Thriving Democracies Require Truths Backed By Agreed On Facts
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| Oak Tree In Front Of Our Home Essay first published on Medium. |
Truth is more than what people say it is. Evidence must be formed in certain ways to verify it; otherwise we would not be able to truly communicate with each other. It is very basic stuff; agreeing on what a dollar buys is a truth. In the 21st century we must agree that the virtual digits posted on our online bank accounts are exact representations of truth. On the other hand, it would be nearly impossible to convince any of the American founders that digital money is a truth.
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Updating our knowledge of truth is therefore necessary to stabilize our democracy. Some truths continue to hold up; others are on a less stable footing. Unstable truths, with any history at all, are the most contentious. The truths about abortion, gay marriage, and LGBT rights in general, likely top the current social debate. The form of economic theory we utilize is another big truth we wrestle over. Systemic racism, structural racism, and racist policies insinuate into almost everything. Its damaging truth is consistently denied. Science denial, especially with COVID, evolution and climate change, clog up, and further polarize our political space.
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Stable, and self-evident truths have always been in much shorter supply than many had believed. Science alone has shown us this is true in many cases. Self-evident was, and is, often self serving. It is shorthand for “Let go my truth Eggo” because it could damage my white christian patriarch mojo and ego. Time to enjoy your rounded waffle with some updated truth syrup serum.
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How We And I Determine, And Attend To, Truth
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We determine our favorite music and musicians by way of our age 12 to 22 minds, give or take a few years. We allow these truths to embed because the mind is more elastic in that general age range. Hormonal changes during puberty create emotions that intensify memory imprints, which make them very difficult to dislodge. However, a liberal leaning person like me is more open to new music, and ideas or truths. More specifically, how my ADHD performs opens up things even more.
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I surmise it is less about elasticity than how my mental absorption never allows me to permanently quarantine most mid-range, unstable truths. I am not as attached to them as many people are. These truths were and are not being released willy-nilly by me, but the locks can be opened with the appropriate keys, turned in a logical way.
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Conservatives are more likely to quarantine such truths. That being said, liberals are generally more open to new truths. This is about an aggregate spectrum not a diagnosis of every liberal or conservative in every situation. Additionally, I would imagine my upbringing instilled various conservative attributes other liberals may not have.
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My idea of mid-range truths concern truths that science and culture may overturn, and truths centered on things most people are unlikely to change including their favorite kind of music, songs, or musicians, or which religion they should follow. I am almost always into searching out better ideas, not afraid to exit my current community of influences if better information arises. Encouraging backlash is “nearly” an addiction; my unending class clown antics were a symptom of this going against the grain addiction. Seeing irony in most things did not help. Of course, I am sure there are people without the spectrum of ADHD I have, or without ADHD at all, that exhibit similar release from nostalgia, keeping their mouth shut, status quo kowtowing, and other anchors to tradition.
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I was more susceptible to emotionally impactful inputs when my ADHD was untreated. Yet that often made those inputs fleeting due to the up and down emotional trips ADHD sent me on. Depending on the beliefs in question my ups or downs could make me believe wholeheartedly, or cause me to release the quarantined belief (truth).
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An ADHD aside: This is why medication is often required for diagnosed ADHD, when natural neurotransmitters mimic the swings of drugs and the withdrawal from them, only a counterbalance of similar effect can correct it. However, ADHD drugs are only about 25% of the corrective measures, which include readjustments to correct bad habits and thought patterns learned during untreated years, and other therapy to control anxieties that were engendered due to ADHD. Of course, creativity is opened up through many paths. Though there is no perfect brain chemistry, there are the edges where negatives outweigh positives. Some portion of the 75% is forever lost to the disorder, yet since a very high percentage of men with ADHD end up with substance abuse problems or imprisonment, just avoiding that is a major win. Merely deciding to make ADHD go away without meds by working harder, doing meditation to calm down, or other is unlikely to have much effect, just like if you had diabetes and needed insulin, only losing weight and eating better will not keep you healthy. For those reasons, ADHD has systemic racism written all over it. Not being forced to live in a redlined housing district, and other white privileges most assuredly gave me just enough advantage to stave off the worst aspects of ADHD. My multiple visits to the principal’s office alone prove white ADHD privilege; I was never expelled, and only suspended a half school day due to fighting.
