The Road to Gilead...

After witnessing the spectacle of two morally ambiguous humans being crowned king and queen in England, I suppose the increase in evangelical mockery of all things Christian should come as no big shock. Clearly, the roots of the church are disintegrating on both sides of the pond in favor of personal preference as the rule. 

Adam Peters

This past week, Kansas led the pack in religious hate as state politics. Seems the chairman of the Ellis County GOP, Adam Peters, [not the football guy] presented a 5-point plan to make Kansas into a conservative sanctuary. According to the The Kansas Reflector:

From the meeting’s opening prayer to the ending prayer, a divine calling was made clear: Republicans must purge the state of anyone who disagrees with their extremist positions on the LGBTQ community, reproductive health care, education and race.

“If you can make it hostile to that group of people, that small sliver of society, and have them move elsewhere, that does a huge amount to shut this down,” Peters said. “It’s both sides of it: You need to attract the good people here, and you also need to make it clear to the bad people, this isn’t gonna go well for you.”

 Yeah, I know; it's Kansas. But folks, they are not alone on this road. 

Nowhere in the Constitution of these here United States are the words separation of church and state ever mentioned. Nope. Nowhere. What the Constitution does say in the First Amendment is:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

But the writers are not done yet. In Article Six, they add:

All Debts contracted and Engagements entered into, before the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be as valid against the United States under this Constitution, as under the Confederation.

This Constitution, and the Laws of the United States which shall be made in Pursuance thereof; and all Treaties made, or which shall be made, under the Authority of the United States, shall be the supreme Law of the Land; and the Judges in every State shall be bound thereby, any Thing in the Constitution or Laws of any State to the Contrary notwithstanding.

The Senators and Representatives before mentioned, and the Members of the several State Legislatures, and all executive and judicial Officers, both of the United States and of the several States, shall be bound by Oath or Affirmation, to support this Constitution; but no religious Test shall ever be Required as a Qualification To any Office or public Trust under the United States.

That one line is gonna be important to remember, because right now, as I type, religious tests are happening all over this country. Remember what Adam Peters said? 

You need to attract the good people here.

And how do you know who "the good people" are? You start with some kind of ideological litmus test. You vet people for their positions and beliefs. And if they don't line up with the party line, you drive them out. No matter how that couch that litmus test, it's an establishment of their religion and the rest of us are supposed to sign up. 

What's next? The stake for non-believers? 

Gilead, here we come!

Abortion restriction legislation is a phenomenal litmus test for the conservative movement in America because it drives out the professionals first. Medical personnel who work with women's reproductive health are leaving states where they face murder convictions for helping women in medical emergencies. We're not talking about abortions here...we're talking about ectopic pregnancies, placental abnormalities, fetuses incompatible with life...that sort of thing...and the mother's health be damned. Once you drive out the medical experts, those who can afford to follow will, leaving the poorest of the poor to suffer the consequences of unavailable maternal health care. Women and children will die...sacrificed on an altar of some sort of evangelical purity church. 

But it won't stop there. LGBTQ and Trans families, unable to get health care, will face their kids being taught their family is evil and sinful. Those people, too, will leave the states where they no longer feel safe from vigilante actions to protect the children who will no longer be safe in school. 

Colleges and universities will be next to suffer the effects of litmus testing when the state government, as Florida did today, enact laws that ban the teaching of inclusion. As explained quite clearly in AXIOS, DeSantis signs bill banning DEI degrees at Florida colleges

Gov. Ron DeSantis signed legislation Monday defunding diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs at Florida's public colleges and allowing the state to remove programs, majors and minors that teach "identity politics." ...

SB 266 prohibits the state's colleges and universities from spending any state or federal dollars on programs and campus activities that advocate for DEI policies or social activism.

• The restriction, however, carves out an exception for campus activities required for "compliance with federal laws or regulations" and retaining institutional accreditation.
• It also creates a mechanism for the state to review existing college courses, majors and minors, and remove ones with lessons "based on theories that systemic racism, sexism, oppression, and privilege" are inherent in the U.S. 

Really?  Just what is the criteria for living in your world, Governor DeSantis?

Yet, there are some pockets of reason. There are places where women are slowly coming out to say "NO." Yeah, it's slow, but as hospitals with maternity services dwindle and women no longer have safe places to give birth, much less get prenatal or neonatal care, the crisis intensifies. 

