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Speaking Out

Posted December 18th, 2015 by Lesley Hazleton

Sometimes you have the privilege of getting to say the right thing at the right time, as with this nine-minute talk I gave the other night to a hugely supportive audience of Christians and Muslims at Trinity Lutheran Church in Lynnwood, WA.  The event was called “Love in a Time of Fear,” but I wasn’t afraid, I was angry, and I said so:

 

[youtube=https://youtu.be/RhKDsdIeeHo]

Full video of the evening is here, with special thanks to Terry Kyllo of Catacomb Churches and to Jeff Siddiqui for bringing it all together, and to the excellent work of Lutheran Community Services Northwest in support of Syrian refugees.

 

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File under: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, ugliness, US politics | Tagged: Tags: abortion, Black Lives Matter, Colorado Springs, Donald Trump, gay marriage, Hitler, Martin Niemoller, neo-fascism, New York Daily News, Planned Parenthood, Republican party, San Bernardino, Ted Cruz | 3 Comments
  1. Mary Johnson says:
    December 18, 2015 at 2:17 pm

    Thank you, Lesley. This is SO important, and so well said.

    You might be interested in this, from my sister Margaret, who converted to Islam before the birth of her first child and is trying to raise a Muslim family in the US: https://medium.com/@coexistmarge/this-time-it-s-different-c0c70fd2db3f#.yo8zgn6nj

    Hoping you are well. Thankful you are angry.

    Mary

    >

  2. Nuzhat says:
    December 18, 2015 at 8:17 pm

    Every voice raised is a step towards correction. There may be enough laid back listeners, but being a part of the vocal band is being more responsible, and important in awakening the sense of direction the listeners can take.
    You always hit the mark with even few words said, Lesley….
    well spoken!
    Nuzhat.

  3. Frederick Osman says:
    December 19, 2015 at 2:13 pm

    Thank you, Lesley. Wonderful, as usual.

A Hard Choice? Really?

Posted October 1st, 2015 by Lesley Hazleton

The right-wing is trying like hell to do a number on the minds of American women. You know that thing about abortion being the hardest choice a woman will ever have to make, or the one she most regrets? Bullshit.

90_percentIn fact 90% of all American women who’ve had an abortion are either glad or simply relieved they did (click here for the research.)  And for every woman I know who’s had an abortion (that’s half the women I know, and quite possibly half the women you know too), a safe, routine, minimally invasive procedure was far from the hardest decision of their lives. For many, like me, it was the simple, sane choice. The only hard part was finding the money to pay for it.

You want a hard decision? What about marriage? Or divorce? Taking on a mortgage? Choosing a cancer treatment? Allowing a terminally ill spouse to die with dignity? What about the multitude of hard decisions we all have to make in the course of our lives, men and women?

But right-wingers don’t think women capable of rational decision-making at all.  It’s apparently especially hard for us delicate souls, which is presumably why they think we agonize over it and decide wrong.  How very Victorian of them. They’re apparently white knights in shining armor, out to save every woman from her own distressingly poor judgment.  In their ideal world, no woman would be “allowed” to make a decision without prior permission from the Republican caucus.  Certainly not any woman with an income under a million a year.

But it’s not our decision-making that stinks, it’s theirs.  Because not only is it morally and ethically bankrupt, it’s full of lies — deliberate lies.

— Like Republican presidential candidate Carly Fiorina pretending to be near tears as she talked about watching a video that didn’t exist and never had.

— Or the head of the House Oversight Committee trying to play gotcha with the head of Planned Parenthood by using a bogus chart created by an anti-abortion group.

— Or abortion opponents pretending there’s no such thing as an embryo.  They’d have us think that every abortion is that of a full-term viable fetus, when none are.  The vast majority of abortions are embryonic, medically defined as up to eight weeks from conception.  But hey, you can’t see an embryo on a sonogram, let alone wave photographs of it in an attempt to guilt-trip women.  So lie, baby, lie — and screw the lives you mess up in the process.

It’s clear by now that nobody cares about facts in the fantasy world of today’s Republicans.  Real facts, that is, as opposed to imaginary ones.

Those of us who live in the real world know for a fact that imaginary facts are dangerous.  Remember those non-existent weapons of mass destruction used as the reason to invade Iraq?  Or those non-existent scientists asserting with great authority that there was no such thing as climate change?

