Religious Liberty

This recent brou-ha-ha over contraception and religious liberty started me thinking about my own freedom of religion.  I am a Catholic, and thus am supposed to follow what the Pope and the Bishops (the hierarchy) teach.  But at this point things get a little confusing.

Pope John Paul II stated that the United States invasion of Iraq did not fit into the Church’s teaching of a just war.  In fact, modern warfare doesn’t fit into that doctrine at all.  My religious conscience totally agrees with that teaching.  So, as a private citizen will I be able to apply for conscientious objector status and not have to pay income taxes to support any war?  It seems to me that this would qualify under the religious liberty criteria.

Further, the Church teaches that capital punishment is wrong.  My religious conscience totally agrees with that teaching.  So, as a private citizen will I be able to not pay state taxes to equip and then use the execution chamber at San Quentin?  This is in violation of my religious conscience.

How about my having to pay taxes that subsidize the oil companies that produce the fossil fuel that is the cause of climate change?  Can I opt out of those subsidies?  My religious conscience dictates that I care for the earth that is the gift of God to humans to enable them to survive in the universe.  Contributing to climate change offends my religious conscience big time.  What about my religious liberty here?

Congressman Paul Ryan presented a federal budget that deeply offends my Christian ethics of preserving a preferential option for the poor.  I do not want to have my tax dollars go to pay the salary of someone so offensive to my religious conscience.  Can I deduct my portion of his salary from my taxes?  He truly violates my sense of morality, which is based on my religion.

As the hierarchy demands religious liberty for its own teachings, what about the religious liberty of those who do not follow those teachings?  Aren’t they to be considered?  Or is the hierarchy stating that only they have the right to religious liberty, and all others, if employed at a Catholic institution, have to find another job if they don’t like what the hierarchy is demanding.

This could go on for pages.  But I think I have made my point.  The hierarchy is way out of line here.  And as usual, they didn’t ask any women what their religious consciences told them. 

No Time for Tyrants

“All witchcraft comes from carnal lust, which is in women insatiable.” Heinrich Kramer and Jakob Sprenger, Malleus Maleficarum, 1487.  And so it began.  This citation, and those immediately following are taken from: Fearless Wives and Frightened Shrews: The Construction of the Witch in Early Modern Germany, Sigrid Brauner, Univ. of Massachusetts Press, Amherst.

We talk about the current War on Women, but never why, where and when did this War start?  The following quote from the jacket of the above quoted book may give us some insight.

“In fifteenth-century Germany, women were singled out as witches for the first time in history; this book explores why.  Sigrid Brauner examines the connections among three central developments in early modern Germany: a shift in gender roles for women; the rise of a new urban ideal of femininity; and the witch hunts that swept across Europe from 1435 to 1750.

Brauner shows that the modern notion of the witch as a willful, conniving, promiscuous woman was first established by German Inquisitors in the Malleus maleficarum (1487).  In subsequent works by Martin Luther and the sixteenth-century playwrights Paul Rebhun and Hans Sachs, the witch emerged as the counterpart to the new feminine ideal of the urban housewife.  By demonstrating how the binary concepts of “good” housewife and “bad wife” (or witch) were propagated among the educated urban elite who presided over witch trials, Brauner suggests that the witch hunts functioned to discipline women who failed to display the docility and subservience expected of the new urban housewife.”

Remember that the end of the witch trials in the United States was in 1750, a mere 362 years ago.  These views of women had entered Puritan Christianity, and were promulgated by prominent pastors such as John Winthrop.  There are many books to describe how this Puritan view of Christianity became so tightly interwoven with the concept of America as a City Upon a Hill, continuing on into the 20^th century with Ronald Regan’s comment in his farewell address, a shining city upon a hill.  “This is a story about that imaginary place, so real in the minds of those for whom religion, politics, and the mythologies of America are one singular story, and how that vision has shaped America’s projection of power onto the rest of the world.”  The Family, Jeff Sharlett, pg.2.