Senators Sandy Senn, Katrina Shealy, Mia McLeod,

Penry Gustafson & Margie Bright Matthews.

Credit...

Photo: Audra Melton for The New York Times

Women in state houses will find themselves dealing with other women who cannot get care, and all that pro-life bull-oney will suddenly be confronted with the significant rise in maternal death. In South Carolina, five women, the only women in their  state senate, have put aside party differences to speak out for the rights of women in their state. Known as the Sister Senators, they have refused to allow the passage of a near-total abortion ban.  From the NY Times:

 

“I don’t think the Republican Party saw us coming, because we didn’t do what they thought we were going to do,” Ms. Shealy, the senior member of the group, said in an interview with the other women around a table in her State House office. “They thought we would do just what they told us to do.”

"Women and their doctors and their husbands or partners should be making these decisions; 170 legislators in the state of South Carolina don’t need to be making these choices."   -  SC Republican State Senator Katrina Shealy 

I cannot see mothers and grandmothers standing idly by as their young women are denied access to prenatal care, face uterus-losing complications, bleeding out from miscarriages when treatment was denied, and watching babies die who are born with such severe abnormalities that their very existence is incompatible with life. 

Never mind WWJD. Try WWMD?  What would Mary do? I'm not even Christian but my Christian friends who hold the Sacred Heart of Mary in such high esteem cannot possibly believe that she would let babies suffer and women die unnecessarily.

Or do they? 

I don't know. 

What I do know is that all these prohibitions being signed into law are not for the benefit of We, The People, much less We, the Female People. They are for the benefit of a small group of small minded people who believe with their heart and soul....not to mention wallet...that their way is the only right way and the rest of us should take a hike outta the country. (And that includes the Indigenous Peoples who were here before them, and who count even less.)

As a side note, following Adam Peter's model of Righteous America, not too many regular folks are gonna be left to do all the menial tasks because they're gonna be too sick or dead without health care and all those socialist programs his kind hates and wants to cut. Wives will be stay-at-home perennially pregnant moms, but will a man's income increase enough to keep food on the table and a roof overhead? And who's gonna pay the medical bills when insurance is out of reach? Maybe it won't matter because environmental regulations will be repealed and the earth, itself, will become increasingly dead, unable to support crops. Let's not even mention air quality.

It's all interconnected. Do away with one aspect, and the building is weakened. Do away with a few more...well....you can all guess the outcome. 

Meanwhile, back at the ranch.....my admiration and thanks go to the Sister Senators of South Carolina. And to North Carolina Congressman Jeff Jackson for his blunt, transparent posts about how this government really works. These folks are unicorns. Go find the unicorns in your local, state, and federal government. Encourage them. Volunteer for them. We're gonna need them. BIG time.

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

And speaking of Jeff Jackson....this is worth watching:

THE STRANGE SAGA OF MR. SANTOS CONTINUES

Say what you will, Jeff Jackson, 

freshman Democrat from North Carolina

 does the best videos. 

Watching him makes me believe 

there are sane people out there. 

I love this guy.

In Case You've Not Thought This Through...

Ebrahim Noroozi/
AP Photo

On PBS Newshour there was a report about new laws for women in Afghanistan. Women are now required to cover themselves in chadori (head-to-toe in a burqa) when leaving the house, IF they are allowed to leave at all. They are forbidden from working or selling their handmade goods. This means millions of Afghani women have been forced further into poverty because they have lost their sole income. The result of that restriction often manifests itself in the necessity to marry off daughters as soon as possible because it would be one less mouth to feed. Five days ago, Voice Of America  published a story about what is happening to Afghani women in poverty. It included this:

For several months Pashtana kept rejecting marriage proposals made for her 14-year-old daughter, Zarghona, until she had to make a final decision. 

"I had to choose between the survival of my four little children and giving Zarghona to marriage," Pashtana told VOA over the phone from the southern Afghan province of Kandahar, where last year her husband, an army soldier, was killed in clashes with then Taliban insurgents. 

The young widow made every effort to provide for her children, but there was no job for her under a Taliban regime that has banned work for women.
Pashtana's family disowned her 15 years ago when she married her former husband against their will, and she only has an elderly mother in-law from her husband's family. 

