It's a mystery how and why women keep giving men grace | Opinion

It must be hard being a woman. Listening to men explain things to you over and over again. Bearing their children. Watching them make a mess of things. Then cleaning up after them.

Becoming invisible.

I honestly cannot imagine how women manage it. How maddening it must be! I’m amazed that only Lorena Bobbitt seems to have acted on an impulse that countless women must have felt.

I’ve spent most of my life surrounded by women. A wife, a mother, two daughters and two granddaughters. No sons and no grandsons. So I have seen, heard and witnessed – sometimes firsthand – what men routinely put women through and how incredibly forgiving women somehow manage to be.

I’ve also been a pastor. Of course, 99.9% of pastors – until very recently – have been men. No surprise there. We wrote the Bible. So on whom did we blame sin in our creation story?

You guessed it.

Nobody really believes in magic apples or talking snakes. Most realize Genesis is a story meant to convey important religious truths. But wouldn’t you know the men who wrote that story – Moses included – would make the villain female?

Men also wrote the U.S. Constitution and 99.9% of the laws passed up until now. So, again, guess who winds up on the light end of the scales of justice? For years, women couldn’t vote. Couldn’t own property. Couldn’t even control what goes on inside their own bodies.

Still.

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Can you imagine us even having an abortion debate if men were the ones who got pregnant? I don’t know a lot of guys who “knocked up” their girlfriends, as we used to put it, but even the good ones who did usually pulled a Herschel Walker.

We’ve had 17 chief justices and 45 presidents, and not one has been female. NOT ONE. And when a woman does run for president, we make her out to be a witch. Just imagine for a moment how the country would react if we learned that a female candidate had paid off a gigolo to keep his mouth shut.

Men have been running things as long as there have been things to run. And they have certainly tried to run women – oftentimes resorting to violence if they found more subtle measures ineffective. Hundreds of times my old law office went to court seeking protective orders for women. You could count the number of men who needed them on one hand.

Don’t take my word for who the real villains are. Visit the county courthouse and see who is accused, tried and convicted of violent crimes. Visit the county jail and see who’s in there. Go to the battlefields of the world and see who’s killing one another.

For centuries, men have used their physical prowess to impose their will on women, leaving them with little more than their wiles and their beauty to get by on. Yet … women continue to love us. Forgive us. Nurture and redeem us. I honestly don’t know how, much less why. Women’s capacity for love seems immense compared to most men’s puny pond of empathy and grace.

I sometimes fantasize about what it would be like if there were only two or three men on the Supreme Court. Only two dozen men in the entire U.S. Senate. And none in the White House. Or the Kremlin. Or the governor's mansion.

Do you think the world would be better or worse? Do you think as many people would be poor, hungry or unable to read? Do you think there would be more or fewer nuclear weapons? Do you think we’d have to hold a bake sale to get new band uniforms or textbooks? Do you think we’d have as many assault rifles on the street?

Sometimes you have to hit bottom before you can see your way out. Could it be that the right way wears a skirt?

Buzz Thomas is a Baptist minister, an attorney and a member of the USA TODAY Board of Contributors.

This article originally appeared on Nashville Tennessean: Opinion: It's a mystery how and why women keep giving men grace