The Vatican Will Soon Overturn Roe vs Wade and There's Barely a Murmur, As America's 'Good Girls' Get in Line
/Rome Says ‘Checkmate’
One of the most prominent sayings in the Bible comes in John 8:31-21 when Jesus says to Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, then you are truly disciples of mine. and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”
via Flickr’s durotrigesThis phrase: “The truth will set you free” has become a lightening-rod concept for facing the facts of life or a situation.
Watching the aggressive takedown of America’s health care legislation by the Vatican is a sobering moment for millions of American women, if they choose to face the facts.
Concepts like separation of church and state are ludicrous, when representatives of the Vatican are camped out in US Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi’s office at the 11th hour, laying out the terms of US health care reform.
There is no dispute among prochoice or prolife forces that the Vatican is playing for keeps on dictating the terms of pending health care legislation.
These countries are poor ones. America is almost unique among developed countries in constantly trading the abortion rights of its female citizens.
The Democratic Party, formerly dedicated to protecting women’s abortion rights, based on the Sureme Court decision Roe vs Wade, is now a mixed mind on the issue of abortion. The Democrats trade votes on abortion matters, making women the same baby-making machines we are in many other countries of the world.
Simply stated, the votes of prochoice people — women or men — are not important to Democrats. Not when the Vatican is on the line.
Our pragmatic President Obama wants a healthcare bill. He will have one, even if further compromises on abortion are necessary. The handwriting is on the wall for Roe vs Wade.
President Obama should put prochoice feminists out of our misery at this point. Our trust quotient is zero. Every woman who believes her daughter will have a right to an abortion — as she has had — needs a reality pill.
Abortion will become illegal in America, probably in my lifetime.
The Vatican says this morning that the senate compromise around abortion funding is not sufficiently restrictive to insure a nonuse of federal funds for abortion.
US President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama — also present — meets with Pope Benedict in his library at the Vatican on July 10, 2009.Today’s Wall Street Journal says Americans Catholic bishops will oppose health care legislation, unless a tougher deal is struck around abortion funding, already as stringent at the Hyde Amendmanet.
The Vatican wants further restrictions around American women.
Members of Congress guided by the Vatican must vote against the bill, because they have made it clear that their allegiance to the Vatican and their own moral code is higher than their allegiance to the laws of America and women generally.
Democrat Ted Kennedy’s assumed replacement Martha Coakley, elected in the runoff on her solemn oath not to cave on abortion language, has already done so, according to today’s The Boston Globe.
Let there be no doubt among American women that the Catholic Church is devoted to reassuming control over the bodies of American women. Period.
The very concerns that I’ve openly expressed in this website regarding Islam’s demand for a surrender of self for women is also required by the Vatican.
There is no difference between the two religions. The Vatican demands the same allegiance from its members, as contemporary Islam demands of its followers: religious law is higher than national law. This is not a confusing set of assumptions, unless Americans make it so.
For once in America, let’s keep the rhetoric to a minimum. The big guys have won on abortion. It’s only a matter of months now before the most symbolic plank of second-wave feminism is broken. Unlike our European counterparts, and Chinese women (which is complicated, I know) the American women can call it a day on abortion rights.
You are a Catholic first, an American second. You are a Muslim first, an Iranian second. The days of John F. Kennedy are over. Today a Catholic politician openly swears his/her allegiance to Rome. There is no ambiguity on this subject.
Silence Is Golden
via Flickr’s claudiaveja
No Place for Feminists in America
One of the lablels rejected by millions of American women in the post-Ronald Regan world was the word ‘feminist’. A word that was and is honored in Europe and in many third-world countries became a ‘dirty word’ in America.
“Good girls’ aren’t feminists.
In You are a very Noughtie - and unhappy - girl the London Times considers the trials and tribulations of why designer clothes and fancy knickers didn’t set women free. In response, Jezebel agrees that ‘Feminism Just … Went Away”: On Women and Happpiness in the 00s.
What pleases me is an acknowledgement from Jezebel that older women aren’t crazy. America’s younger women — the daughters of second-wave feminists — bailed on the concept of feminism, not in the 21st century but initially in the Reagan years.