"I gave Zarghona to this man who was wooing her for several months…what else could I do? How else could I feed my little children?" said the bereaved mother adding the man paid 200,000 Afghanis or about $2,300 in dowry.

Although civil law in Afghanistan has a minimum age of 16 for marriage, that law is somewhat arbitrary. 

"The Sharia is clear about this," said Sadiq Akif, a spokesman for the Taliban's Ministry of Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice, referring to the Islamic jurisprudence.  

"When a girl reaches puberty, she can be given to marriage," Akif told VOA. 

Most girls reach puberty between the ages of 11 and 13, according to Nadia Akseer, a scientist at the Bloomberg School of Public Health at Johns Hopkins University.

Under the Taliban's interpretation of Islamic law, the marriage of an 11-year-old girl, considered middle childhood in most countries, is allowed. Medical professionals strongly disagree. 

Sharia law is clear. Which means that 14-year old Zarghona's husband, who is more than twice her age, will bed her, impregnate her, and expect her to carry that child to term...and then do it all again. 

Back in 2014, 276 girls between the ages of 16 and 18 were kidnapped by Boko Haram in Nigeria. Many were forced into marriages with militants, some into sexual slavery, and some just raped and discarded. Forced impregnation was not unknown. When some were finally freed 7 years later, many were rejected by their families because they were no longer pure. 

In the Islamic State, Yazidi females who were childless or virgins at the edge of puberty were pressed into sexual slavery. If impregnated by their master, the child did not technically belong to the mother; the child became the property of the Islamist father. 

Stacey Louise Banwell, in her paper on sexual slavery, Forced Pregnancy versus Forcible Impregnation: A Critical Analysis of Genocidal Rape during War/Armed Conflict, details the difference between the two. The abstract for the article states:

Forced pregnancy and forcible impregnation are contested terms in relation to genocidal rape. The International Criminal Court (ICC), for example, defines forced pregnancy as ‘the unlawful confinement of a woman forcibly made pregnant, with the intent of affecting the ethnic composition of any population’ (Rome Statute of the ICC, 2011). Whereas, The Holy See suggests that the Statute need only criminalize the act of forcibly making a woman pregnant and not the subsequent act of forcibly keeping her pregnant. Thus, they suggest the term forcible impregnation rather than forced pregnancy (Grey, 2017). This paper unpacks the implications of the ICC’s definition of forced pregnancy in relation to the rape and sexual slavery of Yazidi women in Iraq and Syria. Evidence suggests that ISIS engaged in a genocidal campaign against the Yazidis. Many women and girls were forcibly impregnated, resulting in unwanted pregnancies (Genocide Network, 2017; Human Rights Council, 2016). However, forced impregnation (as defined by the ICC) cannot be applied to this case. Drawing on Grey’s (2017) notion of ‘reproductive violence’ - violence that violates reproductive autonomy - I review international criminal law and the reproductive justice available to women and girls raped and impregnated by ISIS.

The Taliban is also in the business of closing women's hospitals and clinics, thereby leaving women with no access to health care and treatment when a pregnancy is ectopic or blighted. The women just die because there is no available medical assistance. 

Meanwhile, in Kyrgyzstan, while illegal according to their national law, bride kidnapping and forced child marriage still exist in that country. In rural areas, it is not unknown for a bunch of guys to snatch a girl off the street, take her home, and then either force her parents to give her in or rape to impregnate so there is no choice. Girls are usually between the ages of 13-17. And the really scary part....this is often considered "romantic," and a traditional way to obtain a bride. 

Can you imagine a 13-year old child being snatched off the street, forcibly married, and raped into pregnancy? Can you imagine a 11-year old being forced to carry a child to term? 

Maybe you should start. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, that's exactly what's gonna happen. 

Amidst all the angst about SCOTUS overturning Roe v. Wade, several very real fears have come to light. The language of that first draft, according to several legal scholars, actually opens the door to the court-imposed diminishment of some civil rights. In plainer English, that means a conservative court can undo aspects of pre-established civil rights by deciding the federal government does not have constitutional jurisdiction. Inter-racial marriage, same-sex marriage, or even segregation would be open to reversal based on the idea these are states' rights issues, not federal ones. Granted, that document is a draft, but the wording is written in such a way that what was once considered settled law, like Roe v. Wade, can be overturned at the discretion of SCOTUS. 