I bring up this history because over and over I hear otherwise intelligent political pundits asking what is wrong with the Republican Party and Christian fundamentalists, both Catholic and Protestant, and this supposed War on Women?  Can’t they see how destructive it is to their party?  No, they can’t, and the reason is it is all mixed up together with their notion that God has blessed America with this wonderful notion of world-wide power.  Thus they plow ahead with missionary zeal.

And women simply do not fit into this picture.  The men are to go out and do battle for their wives and families, and the wives are to stay home and “guard the home fires”, which is what they have been ordained by God to do.  Thus, anything that prevents them from living out their pre-ordained role in life is to be obliterated.  Birth control, abortion, equal pay for doing a man’s job (which they shouldn’t be doing in the first place), or any of the other legislative actions against women’s rights that have taken place are just what men should be doing to help women stay in their God-ordained role.  Women should not be out working; they should be home with their husbands taking care of them.

This quote is from The Family, pg. 269, and is an example of the sort of thinking taking place in Washington, D.C., and elsewhere.  Most recently in Arizona.  The source of former Senator Sam Brownback’s political and religious thinking came from American fundamentalist, Chuck Colson.  “Colson taught that abortion is a “threshold” issue, a wedge with which to introduce fundamentalism into every question.  Brownback, who’d been quietly pro-choice before he went to Washington, recognized the political utility of the anti-abortion fight and developed what is now a genuine hatred for the very idea that a woman’s body is her own.  It is not, he learned from Colson; it belongs to God, just like that of a man, a line of reasoning by which Colson claims that his fundamentalist faith is more egalitarian than feminism, …”  What is not made clear in the above quote is that in the American fundamentalist faith it is men who determine what God wants.  Women have no say in this matter.

This anti-woman attitude has been attributed to the essence of Christianity.  Nothing could be further from the truth.  The essence of Christianity is what Jesus did and said.  What the more conservative prelates, of whatever church or of none, do not want to remember is that all of Jesus’ male followers abandoned him at the Crucifixion – except for the women!  And when Mary Magadelene went to the tomb to prepare Jesus’ body for permanent internment, the stone had been rolled away from the tomb.  According to the New Testament, Jesus appeared to Mary Magadelene, and instructed her to go and tell the ‘others’, the men, what she had experienced.  Thus, she was the first Apostle.  She did as Jesus instructed, ran and told the men. 

And, guess what?  They didn’t believe her and had to go look for themselves.  2,000 years later we are fighting the same damn battle!!  But this time we’re mad as hell, and we’re not going to take it anymore.

No Grey Matter

An acquaintance died recently.  Abbot David Geraets of the Monastery of the Risen Christ, San Luis Obispo, CA.  I didn’t know Abbot David very well, but I did attend a workshop he gave several years ago.  During that workshop he quipped, “When one thinks in black and white only, then one ignores the grey matter in between.” 

This so-called War on Women has reminded me of that quip constantly.  Also as I have mentioned before, I don’t like the term “War on Women” because a war by definition must have a winner and a loser.   From the perspective of those who are waging this, it may be a war because they want the fundamentalist right-wing radical Christian view of women to win.  From women’s perspective, however, it is a struggle for justice. 

So, Limbaugh calls any woman with an original thought, that is, one not dictated to her by a man, a feminazi.  I’ve never really thought of myself as that, but then he does have the right to his opinion, and the term is not really directed at me personally, so other than generally complain, I’ve never taken issue with it.

But Limbaugh’s personal attacks on individual women have escalated recently, as have the some 1100 laws passed on the federal, state, and some local levels by Republican controlled governments aimed at limiting women’s rights to control their own bodies and destinies.  There have been a few of these laws that are really egregious.  Let me be really clear about something.  I happen to be generally against abortions.  But I am really against some of these laws because I believe that they will cause women to go back to having so-called back-alley abortions in unsanitary conditions, which will cause many women to die unnecessarily.  All Roe v. Wade does is allow a woman to have a medically safe abortion.  It does not require her to have one.  With that being said, let me comment on some of these laws.

