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Lest you think my inclusion of Lessons for Chemistry in this series was mistaken, think about the world that the Dobbs decision envisions. At best, it returns women to the 1950s, the world in which abortion was illegal, a world in which pregnancy and shame were the price women paid for pre-marital sex (a price they should pay for the rest of their lives). It implies that the most important function of women is to have babies, to be baby-making factories. Since legislatures at the federal and state levels (and most local ones as well) are dominated by men, it is men who are making the decisions related to women and their rights. I should note that Catholicism isn’t the only religion that sees women in their baby-making role as their most important function. So, too, do Orthodox Jews and, for all I know, so do devout Muslims (although I admittedly don’t know much about the faith and practice of Islam). I don’t really know that much about other strains of Christianity, particularly evangelicals when it comes to the baby-making role of women. But is clear that among the most devout Christians and Jews, women take a clear back seat to men when it comes to rights and prerogatives.
As for the right to privacy, I know of no religion that recognizes any such right. The most explicit example would be the Catholic practice of confession, in which the confessor relates all of his or her sins, that is, the manner in which they have conducted their private, most intimate lives and in which that conduct is contrary to Church teaching. Sermons of all Christian faiths that I know of regularly preach about the proper conduct of their parishioners’ private lives. In Judaism, there are rules about many aspects of the intimate lives of believers, and rabbis are always available to be consulted about problems in the individual lives of their congregants. I don’t imagine that Islam is much different. After all, all three religions emanate from the same desert.
During his 2022 speech in Rome, rights were very much on the mind of Samuel Alito. In it, when it came to the rights enumerated in the Bill of Rights — that is, freedom of religion, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, etc., unless I clearly misread or heard him, Alito declared that the freedom of religion, otherwise often referred to as religious liberty, was more important than any of the others and that, when push came to shove, the rights of the religious should trump the rights of anyone else. You will also notice that there is no mention by him of the separation of church and state, which can also be found in the Constitution. One of the hallmarks of the current Course is the gradual erosion of that wall.
In case one thought, Alito’s use of history in buttressing his argument in the Dobbs decision, in the 2022 speech, he further demonstrated his lack of anything resembling a learned knowledge of history. For all his extolling of the virtues that Christianity has bestowed on this world, there is no mention of the terrible evils that Christianity has also endowed us with. If you look at the totality of the history of Christianity, you might be hard-pressed to find a reason why it should be granted such a status. That’s not to say that individual Christians aren’t good and wonderful people, generous and giving to their fellow Man. But the institutions of Christianity are something else again. I might say the same thing about the other desert religions as well.
If there is any real distinction to be made between Christianity, Islam, and Judaism in this regard, perhaps it is this: At least since the advent of Christianity, Judaism is the only religion that hasn’t sought temporal power continually through the ages (except when it comes to Israel). In Europe today, we can still see this being played out in Russia’s war against Ukraine, in which the churches of both nations (both variations of Christianity) are fully engaged against each other in the war. In America today, so-called Christian Nationalism is very much a product of large numbers of evangelical preachers who long for temporal power, who long for a return to the status ministers and the Church had in colonial America. In the history of this country, many Christian preachers were strong advocates for slavery (and some were firmly opposed). They also supported the decimation of indigenous natives in America and were active participants in trying to eradicate any trace of indigenous culture. And many British colonists came to America in order to flee the religious wars in Great Britain. Anti-Semitism is purely a byproduct of religious bigotry. Should I go on cataloging the sins of institutional Christianity? Not today. But perhaps you can explain why those who claim to be religious are entitled to rights that belong to no one else.
But back to Lessons in Chemistry (again). If you think that the conservative majority on the Supreme Court seeks to return us to the 1950s, perhaps that’s not correct. Could it be that they seek to return us to 1867, the uear before the 14th Amendment was adopted? Or perhaps it seeks to return us to 1788 when the Constitution was adopted. If the Supreme Court majority thinks of itself as being a group of originalists, that is, the Constitution should be based on an understanding of how the framers of the Constitution understood what they had written, what were the various rights of people have in those years? What were their roles in society?
What rights did women have in 1788, much less 1868? Basically, they had none other than what their husbands granted them. They certainly didn’t have the right to vote or have the right to do much of anything. Every right that women have today, from the right to vote to the right to get a credit card, to the right to engage in family planning, to the right not to be raped by their husbands, and all that and more. Is there anything in the lives of women today that resembles those of 150 or 230 years ago? Do you know any woman who would want to go back to those days? Every right that women have gained in the intervening years has had to be fought for; they were not freely given by men. That has not changed in all that time. The same is true for every right gained by anyone since the founding of the republic. None of them were freely given by those with rights; they had to be wrested from them.
The right to have an abortion, the right to personal autonomy (the same right, by the way, that was insisted on by those who refused to have Covid vaccinations, or the right to freely assemble in a church during the pandemic), is denied or severely limited to the point of absurdity, not to mention the real medical harm to women, in eighteen states. If this is a step backward for women, it is also a step backward for men, whether they recognize it as such or not. If it is indicative of a desire by some (men) to return women to a subservient status, it would be no great surprise. Women, after all, are the ones who tempt men to sin, or that’s apparently how the Bible sees it. Boys will be boys, and girls should put an aspirin or something between their knees so that boys can’t do what boys want to do. In the relations between men and women, men are clearly seen as the victims. It is all such nonsense. Think of it, perhaps, as another gift of religion — not.
So, what, for us, is the ultimate lesson in Lessons in Chemistry and in the Dobbs decision? It is that the past hasn’t gone away; it always seems to be lurking behind us. Or, as Faulkner said (and I know I frequently quote him) “The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.” But there is another lesson to be found in the Ohio vote: Women (and lots of men, too) aren’t having it. The vote was a clear repudiation of Dobbs, of Alito and his cohorts. This isn’t a matter of party politics. This is about who women think they are, who they want to be, and how they want to see the possibilities in their futures, and they won’t allow the Supreme Court to stand in their way.
Thanks, Amy.
Thank you Amy.
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