Despite stating that Roe v. Wade is settled law in their senate confirmation hearings, it's pretty clear that the three most recently appointed Justices, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney-Barrett believe no such thing. Basically, they provided false information to the senate to insure their confirmation. But they were confirmed and nothing about that can or will change. 

But what does that have to do with burqas, child-brides, sexual slavery, and forced impregnation? 

Everything.

Since there is no movement in this country to seriously hold men accountable for involuntary pregnancy, one must consider that it is the sole function of a woman to deal with an unwanted or medically dangerous pregnancy.  Since no intervention would be permitted, a woman with an ectopic pregnancy may very well die because the hospital does not permit the removal of the fertilized egg from an incorrect location. That would be termed an abortion. So the woman dies. 

An eleven- or twelve-year old girl is raped. She is impregnated by a man involuntarily. That child then must bear a child despite the damage it will do to her body. The man, however, retains his penis and balls....so theoretically, he can do it again when his 90 days in jail are up. If he even goes to jail at all. 

Maybe I would feel less angry if men were actually held accountable for pregnancy. I mean, it's a well-known fact a woman can have unprotected sex once, then take 9 months to produce one full-term child. A man can have unprotected sex every day of those same 9 months and produce 270 full-term children.

Tell me again what he's responsible for? Feeding? Clothing? Sheltering? Or just macho chest-puffing? Or is it really about pushing women out of the workplace, diminishing their ability to earn their own way by being able to control their own bodies? And who will be next for arbitrary subjugation?

And if SCOTUS can set up a way to send women back to the 19th century because they have personal feelings about how a woman cannot make decisions for her own uterus, what else do they have up their billowy black sleeves?

The intent of the conservative justices is not simply about abortion. This is the opening salvo in the dismantling of civil rights. The draft of the overturn used language that is associated with the anti-abortion movement, indicating that there is a closeness between those justices and the movement itself. On PBS NEWSHOUR [go to 15:10 - End of Roe], Kathryn Kolbert, who defended Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania in Planned Parenthood of Southeast Pennsylvania v. Casey in the last serious challenge before SCOTUS in 1992 pointed out that the language used in the draft opens the door to the reversal of all sorts of rights based on the 14th Amendment. She states:

I think the really critical part of the decision is that five justices of this court have said that they can overrule a long history of support for civil rights and civil liberties because they individually disagree with it. And that has never been the case. The doctrine of stare decisis says that, when a law is made, it ought to be respected from generation to generation, and only in really specific circumstances...when the underlying law has changed, when the circumstance of the factual underpinnings of a case have changed. It ought to be upheld. And I think the hard part here is, Let's think about this. We have had five decades of support for Roe vs. Wade. And then entire generations of women in this country have relied upon this decision, and, frankly, ordered their lives. Millions of women have obtained abortions as a result of Roe. And all of that is being rolled back because five individuals have decided, in my view, willy-nilly, to change the law. And I think that is a real hit on the institutional integrity of this court.

She goes on to say that this is a reciprocal right: the right to have an abortion as well as the right to carry a pregnancy to term; that it works both ways. Once you remove the right of decision making from one aspect of civil life, the door opens to the removal of other civil rights based on the personal preferences of the court. 

We don't need no stinking settled law...according to Clarence Thomas, husband of an insurrectionist who goes without any sort of consequence or recusal, who commented in Justice Alito's draft: 

"Precedent is a mantra when we don't want to think."

Really? 

That is not why SCOTUS was created as the third branch of a government that was OF We, the people, BY We, the people, FOR We, the people. Over 2/3 of this nation wants Roe v. Wade to remain as is. Suddenly, according to the Roberts court, We, the People, don't matter. 

IF Roe is overturned...IF the GOP sweeps takes control of both the Senate and the House, get used to the idea that We, the People, don't matter, and that this nation is now a Christian, evangelical nation. The rest of us are no longer welcome. 

Folks, we are living in dangerous times. 

The Wifely Person's Tip o'the Week

Opinions regarding the future of this blog are still being accepted, entertained, and considered.

Right now, most respondents are coming via email, a couple of comments are posted, 

and some answered via LINKED IN. 

Feel free to offer your 2¢,

I am listening.