Tony Perkins, Family Research Council (radical right wing Christian), stated on Martin Bashir’s program on MSNBC that his organization is pushing the laws that a woman must at least have an external ultrasound and subsequently see the image of the fetus she is contemplating aborting.  His further comment was that a woman must have all of the information possible before choosing an abortion.  In other words, men must decide what information a woman should have before making the abortion decision.  What utter nonsense.  Any pregnant woman has all of the information she needs.  Her body is talking to her in a manner that no man could ever understand.  To infer that men know more than she about what is going on with her is pure misogyny.  At least, for the moment, the Virginia legislature has dropped the requirement of a transvaginal ultrasound, although 7 states already require external ultrasound procedures prior to abortions. 

Other laws being contemplated in some areas is that any woman who has a miscarriage should be criminally prosecuted.  Or that a woman who has a miscarriage must have a picture of the fetus which she must view.  Now I know personally that miscarriages may occur even when the woman desperately wants the pregnancy.  The following quote is from The Mayo Clinic:  “Miscarriage is the spontaneous loss of a pregnancy before the 20th week. About 15 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. But the actual number is probably much higher because many miscarriages occur so early in pregnancy that a woman doesn't even know she's pregnant. Most miscarriages occur because the fetus isn't developing normally.”  I know that some may occur from hormonal imbalance.  To criminally charge a woman for a miscarriage, or to force her to view the miscarried mass of tissue is completely unjust.

These are just a few of the black and white (and I don’t mean race here) beliefs as one can imagine.  It has become totally a matter of I am right and you are wrong.  Consequently no resolution to these arguments can ever be found with this type of rigid belief system.

It is just as Abbott David said.  “The grey matter in between is being completely ignored.”

Pretty Words

What in the world is wrong with the mainstream media?  Why are they zeroing in on Rush Limbaugh’s “poor choice of words”?  Would using more polite language make the attitude toward women expressed by Limbaugh less reprehensible?  I was raised with the phrase, “Don’t worry your pretty little head about that.”  To me, that phrase is just as reprehensible as Limbaugh’s, though quite polite.  It is the thought behind the words that is reprehensible.  Not whether the thoughts are wrapped up in pretty words.

Nostalgia and the 1950's

Once again there are so many things to write about I’m having trouble picking any.  My husband just suggested that I write about oil prices.  That takes about three lines.  The Koch brothers own more oil and gas companies than any other conglomerate, and since they are so anti-Obama, it is easy to see the connection between escalating gasoline prices at the pump and the year that Obama is up for re-election.  I watch the TV pundits talk about the fact that it is ‘the speculators’ on Wall Street who are driving up the price of oil.  Well, duh!

Then there is the Republican party trying to take us all back to the 1950’s.  That is the decade that I graduated from college, got married, had the first bumper sticker on the UC Davis campus, “Joe Must Go”, referring to Joe McCarthy, had our first, second, third, and fourth babies, and my husband earned his PhD in Soil Physics.  I don’t remember too much about politics in that decade!  We also had a baby in 1960.  Vatican roulette, or the natural method of birth control. 

But I do remember that my application to the State Department was turned down because I was 35 pounds overweight.  That didn’t seem to be a problem with some porky men I saw pictures of working for the State Department at that time, however.  I could have gone on to law or medical school, neither of which really appealed to me, but other than that my prospects for a job were nursing, teaching or secretary.  Not much of an option.  And I had to be really careful about where I went or with whom I was seen because I had been indoctrinated to not be seen as ‘one of those women’.  I never really knew at that time of innocence what ‘those women’ did to be one, but then it was the 1950’s.