The daughters of America’s second-wave feminists were mad at their mothers for benign neglect, casting mom as a narcissistic, self-indulgent me-first woman. As is often the case in history, daughters make it their business to set matters right in their lives.
The daughters of America’s second-wave feminists seemed to agree that Conservatives had a point regarding the self-indulgence of older boomer women.
Our fight for real rights for all women in the world became a sidebar to the self-help industry dedicated to mending our daughters, who would be good mothers first — before all else. Today’s busy moms actually spend more time with kids than mothers of the fifties.
America’s younger women reset the country on a “better” course of action, one in which mom again surrendered herself to the forces around her— although not without resentement and anger.
Surrender is difficult unless you’re a five-star religious believer and go willingly into spiritual enlightenment. The great Rose Kennedy was an honorable standard-bearer for this vision of a righteous, selfless woman. She is the model the Vatican has in mind for American women.
If America’s second-wave feminists were confident about standing up for women’s rights, our daughters tried to wrestle with the contradictions we created. Given America’s poor comparative standing on women’s rights globally (we’re 61 in political participation), it’s time to give our daughters their due.
Mission accomplished, and rightly so. After all, we live in a democracy, not some occupied territory governed from afar. This is America, land of the free.
In their silence about women’s rights and refusal to be ‘feminists’, the achievements of the next generation on women’s rights stalled.
The wins weren’t legislative, to the best of my knowledge. The countries of Europe left American women in the dust on structured legal changes in women’s lives regarding the work place, healthcare, abortion, marriage and divorce.
I don’t believe most American women understand just how far behind we are in the world, when it comes to women’s rights. I’ve observed this situation for about 15 years and have spoken about it with clients.
Fundamental to the European women’s mindset is a control over her own body and right to a self-identity. This “ism” is the plank of any serious women’s rights movement. At the end of the day, if you don’t have control over your body, you have no real rights.
Control over one’s body is a precept of women’s liberation. Without it, you are the property of the state and religious authorities.
If second-wave American feminists fought for legal rights and none more important than having control over our own bodies, our daughters focused on a broader range of acceptable labels for women. Being a ‘slut girl’ was and is an expression of controlling your own body. Words and reputation were more important than protecting legislation and electing women with strong commitments to a women’s rights agenda.
Unlike the European women, Americans subordinated our concerns to the “trust me” guys — you know, the ones who will never get us pregnant.
It’s the college-age and younger women who now inherit this feminist strategy — or lack of it. The fight for women’s bodies is in high gear, already declared in new political battles shaping up in upcoming elections. At least today, their focus on women’s rights can be described as considered from a prone position.
via Flickr’s claudiaveja
The Vatican and Catholicism is going for broke. And women have no one, including our President, who is committed to protecting these rights. Women are going down, having the rights that the patriarchy decides to give them. No more and no less.
Make no mistake, the Vatican and its advocates who believe that God’s law is a higher one than the Supreme Court’s are determined to overturn Roe vs. Wade. The same Vatican that was embroiled in a massive sex abuse scandal in 2003 — the same sex abuse scandal that now rocks Ireland — says “today” is the moment to retake American women’s hard-won legal control over their bodies.
Women and Their Bodies
In the days of Jesus and then Muhammad, women had more abortion rights than both clergies now embrace — which is few to none. The reality of a living, breathing functioning woman was far more important during the time of Christ, than the existence of a multi-celled embryo.
These two concepts — mother and embryo — were not equated in either early Catholicism or in Islam. Subsequent generations of men have interpreted religious texts, defining their meaning for women.
Modern translations of the Bible dispute the academically-determined, anthropological facts of women’s lives among early Christians and Muslims, arguing that the test demands women’s submission on these critical issues. With every new translation and interpretation of meaning, women have lost ground, making women worse off than men worldwide, without dispute.
The reasons are disputed, but not the reality of women’s global inferior status, except in certain enlightened countries in Europe and Africa, where dramatic new scripts are being written for women in select countries.
In both religions, anthropologists argue that women had more freedom over their own bodies than today’s Biblical scholars — nearly always men — want to give us. Most thinking people agree that religious texts are open to interpretation, based on translation skills and the prejudices of the interpreters.
Educated Muslim women regularly argue that their religion was co-opted and redefined by tribal laws and Muslim patriarchies. The history of Catholicism is similar. Men have defined the Bible, as it applies to women.