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While my breaks from former beliefs were never as clean as it may seem in my personal narrative, I dramatically show how not everyone can think alike. Externally my progressions from one thing to another, even with my untreated, ADHD did not look that much different than most other people, but if I journaled about my life experiences from age 10 to 40, my ADHD topography would be very evident, and easily differentiated from those without it.
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This is not to say I peeled through major truths constantly, and rejected them out of hand. My catholic parents, who were never far from my thoughts or actions, bounded me to many truths. The church’s conservatism also made an impression on me at least until I left home after graduating high school. However, my hyper-imaginative –– too often unproductive in the classroom –– rebellious ADHD mind clashed with the oppressive structure of catholicism, making adolescence even more unbearable. The inability for the church to see, care about, or solve my problems let alone its own, gave me the out for dismissing its value, and much of its truth traditions. Ironically, owning up to their hypocrisy has never been much in vogue in catholic and conservative evangelical churches. They still must lash out at the Other more loudly and viciously.
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Realize that truth traditions are not from the murder-is-wrong truth category, but the truths that create and perpetuate the stature of a belief system. Most are mid-range truths. Note: the stature category does not include the realness or non-realness of god since the belief in one god does not differentiate any one christian sect from another, or Jewish and Muslim religions for that matter.
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While my personal narrative above is from a recent self-assessment, it is helpful in understanding how breaking from old truths can occur. When a religious person is talking about truth or the lack of it today, they are generally coalescing around stature truths not fully verified scientific truths, multi-source researched historical truths, or societally sound truths.
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The truths that justify the higher stature or status of their beliefs are very fragile, so they protect themselves by attempting to tie down truths in other realms like science, history, and societal. If they convince enough of their converts these reduced and ransacked science, history and social truths are theirs as well, fewer converts will notice their invalid reasons for being a church. White christian, conservative evangelicals are the most defensive in this arena. The Roman catholic church has the pope, the Vatican, an international presence, and a longer history so their truth stature can withstand more direct scrutiny, as we can tell from their decades, or likely centuries long denial and coverup of sexual abuse, and until recently, escape from most of its consequences.
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Following the moral laws of the bible and any church is a catch-as-catch-can menagerie of changes and updates that belie any specific and consensus accounting. Jewish scholars do not even agree on how many laws are in the old testament, what ones should be followed today, etc. Obviously there are basic moral laws we all still agree on like murder is wrong as well as attacking your neighbor with a brick, or eating with someone else’s unwashed spoon. Yet, beyond the first half or full dozen or so, things breakdown awful fast.
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To increase the stature of your religion in a democracy requires smoke and mirrors, with fire and brimstone tossed in. Being persecuted is the smoke caused by the gnashing of losing-your-former-power teeth. Mirrors make it all about YOUR religious sect, and how your politicians, presidents, and plutocrats worship you. You set fires to as many historical and scientific truths as possible to distract from the weaker political hand you have. Like claiming we are a christian nation. Finally, you frequently dash democracy against your denigrate and disenfranchise the Other brimstone to raise your false stature, and false idol statues.
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The Deities of Denying, Demanding & Dismissing
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Denying science, demanding direct government involvement in pregnancy, and dismissing a class, creed, race or gender of people because their influence is minimal, is difficult to do if you are a mere, non-politically dominant religion in this nation. However, if your religious stature is made higher than We The People, you can determine the fate of others who do not have your beliefs. Inconvenient truths are heresy and blasphemy, and become disposable like the melting glaciers casualties in Glacier National Park, linked to the inconvenient truth of human caused climate change. A secular society is used as an epithet by the theocracy wannabes, but is the only type of comprehensive and viable format for a democracy. Unless we deny our diversity, there is no other way to categorize this nation.
