Stand with Women

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We like to think we’re the most advanced civilization in the world, but we allow the appointment of “justices” who still believe women are inferior to men.  Millions of women who’d been born into the modern world yesterday found themselves thrust back into medievalist thinking that now seems to reign in the Supreme Court.  Even Donald Trump, who is responsible, has expressed his doubts.  When will we acknowledge that women should have the same rights as men?  How long do we have to continue this inane struggle against religious amateurs who believe their reading of Scripture is the only correct one?  I was raised by a woman on her own.  Uneducated, with no practical job skills, she remained religious and very capably reared three sons.  She was far more capable than my father.

Democracy can be gamed, of course.  And the “angry white man” has become America’s new face to the world.  The petulant, selfish male who thinks everyone else is getting the benefits.  Even as Catholic-majority nations are declaring women’s rights, America is stepping backward in the Human Rights Index because certain senators refused to allow voting on legitimate candidates for the supreme court.  How they can go home and face their wives I do not know.  Of course, our laws do not apply to our lawmakers.  As revelations continually show, theirs is a world of “do as I say, not as I do.”  Is it so difficult to say it out loud?  Women are fully human and have an inherent claim to the same rights as men.  But then again, when have those blinded by religion ever seen clearly?

America, do you enjoy seeing your rights stripped away?  Do you enjoy justices who one day decide it’s our right to carry weapons in public and then next to say that women must remain home barefoot and pregnant?  Is this the mentality that now rules the gamed “supreme” court?  I’d like to exegete that word supreme and ask our “justices” just how deeply they’ve studied religion.  And that doesn’t mean just praying over your Bible.  The most difficult courses in the religion-philosophy curriculum are those dealing with ethics.  Days spent wrestling with the subtleties of how reason, law, and religion interact and teasing them apart to look at each with real understanding.  Or do we just vote along party lines like any beast in the herd?  It’s a shock to have been born in the sixties only to now find yourself living in the fifties with all their inherent hypocrisy.  I stand with women, not amateur theology masquerading as justice.

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A Long Way to Go

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“One of the greatest injustices we do to young people is ask them to be conservative.” The words are those of Francis Schaeffer. The Francis Schaeffer. Among evangelical circuits, Schaeffer has a status right up there with James Dobson, Ronald Reagan, and Saint Paul. At Grove City College he was viewed with such veneration that hagiography would be an understatement. Few realize that Schaeffer was a mover and shaker in the hippie movement until Roe v. Wade caused what might have been akin to a breakdown. Schaeffer transformed into what he once despised, the ultra-conservative trying to protect the unborn. While Catholic groups had been unsuccessful at capturing Jerry Falwell’s sympathy for fetuses, Schaeffer would win. His book, A Christian Manifesto, published the year I started college, was required reading for religion majors. Abortion had now been taken on as an “evangelical” issue.

Fast forward a few decades. Karen Handel, erstwhile Georgia gubernatorial hopeful, becomes senior vice-president for Susan G. Komen’s The Cure. Handel ran for governor on a pro-life platform. The Cure (temporarily) withdraws funding from Planned Parenthood—the idea that every child should be loved and esteemed is less important than every child should be born. With those little tiny feet. And as it turns out, hopefully with little tiny penises as well. Divide and conquer. Women against women. The Margaret Thatcher syndrome. Call it what you will, but abortion as a religio-political issue revolves around women’s rights. Anti-female legislation has had a long and sordid affair with Christian theology, reaching back to medieval witch-hunts and Catholic sacerdotal declarations. What is sometimes excused as ignorance in less developed societies where women are routinely brutalized is given a Gospel air brush job and called “anti-abortion” in the United States. The real issue, the literal elephant in the room, is women’s rights.

The evidence on this is incontrovertible for anyone who is willing to open their eyes. In order for our culture—men hurling themselves at each other during the Superbowl while women are preparing food in the kitchen—to survive, outmoded gender expectations must be kept firmly in place. Even if you want to cure breast cancer—largely a plague against females—you do it so they can live to produce more males. Being raised with an absentee father, I learned very early that women had every right to equal treatment with men, but I also learned that it did not happen. The trick has been to get women on board to vote against their own best interests. Raise them up to think their religion, their God, demands them to be subservient. And if a man wants sex, it is a woman’s duty to comply. And abortion undoes all a man’s hard work in the bedroom, or backseat, or dark alleyway. Yes, these issues are complex and myriad aspects play into them. I say we call a quorum on the debate until one-half of the human race is truly given a chance to find its voice.

What does he have that half the human race doesn't?

Political Insantorum

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Some weeks it is Thursday before I get a look at Tuesday’s newspaper. It has been one of those weeks. On the op-ed page of the New Jersey Star-Ledger is a piece by Harvard professor Noah Feldman on the somewhat surprising rise of Rick Santorum in the melee otherwise known as the GOP nomination process. The intolerant Catholic (Santorum, not Feldman) has surprised many with his appeal to the Evangelical Protestant camp, the traditional enemies of anything popish. As Feldman points out, if you add up Santorum, Bachmann and Perry, you get the equivalent of a 2008 Iowa Huckabee with Romney staying about where he was back then. This calculus of political doublespeak points to a very basic, fundamental lie at the heart of it all: none of the candidates is a theologian, but they act one on TV. Santorum’s Catholicism is blurring with Huckabee’s Baptist sensibilities in a way that should make even the most profane Reformer shudder. Baptists supporting a Catholic? This marriage can’t end happily.

I am no politician. I’m not even a political science student. As someone who has kept a weather eye on religion for over forty years, however, it is clear that “Christianity” in America is a house built on shifting sands. For a nation founded on the notion of religious freedom, an awfully large number of citizens sure want to limit the options. Freedom of religion is the choice whether to sit on the right hand side of the aisle, or the left (with the former being strongly urged). Freedom of religion can be frightening because no one has all the answers. And politicians, who regularly distance themselves from the rest of us, send their children to private schools to underscore the fact. Is it not so, Mr. Santorum?

Those who want to take their dogma to the White House should make sure it’s at least paper-trained first. Feldman notes that Roe v Wade gave the initial push of Evangelical toward Catholic. I am reminded of the excellent book Republican Gomorrah by Max Blumenthal—those who are interested in the real roots of the overly emotional secret lives of blastoplasts should read this book. Suffice it to say that some very interested parties really didn’t care much until a particular quasi-celebrity decided to make a cause célèbre of the issue. Now the way to the seat of power is paved with unwanted pregnancies. It is high time politicians got their hands out of their pockets and off their Bibles and started using them to help the average person again. In fact, it might not hurt if they had to be an average person before running to represent them. But then, they wouldn’t be able to afford private school for their kids, would they? Mixing with hoi polloi takes more fortitude than a congress full of representatives can muster after all their pampered rearings.