Forget hard decisions for the moment.  Here’s an easy one:  A year from now, do all you can to make sure we send this gang of women-hating, war-mongering, planet-polluting liars back to whatever slime pit they crawled out of.

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File under: feminism, US politics, war, women | Tagged: Tags: abortion, Carly Fiorina, embryo, imaginary facts, Planned Parenthood, Republicans | 7 Comments
  1. Amna says:
    October 1, 2015 at 11:36 am

    Right on Lesley!
    But I am afraid that this whole country is blinded with madness and hatred and stepping away from humanity, humility and humanitarianism …The way things are going we could have the republican president representing this country next year and that will be the beginning of dark ages,once again… All my reasons for coming to this country in hope of finding equality, prosperity and freedom will be wiped away… there is less and less concern in this country for minorities, women and suffering of people in other parts of the world. America will turn the corner for worse and will never be the same….

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      October 1, 2015 at 12:00 pm

      Not the whole country, Amna. Nowhere near. But a warning that we can never take sanity and progress for granted. We always need to stand up and be counted, speak out, and call the bluff of ignorance and bigotry. Each in our own small way.
      Here’s Margaret Mead: “Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world. Indeed it’s the only thing that ever has.”

  2. jveeds says:
    October 1, 2015 at 5:42 pm

    Not to change the subject…well, OK, to change the subject…do you have any thoughts on the Pope’s personal audience with the Kentucky county clerk, Kim Davis? I read Andy Borowitz’s satire on it and thought he was making that part up. But it really happened. But the weird thing is, no one from the Pontiff’s team seems to be willing to say why the abominable Davis was invited, what they talked about and there’s even some speculation that the Heir to the Chair wasn’t entirely aware that the meeting was being set up. That’s pretty hard to believe and maybe by the time you get to pontificalizing on this yourself we’ll have more info.

    But in the meantime, I’d love to get your take on this. Maybe His Petership was calling her in to say “STFU,” albeit in more popely terms.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      October 2, 2015 at 9:40 am

      Oh yes, it’s a weird kind of fun to watch Vatican spokesmen trying to spin this! The rationalizations are fascinatingly torturous. Yesterday: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/01/us/pope-francis-kim-davis-kentucky-clerk-washington-same-sex-marriage.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=second-column-region&region=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0 and then today: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/03/world/europe/pope-francis-kim-davis-meeting.html
      Me? No pontif(f)icating for now. I’m just continually amazed at the screwed-up stance of orthodox religion on anything to do with sex (viz abortion, women clergy, gay marriage, contraception, priestly celibacy, pederasty).

  3. jveeds says:
    October 2, 2015 at 10:41 am

    Either way, I’d say this was a monumental failure of the Pope and his handlers, an epic miscue whereby either the Pope was under-informed, or misled, or simply had no conception of the political implications of having this notorious and divisive evangelical yahoo anywhere near his midst.

    It’s hard to believe that the papal PR machine allowed this to happen. In my view, it spoils much of the goodwill that the entire visit to America had gathered. So so sooooo stupid to let something this obviously misguided to happen.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      October 2, 2015 at 11:10 am

      Agreed. A ton of secular goodwill went out the door the moment Kim Davis entered it. Or maybe it was just a sudden jolt of reality.

  4. chakaoc says:
    October 9, 2015 at 5:34 pm

    Go, Lesley – morons and liars all. Their investigation into PP found nothing but there will be no exoneration because….well, it served their purpose. The slime pit beckons – hope they heed the call.

Who’s Really Pro-Life?

Posted September 10th, 2015 by Lesley Hazleton

How have we allowed this to happen? How have we allowed anti-abortion activists to call themselves pro-life? How have we not called them out, loud and clear, on this Orwellian double-speak?

Many of those against abortion are the same right-wingers who want to nuke the hell out of Iran or any other designated enemy of the day; who support the death penalty no matter how many death-row inmates have been proven innocent; who obstruct all attempts at gun control even when kindergarten kids are massacred; who see nothing wrong about cops shooting unarmed black men in the back. But a single fertilized egg inside a woman’s uterus? Suddenly, that’s sacred.