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While I have little respect for the catholic church, am not Jewish, nor Mormon, or Muslim, I am pretty sure they would not want far-right, mostly white, conservative, evangelical christians determining our national direction or designation as “their” christian nation. Their over-the-top antics, and arrogance are legion, and a lesion on democracy.
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Furthermore, only through an uncritical and nostalgic history lens would anyone agree that these evangelicals have a valid persecution argument. The persecution spun today by right-leaning christians is not knew, it is reminiscent of the exaggerated, near-fable of christians being thrown to the lions by the Romans. Until at least 1965, conservative southern christians were the persecutors extraordinaire, and have done barely the minimum to dissuade most that they are not continuing the persecution of others. If they were allowed to rule in a nonsecular way, their theocratic state would excommunicate all its religious state detractors. Being intolerant of change, they must clamp down severely, and eviscerate a We The People democracy. That is the god’s honest truth, and scientific evidence verified, since god has not smote me for noting it.
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Religion that makes too much of its connection with science truths will always get trapped in unwinnable and vacuous arguments, and/or will desire the power to disarm those producing new truths. Every age has included a religious entity flailing away at what would be proved science truth at some point in the future. That is one reason why religious faith and science are as incongruous as church and state. Their underlying psychology has a built in conflicting antipathy towards a secular, democratic society of evolving and disparate interests.
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If it was discovered that god was not real through science, christians would not believe in that truth. If, utilizing the scientific method, the actual existence of god was discovered, but he never had a son who died on a cross, christians would not believe it. Unless the science-denying religious are able to solve that goalpost-moving paradox, their insistence on infiltrating public education with unintelligible design, and interfering in science-based legislation should be made null, and avoided.
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How does putting Galileo under house arrest again until he dies, after threatening his death for his science truth, make America greater? Scientific consensus is truth as far as we can tell. A secular, pluralistic society must have an arbiter, and science is the best overall representative. Should science make every kind of decision, or must everyone only listen to science for its truths? No. Is science always correct? No. But science provides evidence in layers and layers, with others around the world coming to the same layered conclusions. And as we all know, layers of peer reviewed science papers cover the hardened and hidebound rock of religious belief, so it wins when we need solutions to problems in advanced and secular society.
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Since every person has a somewhat different idea of what their deity or fixed-in-time religious text would decide, science evidence becomes the only evidence we could ever generally agree on. Obviously, that is only true when the government is not a religious fundamentalist institution.
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Conservative Christian Nation Mirroring
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The problematic construction of a christian nation is seen in its mirror images throughout the world. The only country that closely resembles the United States with its democratic institutions, and also a religious state, is Israel. That said, its most conservative sector brings it into greater contention with neighboring peoples inside “their” boundaries, and directly outside. Its most conservative believers use their religious text to generate more extreme contact with Palestinians. Their ancient texts provide interpretations, which seem to demand settlement building on “non-Israeli” land , and other boundary extensions.
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The Jewish state likely has created a no-win situation by interlocking their various inconsistencies of democracy and rights with a nation that was, more recently than ours, carved out of lands others had called home. This is to say nothing of the internal struggles between conservative Israeli leaders and liberal jews. Should non-christian, and/or non-conservatives in the United States be asked to revert to such a societally restrictive, and democracy damaging state of affairs?
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Although Israel seems to have less of an aversion to science and education than the U.S., the other “based on a religion” mirrors are even less attractive. Saudi Arabia, our most ironic at-this-point ally, and countries such as Iran and Afghanistan all are nations, even the most conservative christian, would never call home. Yet, there is no reason our nation would not regress in the ways Muslim society did after the 13th century if we became a conservative evangelical christian nation. Many conservatives rather disdain democracy, figuring us infidels are just a mob, and our soon majority of the Other are not worthy of the vote. There is nothing currently qualitative or updated supporting those democracy fears, it is all based on 18th century notions. Religious states start there, and go backwards.
