birth control

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Rise of Fascism in the United States?


At first blush the title would seem to greatly overreach the present political status in the United States. It may be a bit but when you look at the definition of fascism certain parts are an undeniable part America’s political makeup today. (Fascism: A philosophy or governmental system marked by stringent socioeconomic control, a strong central government usu. headed by a dictator, and often a belligerently nationalistic policy; Webster’s II New Riverside University Dictionary, 1988, Houghton Mifflin Co., p. 466). With slight modifications of that definition, we can arrive at the far right, and controlling, portion of the Republican Party today. From 2017 to 2020, in Donald Trump, we had a man who acted like a dictator, and, who like true fascists of the 20th Century, tried to invalidate a national election when it did not go his way. Fortunately, men and women of good conscience did not sign on to his rhetoric.

Right now, with a decidedly very conservative U.S. Supreme Court, activist judges are attempting to push their religious views upon the entire population of America. This thinly veiled chicanery has the conservative majority in the USSJC taking the almost unprecedented view of reversing precedent after precedent held in that very court with regard to Roe v. Wade. I, as someone who actually opposes abortion, find that overturning Roe is contrary to the interests of the American population at large. And what is the legal precedent for not overturning Roe? The second part of the First Amendment which states that the government shall make no law with regard to religion. This is a moral issue founded in our religious beliefs and not one based in historical law.

Fascism, at its core, tries to limit and/or restrict individual rights to self-expression and access to good medical care. Roe, quite simply, ordered that the right of a woman to medical care according to her conscience could not be infringed upon. This is the part that the SJC seems to be ignoring in favor of its own religious beliefs which, in the case of the two of the most recent appointees to the SJC are rooted in Roman Catholicism. It might also find its roots in the basic beliefs of Justice Samuel Alito as well, the writer of the likely SJC decision.

From a purely public view, only 35% of Americans are in favor of overturning Roe! And yet, because of this minority’s activism, almost half of all states will make abortion illegal with some making laws to criminalize a citizen of its state from getting an abortion in another state!

Next in line, most certainly, will be birth control, contraception. The line between the legalization of birth control and Roe is a mere 5 years! When I was attending Boston University in 1967, Bill Baird, a birth control activist, started to give a talk at Boston University about birth control. City of Boston police arrested him for just talking about it! That was where we were! Are we now heading back to that? Again, fascism, at its root, restricts free speech. Worse, it also dictates morality, and this is at the heart of what is going on right now in America.

I am someone who is against abortion, even though what I have just written might belie that. But, as a male, it is not a decision I have to make. What I view as morally wrong is not enough for me to visit my views upon those who see it differently. That is why I have always supported a woman’s right to choose. I have never been in favor of legislating morality, and this is most certainly what is happening in America today. It is a sad day for America if this minority opinion is forced upon the majority. It is what makes fascism work!

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Can the Roman Catholic Church Be Dragged Out of the 12th Century?


I was brought up in the Roman Catholic Church.  It was a curious upbringing because my mother was the Catholic but my father was a Unitarian.  It was the odd confluence of an extremely conservative church, Catholic, with an extremely liberal church, Unitarian.  And in those days, the 1950s and 1960s, marriage of Catholics to non-Catholics was discouraged, to say the least.  My parents were married in 1946 in the Rectory of St. Michael’s Church in North Andover Massachusetts.  Church weddings of that sort were prohibited in those days.  My mother saw to it that I was in church every Sunday and in Sunday school immediately following.  As I got older I was required to attend religious classes once a week after school.  First communion and confirmation were a given and something we all actually looked forward to.

In the early 1960s Pope John XXIII and Pope Paul VI oversaw certain transformations in the Catholic Church.  Prior to then the Catholic mass was said entirely in Latin.  Latin was removed in favor of the language spoken locally.  The American Catholic Church embraced the idea of bringing folk music into its services.  It seemed the Catholic Church was embracing the idea of change and was becoming a friendlier and less feared church than it had been.  In the years since the church also embraced the idea of having deacons, lay people who passed out communion, and lay people who assisted in performing the mass.  Also, most nuns’ habits gave way to ordinary clothing.

Unfortunately, since the death of Pope Paul VI, the Roman Catholic Church seems to have reverted to its extremely conservative ways.  In doing so it has once again turned its back on the needs of Catholics word-wide.  The church seems to be in total denial of its responsibility to its membership.