They’re not pro-life. I am. And Planned Parenthood is. And NARAL, the National Abortion Rights Action League, is. Because nobody here is advocating for abortion per se; what we’re for is the right to have one. For motherhood to be a matter of choice, not compulsion. And for a child’s right to come into the world wanted and welcomed. What we’re for, in short, is life. Not life in the abstract, but real life, as it is lived.

What we’re for is not more but fewer abortions. And the way to achieve that is clear: sex education in schools, and freely available contraception for women. Yet the anti-abortion crowd is against both. Which means that all they ensure is that there’ll be more abortions.

no-more-coat-hangersThe historical record is clear: women have always aborted pregnancies, whether with herbs, with knitting needles, or with wire coat-hangers in back-street abortions such as the one that nearly killed a close friend when I was a student. So now that abortion is safe – a minor medical procedure – the anti-abortion crowd are doing everything they can to make it dangerous again: to make the woman pay for having the gall to be sexual, and to make the unwanted child pay too.

If a woman chooses to carry a pregnancy to term and then give the child up for adoption, I totally support her choice. But it is cruel and punitive to force her to do so. It is downright obscene to insist that a rape victim carry her rapist’s child. And to make a woman give birth to a severely disabled child doomed to die in pain within hours, weeks, or months is nothing less than torture, of both mother and child.

This isn’t about the Bible or the Quran. It’s about punishment, about a basic attitude of life negation, of harshness and joylessness. It isn’t pro-life; it’s anti-life.

If its advocates weren’t causing so much misery and suffering, I might even find it in myself to feel sorry for them.

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File under: existence, feminism, US politics, women | Tagged: Tags: abortion, contraception, double-speak, Naral, Planned Parenthood, pro-life, sex education | 11 Comments
  1. iobserveall says:
    September 10, 2015 at 12:25 pm

    I agree with every word you wrote.

  2. avasterlingauthor says:
    September 10, 2015 at 12:50 pm

    I agree with some things you say, but you do use a pretty broad brush toward your opposition to further your point. ; )

  3. Mary Waechter says:
    September 10, 2015 at 11:31 pm

    Very well put. I agree 100%!

  4. Fran Love says:
    September 11, 2015 at 8:29 am

    Lesley, you’ve covered all the issues perfectly. I wish I could have said it as well as you did. Other than posting here at your blog, have you published this article anywhere else?

    I know I could send this to a few of my friends via Facebook, but it wouldn’t get the coverage it deserves. I also realize there will be plenty of opposition to your statements, but they have to be said. We have to keep speaking out, especially because of the opposition. Thank you.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 11, 2015 at 8:38 am

      Thanks, Fran — and of course share on FB, and urge others to share. That can be enormously effective in spreading ideas. — L.

  5. Amin Tan says:
    September 11, 2015 at 10:13 am

    Dear Lesley Hazleton,
    You have said it all. I concur absolutely. Some people are so dogmatic about opposing abortion regardless of undesirable circumstances like rape, poverty, young and immature age, broken or mistaken relationship and so on. One must have basic common sense in life.

  6. Justine says:
    September 13, 2015 at 3:41 pm

    Would you mind if I linked to this from an opposing viewpoint?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      September 16, 2015 at 10:39 am

      The blog is in the public domain, Justine, so of course feel free to do so. I will read with interest.– L.

  7. Tea-mahm says:
    September 14, 2015 at 9:02 am

    Lesley, this is it. Lets get every news agency to carry your message.
    I’m cheering for your words. Thank you, Tamam

  8. Joan says:
    September 14, 2015 at 9:18 am

    Agreed on all points. And I’d like to add another. The same people who are anti-abortion want to drastically reduce the social support system that helps care for the children (and parents) they insist should follow through with unwanted pregnancies, including the organizations that help prevent those pregnancies in the first place (e.g., Planned Parenthood).

  9. Denise Kaufman says:
    September 15, 2015 at 12:12 am

    I’ve said for a long time that we’ve let the other side define the terms. How did we let them co-opt the term “pro-life”? At the very least, we are all pro-life. I personally think that proof of “pro-life” includes supporting universal health care and early childhood education for all children. Many people are pro-birth but anti-childhood? We are pro-choice and they are anti-choice. Some new terms are needed!!