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Should we have a system that swings wildly back and forth due to the fears or flagellations of one side and the other? No. But we have that now. The structure is devolving because we have not evolved the structure. Politicians are prevented from, or unwilling to, make changes when they must. We require new structures. Keeping us in the same bucket forever is dangerous, and it would be worse to put us further back into a religious state bucket. Why do we want to follow the Islamic culture’s 14th century path to scientific irrelevance? Who took up the torch after they dropped it? The Europeans did: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and Newton in the 15th to 17th centuries. Do we continue our march forward to more enlightenment, or careen off the stage into a conservative christian flagellation fantasy, and penance purgatory?
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Another attack conservative christians make on concepts such as secular and science is they are also religions, which is a very confusing house-of-mirrors logic. Are they slamming religion by making every supposed antagonist a religion too, or do they fear we want tax free status so we can promote politicians directly from our secularist science seminar lecterns? They think we all are humanists, another religion they say. Then is there little difference between the two camps: religion and science-secular-humanists? Like Sir Issac Newton’s science robbed some of the church’s power; today, conservative christians do not want their power to become superfluous as the 16th century church worried it might, and did to a large extent. Almost everything they worry about in 2020 has come up in previous generations, and many lashed out in the same fearful ways.
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The catholic church making Galileo recant heliocentrism, or cease and desist, under threat, is not the only example of its kind. Additionally, when you read that the church was important in the development of science, realize this line of thinking is based on a contrived premise. The catholic church was simply most of education until sometime in the 15th century. This educational dominance came from its staggering wealth, and having so much control over the people. As to power, censorship, and a focus on education, they were basically the Soviet Union of their day. Most of those who were formally taught were taught in catholic monasteries, and other local religious institutions. Science would never have come into its own without secular schooling.
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When the catholic church was not threatening scientists with death or imprisonment for works conflicting with their teachings, they were censoring their work or burning it. Otherwise, science was mostly theology before the 1600s. Church science had to be managed, and choreographed to avoid stepping over any inconvenient lines. Imagine it being required that even your 3rd grade science project get approved by the pope before displaying it in the school gymnasium. There are sources that dispute the catholic church’s science meddling, but it is obvious that catholicism’s science truths evolve very slowly. This can be understood today through their still ancient edicts as to the LGBT community, and more specifically, that condoms should not be used to reduce AIDS infection and other STDs, often citing wrongly that they increase sexual activity. Their truths are at least more mixed up, and slow go, than any hated and disparaged “secularist”. And their support of science is mostly the hand waving of laggards.
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Recently the pope said evolution and the Big Bang are real. Yet, both statements are couched in god creating everything. Science is not about god doing anything because god is not scientific; god is a belief. And, there is a problematic paradox within this line of thinking. The bible and the gospels hold science in a place. Trapping science is not science. Fortunately, the church has stretched itself from the days of Galileo, but it is the breaking of unstable truths off religious dogmas that has gotten us here not any church devoted to real science. For that matter, people create science; churches are merely incidental. Unless, of course, they are holding science back, or the keeper of all the money as the catholic church was before the 1700s.
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Without The Enlightenment, and secular democracies, we would have inched along in Medieval darkness for an additional one or two millennia in society and science. And both the catholics and the christian right clearly still drag behind us their anti-progress anchor.
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Logs In Their Eyes, Blinded As Truth Dies
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The truth runs in many directions. There are some truths I am likely missing or skimming that affect my arguments in this essay. Yet, to proceed effectively into the future, we must remove the logs, splinters, or sawdust from each others’ eyes. Having faith in god does not preclude anyone from being scientific, but continually moving the god goalpost further and further back after the next discovery is not a logical, or an intellectually honest way to approach science.
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The Big Bang is a perfect example. Today, we know that the Big Bang happened, but do not know what, if anything, was there before it happened. Many people would say that must mean god is real, or something to that effect. But what happens when astrophysicists determine what that “nothing” is tomorrow, and, the next “nothing”, or the we-will-never-know-thing is discovered and known, and so on? It happened with an imbalance in humours that we now call bacteria, and with luminiferous aether, which became the Theory of Relativity.