The Archdiocese of Boston, one of the largest diocese by membership in the country, has such difficulty in attracting young men to its seminary that it usually graduates and ordains new priests in numbers less than 10.  I suspect the reason for this is simple, the church still requires a lifetime promise of celibacy by its priests.  This is contrary to every human predilection known.  And of courses, priests cannot marry.  Some years ago I had a good friend who was a priest who had just entered his 40s.  He could no longer deny his attraction to women and observe his vow of celibacy.  He was an excellent priest but found it necessary to leave the priesthood as he found the requirements imposed upon him to be untenable.  I think this is a very common occurance.

Along this same line, I had to travel to Oklahoma City for business about 15 years ago.  My stays out there became extended and encompassed weekends.  I visited one of the 3 Catholic Churches there where I found an aging priest.  He told me he could not retire because there was no one to replace him even though he was in his late 70s.  I also found out that there are many small cities in the plains states that have Catholic Churches but no priest assigned.  They are served by traveling priests.

The obvious solution to this problem seems simple enough, allow priests to marry.  But for reasons which defy logic, the very conservative College of Cardinals steadfastly refuses to even consider such a change. Here is their logic as presented on catholic.com: “Theologically, it may be pointed out that priests serve in the place of Christ and therefore, their ministry specially configures them to Christ. As is clear from Scripture, Christ was not married (except in a mystical sense, to the Church). By remaining celibate and devoting themselves to the service of the Church, priests more closely model, configure themselves to, and consecrate themselves to Christ.”  But this was a change the Roman Church made in 1139.  The Eastern Rite of the Catholic Church, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, and others, never adopted this belief.

Pope Francis recently reminded, and reaffirmed, that divorced Catholics who had remarried and not gotten an annulment of their first marriage, are “living in sin” and therefore cannot receive communion!  I believe the Catholic Church is the only major church in the world which prohibits its member from remarrying without getting an annulment.  I once asked a priest about an annulment and he explained that in essence it is a declaration that an actual marriage never existed.  For me to have pursued, and received, such a declaration would have been essentially perpetrating a huge fraud.  I was married to that woman for 14 years and had 3 children by her.  Of course it was a marriage!  But the Catholic Church states it wants me to still attend mass but I just cannot take part in the most important part of the service.  This is like inviting me to a birthday party but telling me I cannot have any cake and ice cream.  The concept is absolutely absurd!

Next we have birth control and abortion.  I absolutely understand the church’s stand on abortion, it is entirely contrary to its most basic beliefs.  And while I absolute agree with the prohibition regardless of circumstance, I also believe it to be an entirely personal moral dilemma and that each woman needs to make a decision based on her on conscience and without the intrusion of outside influence.  It is a discussion between her and the God of her understanding.

But other forms of birth control are an entirely different matter.  The use of condoms and contraception are a modern day necessity.  For a married Catholic to follow the church’s teachings exactly, they would need to go contrary to the basic and loving desires, forgoing all sexual contact out of fear of pregnancy.  This is an absolutely absurd idea and prohibition.

Finally is the church’s stance towards gay people.  Their stance is easy to understand in the light of what the Bible says. I have two problems with that however.  First, all the various versions of the New Testament today are translations from ancient Greek.  But the problem is that Jesus Christ spoke in the Aramaic language, not Greek.  This means at the very least there was a translation made.  But was that translation from an oral tradition or the written word?  No one knows.  But we do know that Aramaic had about 5000 words total.  Now compare that with the over 1 million words in the English language today to get a feel for the problem.  Noted writer, Dr. Isaac Asimov, related how the word for young girl and virgin in Aramaic are the exact same word.  It is my belief that the first person relating the story of the birth of Jesus was referring to Mary as a young girl because we believe she was likely as young as 12 when she married the much older Joseph.  That she was a virgin was a more important concept to 10th century Rome than 1st Century Palestine, Turkey, and Greece.  The mysticism surrounding a virgin birth was more valuable to Dark Age church leaders than explaining a sexual congress between Mary and Joseph.  By the 12th century the Catholic Church was all about putting even the mention of sexuality into the closet.  What does all this have to do with being gay?  Simple, it is my belief that large portions of the New Testament are both incomplete and incorrect translations.  The Gnostic Gospels sheds some light on this with its Gospel of Mary, something the Roman Church has chosen to distance itself from.  But more to the point, it could mean the admonition of one man laying with another may have originally been a prohibition of adult men bedding boys, something which happened frequently in those days, particularly in traveling merchants.  That gay men existed at the time of Jesus is undeniable.  But so did pedophilia and I believe Jesus saw that as a much more serious problem than man’s inability to understand gay love.  One is an abuse of power, position, and children, while the other is a different sort of love.  I do not understand love between same sex individuals but I do accept it.  It just as real as any other sort of love and that is all I need to know.