A Tale of Two Countries

Posted October 28th, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Compare these two news reports from October 26.  The first, from France:

The lower house of the French parliament voted on Friday to fully reimburse all abortions and to make contraception free for minors from the age of 15 to 18.  France’s national medical insurance pays for abortions for minors and the poor, while other women are reimbursed for up to 80 percent of the procedure’s cost…  Contraception is partly reimbursed.  The bill now goes to the Senate, where it is likely to pass. [AP]

A safe bet:  with free and easily available contraception, there’ll be far fewer abortions in France.  And with free and safe abortions, there’ll be far fewer unwanted children born into poverty and negligence.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the Republican party sees any form of national health insurance as some kind of dire Communist plot against America, and plans to scrap Medicare.  Its official platform calls for a ban on all abortion except in cases of incest and armed rape (and there are a ton of Republicans who want to ban it even then), and it is intent on shutting down the country’s largest provider of contraceptive advice and services:

Planned Parenthood filed a new lawsuit on Friday over a Texas rule that bars its clinics from a state health program for low-income women because the organization performs abortions…  In the past two years, conservative Republicans in more than a dozen states have taken steps to eliminate funding for Planned Parenthood. [UPI]

What puzzles me about the French bill:  why it seems to exclude girls under the age of 15.

What puzzles me about the American elections:  how any self-respecting woman could even conceive of voting Republican.  Or any man with a conscience.

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File under: US politics, women | Tagged: Tags: abortion, contraception, France, health insurance, Medicare, Republican party, war on women | 10 Comments
  1. Sani says:
    October 28, 2012 at 1:26 pm

    Why should a woman go to seek for abortion?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      October 29, 2012 at 7:54 am

      Sani — maybe start by reading the other comments…

  2. Judith says:
    October 28, 2012 at 1:32 pm

    It is a matter of control. They can’t let go of a woman’s womb and the power of dominance.

  3. Jude says:
    October 28, 2012 at 1:49 pm

    I know a lot of devout Christian women who vote for Republicans because they are opposed to abortion. I don’t argue with them about religion, politics, or abortion because I hate arguing. But I know that if they knew what I am–an atheist liberal–they’d pray for me and consider me evil. Sometimes I think it’s like coming out as gay–if people in small towns realized that atheists are all around them, and that we’re okay human beings, maybe they’d get over the prejudice. For that reason, I bought an atheist bumper sticker for my pickup. Anyway, I can understand why they take abortion personally–they actually *like* babies (I gave birth to three of them, and they were okay, but other babies? Yuck). But their overriding need to stop others from getting abortions leads them to vote for idiots like Romney. It’s difficult to forgive them for that.

  4. paul skillman says:
    October 28, 2012 at 3:21 pm

    Yes, Yes. What is wrong with American. I am American but I do not understand.

  5. Chad says:
    October 28, 2012 at 3:32 pm

    The poor cant catch a break. Here’s an example. A poor single woman works as a store cashier in the morning and a waitress in the evening. Her job barely covers her rent and her old mom’s medications.

    Insurance will not cover contraception, and if she gets pregnant, she cant get an abortion. So she is forced to keep an unwanted child who ends up raised by the streets.

    Same people who are against contraceptive coverage and abortions are the ones who oppose helping this family or this kid when he grows to become unemployed or homeless because any help to him is “entitlement”. They are all “good christians” when it comes to saying no to abortion and contraception, but when it comes to helping poor people or providing healthcare, food or shelter for the poor, they forget that Jesus was all for the poor and weak, they are suddenly greedy people. They use religion only for the ideas they like. Every “life” is important and from god, only till its an adult whose poor then racism takes over and its just hate.

    All very hypocritical if u ask me. They all talk about abstinence like its the solution to everything, but lets ask those same “god-fearing” people…how many of them were abstinent till they got married. Let alone what percentage were abstinent through college. Why do they try to force things down society’s throat when even they couldnt live by these ideals. I just dont get it. Sad.

  6. SusieOfArabia says:
    October 28, 2012 at 10:00 pm

    The religious right in the US have taken over the Republican Party – and it’s a dangerous situation for all women. We must vote these backward idiots out of office, for all our sakes.

