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.

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.

In 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.

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.

The 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.

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.

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.

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.“)