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Evolution provides another example of goalpost moving as to the bible’s genesis story. Many billionaires, and the conservative right, make it worse by not even moving the goalposts for human caused climate change. Stopping science in its tracks completely.
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In another twist of churchy science, many religious leaders in the 1920s and 1930s latched onto quantum physics to supposedly prove the validity of god because of various unexplained aspects of the science before the mid 20th century. This is the problem with religion trying to intertwine with science too tightly. They never really choose whether science can disprove the presence of god or it cannot. These science wary interlopers want it both ways.
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Either religion must be ready to commit to accepting god as not real at some point if science proves it, or it must quit using science as a cudgel in connection with legislation and related. The church’s pathetic meanderings in current public policy are laughable due to its infinite truth inconsistencies as to science, and propagation of submarine levels of fact-voided, uncritical thinking.
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Taboo, Voodoo, Orthodox, And Heterodox
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Beyond science truths we also have the social truths that may rely somewhat on science, but have a cultural and/or taboo element. Sex, sexuality, sexism, gender, and bodily autonomy are still intertwined in the religious aspect of truth. Lepers were excluded and shunned in bible times. Epileptics and the mentally ill were often considered being possessed with evil spirits. Having more than one wife was also not uncommon. Slavery in the bible was used to justify slavery in America, particularly after the Declaration of Independence’s challenge from the “all men are created equal” statement. These beliefs about what god wanted have changed over time. Did god command that? I would say we grew out of such things, sometimes with science helping out.
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Could we have “grown out of such things” sooner? Sure. Must we continue to persecute, and I mean actually persecute, those who do not conform to our superficial and unscientific ideas of perfection? Can we continue to make a person’s differences that in reality hurt no one, something god hates, and still believe it? Even after all the refutations of similar “maladies” in the last thousand years or so, some of which I listed? Should I allow my nation to be part of such retrograde, ignorant, or bigoted, truth persecution?
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There have been other times where we have grown out of our bigotry that have many of the same overtones as the fight against gay rights. Only nine states never passed anti-miscegenation laws. The arguments for these laws were as odious as those against gay sex and marriage, filled with lies, mischaracterizations, and angry shouts of damnation. While there is no exact correlate with either one of those two legal questions, or abortion for that matter, it is interesting religious institutions were/are intertwined in many issues like it. Then at some point after, they will capitulate to reality, and the consensus of society, and/or science. Why do many conservative christians incorrectly compare gay sex to bestiality and pedophilia? How do lies fit with christian ethics and caring about god’s children? The means justify their end times folderol? Is it just so easy to attack what those do, who are a small, previously ignored and made invisible, percentage of society (gay sex), or you have denigrated and subjugated (miscegenation)?
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Ironically, there is little likelihood anti-adultery laws, a prohibition in the Ten Commandments, are going to get pushed or implemented any time soon by Conservative Churches For Letting Our Straight Majority Do-What-They-Want-With-Their-Own-Lifestyle-Choices Commission. Huh. And there is no equivocation possible in that 7th commandment. Note, fornication also relates to adultery. As far as I know, no one has ever reinterpreted or changed that commandment’s meaning, or the word itself, in the bible, like bible text fornicators… I mean truth meddlers… I mean vengeful christians have with other biblical sexual references.
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On biblegateway dot com I found over 20 of the 30 plus bible translations, have “interpretations” that use the word homosexuality at least once, which was a term created in 1868! And the word, and concept of, heterosexuality was not developed until decades later. So these, some maybe fearing the outing of their own sexuality men, and women, were godly enough to reinterpret the words of the prophets, Jesus, and the original old testament and gospel writers? Huh. Should I have any doubt that they may have had “some” self interest in pushing harder on their pet project of ridicule, hate, isolation, and despair?