  7. Jerry M says:
    January 15, 2013 at 11:43 am

    The people who run the US must be making a lot of profit from an inefficient health care system. Otherwise it makes no sense. It is uber expensive and wasteful.

  8. Fish Jones says:
    January 17, 2013 at 12:12 am

    I commented on your guns one too.

    While guns are a lifelong hobby of mine, they are about the only thing that makes Republicans… Less irritating?

    France is awesome for setting that up.

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      January 17, 2013 at 10:58 am

      Huh?

Neanderthals in D.C.

Posted August 20th, 2012 by Lesley Hazleton

Don’t you just love it when politicians say: “I mis-spoke”?

Republican congressman Todd Akin’s breathtakingly Neanderthal assertion that women’s bodies automatically prevent pregnancy if they’re victims of what he calls “legitimate rape” — his argument against allowing abortion even in cases of rape — has brought suitably righteous wrath down upon him.  Today he says he “mis-spoke.”  Though he doesn’t say exactly how.

So here’s what I’m guessing is Akin’s’ un-mis-spoken version:

Look, we all know that women lie.  Jesus Christ, they lie all the time.  What’s a guy to do?  So she’s a little drunk, okay, and she’s saying ‘No,’ okay, but you know she doesn’t mean it, because women never do, so you give her what she wants and then the next morning what does she do but cry rape?  That, my friends, is what I mean by illegitimate rape.

To be legitimate, it’d damn well better be violent.  At knifepoint or gunpoint.  And those Wahhabi or Taliban types or whatever they call themselves out there in Afghanistan and whatnot have a good point:  either you’ve got four witnesses that she was violently raped or forget it, she’s just covering her ass by lying.  And she’s a little whore to boot.  Serves her right, is what I say.

Fact is, if she gets pregnant, you can be just about one hundred percent sure she wasn’t really raped, because I know some wonderful doctors who assure me that women’s bodies are like that:  you know, they’re such conniving bitches, they can control whether they get pregnant or not.  If they don’t want, they just shut down.  Something in their bodies just switches off.  Factory’s closed, know what I mean?

No I haven’t checked their medical credentials, and I can’t tell you their names off the cuff, but I can tell you they’re God-fearing Christian doctors, all highly recommended by one of the one hundred pastors who’ve endorsed my campaign for senator for this great state of Missouri — pastors like that good man in Florida, Terry Jones, total victim of the Muslim-loving bend-over-backwards politically-correct liberal east-coast media elite.

These doctors, they’ve got Christian ethics, so they’re not about to let some hysterical woman who went and got herself pregnant worm her way out of it with an abortion.  They know that if a woman doesn’t want to get pregnant, she doesn’t.  If she does want to — well, there’s lots of guys out there who can testify to having been tricked into marriage by some bitch who went and got herself pregnant.  Am I right or am I right, guys?  Hey?  Y’know what I mean?

What’s that?  The Centers for Disease Control say that over 32,000 women a year get pregnant as a result of rape?  Well there’s big government for you.  The CDC will be one of the first government-funded institutions to be abolished when my pals Romney and Ryan get into the White House.  We’ll close that bunch of liberal pseudo-scientists down.

So yeah, those woman who really are raped — legitimately raped — I guess one or two might have their bodies let them down and somehow get pregnant.  But hey, nobody asked them to go and get raped.  And we can’t go allowing them to have abortions like a get-out-of-jail-free card.  That’d be wrong, my friends.  Wrong in the eyes of the Lord.

Goddammit they’re gonna have those kids and raise ’em, whether they want to or not.  And don’t let them think we’re gonna help them.  We’re going to shut down all those programs that allow single mothers to freeload off decent hard-working Christian citizens of this country who have the good sense not to and get themselves raped.  We’re going to bring decency back to America, my friends.  We’re going to bring ethics back to America.  God bless America.

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File under: Christianity, fundamentalism, Islam, ugliness, US politics, women | Tagged: Tags: "legitimate rape", abortion, Centers for Disease Control, Missouri, Mitt Romney, Paul Ryan, Terry Jones, Todd Akin, U.S.Congress, U.S.Senate | 4 Comments
  1. susan weirauch says:
    August 20, 2012 at 6:53 pm

    Well said!

  2. Lynn Rosen says:
    August 20, 2012 at 11:04 pm

    Damm straight, sistah!