It’s not clear whether American women will decide to play catchup to secure their rights in the coming decades or hand them back to a religious patriarchy only too happy to take them.
The Pew Research group puts America on the middle of the continuum on Catholic religiosity. There’s no doubt that southern Catholicism is more religious than European Catholicism. With our close ties to Latin America and Mexico, America sits between the two poles.
Research via Pew Research Center
An abortion case around a nine-year-old Brazilian girl last spring created a furor last spring, but also gave the Vatican a chance to articulate its view not only about abortion but also the relationship between the embryo and the nine-year-old mother who was raped and governed by physical limitations injurious to her life.
Doctors concluded that her hips weren’t wide enough to birth a baby but the Vatican overruled the doctors. (Note, the girls parents arranged for an abortion anyway.)
The Vatican stood firm that the rights of the embryo were higher than the rights of the nine-year-old raped girl.
via Flickr’s thamarThe Coming Battle of Religions
From my perspective, this is the setup going into this week’s negotiations around health care. In their silence American women seem to endorse the words of Cardinal Re and the position of the Vatican.
As an American woman, we are the lesser life form without question in ALL cases, based on the goals of the Vatican.
Catholic women worldwide are not allowed to do anything selfish — including protecting themselves from an AIDS infected husband or impeding conception. The rights of the patriarchy to bank the future of the church with more little Catholics is paramount.
Abstinence is the only alternative and that is discouraged in marriage, which is encouraged. Women exist to produce more Catholic babies, while doing charity work that advances the church’s values.
Welcome to the future religious landscape. Islam is on track to replace Catholicism as the world’s largest religion.
Educated Christian women aren’t having enough babies to keep Catholicism in the top spot. Women are nothing more than pawns in this competitive battle for setting the global religious agenda. We have been pawns for centuries, and without the defense of our rights, we will lose them again.
The handwriting is on the wall, and it’s too late for American women to turn the tide, even if large numbers wanted to do so. The horse is out of the barn, if you’ll pardon the expression.
You are now loyal to America’s Supreme Court or to the Catholic Church. You cannot be both, because a fundamental schism exists around women’s bodies.
I will abide by the majority decision, as long as millions of American women are involved, and we agree that giving up the control of ourselves is the higher priority for being self-realized women with obligations beyond ourselves in the world.
It’s not democratic for selective second-wave feminists to define an issue governing all American women. It appears that American women have made a different decision about what freedom means, and I must respect their thinking.
In the seventies, New York women would have been marching down Fifth Avenue by now. It’s inconceivable that silence would have been the loudest sound on this issue!
Today, the American ‘good girls’ get in line for our marching orders, with a distinct preference for a male voice.
via Flickr’s theskipping boyWe all have fatigue from two wars and a plummeting economy. We’re exhausted with the decline of our institutions and it’s tough to raise our voices on this topic.
Not to be critical, my dear lady friends, but prochoice American women are not worthy opponents for the Vatican. How about if we just sign a national petition saying “here, take me, I’m yours. With so little concern about protecting abortion rights, we are close to becoming fertility fodder once again.
Perhaps at another time in the future, American women will join poor women in Mexico and Brazil, fighting for rights today’s women willingly relinquished.
Perhaps South American women will win those rights, when we’ve given up ours.Not all religions believe that women must sacrifice themselves.
We know that the Anglican and Episcopalian churches support the full range of women’s rights.
Many branches of Evangelical churches also preach a different message for women. Evangelism is growing rapidly among poor women worldwide. In Brazil, the Universal Church’s television channel TV Record broadcast this message to Brazilian women: “I decided who to marry. I decided to use the pill. With my vote I decided who’d be elected President. I decided to work so that I won’t be discriminated against. Why can’t I decide what to do with my own body? Women should be able to decide for themselves what’s important.”via Time
We hear no such messages in America. That’s old-school thinking.
Women wanting control over their own bodies doesn’t imply a rejection of religion, spirituality or even Christianity. Religion can and does coexist with feminism.
Former president Jimmy Carter spoke recently not only for himself, but also for the great Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu and other famous members of The Elders in a speech calling religion an agent of women’s oppression.
