ROE V. WADE OVERTURNED - JUNE 24, 2022

Blessed Virgin Mary and Baby Jesus

by

Silver S. Parnell

(c) Copyright 2021

All rights reserved.

Today's events have overshadowed everything else for the moment, and I have some comments.

First of all, if this had been the last instead of the only action in a series of real efforts to improve America's pro-family and pro-life efforts, we would have something to celebrate.

If overturning Roe was the last, instead of the only action, we would have a nationwide living wage that was more than adequate to support grownups and kids.

If it was the last, instead of the only action, families would not be forced to bankrupt themselves caring for a sick child or other family member because every family would have guaranteed health care.

If it was the last, instead of the only action, mothers and fathers would each have paid maternity/paternity leave for at least the first six months of the baby's life.

If it was the last, instead of the only action, education from Pre-K through college would be free at point of service. 

If it was the last, instead of the only action, the "pro-life" Republican Party would have proven that it actually cares about families and children with all those other actions, but the opposite is true. It has proven that it is hostile to families, hostile to children, hostile to the poor, the elderly, the disabled. It fights against all those actions I have listed.

The other industrialized nations take much better care of their citizens than we do, despite having far less wealth and natural resources than our country holds.  Our citizens struggle to put food on the table and a roof over their heads, while a handful of greedy corporate overlords is so bored and sated with life that they take vacations in outer space. The people who created the wealth with their work do not get their fair share of the wealth that they worked for. They are wage slaves.

It is no wonder that most women cite financial hardship as a reason for their abortion. We live in a culture that is hostile to children and families.

Forget for a moment the financial impossibility of raising a child on a food service workers salary. Women's bodies have always been under attack.  Every war involves the rape and unwilling impregnation of women. From their own households where countless children are raped by family members, to the rape by coercion during a date, to the workplace where employers make it clear that the woman will be fired if she does not give the boss sex, I have experienced all of these myself and I know how very common it all is, how dirty and hopeless it makes you feel, and how impossible it is to keep one's sanity while at the same time being forced to carry a growing thing within yourself that is put there by force. For the woman in this position, it is not a baby. It is a hostile invader, a parasite, a daily reminder of the humiliation, shame and trauma. But do these "pro life warriors" who go to war against these women give a damn about any of that? No. Women remain the spoils of war.

The big lie underneath all this is that the party that claims to be "pro-life" is nothing more than an agency that works on behalf of the wealthy overlord class. In a deliberate, cynical ploy to get voters to agree to remain poor and to work as wage slaves so that the rich can get richer, it lies and says it cares about babies and families. It lies and says it is "pro life."

Lying is how it routinely does business. Each of Trump's Supreme Court appointees lied in their confirmation hearing testimony. They claimed adherence to the doctrine of stare decisis and that Roe was established law, so they would respect that and Roe wasn't in their sites. But the first thing we heard from them thereafter was a leaked document that the doctrine of stare decisis would be trashed and Roe would be overturned, and today we get the final draft. Instead of respecting stare decisis, they have thrown out the principle of adhering to precedent. Because they have a political agenda, everything that has gone before is now up for grabs, despite their assurances that this would not happen.

Whoever would love life and see good days

must keep their tongue from evil and their lips

from deceitful speech."

1 Peter 3:10

I used to vote across both parties. I used to believe that both parties consisted of people of good will that were trying to better the country and that I could vote either Republican or Democrat, based upon the issue under discussion at the moment, but I can no longer do that. I have lost all respect for the politicians in the Republican Party, with the exception of a very small number of men and women who have distinguished themselves recently with their honesty, ethics, and (frankly) bravery in calling out their fellow Republican politicians.

When I watched the interviews with weepy but jubilant "pro-life" demonstrators, crowing about their "victory" using a variety of triumphal language, the journalists would often ask them how they feel about the people whose lives have been upended by this action by a radical right wing political set of jurists. Not one of them had a shred of understanding or compassion for the girls and women against whom they had just effected a hostile takeover.

One woman blithely talked about adoption and I wondered how SHE would like to spend 9 months carrying the offspring of a violent rapist? Besides which, who is going to pay the medical bills for the women and babies? Who will support them when they can no longer work?

The biggest lie of all is that overturning Roe will save those "dear precious babies." What it will do is push women into back alley abortions (again) and into amateur self-surgery with knitting needles or crochet hooks. Those who have the money and the connections and resources to travel hundreds of miles to another state where it remains legal (for now) will avail themselves of it. My point is that abortions have always been available and always will be. "Pro-life" activists are kidding themselves if they think they are saving the babies.

