Oh those Conservative men and their fear of lady-parts—and apparently insurance forms.
Our story begins when several Catholic universities such as the formidable Notre Dame, as well as the anti-contraception/anti-abortion group (how’s that for an oxymoron) Priests for Life, went to court claiming that they shouldn’t be required to fill out a form that allows them to deny women birth control. It should just happen. It’s their inalienable right, and forms are just too… secular? … profane? … time-consuming? … who knows.
Of course this all stems from the now infamous Hobby Lobby ruling in which the Supreme Court ruled that closely-held, profit-making, Christian-misogynistic corporations such as Hobby Lobby could act as personal gate-keepers to a woman’s va-ja-ja. They were given that right by five Christian men—to… you know… slather their beliefs all over their female employees’ uterus. The Supreme Court handed these persons? … corporations? … religions? … churches? … Carte blanche control over one of the most sacred of women’s rights… the right to control their own reproduction.
WHY? Why should these men care so much what women do?
Well… because they’re men, because they’re Christians, and because they’re told from an early age that are to rule over women. After all, women are the reason we’re in this mess in the first place. If Eve hadn’t listened to the snake, and then tempted Adam, we’d still be naked, unarmed vegetarians.
In legislatures around the country—state after state, Conservative Christian men are going after women’s bodies with a vengeance, attacking their right to prevent pregnancy, and their right to terminate it if it happens. They are confused about how reproduction works in the first place, they don’t understand rape, and are mostly unsympathetic of the affect it has on a women.
Obviously this is misogyny, but it goes deeper. They don’t see women as people, they’re still seen as property. No, they’re not asking women to wear burqas (yet), but it’s the same principal. They’re taught (we’re taught) to think this way in church, starting from a very early age. It’s read to us right out of our holy book. And it’s not even all that subtle either.
Going back to Genesis: God created man… then he paraded all the animals before Adam (showing that Christians were initially meant to marry their pets). When there wasn’t any animal fit for Adam, God put him into a deep sleep and created Eve… as an afterthought. Of course Eve led Adam astray and introduced sin into the world, and so God cursed her lady parts and gave man dominion over them.
Then we move into Exodus where God gives us these commandments. Ten of them to be exact. What scholars call the Decalogue. The tenth one goes something like this:
“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male or female servant, his ox or donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor.”
Notice here how the wife is included with the man’s property: his house, his slaves, his animals, and his wife.
We also have scriptures like:
“Wives, submit yourselves to your own husbands as you do to the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife as Christ is the head of the church, his body, of which he is the Savior. Now as the church submits to Christ, so also wives should submit to their husbands in everything.”
Some marriage vows still ask the bride:
“Do you promise to love, honor, and obey…”
The reason that the men of Fox “news” and the Conservative women who listen to them hate “feminism” (which they blame for abortion and birth control) — is that woman are saying, with their bodies, “we’re not your property,” and good men of the Bible just aren’t having any of it. If a woman takes birth control, that’s more power she’s taking from men. That’s not very submissive. So they have to legislate to keep her from achieving this power.
At this moment in history, women are doing what women have never done: they’re working, earning money, making their own decisions, choosing their own life partners, keeping their last names, choosing how many children they want, and now… horror of horrors… having sex for fun.
You can hear it embedded in the punditry around abortion and birth control. It’s a very simple message: If women are going to have sex, they should be punished for it. They use big words like “Pro-Life,” but there’s no denying the randomness of their “pro-life" beliefs. Once the baby is born, they care very little for it. They cut off educational funding, they approve slave labor, deny parents a living wage, send kids to jail at the slightest provocation, defend the cops who are shooting them at random, vilify the victims of rape, and ultimately, put that person to death if they don’t like what he did. But for those few months that the fetus sits in the womb, it’s “sacred.”
This isn’t a struggle about “sincerely held beliefs,” but a struggle for ownership. Saul of Tarsus, aka Saint Paul of Misogyny couldn’t be more proud.