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We still have poor, constantly harmed, and truly sick people in our own wealthy nation, and we take time to persecute “aberrations” because someone’s god book says waste time on it when others are suffering? Should I scold and repudiate a gay person for wanting to get married, who is also epileptic, poor, and leprosy suffering, or help him/her/them/they in another way? Maybe I should dismiss racism as an apparition, and instead scream all day at individuals looking to deal with their own personal situation at Planned Parenthood. “The log in our own eyes will not stop us from not allowing someone space to decide about their own lives.”
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Both conservative catholics, and evangelical christians use persecution, falsely about themselves, and aggressively against others, to promote their ends justify their meanness. Truly loving others, and attending to the poor seem not to fill their coffers, so anger and fear truths are their go-to giving tools. Their love-the-sinner, hate-the-sin project has not saved one person due to their overall ablate reality-and-science project. These superficial christians see people from a superposition of arrogance using zero-gravity ignorance. Thinking a person’s soul is their sexuality, gender expression, poverty, or pregnancies. The truth cannot be seen without removing the “aberrations” they fear from their superficial worshippers’ eyes first. It is backwards to Jesus’ teachings, but accuracy has never been the point; instead snuffing out the soul of the “inhuman aberrant” must be done.
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Not every catholic, nor every conservative christian, takes it to that extreme. Many may agree with me to a large extent. But the overriding engine of these two religious groups has detrimental effects on those it targets. Its wins are negligible, and its old philosophies about sexuality, gender, and abortion will never have the effect their screaming does on ear drums. Westboro baptists can keep railing at the funerals of gay soldiers, and gays will still serve in the military. Just like you cannot make epilepsy or mental illness go away with exorcism, the gay and abortion does not go away with hateful posters, and screaming prayers. Praying sex away, or demeaning the gay away merely shows ignorance of the truth, and of how things actually change. Pray away your own reluctance to end poverty, and get health care to the ill before picking out individuals to harm with your misguided righteousness.
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Yes, abortion rights and LGBT rights are not on the same plane. Yet when the strongest religious groups in the nation target the most vulnerable minorities, or women in what can be the most vulnerable time of their life, there is nothing Jesus-like in it. In this scenario, Jesus has crushed in the head of the adulterous woman with the first stone he can find at the Mount of Olives. You do not save fetuses, or children in the womb by making mothers the target of your hate and anger. Like hating the sin and loving the sinner, focusing on the doctors or the government does not absolve anyone of the damage done to the lives of those in the firing line. The skulking around and screaming of the abortion haters, and gay bashers is a pungent, and pathological portrayal of Jesus. This is bible thumping to show how well you thump others, rather than any understanding of the gospels.
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Science plays a role in both LGBT rights and abortion rights, but these are not the truths that are at the center of them. There is as little known about why humans are heterosexual as why we are sexual in other ways. Sexuality in almost all its forms is very likely a social construction. Ironically, the emphasis on procreation was not developed from religious scriptures but via stoicism. Augustine was merely the plagiarist of this belief. There they go, the catholics scamming again.
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When the catholic church removes their massive logjam from their own sexually deviant, inner sanctum, eyes-wide-shut, they can continue casting boulders at their own gold-framed glass houses. Remember that for about 1500 years, the catholic church was better at amassing wealth than science, selling fake relics, scamming indulgences, and more. That two sentence rant is for the damage its leaders inflicted on my family’s life, mine, and those who suffered in other ways, and those I will never know because they died alone in despair from abandonment by the church, and by their families who are under its non-science, hate-their “different” child spell. The church, representatives, and believers, do this by making different a sin, and twisting belief in a loving Jesus into a belligerent ignorance, and an unquenchable hate that targets others unconsciously or not.
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Most of the members of this Silver Creek township church, where my wife’s family, and ancestors, had attended since it was built on the corner of their property in 1890, voted us out in 2010. How can you continue attending a church after a phalanx of shallow thinking, heartless, and bigoted people attack others including those you know, are related to, and love?
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Our two daughters were in 6th and 9th grade when we left, and it was devastating for them, and my wife, in many ways. We said goodbye to grandma and grandpa, aunt, uncle and cousins who stayed for their reasons, but voted against the measure as we did.