As before mentioned, if the GOP really cared about children and families, it would not have pushed so hard against the social programs that could have helped them. It would not have worked to keep wages low. It would not have worked so hard to give tax breaks to the rich. They did not want to pay for pro-family measures and they continue to try to rip social security out from under the elderly who paid into it for DECADES which, if they succeed, will leave people like me on the streets. The underlying, consistent theme is NOT "pro-life," it is pro-rich guy. The "pro life" aspect is a hook to catch gullible voters.

I predict that the number of children that are born through forced compliance will be smaller than the number of women and babies that die as a result of either back-alley abortions, suicide, or self-surgery misadventure.

Anyone reading this may (incorrectly) assume that I am pro-abortion. I am not. I am simply able to have compassion and empathy for people other than myself who live in ways other than the way in which I live and who have a point of view that I do not share. I respect, also, that the USA is a country that was founded on freedom of religion. It is one of the main reasons why the original settlers came from Europe. They were living under a repressive religious autocracy.

My personal philosophy around sex life is formed by my life experiences which have taught me that women are always the losers when they have sex outside of marriage, and that unwanted pregnancies are only one of the many problems that arise when people treat sex as if it was an entertainment. My solution for the huge number of abortions performed in America would be partially ameliorated by a return to the custom of waiting to have sex until one is married. But I realize that you cannot force people to live in a way they do not agree with, nor should we WANT to do that in a country supposedly founded on freedom of religion.

Obviously, this issue is complex, and a lot of different people have opinions about this. The philosophical differences are huge - and neither side seems positioned to even begin to try and understand the other, which brings up my final point:

Whatever happened to evangelization?

Jesus never advocated for a takeover of the government. In fact, the opposite is true. Neither did he recommend that his followers use force to make people comply with his commandments. He told them to kick the sand from their feet and move on. That is all. These "pro life warriors" have done the exact opposite of what Jesus commanded. They work against the social programs that sound a LOT like Jesus's commandment to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, visit the prisoner, etc., and instead of evangelizing the culture, they go to war against it.

None of this looks like anything Jesus would recognize. It is hypocritical - something which non-Christians have noticed. If they disliked Christians before this era, they despise them now - because of the lying, manipulation, hate-filled bullying, and general hypocrisy. The manner in which one does things is important, and it is not ok to commit the evil of lying and manipulation in order to get something done that you consider to be "good." Catholics know this. It is in the catechism. Apparently, other types of Christians do not care about it.

If our culture is the opposite of something Jesus would like to see, the blame for that does not lay with the  "lefties." We failed to evangelize. We failed to demonstrate the glory of Jesus Christ. We consistently behave in unholy ways and we are responsible for this culture becoming more and more pagan.

Instead of crowing about how we "won" this culture war and overturned Roe, we should be on our knees, with apologies on our lips, for how poorly we have evangelized this nation and how badly we have treated one another, in direct disobedience to Jesus commands. We have forced a standard of behavior onto non-Christians using lies and manipulation instead of evangelizing.

In the end, few, if any, lives will be saved. The conditions in which the poor live will be far worse, and the rich guys at the top of the pyramid will continue to take vacations in outer space. It is mind boggling. With all the resentment that has built up against hypocritical Christians, is evangelization even POSSIBLE now?

The solution? Each of us need to do better, be better, follow Him better, and be better examples than we have been. No one will listen to us otherwise, if they will listen to us at all after this.

May we all be blessed!

Silver Rose
Sannyasini Kaliprana

Silver Cottage Hermitage

P.S. All of the blog posts I write are independently researched and written by me and all of them are protected by legal copyright and may not be copied for any purpose by any person for any reason, so please just enjoy them here and leave them here where you found them.

(c) Copyright 2022, Silver S. Parnell

All rights reserved.

No copying for any purpose by anyone is allowed.

ABORTION

Some people are so preoccupied with the topic of abortion that they talk of little else on social media and elsewhere. Nearly every political and cultural conversation gets hijacked onto this topic, due to the tunnel vision of the abortion-obsessed, and I am tired of continually taking that detour, so I have written this statement of my position on this issue. From now on, every time someone tries to wrestle a conversation from the price of cilantro at my local market to THE HORROR OF ABORTION, I am posting a link to this blog entry and moving on without further comment.

