I’m concerned whenever any singular orientation secures that much dominance. I don’t care whether it would be six Presbyterians (As one who used to be a Presbyterian . . . talk about borrrrring!), six Anglicans, six Jews, six atheists, six Mr. Goodwrench mechanics, or six Pongo-Pongo islanders...
The following is a fact. No one — for emphasis, let me repeat that: NO ONE — subscribes to any religion as a consequence of an exhaustive search and exhausting researching of all choices available. Statistically, one’s religious identification is overwhelmingly no more thoughtful than one’s racial identity or the color of one’s eyes. Statistically, one subscribes to a particular religion because he or she was born into it and raised in it. The most ardent Christian would, statistically, be an equally ardent Moslem save only for the accidental fact of birth. Thinking was not in the equation. It wasn’t. Deal with it.
Ever heard someone say, “I know how you feel,” or “I know what you’re feeling”? Of course you have. We all have. It’s lame. It is as inaccurate a postulation as the human mind can conjure. And the reason it is, is because no one can know exactly how someone else feels. What we feel about any given circumstance is a product of our genetic predispositions and the sum or our life experiences. Period! We cannot truly go outside those bounds. To do so and we would no longer be who we are. And that none of us can do.
Just a few quick examples, to set the argument. The erstwhile staid and steady soldier who inexplicably, suddenly opens fire on his comrades, or the loving mother who drowns her child . . .. Why? How could he, or she? No one “knows” what they were feeling. What it was they were feeling at the time was an amalgam of all that they had experienced, from toddlerhood to the moment. This is not to excuse. Rather it is to understand that no one can crawl into the heart, the soul, and the skin of another, and it is to state that none of us can completely escape our own genetics and experiences.
Nor can Judge Sonia Sotomayor, a Roman Catholic. I’m not especially worried about how she might opine on a case involving corporate law, or one concerning workers’ rights, or what have you. The Church has never come down on those matters. I am, however, very much concerned how she might find when the issue involves the dignity of a woman to decide her own reproductive future. The Church is as it has ever been, unequivocal. Not only is it staunchly anti-abortion, it yet regards any effort at birth control, save for the rhythm-method, sinful. The latter sin has, thank God, been widely relegated to the ridiculous bin by the majority of Catholics. But not the former. The Church to which Obama’s candidate belongs even went so far as to all but excommunicate ex-presidential candidate John Kerry for his presumption of women’s dignity. But Kerry was a political contender who had to contend with the array of opinions of the entire electorate. The luxury of an unwavering extraordinarily narrow stand was not available to him. He had to answer to an entire nation of voters. An appointed judge has no need to battle openly or hard with his or her predisposition. The judge works in the dark secrecy of his or her chambers, and, once confirmed, never has to again answer to anyone.
The abortion issue, while simple-mindedly, stark black and white to some, is hardly that. Doctrinaire does not work humanely in the human paradigm. Ignoring here the tragedies of children born into such hostile fatherless environments as mothers wholly unequipped emotionally or psychologically or economically or educationally or physically to raise a child, I want to draw out just one “right to life” issue. It is not just the child. It is never just the child.
Life pursues life to the extreme. The command to sex is among the most powerful and undeniable. There will be sex, and there will be pregnancies. And there will be women, some barely more than children themselves, who will find themselves pregnant, and who, for a panoply of reasons, will grasp whatever means may be available to terminate the pregnancy.
My own aunt, now deceased, being raised in an unforgiving Catholic household, found herself nonetheless pregnant; somewhere around the age of 16, or so, to the best of my knowledge. The fact of her out-of-wedlock sexual liaison would have ostracized her from the family, had it been discovered. Thus it was that she found herself in an absolutely untenable dilemma. Begin to show would have meant banishment. Carry the fetus to term would have meant banishment. Banishment was the certainty. (If you knew my grandmother, such speculation was by no means speculative, banishment forever was absolutely a sure thing.)
Safe, medically supervised abortion, back in the day, was an option only to girls and women whose families had the means to send them on a trip to Europe, for a “vacation” from which they would return after a few months sunny and refreshed. Even had my grandmother been less unforgiving and more understanding, the farming community family was economically austere. No Europe for my aunt. Facing humiliation and utter condemnation for her sexual behavior and the resulting pregnancy, the only other alternative being a coat hanger, my aunt repaired to a back alley butcher. She was rushed to a Lansing hospital ER where she nearly died. Many, many thousands, if not millions of American women did die as a direct consequence of not having safe, medically supervised abortions available to them.
Thus, to all who pontificate loudly on the right to life of a fetus I remind them that the pregnant woman has at least the same right to a presumption of a right to life. Remove abortion as a legally permissible option and you concomitantly condemn to death millions of women, or millions of children to the most forbiddingly dismal lives.
Thus it is that I, for one, am anxious over Judge Sonia Sotomayor. That I am must not, however, put me in a league anywhere near the ilk of Huckabee and friends.
— Ed Tubbs
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