To be fair, the Roman Catholic Church is not alone in favoring certain absolutes of human behavior.  Evangelical and other conservative Christian churches in the world espouse many of the same tenants.  But it is a requirement of any church to tend to the needs of its followers.  The Roman Catholic Church is absolutely failing in this respect and that is likely the primary reason it has seen church attendance plummet and parishes closes even though the number of people who identify themselves as Catholic rises.

The Roman Catholic desperately needs to make itself more attractive to all its members, not just those who adhere to its rigid tenants.  I suspect that if all those Catholics who regularly attend church today were to suddenly stop attending church because they violate one or more of these basic tenants, Catholic Churches worldwide would become empty.  The Catholic Church does not lack for theologians, both lay and ministerial, who desperately want the changes I have mentioned.  But as long as a very small and very conservative group of Cardinals are allowed to continue as they have, church attendance and membership will continue to fall.  But worse, the church will continue to ignore many of the most basic teachings of Jesus Christ.

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Why Is Birth Control Still a Hot Topic?


Four of the hottest topics in the history of America have all involved individual rights, slavery, rights of blacks, right of women to vote, and birth control.  Three of those are no longer hot topics but all can find their roots in the early to mid-19th Century.  Why then have we been unable to make the basic tenants of birth control something that is widely accepted so that any discussion of it has a baseline of accepted principles?  The only reason is because there are those who want it to be a part of morality.

Our country realized when it repealed the 21st Amendment, alcohol prohibition, that it could not legislate morality as was done with this amendment.  We clearly recognized that at least where drinking was concerned, whatever morals were attached to it were an entirely personal thing that governments have no business legislating.

In the early 20th Century a woman named Margaret Sanger, of poor Irish Catholic parents from Corning New York, moved to the lower east side of New York City where she set up a woman’s clinic.  As a trained nurse, and one who had aspired to be a physician, she found that the health of poor women was poorly attended to, and worse, there was no forum for the woman to be educated relative to her own body.  Such discussions were considered taboo at the time.  She had found the urban poor to suffer from an extremely high infant mortality rate.  But it was at that time she also found that many of these women desired to find a way to forestall unwanted pregnancies.  And it was on this point in particular that Sanger lead the charge.  He efforts were both criticized and condemned by early 20th century society.  When she tried to inform a larger number of women by sending sex education materials through the mail, she was prosecuted and found guilty of distributing pornography.  That was in 1917 and at the time she received a large amount of her support from the suffragettes.  But when, in 1920, women got the vote, the suffrage movement ceased and with it Sanger’s best support.  And worse for her, she had earlier allied herself with the Socialist movement in the U.S. and alienated even more people because of that.

Sanger died in 1966 failing to see what would certainly have been her greatest victory, the 1973 US Supreme Court decision on Roe vs. Wade.  The SJC decided that it was an issue of privacy and that abortion was the moral decision of a woman in conjunction with her doctor.  That should have made the issue resolved and given the American public a starting place to move on from.  Unfortunately that has not been the case.

Sanger’s inspiration was the idea of giving women the information necessary about her body to make educated decisions with regard to it.  Key to the discussion was always the word “education.”  And it is on this point which America is failing.  Our high teen birth rate, high abortion rate, and high undesired birth rate.

I find abortion to be absolutely abhorrent.  But my solution is not to ban abortion, but to better educate those who have abortions and unwanted pregnancies, teens in particular.  My challenge to the anti-abortion crowd, who euphemistically call themselves “Pro-life,” is to come up with a solution that reduces a woman’s need and/or desire to get an abortion.  It is troubling that these anti-abortion people also seem to be anti-sex education where adolescents and teens are concerned.  Their magical thinking allows that all the sex education they need they can find at home.  Ideally that would be true, but the real world tells an entirely different story.  It is not coincidental that the highest teen birth rates happens to the poorest educated.  It is also not coincidental that unwanted pregnancies happen most frequently not just to teens, but to the poor who do not have access to good medical support.

I was astonished that within the US Congress there is a movement to cease public funding of Planned Parenthood.  While the organization certainly advises women with regard to abortion, its services do not stop there.  They also deal with all aspects of women’s health and education, such as cervical cancer screening, breast cancer screening, STDs and so forth.  How can anyone in their right mind think that public funding for such a group is a bad thing?

America first has to come to terms with the fact that it needs to educate their children with what is happening to their bodies as they enter puberty.  And that education needs to continue, in the public forum, for as long as they are in school.  It is far less expensive, in all respects, to educate our children with regard to sex than it is to have them pregnant when they have not yet stopped being children.  To do this Americans must stop thinking of sex, where education is concerned, as being private, taboo, or too embarrassing.  And also because sexually transmitted diseases, to include AIDS, gonorrhea, syphilis, etc. put us all at risk.