I do not like abortion

I am not in favor of killing babies. I do not "support abortion." Abortion is horrible. DUH.

Nor will I abandon every commandment of Christ in order to vote for people who say or insinuate that they will make abortion illegal. Making abortion illegal was never a successful method of eliminating abortion. When you make it illegal, you only make it less safe. Because abortion has always been available to women and they will resort to it if pushed.

If we really want to eliminate abortion, we could make our country more family friendly and follow the examples of the rest of the industrialized world by making maternity and paternity leave available as well as free child care. Instead, we behave as if each one of us is in competition with every other American. We behave as if we hate one another and must fight each other to the death for limited resources.

We do not have limited resources. It is just that all the resources have been handed over to a tiny number of people while the wages of the workers that create the wealth are suppressed. When asked, women say that they get abortions because of MONEY. They can't afford to raise a child. It is IMPOSSIBLE. Most workers in our country do not receive a living wage.

The right wing uses abortion as a lure to capture voters when their real agenda is to accelerate this enrichment of the wealthy while they torment, starve and further impoverish the poor.

For instance: In the two years Donald Trump has been in office, Planned Parenthood, the biggest abortion provider in the U.S., has been funded by the government something like 9 times. He's seated one truly wretched supreme court judge, whom I firmly believe DID sexually attack Dr. Ford during a party. (In addition to my customary research, I watched all the videos of the hearings.)

The GOP treated Dr. Ford shamefully and, indeed, as I watched the debacle on television, I felt I was witnessing a second rape.

Watching Kavanaugh sputter and riot his way through a decidedly partisan, voluminous defense, his puckery red mouth, wet with the spittle of his outrage, made me want to retch. I vowed never to vote Republican ever again, when everything was said and done. Will Kavanaugh deliver the promised abolition of abortion? He is dishonest enough to renege on his subtle promise in that regard, but he WILL likely save Trump from being thrown into prison for criminal wrongdoing. The whole vile mess makes me sick.

Catholics are not required to vote Republican

The Republican Party, as it is currently constituted, stands for positions that are directly in opposition to everything Jesus advocated. The only quasi-Christian position on their platform is the supposedly "pro-life" position, which actually boils down to a very weak anti-abortion position that only makes it illegal, when illegality has never prevented abortions. It only prevented SAFE abortions.

Anyone that claims that Catholics "have" to vote Republican is lying.

Pope Benedict clarified this during his term as Pope. (See the quote below his picture.)

A catholic would be guilty of formal cooperation

in evil, and so unworthy to present himself for holy

communion, if he were to deliberately vote for a

candidate precisely because of the candidate's

permissive stand on abortion and/or euthanasia.

when a Catholic does not share a candidate's stand

in favor of abortion and/or euthanasia, but votes

for that candidate for other reasons, it is considered

remote material cooperation, which can be permitted

in the presence of proportionate reasons.

~Pope Benedict~

My opinion: Criminalizing abortion does not solve the problem

There is no corroborating research or statistic that supports the idea that making abortion illegal is a working method because, as history has borne out, women get abortions, whether legal or not.

American laws, generally speaking, reflect the will of the majority of the people, in concert with the guiding principles laid down in our Constitution.

Abortion is legal, but it is not mandatory. This isn't china, where parents are only allowed to have a certain number of children and are thereafter forced to abort subsequent children.

If no one wanted an abortion, we could have an abortuary on every street corner and they would be empty, and this fact relates to my central position.

The remedy must address the needs of both mother and child.

Pro-lifers and pro-choicers are equally vehement in their insistence on the rightness of their respective positions. Pro-lifers are advocating for the babies. Pro-choicers advocate for the mothers. It is a furious pitched battle between them, which is why we need a nuanced approach that advocates for BOTH.

How can we do that? Well, first of all, stop obsessing about whether or not abortion is legal. Even when illegal, is it STILL available, and pretending otherwise is just naive and unrealistic.

We must evangelize the culture

As religious people, we need to stop behaving as if we can (or should) try to force other people to obey our moral laws when it comes to sexual behavior.  Sexual immorality and the pregnancies that may result from it are beyond the pale of what Christians can expect to manipulate. We need to remember that Jesus did not force anyone to follow him. He invited them.  We should do the same by working to evangelize the culture to gain the hearts and minds of a majority, which is absolutely within the mandate given us by Jesus.

