Virginia transvaginal ultrasounds. Oklahoma zygote personhood. Rick Santorum. I am so gobsmacked, I seriously have no idea what to say. It’s as though Republicans have deluded themselves into believing that the past, a time when people were tortured and killed for speaking out against the Church, when women were treated as baby-making appliances rather than human beings, when the genocide of people with skin browner than Rick Santorum was considered by the elite of Europe to be a righteous act, that this tarnished and violent past of ours is some sort of Golden Age to which we should return. Progressive Americans keep shouting at Republicans like Rick Santorum, Rick Perry, Virginia governor Bob McDonnell, and so many others under the banner of the GOP, to pull their heads out of their asses and join us in the real world of the twenty-first century, but apparently there is some sort of euphoric mass hallucination going on in their bowels that makes it difficult for them to hear reason.
Republicans and conservative Christians (often the same hat turned inside-out) keep touting the tired (and false) rhetoric that they are anti abortion because they are “pro life”, yet their track record for protecting the lives of Americans is extremely poor. Republicans like Michele Bachmann, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich, are the ones who seek out war in every corner of the globe, and they are perfectly willing to send out young American men and women to get maimed and killed. Republicans like Rick Perry support the death penalty. Republicans like those in Virginia or Oklahoma who have passed, or seek to pass these “personhood” amendments, are not concerned about the health and well being of the mother, but only the seed she carries. Republicans are not “pro life”. They are “pro control”.
Just as the grounds at Versailles are meticulously trimmed, with nary a branch or leaf out of place, the closer one approaches the palace (because even nature itself was under the direct control of the king), so too is the Republican party seeking to dominate, to control every aspect of life, particularly women’s lives, not simply from birth, but from conception until death. And even in death, conservative Christians demand obedience. Whether it’s Mitt Romney’s Mormons baptizing the dead, or Rick Santorum’s Catholics praying for salvation, Republicans are making it clear that the reasoning behind their decision making does not come from science, but from superstition.
When Progressives speak out against this vile and unwanted penetration of backward religious ideologies into politics, religious leaders have cried foul and made claims that we are inhibiting their religious liberty. Yes, conservative Christian Republican men have convinced themselves that they are the victims here, that they are the persecuted ones, because something like Obama’s health care mandate for birth control is somehow violating their freedom of religion. Conservative Christians have no qualms about insinuating their bigoted, backward beliefs into government in order to create invasive moral legislation, yet they shed such crocodile tears when government demands they obey the law of the land. Some have even gone so far as to claim they are being torn between obeying the law and obeying their religion, as though the two were fundamentally incompatible. This suggests that the only government conservative Christians want to obey is a theocracy, a God-fearing President touting the Bible as the divinely mandated Law of the Land.
Clearly I’m more than a little angry about this. How did such backward-thinking, future-fearing, superstitious men come to be such a dominant voice in American politics? These are people who should be reduced to a very vocal minority fringe group, types one might find in Monty Python’s Life of Brian shouting about lost hammers and nine-bladed swords. This is not a group of people that should be taken seriously at all. Yet we must because they so dominate American politics.
I sincerely hope that ideological yahoos like Rick Santorum or Bob McDonnell truly are just a very vocal minority, and that they do not represent all who label themselves Catholic or Christian in this country. I sincerely hope that politically conservative folk, particularly conservative and/or Republican women who are on the Pill, recognize the danger that comes from the twenty-first century Republican party, and that they choose to distance themselves from it. I sincerely hope that everyone will see the contemporary Republican party to be just as vile and repugnant as the Westboro Baptist Church.
But I don’t want to delude myself.
