“This idealization of motherhood is
essentially a means of keeping women from developing a sexual
consciousness and from breaking through the barriers of sexual
repression - of keeping alive their sexual anxieties and guilt
feelings. The very existence of woman as a sexual being would
threaten authoritarian ideology; her recognition and social
affirmation would mean its collapse.” - Wilhelm Reich, The Mass
Psychology of Fascism, 1933.
Joe Biden is a Catholic and a Democrat who honors the US
Constitution by not imposing his religion’s mandate to ban
abortion on all Americans. He is an American politician who can
separate church and state, as the Constitution of the United
States mandates in the First Amendment. He is a Catholic, like
Amy Coney Barrett, and goes to church every Sunday to receive
Communion. In October, 2019, while campaigning in South
Carolina, Biden was denied Communion during Mass by Father
Robert Morey, the pastor at St. Anthony Catholic Church, because
of Biden’s pro-choice stance on abortion. Morey justified his
denial of Communion to Biden by saying, “any public figure who
advocates for abortion places himself or herself outside of
Church teaching." Biden’s response to reporters was: "I am not
going to discuss that. That is just my personal life,"
That is precisely what I was taught about religion as a child:
Religion is a strictly personal matter. It has to be a personal
matter because there are many Americans who do not share my
beliefs, the beliefs of my neighbors, or the beliefs of Amy
Coney Barrett. According to the Pew Research Center: “The
religious landscape of the United States continues to change at
a rapid clip. In Pew Research Center telephone surveys conducted
in 2018 and 2019, 65% of American adults describe themselves as
Christians when asked about their religion, down 12 percentage
points over the past decade. Meanwhile, the religiously
unaffiliated share of the population, consisting of people who
describe their religious identity as atheist, agnostic or
“nothing in particular,” now stands at 26%, up from 17% in 2009.
And both Protestantism and Catholicism are experiencing losses
of population share. Currently, 43% of U.S. adults identify with
Protestantism, down from 51% in 2009. And one-in-five adults
(20%) are Catholic, down from 23% in 2009.” So, while 20% of
Americans are Catholics, 26% are atheist, agnostic, or “nothing
in particular”.
But we will have 7 Justices on the Supreme Court who are
Catholic, (though Justice Gorsuch, formerly a Catholic, is now a
practicing Episcopalian), and two Justices who are Jewish. This
heavily skewed conservative court is now a certainty because of
Mitch McConnell’s crusade to confirm Amy Coney Barrett to the
Supreme Court before the 2020 election, and while he is still
the Senate Majority Leader.
So, it is perfectly reasonable to ask whether all of these
conservative justices consider their religious beliefs to be a
strictly personal matter, like Joe Biden does, or whether they
will insert their religious views into their rulings,
particularly their ruling on Roe v. Wade.
On May 25, 2019, Pope Francis announced that abortion was always
unacceptable, regardless of whether a fetus is fatally ill or
has pathological disorders. Asking: “Is it legitimate to take
out a human life to solve a problem?” And further asking
rhetorically: “Is it permissible to contract a hitman to solve a
problem?”
Can our 7 conservative Supreme Court Justices all separate
church and state, when Catholic Bishops from Atlanta,
Charleston, and Charlotte signed a 2004 decree stating that: “By
supporting pro-abortion legislation they participate in manifest
grave sin, a condition which excludes them from admission to
Holy Communion as long as they persist in the pro-abortion
stance…and go on to say, “We declare that Catholics serving in
public life espousing positions contrary to the teaching of the
Church on the sanctity and inviolability of human life,
especially those running for or elected to public office, are
not to be admitted to Holy Communion in any Catholic church
within our jurisdictions”. Their words urge a direct violation
of the separation of church and state for any Catholic
politician who supports a woman’s right to choose and was the
reason Joe Biden was denied Holy Communion in South Carolina in
2019.
The woodenly pious, Amy Coney Barrett, says she can separate her
religious views from her judicial decisions, but in her current
and past rulings, it is quite obvious that she intends to do
nothing of the kind..
In 1973, Roe v. Wade was decided in a 7-to-2 vote by a court
with a 6-to-3 Republican majority; five of the six Republican
appointees voted to legalize abortion. Now, with Barrett’s
confirmation in 2020, only 47 years later, it will be decided
again with the opposite result. In a country where adherence to
religion is diminishing rapidly, and where a large majority of
Americans support a woman’s right to choose, it is not
implausible to attribute this dramatic swing against abortion
rights to the religious beliefs held by the 7 Republican
Catholics who currently represent the majority on the Court.
Even though the Republican Party cites itself as the party of
“religious freedom” and is currently playing that particular
card in the confirmation proceedings of Amy Coney Barrett, their
thunderous defense of motherhood is really an exercise in
backstairs realpolitik. Lacking the majority necessary to
actually win an election with ideas, Republicans have been
biting off sizeable chunks of the United States of America by
crafting specific messages to activate dogma contained in
religious beliefs and through the primal fears held by groups
such as: The Proud Boys, the Christian Nationalist Movement, and
the Rust Belt machismo seen at Donald Trump’s rallies. They all
gather in a raucous form of ecumenism to hear Trump’s
triumphalist message channeled through the philosophy of Norman
Vincent Peal. And Trump’s version of Peale’s inane philosophy is
literally on steroids, thanks to the dexamethasone he is
currently taking.
(It is worth the time to read about Norman Vincent Peale in
order to understand: where Donald Trump cut his teeth; why he
believes he’s invulnerable; and why he genuinely believes he’s a
superior being because he’s wealthy.)
I, for one, do not consider a zygote a human being. And I do
consider a woman’s body to belong entirely to her - and
specifically not to her husband, the leaders of her religion,
and, most importantly, not to her government. Objection to the
confirmation of Amy Coney Barrett isn’t an attack on her
religion; it is a refusal to permit belief to overtake reason in
our constitutionally mandated secular government.
Moreover, if America permits Republicans to nominate Supreme
Court Justices based, at least in part, upon their religious
beliefs, the Establishment Clause in the Constitution has,
indeed, been trampled.
Yes, Republicans might be successful in seating Amy Coney
Barrett on the Supreme Court, but we all know the chess move
that will ensue so that the highest court in America will not
lead us toward religio/authoritarianism.
After November 3, 2020, perhaps Republicans will rethink their
current vacuous policies and, instead, remember their own
support of Reconstruction following the Civil War. And perhaps
the Democrats, under Joe Biden’s leadership, will not continue
to evade the necessity of initiating their own era of
Reconstruction – an era that will reassert America’s
constitutional mandates to remain a secular nation that defines
itself by its pluralism and its tolerance of the views of all of
its citizens. The time has come for the new Democratic majority
to finally look at how we nominate and confirm Supreme Court
Justices and to find a mechanism that protects this crucial
institution from the depredations of a party that has lost its
way and fallen into disrepute. |
