It’s only May, and I’m already so sick of the politicians and my country’s devolution, that I want to bury my head in the sand and forget the whole business. But that is something I cannot do, because half of the electorate endorse policies that are antithetical to my existence. This is where I talk to the “conservatives” and those so far-right in their ideologies as to be regressionist in their ambition. Um, this means you Republicans.
Those of you who claim the mantle of conservative, including those in my family, read well this rambling bit, because one of your duties as a citizen is to be of an informed electorate. Please tell me you get that, because it is one of the principles this nation was founded on, and your party of choice is so very fond of waving around the Constitution and Declaration of Independence and referring to it while directly opposing in rhetoric and policy those very shrines of our society’s founding principles. Please read those documents, including all the amendments to the constitution, because those are the basis for the rule of law here, and are to be applied to all citizens, period.
It is an embarrassment that we have a hard time coming to terms with the equality of our people. Former slaves and women had to fight to gain recognition of their humanity and equality. Who did they have to wrest that recognition from, and why? Why are we still locked in struggles against the elevation of all of our citizenry? We are all created equal in value if not ability and form. Anything else is an oppressive mentality, and that oppression is the very thing that is tearing us down. The desire to control, invalidate, and suppress people based on whatever differences that the traditional power-hoarders feel threatened by is the root of all these disruptive “movements” throughout our history. And by assuming that these people who seek to keep a majority of the country from full participation are justified and correct, is akin to serving the abuser who uses the same tactics to dehumanise their co-dependent victim.
As a survivor, but no longer victim, of both parental and spousal abusers, no desire is left in me to be the victim of my country’s leaders’ inhumane treatment. The politicisation of my body, whether it be because I am an intersex/transsexual or a woman is indefensible except by the tenets of some religion. Rather the religious basis is thrown up as support for personal prejudices. Enslavement and dehumanisation of women and slaves had the same books thrown up in defence of their oppression as is now happening in the opposition of equality for GLBT people from marriage rights to the right to use appropriate public facilities to discrimination in hiring and housing. It’s nothing new, it’s the same argument, the same props, the same vitriol and propaganda, and the same injustice as it has always been, only with another group to focus on.
I’m going to preface this next section by saying that I know a good number of Christians who try to live the words of Jesus and live in Love. But they are not as loud as nor as organised as the people who through fear, live in hate, and attempt to impose their beliefs by denying the rights they enjoy from others.
So let me address Christianity’s role in the oppression narrative. In it’s inception, the Jewish sect suffered persecution as all emergent social groups do. a culture of persecution persists to this day in the popular evangelical groups, and this underlying perpetual victimisation as perceived as coming from Satan (“the adversary”) surfaces as fear of the eternal “Other.” Any threat to the understandings of followers, however shallow or mistaken those understandings or blind beliefs are, constitute an attack upon their reality by the great Adversary, the antithesis of God. The Other is thereby literally “demonised,” and as such, it cannot be reasoned away. It is evil, destructive, unnatural, corruptive, insidious, unholy, and thus deserves extermination. This took the form of the Crusades, the Inquisition, the continuing Witch Hunts (Europe to America and Africa, the genocide of the Americas, the enslavement of non-white people and the white poor, women’s chattel status, lynching in the 19th and 20th centuries, and the aforementioned denial of the full humanity of non-whites and women that persists today. The persecuted became the persecutor, or, rather the destructive cultures adopted Christianity and used it as a tool of oppression. Christianity, itself is not a problem, outside it’s hyper-misogynistic foundations, it’s the anti-social sociopaths who use its book as fictional “basis” for their personal, self-serving agendas.
As Christians, one is required to follow the words of the Christ, after all, He’s kind of the main character in the story. So, conservative, Christian Americans out there who rail against openly available healthcare, “entitlements” for the poor, homosexuality, transgender people, the freedom of a woman to make decisions about her own body, and we’ll throw in slavery because it never ended.
What exactly does Jesus say about the poor?
And what of the sick? He healed them without reservation,
About women Jesus mentioned nothing about their equality or inequality explicitly (nor anything about abortion), but treated them as individuals, no different than the men he met, ultimately proclaiming in Galatians (3:28): “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.”
About slavery? Matthew (20:26-28) “If you want to be great, you must be the servant of all the others. And if you want to be first, you must be the slave of the rest. The Son of Man did not come to be a slave master, but a slave who will give his life to rescue many people.” or, more succinctly: Mark (10:44) “Whoever wants to be first among you must be the slave of everyone else.” “But wait, that’s spiritual and metaphorical slavery,” you say. Yes it is.
And what about the GLBTI folk out there? Matthew (19:12-13): “Jesus replied, ‘Not everyone can accept this word, but only those to whom it has been given. For some are eunuchs because they were born that way; others were made that way by men; and others have renounced marriage because of the kingdom of heaven. The one who can accept this should accept it’. Born that way is the thing, here. There is some speculation as to who these passages cove, or if they mean much at all, but for most people around the world, outside of the modern Western world, the births of intersexed people and animals (sometimes mistakenly called hermaphrodites), and as our understanding of just what influences who and what we are expands, we find that there are physical and genetic differences in those attracted to the same sex as compared to those who are heterosexually oriented, so this passage would also seem to apply to those who didn’t follow the “normal” social path of pairing up with a member of the opposite sex and having babies.
