twist facts to power their movement to the High Moral Ground. The distinction between behavior and belief is lost on those who view morality as motive, who think they are affected by what a person believes, as opposed to how a person behaves. That they cannot expand their version of “pro-life” to include protesting the War in Iraq, prison reform, eradicating poverty, or providing universal health care undermines their moral, if not political, authority.

Law provides recourse to cope with unsocial acts; it cannot make or measure goodness. Law can prevent those with cruel, hateful agendas disguised as decency from gaining power. Our duty is to take people like Mary Worthington seriously enough to hold our lawmakers responsible to the ideas and ideals set down in the Constitution, not to her sad and disgusting version of reality.

Once again the discussion becomes an argument between women rather than what feminism is really about: the politics of power.

Feminism is about who has the power and how much of it relates to gender. Despite research and discussion of how little nature has to do with nuture, how social roles ordain as much or more than biological imperatives do, we seem unable to shape the political terrain. Uncompensated work, whether in the home or on a job site supports an economy based on visibility. If you are in your house, you are not going to be seen or valued in public because, despite all the talk about making future great people who will change the world, if you are not shaping the public sphere you are not changing the world.

I am the woman who works, who takes over for the woman who picks up her kids, who gets to do more work for no more pay when the parent - always the female - goes home to tend a sick child. It has rarely been a man who takes leave for a feverish kid or to see a play or game. Yet it is men who are compensated, men who make the rules about work life, men who claim the moral high ground of family values and very visible men who want to set rules on the biology and philosphy of reproduction and abortion.

The failure of feminism is that it hasn't changed work life, that it hasn't encouraged women to seek, raise and teach men that there is no such thing as a women's place anymore than there is such a thing as a man's place. This is not a case of public versus private life, it is a cause of living to our best abilities. We are evolving creatures who must make choices about what to have and what to surrender. We don't get to have it all, but we do get to create more options.