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Our oldest daughter, when she was about 11, had said, “If they love each other, why would it matter who they marry?” So who is able to see god’s image in the faces of others, the “grown ups” or the young? Please, open your minds before you destroy the minds of others for good.
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Life Begins At Perception
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The science on abortion is more epidermic as to truths. Since when “life begins” is where some believe the argument against it should start, science would have little bearing on what abortion foes ultimately seek to accomplish. Ergo, everything after conception is beside the point.
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The question becomes how is abortion, the day after conception, murder? If it is, why have these zealots not told the world that their ultimate goal is to police conception? And that we will soon have the Minority Abortion Report Police (MARP)? If it is not murder, we are done here. If the act of murder is possible when life begins, other science answers about pregnancy are moot, from a final resolution of the political issue standpoint.
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However, science has been part of the abortion conversation. For example, when the first fetal heartbeat occurs, and the fetus first feels pain are not the truths abortion foes make them out to be. The “fetal” heartbeat cannot occur in the sixth week, as anti-abortionists say, because it is still the embryo until the eighth week. And there is not even a formed heart at six weeks, just a jumble of vessels. As to feeling pain, the third trimester is the earliest science says it occurs, and third trimester abortions only occur when the mother’s life is in danger. Another lie is that abortions cause cancers; they do not. Is there a reason “christians” need to lie about science to keep followers on their side?
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Contraception reduces pregnancies like Zoloft reduces anxieties; while recommending abstinence for their kids is a placebo that helps conservative christian parents forget about their own adolescence. Demanding lay people use abstinence to avoid having sex, and the rhythm method to avoid pregnancy, is like a priest counseling anyone to use only a going-cold-turkey-and-teetotaling method to end alcohol abuse, as he hiccups. Actual scientific studies show contraception works, and it saves lives. Life may begin at conception, however it seems the proper use of many minds never begin, even when the mechanics of their brains are fully functioning.
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More importantly, we have the sexist and patriarchal elements of conservative religious theory that play into the abortion narrative. The Constitution also plays a part in determining whether birth mothers get the same right to their own life as biological fathers do. Obviously the female is the only person who can get pregnant, but the biological father cannot be left out of the picture, especially if we are talking about the ethical or religious responsibility for a child. To make abortion illegal, in all or most instances, would require the father to take more responsibility.
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Additionally, are there any laws suggested for men, let alone enacted, that correspond with a more stringent abortion law environment? If not, this in itself proves the sexist, patriarchal, and misogynist aspect of conservative religious attitudes as to who the sinner is in the sex act arena. A woman’s public belly is the worst of the sin, not the act of out of wedlock impregnation. She must walk the trail of shame for nine full months. No! Shame on you “christians”, not on her.
Confusing religious edicts, penalties, and attitudes are much of the reason for screwed up sexual habits in the world. There is no real truth here, just ancient ignorance about the human mind, and hyped up fear about the human body. Make the woman responsible, scream at her, and demean her as she walks into Planned Parenthood, while the father walks on by without a care or notice. Instead…
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For every other child born out of wedlock, the father should be required to bring it up. A coin flip is done to start the process, making sure it is not always the mother raising the first, or only child. Simply paying child support leaves the father with the respect of society, whereas women are always left with the “single mother and out of wedlock scorn” religion has peddled throughout the eons. If that is not workable, castration, must be made law. That is full frontal jewels removal a.k.a. searing seed sack shearing, not a mere vasectomy. After their searing sheering, the pope can talk those men into never having sex again, since it is considered by catholics as marital fornicating if not done to procreate, and never as a way to just enjoy a pleasant quickie with your spouse.
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While wealthy southern christian conservatives were not the only group fighting against female suffrage before 1920, they and conservative catholics would be a big part of the next wave of female rights’ battles. They killed the ERA when it was within a state or two from passing. Conservatives fought Title IX. Nor are they friendly about providing government help to women who need of childcare, food for their children, healthcare or any other support. They were against women in the military. Let the men do it because we hate that women get the rights and/or power that men have. If the biological father abandons the mother, it is the birth mother’s fault, so (their own) government should abandon them, and they should suffer.