It was in the 1950’s that I also did a short stint as a social worker in Santa Clara County.  When a young Hispanic woman and her brother came in to see me with the complaint that her husband kept stabbing her and the local police department would do nothing about it, (Mexicans stabbed each other all of the time, was the excuse) the brother told me if I didn’t do something about it, he would kill the husband.  In my vapid stupidity I explained to him that I noticed he had on a wedding ring, and asked if he had children, and he answered in the affirmative.  So I explained that he had told me of his plans which would make it pre-meditated murder, which meant either the death penalty or a long prison sentence.  The couple left, and I felt very smug.  That night the unmarried brother killed the husband.  I quit my job and moved to another county.  I kept track of the case, and the unmarried brother was convicted of involuntary homicide.  Justice was done, sort of.

When my husband finished his course work, we moved to Reno, NV where he taught at the U of N while he finished writing his thesis.  That was the time that the United States wanted the winter Olympics to be at Squaw Valley in the Sierra Nevada Mountain range, but, Nevada still had a poll tax to keep its minorities from voting, and that was the only reason Nevada got rid of the poll tax.  It wanted the revenue from tourism.  Minorities were already prohibited from going into the gambling casinos for the general public, except as entertainers.  They had their own club, The Cotton Club.  That was good enough for them, the state said.

Contraceptives and abortion were illegal everywhere, inter-racial marriage was illegal in some states. There was the Equal Rights Amendment, or ERA, to guarantee women the same rights as men.  It still hasn’t passed even though it has been introduced in Congress every year since 1923!

There used to be an ad for a cigarette called Virginia Slims which was aimed at women.  “You’ve come a long way, baby!”  After this week’s uproar, and very rightly so, over Rush Limbaugh’s horribly disgusting statements to and about a young woman who was refused permission to testify before Congress about birth control not always being about contraception, but which can be medically necessary for some women, including her friend, I have only two comments to make.  One, we need to Flush Rush, and women have not come nearly far enough if he can get away with saying what he did.

I guess it depends on whether you are a minority or a woman if you have a nostalgic view of the 1950’s.  For us, it wasn’t so good.

A Discussion of Birth Control? In 2012?

A Discussion of Birth Control?  In 2012?

At first it took me a little time to figure this out.  I’m not really into culture wars, social wars, war on women, or war on terror.  That rhetoric really doesn’t get people very far in having a real discussion because it frames the discussion before it even starts.  However there have been some aspects of this discussion that have been really troubling to me.  One of the first is that so many Republican women are supporting Rick Santorum.  Why?

Then I had an “Ah, ha,” moment.  By not using artificial birth control methods, right-wing women can assure their husbands that, “This is the wrong time of the month, dear.  We couldn’t possibly!” thus keeping their rather smug, autocratic and authoritarian husbands at bed’s length.  What better excuse is there than that!

Seriously, however, this whole argument is pretty much a political set-up.  For one thing, for centuries Catholic teaching (which this current crop of conservative Catholic Bishops like to pretend doesn’t exist if it doesn’t correspond to what the Republican National Committee wants) has rested on the tripod of the hierarchy, the theologians, and the sensus fidelium, which is the experience-fed wisdom of the laity.  These three sources of teaching have been described as “complementary and mutually corrective” by, I believe, Cardinal Avery Dulles.  Thus, the fact that 98% of Catholic women have used birth control should be taken into account, to say nothing of their husbands, by the Bishops in their discussions of religious liberty.  Which is another political set-up, in my opinion.

For one thing, the Bishops are demanding that what they believe, in opposition to a massive majority of Catholic women, many Catholic men, and a great many theologians, must be the norm by which this whole controversy is measured.  This completely ignores the religious liberty of Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Sikhs, Hindus, and people of all other religious or philosophical beliefs, or believers in non-belief. 