Thirdly, we have to be realistic about the limitations of the American legal system when it comes to impressing Christian norms on it. The separation of church and state has been a fundamental criterion from the very foundation of our country and, while I agree that the founding fathers probably did not anticipate that many Americans would one day belong to non-Christian religions (or no religion at all), the overriding conception of individual freedoms can't be ignored.

In the arena of abortion, even if the law were to recognize the rights of the unborn child, you cannot divorce the baby from the mother until it is born. The law will never again allow the rights of the unborn baby to circumvent the rights of the mother, regardless of whether or not we believe that an abortion murders a child. That ship has sailed.

If you want to make laws, enact laws that support moms and babies.

It is not logical to stand in the way of legislation that financially supports poor moms and their babies, either through direct money or services such as free day care, and at the same time pretend that we care about the babies that suffer because its parents are poor and we refuse to fund their relief.

Babies need food, shelter, utilities, clothing, transportation and day care. If a young woman does not have the income to give a child those basic things, abortion will be the only way out. Forget adoption. Most women know they couldn't give up their child, once they've given birth, and if they don't have the money to support a child, they don't have the money to get themselves through a pregnancy either.

Women do not "want" to kill their children, either through abortion or, in the alternative, through poverty, illness and disease. They are forced into this decision because financial difficulties are the primary reason women cite for choosing abortion.

Legislation doesn't solve every human issue

People who resent tax dollars being earmarked for the poor are resentful because they are selfish, first of all, but in the case of the American Christian, it is often the mistaken belief that supporting illegitimate babies will 'encourage" young women to have lots of children they can't afford. There is no proof of that and, even if it were true for some, the number would be quite small.

I would remind my fellow Christians readers that if there are a few "extra" babies in the world, it's not a bad thing. Right?

Hear this: There is nothing you can do about anyone else's larcenous heart or grifter tendencies. There will always be a small percentage of people who are like that. You can't do anything about it.

There is also nothing you can do about lazy people. I know a young, healthy woman, only 20 years old, who refuses to get a full time job. She says part time is "enough." When I ask her what she'll do if she has an emergency, she asserts that her mother will have to pay the bill! I wonder if she got her mom's agreement to that? (I know her mother. She has one full time job and one part-time job. I'm guessing she's not happy about any of this.)

In any case, nothing is perfect, and we cannot sacrifice a great good because it can't be perfect. Someone will take advantage of our generosity. Someone will steal. Someone will lie and cheat. We have to do the best we can. Here is what Saint John Chrysostom says about it:

"The poor man has one plea, his want and his standing

in need: do not require anything else from him; but even if 

he is the most wicked of all men and is at a loss for his

necessary sustenance, let us free him from hunger."

~St. John Chrysostom~

Obviously, a baby is entirely innocent and, even if I agreed with you that it is a bad thing to encourage immorality by supporting moms who are having sex outside of marriage, for instance, we would still have to support the babies, right? Part of supporting the babies necessitates supporting the mothers. You can't separate the two.

Don't scream at me.

Now, I can hear people screaming at me already, and I haven't even posted this yet. There are some of you who are singularly focused on the fact that abortion is murder, and you can't SEE anything but that, you can't HEAR anything but that, and you can't TALK about anything but that. Just know that, as long as you refuse to see, hear or discuss anything but the fact that abortion kills a baby, you will be a miserable failure in your attempts to win people over to your way of thinking. You cannot sway people over to your side by hitting them over the head with a hammer. That approach does not work.

Stop spreading superstitious lies about pro-choice advocates and talk to them instead.

I am sick of watching the right and the left fling insults at one another and lie about each other. The right says the left just "wants to kill babies." The left says the right "just wants to control women." They are both off base. Instead of imagining the motives of the other side, it is time to listen. Get on the same page somehow and start using the same language to have the discussion.

At present, the pro-choice people are just as disgusted with you as you are of them, and it isn't because they are, supposedly, evil. it is because the anti-abortion people refuse to see the issues that bother those on the left.

The peculiar quandary in which we find ourselves is that both sides think they are arguing for the greatest good and that the other side is malicious. This is an impossible impasse that we must overcome if we are to make any progress in lessening the numbers of abortions.

Somehow we have to arrive at solutions that respect and dignify every human person. The rights of the mothers and the babies have got to be supported at the same time. At present, the pro-choicers advocate for the rights of the moms while the anti-abortion crowd speaks for the babies. We need a comprehensive approach that supports both.

God save us all

Silver Rose