  3. Zarina Sarfraz says:
    August 26, 2012 at 9:56 pm

    This kind of thinking causes all & every religion to get a bad name just because the ” gentleman ” concerned appears to be BRAIN DAMAGED!! Has he any females in his family who could become victims? or has he forgotten that men could become victims also?ZS

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      August 27, 2012 at 8:18 am

      Zarina, I think the word “thinking” is being way over-generous. The Akins/Ryan line — now a plank in the Republican platform — is that women are “using” rape as an “excuse” for abortion. It’s part of the Republican stance against abortion under any circumstances. But then of course these men have no chance of getting pregnant if they were to be raped.

The Church Goes to Battle — Against Nuns

Posted May 26th, 2010 by Lesley Hazleton

Even as the Catholic Church shields and panders to child rapists masquerading as priests (I use the word “panders” advisedly, since so many of the children are altar boys),  it’s gone to battle against its own nuns.

The Apostolic Visitation currently in progress is not a new take on the Annunciation.   It’s an investigation of convents and women’s orders in the U.S. inspired by the well-founded suspicion that they’re not all Vatican-kosher.   Essentially, it’s a form of Inquisition.   And yet another sign of how firmly the Church has its finger on the self-destruct button.

Not so long ago, outrage was restricted to feminist Catholics like Mary Hunt, whose article here pulls no punches.   A brief extract:

God knows Catholicism has a gender problem. But the structures of power are so perverse as to be dangerous. More than mandatory celibacy, homosexuality, all-male priesthood, and other reasons floated to explain why so many priests abuse children and why so many bishops cover up for them, the monarchical model of power is, to my mind, the major reason why crimes went unchecked and criminals remained in ministry. In a monarchy, there are no checks and balances against power at the highest levels. There is no way to vote the bums out or force them with threats of removal to run institutions in a transparent, indeed legal, way.

Now the outrage is spreading within the Church itself.  Earlier this year, the bishop bums created a ton more of it by censuring the dozens of leaders of women’s Catholic orders (representing tens of thousands of nuns) who signed a letter to Congress supporting the health-care bill.   And then news broke of a critically ill pregnant mother of four told by her doctors in a Catholic hospital in Phoenix  that the only way to save her life was to terminate her 11-week pregnancy.   Sister Margaret McBride, the hospital administrator on duty, convened the Ethics Committee and with the patient’s agreement, approved the procedure.  By doing so, she ensured that the woman lived, that four children still had a mother, and that her Church dug itself still deeper into an apparently bottomless moral cesspool.

It excommunicated her.

So here are two faces of Catholicism:   on the left, the nun who faced what for her was an agonizing choice (reportedly a strong right-to-life advocate, she indeed opted, though not in any way she expected,  for life over death):

And on the right,  the bishop, Thomas Olmsted, who ordered both Sister McBride and her patient to be excommunicated, and threatened to remove recognition (and thus funding) of the hospital as a Catholic institution.

The excommunication seems to be up in the air since it was publicized, though Sister McBride has been “reassigned” within the hospital.   Maybe she’s swabbing floors as punishment.  But what’s needed, as Mary Hunt so cogently advocates, is far more than a clean-up of the Church by women, “as though, being women, they will flap their white veils and make all things new.”   What’s needed isn’t women as bishops, or even, as Maureen Dowd argued in the New York Times, a woman as Pope.  What’s needed is “a new model of church without a pope or anyone else on top…  A democratic, participatory, egalitarian church.”

The irony is that that’s exactly how the church began in the first and second centuries, before power, wealth, and hierarchy took over.   Before it incorporated.   That’s when the Jesus movement was still about liberation and social justice, Mary Magdalene was still the apostle to the apostles, and the least relevant thing about Jesus’ mother was whether she had an intact hymen.

(Postscript:  the day after I posted this, Nick Kristof wrote an op-ed in the NYT with a title I wish I’d thought of:  “Sister Margaret’s Choice.“)

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File under: Christianity, feminism | Tagged: Tags: abortion, Apostolic Visitation, Bishop Thomas Olmsted, child abuse, excommunication, Mary Hunt, nuns, Pope, rape, Roman Catholic Church, Sister Margaret McBride | 3 Comments
  1. Bruce Saunders says:
    May 26, 2010 at 4:36 pm

    Let me add a few morsels to the plates of the lions and lambs on either side of this issue.