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The Constitution is now the play thing of the religious right with at least five, if not six, justices likely following their every lead in forcing women to return to our former gender caste system. As you read above, women have been at the mercy of the religious right, and white male conservatives overall, for their rights. Their grip on the Constitution has never been more insidious. Phyllis Schlafly was viciously, pro-holding women back, and a massive scammer for her religion. She made our two daughters’ lives worse by allowing white, faux christian, conservative men continue many of their patriarchal and destructive policies. Women are made second class citizens due the invasion of their bodies by the state, and the removal of their autonomy in family planning. These assaults on women by Constitutional rights laggards like conservative so-called christians can no longer be tolerated.
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If the hate-on-women mentality continues in “christian” circles, we will likely grind through these abortion battles for many decades until things finally change without one sides’ input. Of course, a civil war did solve our last religion suffused fight in a similar way. Huh. Or we can take a huge leap to a better place together. Why not reduce abortions by a half, 99% or wherever first, then yell at each other for another thousand years to reduce abortions more? This all, or nothing, thing will get us nothing, or worse. The truth may hurt, but it can hurt less if we allow it to by making some forward progress.
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Americans may never come to a “consensus” that abortion is, or is not murder. That is not the truth I am asking readers to consider here. Though we do need to find our way to a better place. If our souls are at stake, we must decide how we protect all of them. Do we lash out until the heathens or religious zealots are threatened and punished into submission sometime into the distant future? We are in the beginning, or in the middle of that place, and nothing will be solved there. Continued reactionary anger is the result no matter what any Supreme Court decides in the next few weeks or years.
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Now, a question about science and political party affiliation. Is there an unholy, science-denying combination reflected in conservative evangelicals and conservative catholics joining forces? Catholics have always been less likely to make evolution a contention point in their science literacy. How much does it influence catholics that conservative evangelicals are anti-evolution, anti-climate change, and anti-COVID science? Maybe liberal catholics are the only catholics who agree with the scientific consensus in those three areas. If not, how does a conservative catholic continue to vote for Republicans? Are they trading the future of life on earth to pretend to save fetuses/unborn children? I never did ask my parents this question. I fear they would not have thought climate change was a big problem. Even knowing what we know more than a decade after their deaths. So I ask you to please choose your science literacy wisely.
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Conclusion
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When we ascribe god as likely present in any form of science-has-not-discovered-it-yet situation, we are asking ourselves, or our future selves, to swallow that inaccurate prognostication at some point. Over time it has become a wack-a-mole, goalpost moving process; only god is the mole, and faith is the post. If you and I are not god, and science is our discover of the human perspective, who are we to say where god is, or is not, in a matter science has not yet figured out? Some would call this arrogance, even idol worship. At best and the most profound, if you believe in god, you should see god’s love for us in the face of every person, anything after that is pure arrogant speculation, and will likely cause harm to the others we do not see.
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Again, no one is forced to agree with every scientific peer-reviewed paper, my opinions, or even every fact developed from any type of source, yet when decisions must be made, we need to go with the best consensus guidance possible. Using a fixed-in-time religious document that will have many interpretations, provides only those who believe it with a foundation, cannot be used to guide a diverse nation of many beliefs. Our Constitution did not create a Christian nation, and even if it had without my knowledge, clearly none of the founders designated today’s Christian right as the final arbiter of our nation’s progress, or regress.
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Therefore, the facts must be the final arbiter. And science is one of the ways we will get to a better democratic structure with some semblance of impartiality. If everyone had ADHD, impartiality would be in greater supply already. Unfortunately, everyone is not so lucky.
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By Richard The Chwalek
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To get a fuller explanation of why I believe a better democratic structure must be pursued, and to learn about an actual, full-on solution, get my ebook: Our Democracy Requires An Update: A Transformational We The People System.
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