Oh, what did Jesus say about marriage? Well, in no uncertain terms, his problems were with divorce, and he absolutely ruled out remarriage after after one. Read it: Mark (10:2-12) And Pharisees came up and in order to test him asked, “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife?” He answered them, “What did Moses command you?” They said, “Moses allowed a man to write a certificate of divorce, and to put her away.” But Jesus said to them, “For your hardness of heart he wrote you this commandment. But from the beginning of creation, ‘God made them male and female.’ ‘For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two but one flesh. What therefore God has joined together, let not man put asunder.” And in the house the disciples asked him again about this matter. And he said to them, “Whoever divorces his wife and marries another, commits adultery against her; and if she divorces her husband and marries another, she commits adultery.”
So what is my point? that those who wield the Bible and spout biblically inspired claptrap as the foundations for restrictive and punitive laws for any segment of the population are your anti-Christs, your false prophets, and they are preying on your ignorance on the matters to get you to support their denial of the equality this country is supposed to guarantee for every citizen regardless of religion or any other ideological or physical reason. “But Leviticus and Deuteronomy?” you shout, “surely those condemn homosexuality and cross-dressing.” How about this, go back and read those books of the Torah, Mosaic laws governing how the ancient Hebrews were to live. Now, after you’ve done that, enumerate how many of those commandments you break every day. Now shut up about it, because you’ve probably violated five within the past week without even having to try. “But Jesus died for our sins, thus negating some of those.” Yeah, which ones, specifically? Are you insinuating that Jesus died so that you can eat bacon and shrimp while wearing a cotton/poly blend top? I smell bull, here, and it’s not coming from your altar-fire.
But what about Judaism and Islam? They condemn the same stuff in their books, right? After all, the Old Testament is the Torah, and Islam recognises the Pentateuch (five books of Moses) as the word of God, too. Yes, true, and I’ve read translations of both the TaNaKH and the Qur’an, and they describe in bloody detail how not cool they are with women, foreigners, and homosexuals. Here is a difference, though. In the United States, despite the spurious evidence ejaculated by white supremacy groups, the direct influence exerted by these faiths’ traditional laws on the modern political arena is minimal.
It seems that I would be attacking straight, white, cis-gendered, Christian men, here, wouldn’t it? While it is true that those are characteristics shared by the majority of the people who deny equality for the rest, they are not required. Fear of losing privilege and the resultant need for absolute control of those you feel threatened by through institutionalised denial of their equality is the only criteria entry into that club.
Now, that club is predominantly represented by the Republican platform of strict social conservatism. Fiscal responsibility is obviously not either of the main parties’ actual goal, despite the rhetoric, so I will not address it. Far from the ideas represented in the Constitution, Republican efforts have been centred on repression, denial of rights, discrimination, and oppression. So-called “right to work” laws and their public servant kin that strip rights to collective bargaining lower wages and allow for a slackening of requirements of safe working environments as well as take away health care options for millions. Bullying laws support hostile conditions in schools by protecting the free-speech of bullies and stifling the same rights for the victims. Money is stripped from school budgets, inaccurate and simplistic assessment methods are mandated for inflexible and arbitrary performance requirements while the same people who took the funding and instituted the indefensible expectations proclaim the schools to be failing the children. Women are demonised for being sexual, rape and incest is defended, and the right to the sanctity of a woman’s own body is being stripped away. Transgender access to appropriate bathrooms is coming under fire. Homosexual people and couples are denied equality in marriage and adoption options in most states. People of colour still face institutionalised discrimination, and modern voting access restriction laws disenfranchise them and the poor and the aged. The poor in this country, roughly half of us, suffer from the deregulation, outsourcing, and flight of jobs supported by the policies pushed by Republicans. And who can claim to be all about Christian “values,” and deny access to health care to a quarter of the population? Arrogant, self-serving, sanctimonious, sociopathic, control freaks, that’s who. And you, you help them.
Democrats are not without blame, by any stretch, but they are less anti-Constitutional values, at least on the surface, than the Republicans. I would argue that their platform positions are also more in tune with the teachings of the very One that the Republican “base” purportedly believes in. Like my parents, I aspire to the designation of “independent” when it comes to politics and voting. I would have no problem supporting a Republican for office if that person embodied any of the traditional values of that party. Unfortunately, the party of Lincoln is now the party of Fallwell, limited government is a joke except to those crushed under the regulation of everyday life, and fiscal responsibility no longer applies when there are wars to wage against drugs, terror, and women. Ignorance and hate wrapped in the Shroud of Turin appear to be the values of the modern Republican party. If I’m wrong, somebody please show me how.
P.S.:
“… with Liberty and Justice for All.” (The “under God” was not originally in there. Revisionists!
Dissent of a Woman 