    For the lions, I would add to Lesley’s and Mary Hunt’s killing bites these documented facts: Bishop Olmsted did refuse Communion to a ten year old child because the child was autistic and could not swallow.

    Bishop Olmsted did try to shield his diocese from clerical sex-abuse suits by incorporating local parishes individually (thereby significantly reducing the diocese’s assets).

    Bishop Olmsted did send no Roman Catholic Clergy to a recent ecumenical gathering in support of meaningful and humane immigration reform… even though half his diocese is Hispanic and presumably many of these Catholics are illegals.

    And Bishop Olmsted has neither publicly criticized nor made any public effort to change the behavior of Maricopa Sheriff Arpaio, a blunt and brutal office holder, who is Roman Catholic.

    Now for the lambs’ plate, I put these morsels:

    The majority of facts about the event in question are deliberately kept private — for the privacy of the patient, whose identity is unknown.

    We do know that the mother was eleven weeks pregnant, was diagnosed with acute pulmonary hypertension and was at risk of dying.

    We also know that hospital policy, in accordance with Canon Law, forbade abortion — even to save the mother’s life, but did not disallow orthodox treatment of a potentially fatal condition for the mother even if that treatment risked the fetus’s life or well-being.

    We know the hospital ethics committee voted to approve the procedure … but we don’t know what the approved procedure was. D&C? Suction? Drugs? Another procedure?

    We know also that Sister McBride voted with the committee majority to proceed.

    We know that Sister McBride was informed privately, by letter, that she had incurred automatic excommunication for voting as she had, per canon 1398 of the Code of Canon Law. Presumably others involved also received the same letter or a similar letter citing a different canon.

    We know if a direct abortion occurred and Sister McBride is implicated as merely an accomplice, for failing to vote against the procedure in the ethics meeting, by canon 1329 she is automatically excommunicated.

    However, if she ‘procured a completed abortion,’ she is automatically excommunicated per canon 1398. For further explanation, see Pope John Paul II’s encyclical Evangelium Vitae (BV 62).

    Either way, she is automatically excommunicated by canon law.

    We know by his appointment, training and administrative experience Bishop Omsted is a canonist … a person who accepts responsibility for upholding canon law.

    We know too that Bishop Olmsted’s public statement was prompted by an incendiary newspaper report that ignited the controversy and the Bishop’s public statement did not mention Sister McBride directly — or any person.

    We know that at least one knowledgeable commentator has written that the Bishop wanted to deal with the matter privately, with a desire to protect the reputations and privacy of those involved. His public statement was meant only to acknowledge than an abortion contrary to Canon Law had in fact taken place in a Catholic hospital.

    (It is not inconceivable that the sent letter(s) were matters of form and could have been allowed to disappear into files if the situation had not been made public and escalated.)

    We know too, if we have read Bishop Olmsted’s ‘columns,’ that he deeply agrees with the Church’s position on the essentiality of all human life. In his piece, “Why We Won’t Remain Silent,” he wrote that when it is lawful to destroy human life, “Those who don’t oppose a culture of deaths may find themselves resorting to death as a solution.” As a church leader who believes in The Gospel of Life,’ Olmsted is willing to stand up every time life is threatened. {words from John Paul II’s encyclical are borrowed here)

    What about the Bishop as a person? What about his other beliefs? A person interested in this topic might do well to look into the beliefs of the Jesus Caritas Frtaternity of Priests to which he belongs, and to the writings and morality exhibited in the life of the fraternity’s hero and founder, Charles de Foucauld. A Nazi-minded lot this isn’t.

    Whose right then? The lambs or the lions at this table?

    • Lesley Hazleton says:
      May 26, 2010 at 7:01 pm

      You mean the bishop’s complaining that they left him no choice? That’s rich. In fact he should be down on his knees in gratitude to McBride. If the hospital had ingored medical advice and let the patient die, they’d be facing a murder charge now.

  2. Nancy McClelland says:
    May 27, 2010 at 7:42 pm

    “Before it incorporated…. when the Jesus movement was still about liberation and social justice, Mary Magdalene was still the apostle to the apostles,” — I love reading your blog!

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