This goes back to the 16^th century in Europe after the beginning of the Reformation when all of the people, regardless of their consciences, had to conform their beliefs to that of the ruler of their city or country.  This became really difficult if a Catholic ruler was deposed by a Protestant and everyone had to then be Protestant, and that one would be run out by a Catholic, and, oops, there we go again!  Back to the old Papacy.  Europe fought a real war for 30 years over just this kind of thing, which is basically why our wise founding fathers and mothers insisted on the First Amendment to the Constitution.  Of course this really cut down on the secular power that prelates of any organized religion could wield in America, which was the whole point in the first place.  It would appear that some of our conservative American Catholic Bishops are longing for the old days.

As a Catholic woman who dearly loves her Catholic faith, I assert that in this instance, and in a couple of others I can think of at the moment, some of our Catholic Bishops are clearly out of balance with the other two legs of the tripod on which our Catholic teaching rests.  In a sense I am glad that this tripod is out of balance.  If it tips over, the hierarchy will have to reevaluate itself and, one would sincerely pray as a result, reform itself.

In the meantime, I have made up a little mantra regarding birth control that I think ought to be taught to all of our children:

Before you screw

You ought to do

Those things

You know you need to do.

Wackadoodles!

Some conservative last week commented that California didn’t count in the conservative primary race because it was just all full of wackadoodles.  For those whose native language is not English, a wackadoodle is definitely not a term of endearment.

OK.  We do have at least one wackadoodle – Darryl Issa of this week’s Congressional fame.  Issa, Chair of the House Oversight Committee, held a hearing without one single woman on the first panel, and only two on the second.  And those two had been vetted to insure that they agreed with the result Issa wanted for the panel’s decision.  Needless to say, women were outraged since the subject was whether President Obama’s decision regarding birth control coverage for Catholic institutions infringed on the First Amendment of the US Constitution that Congress “…shall make no laws respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…”  Regardless of the subject matter, or in this case precisely because of it, women should have been at least half of those testifying.  If a woman had been there to testify, perhaps Bishop Lori would have been taken to task for comparing a government involvement in birth control to requiring a Kosher deli to serve pork.  Talk about wackadoodles!!

With California out of the way, the political landscape all over this country is liberally dotted with wackadoodles.  Rick Santorum actually thinking that taking away birth control is a hot button issue for evangelical voters, and that this will actually get him elected.  Of course, evangelical voters are only about a third of the electorate, and since they do not have huge families one can only assume it has not been abstinence that made the families smaller. Santorum also wants to take away state and federal funding for education.  This would eliminate public schools from K through PhD for most Americans.  A few would be able to afford private schools, or some neighborhoods and small towns might be able to fund their own schools, but basically what we would have would be an uneducated, illiterate citizenry.  At the same time he wants to make America economically competitive.  So how can that happen with not enough people to staff the research and development labs that are required to come up with innovative new ideas.  Santorum is a wackadoodle par excellence.

But my all-time favorite is Mitt Romney.  This morning he gave a campaign speech in Michigan talking about why he loves Michigan.  One of his points was that the trees are the right height.  Right height?  For what?  For Michigan?  That then leads to the next question, “Does every state have to have trees that are the right height for that state?  And if so, how is that determination made?”  In California, for example, we have trees called scrub oaks.  They grow to no more than four to fight feet in height, and grow relatively near the ocean.  Then in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, also in California, we have the gigantic and ancient Sequoia.  These are the tallest trees in the world, attaining a height of 379 feet, or 115.5 meters.  They can reach 23 feet in diameter at the base.  So which is the right height tree for California?  This is the same man who, when questioned about strapping his Irish Wolfhound to the roof of his car for a 12 hour drive, said there was no problem.  The kennel the dog was in was airtight.  Airtight?  After 12 hours in an airtight container that dog would have been dead. 

Don’t tell me that California is full of wackadoodles.  We don’t hold a candle to the Republicans running for the Presidency this year.  In my youth I was a Republican.  I thank God from the bottom of my heart that I became older and wiser.