To anti-abortionists I say, support those things that help women from getting pregnant in the first place.  Make it a given that all young girls and women will have equal and unobstructed access to birth control methods.  Make a part of that education the actual costs, both financial and psychological, of bringing a child into the world.  Make a world where abortion is only a last resort, not a convenience, or measure of desperation.  There is no substitute for a well-educated and well-informed public.

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Who Is the Real Mitt Romney?


Romney’s election committee was quick to distance their candidate from remarks made by Indiana US Senate candidate Richard Mourdock vis-a-vis rape and abortion.  Mourdock said such thing reflect “God’s will” and he opposes abortion even in such circumstances.  The Romney campaign quickly said that Mourdock’s views do not necessarily reflect his own.  There is just one problem with that statement, in this case they do.

You rightfully ask how I can possibly know that.   It is really quite simple.  Mitt Romney is a devout and practicing Mormon.  Mormons are a very conservative sect as religions go, and are known for that.  Mormons are known, and take pride in, their extremely conservative views, particularly those regarding abortion.  There is nothing wrong with such beliefs, and I am not trying to suggest there is, but for Romney to say he does not share Mourdock’s views is very disingenuous.

Mitt Romney is probably the most conservative candidate since Calvin Coolidge and Herbert Hoover, and even more so than either of them.  There is nothing wrong with being so conservative, of course, but I am more than a little surprised that the Obama campaign has failed to even suggest it.  Maybe they are afraid as coming across wrong in pointing out how conservative the average Mormon is.  But it is true, and what is wrong with telling the truth?

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Rush Limbaugh Takes on the Feminazis


I do not understand why any woman in the United States who has any self-worth would want to be a Republican today.  I cannot help but wonder if some of these women have been completely brainwashed by either their parents or their spouse.  As much as I despise the politics of both major parties in the United States, the double standard of the Republican Party galls me the most.

Rush Limbaugh thought it all right to call Sandra Fluke, the Georgetown University Law student, a slut and a prostitute.  I do not know how much more insulting one person can be but Limbaugh honestly believed what he said.  He, of course, tried to retract his statements when the stuff hit the fan but he did not mean it.  He spoke his truth with the first words out of his mouth.  The sad part is, he speak for a lot of the Republican Party.  How can I say that?  There was little condemnation that emanated from his fellow Republicans following his statement.

Limbaugh says what other think, and he has a long history of such remarks.  He knows the more outrageous he sounds the bigger his audience.  But the sad part of that, a lot of his audience is allowing him to do their thinking for them.  Some years ago they took great pride in being called “ditto-heads.”  Even though that is not being said anymore, the sentiment has not gone away.

Back in the 1980s when I was in graduate school, I took two courses in women’s studies.  In both courses there were about 20 women and me, the only male in the class.  I can tell you unequivocally that about half the class wanted to cut my balls off and feed them to me.  I finished both courses and received an A in each.  The courses were taught by a female professor so I did not get any break there.  But I learned a lot in those courses about women’s history.  The said part is, too many men still view women in a negative light.  It is my belief that the majority of those men are quite conservative.  They still like the barefoot and pregnant tack.

Sandra Fluke was simply testifying before Congress about her experience with birth control.  Prior to that she had no celebrity.  No one outside her family and friends knew her.  She was just someone’s daughter, someone’s sister, someone’s friend.  But then Limbaugh that it appropriate to attack her for her beliefs.  In doing so he has assaulted every daughter, every wife, every sister in America.  His narrow bigoted beliefs trumped everything else, at least as far as he was concerned.  Rather than address Miss Fluke’s appearance before Congress in a rational and respectful manner, he chose to defame her otherwise good character and vilify her before all America.  The bell is rung and cannot be unrung.  Sandra Fluke has been negatively labeled in the minds of millions of conservative American women for no good reason at all.

In Limbaugh’s mind, every daughter, every wife, every sister, every mother who has used birth control is a prostitute and a slut.  There is no other was to interpret what he has said!  Every mother, every sister, every daughter, every wife who has used birth control should be outraged.

For these reasons, and others, I find it so very difficult to understand how any American woman can look herself in the mirror and be happy with herself if she has not condemned Limbaugh’s actions.  I cannot understand the Republican Party’s loud silence on the subject as well.  Limbaugh labeled all women who fought for women’s rights and equal protection under the law as “feminazis.”  He has not taken that back nor has the Republican Party distanced themselves from him.  It just makes me wonder.