Tim, Lisa and I were running up First Avenue in Laurel a little before six in the morning. I was whining about cleaning cattails out of an irrigating pond and how I planned to use my weed burner to torch those I could not reach with my backhoe. “Weed burner?” Lisa asked. “Is that one of those things which goes ‘grrllck’?” Tim, a farm kid from Missouri, smirked and glanced at me, but said not a word as we trotted along. For a brief second an embarrassing silence hung in the air until suddenly Lisa jumped back in saying, “Okay, so I am a girl and I don’t make good boy noises.” Tim and I chuckled softly in agreement. Lisa’s dropping the term “boy noises” sparked the conversation like a weed burner hitting a cattail patch, so for the next two miles we discussed the innate differences between the sexes.

I brought up the sex-linked discrepancy in color perception. Several years back, I received an emergency phone call from a nice lady who had found a lost dog and was searching for its owner. In describing the dog she kindly offered his coat color as being taupe. As hard as I tried, I could not conjure a visual image of taupe. Ladies, here is a little peek into guy life—our color acuity is purposely limited. Mostly, we can see the three colors or color groups, black, hunter orange, and red, white and blue. We like simple. Tim is a bit of an outlier as he can also see green and yellow, but this is likely due to his career employment with John Deere. This proves contrary to conventional wisdom, men can be trained.

Soon we rambled to the second difference, problem solving. Guys like to fix things. When we spot broken stuff we plan how to fix it, or better yet, redesign and upgrade it so it does not break again. Whether it is a leaking toilet, a rotted brace post, or even broken relationships, we focus on fixing it. Ladies are not fixers; instead they prefer to incessantly ruminate on a problem until the dilemma finally shrugs its shoulders, surrenders in desperation and limps on down the road. Sometimes this discrepancy creates conflict. My oldest daughter recently taught me, “When Mom is talking about problems, just listen; she doesn’t want you to fix anything.” Although it feels like we are verbally beating a dead horse, I yield to girl logic and approvingly nod my head to the repetitive thrashing of problem after problem. Being a trophy husband is not as easy as I make it appear.

The third disparity is interpreting emotion through facial expressions; like color perception, ladies reign supreme here as well. A while back I watched a documentary comparing brain function differences between men and women. While recording cerebral electrical activity, test subjects were asked to describe the emotion demonstrated by facial expressions in photographs on various flash cards. The female subjects nailed the correct response in milliseconds using a tiny percent of their brains. The guys, on the other hand, required minutes of hard study utilizing 70 percent of their gray matter to deduce an answer which was wrong as frequently as it was right. Bubba really sucked in the facial expression flash card test and this brings me to my point.

Men and women, moms and dads, are innately different with each contributing a unique, yet critical component in the proper rearing of their children. This is exactly as God designed, but His truth was ignored on May 9th when the U.S. Department of Education directed the replacement of the terms “mother and father” with “parent one and parent two” on Federal Application for Student Aid forms. Harkened as a progressive leap forward, this is yet another example how collectivism is incrementally destroying the American family. Oops, I almost forgot, “Happy Parent-One Day” I say as I roll my eyes demonstrating an emotion so obvious even men can understand. Four terms in Montana’s House has taught me the left is freaking insane, yet perfectly normal people across the hinterlands unknowingly vote for Democrats and liberal Republicans all while expecting different results. We get the government we deserve and although ignorance is no excuse, it’s the only one we have.