She Summed Up Women’s Rights for Us: Women Have the Right to be Born.

This is Really About Militant Christianity: Watch Out for the Mastrianos

For the wife of the Republican candidate for governor or Pennsylvania, women’s rights can be summarized as “a woman’s right to be born.” Yep.  That is what a woman looking to be a “first” lady (a term I don’t understand) of this state says to crowds when asked by her anti-abortion husband to remark on abortion. Then she, Rebbie, said, that in Pennsylvania, “we certainly believe in a woman's right to the Second Amendment, don't we?”

Mastriano is a potential disaster for my state. He wants PA to be the Florida of the north, without a governor “reigning over you with terror and fear.” He also wants the right to pick who wins elections. I did not believe the people of my state, affectionately known to some of us as Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and Alabama in between, could take this man seriously as a candidate for governing our state. But now I am not so sure. He is up against a Jew, first of all, and that is a bit much for some people to take. He is a retired military man, which deserves reverential treatment for some reason I don’t get. He wore a Confederate uniform for a photo shoot at the Army War College, which was denounced by the College. He is a Trumper, DeSantis acolyte, election denier, rights reverser, and hater of women. He had his rump shot, so no left-winger stands a chance against him. I don’t know, he’s the one who said it.

We already know the ideologies of right-wing Republicans, so you don’t need more ranting from me, although here I go. But people believe this stuff and love it. It is with intent to Christianize the state – to hell with diversity, freedom of and from religion, democracy, and who people actually are.  It is with intent to force everyone to behave according to a masculine, militant, overly-simplified and hate-filled Christian set of beliefs with suspicious bases in some two-thousand-year-old static, stale, and questionable theology for the ages. That theology has been concocted from a bunch of self-serving interpretations of what some clergy/ministers believe God wants. [I love that Christians believe God is omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent, but certain people have a direct pipeline to actually read his mind. That should be the first flag that something is not right with religion.]

The hate is never what I expected from Christians, but it always was just below the surface. Above the surface was peace, love, kindness, humility, and the Golden Rule. Below the surface was immense distrust of anyone who did not believe the same way and, more emphatically, behave appropriately. Premarital sex, abortion, divorce, giving the church money, educating your children, women’s submission to their fathers and husbands, traditional gender roles, heterosexuality, and that queasy, greasy way that evangelical Christians speak about “the Lord.”  They all know what is right for you. You must listen and obey. You must subordinate yourself and your wishes to God – or really, the congregation who is aware of your every move, surveilling you to be sure you are doing right by them, the face of evangelical Christianity -- I mean, God.

I am not a religious person.  I grew up Catholic, my mother insistent that my father, also a military officer like my mother, convert. I went to 12 years of Catholic schools mostly in the deep South, found out at age 14 my mother was a survivor of the Jewish genocide in Austria during Hitler’s reign, a refugee and immigrant to the US after several tries in other European countries, and then started to take a deeper look at what I had grown up professing to believe in.

We are the religion we are inculcated with. Most of us in the US are born into families with a professed religion or some history of one. We don’t choose, we integrate. We grow up believing that our religion is the true one, the best one, and others are missing the point. And we are scolded when we question, probably because the questions children have can’t really be answered in truthfulness. We don’t know. We don’t know why we should believe. We don’t know what happens to us when we die. We don’t know where the soul resides, if we actually have one, and how do we know that we do anyway? We definitely don’t know or agree on when we become fully human beings.

My mother was intensely religious.  She joined and then led Catholic charismatic groups back in the 1970s and 80s, was sought out for her wisdom, and intensified her beliefs with Jungian analyses until her death.  It was interesting being her academic and studious daughter. Eventually I had the confidence and courage to question her beliefs. Let’s just say that while we were very close, neither of us was very persuasive to the other.  I completely believed that she looked forward to dying so she could by one with God, or Jesus, or the Holy Spirit – one or all of them. She was morphine-compromised, but almost giddy at the thought she was near death.

I also married a fundamentalist/evangelical young man who had been “saved” from something dreadful when he was 19. He needed me. I understood that as love, for a lot of reasons stemming from my childhood. But he despaired every other day that he was not following God’s laws, and was extraordinarily depressed, even suicidal during those years.  I had no idea what to do about that but be the nurturing person I had been forced to grow up to be.  Eventually we divorced.

So, I have had a good share of my life caught up in conservative Christianity. The (unpolitical) Southern Baptists my husband and I joined in the early 1980s firmly believed Catholicism was a cult, so that ended any discussion of pretty much anything I had to say.  Proving something isn’t is hopeless. I soon dropped out of Sunday School. I tried to believe. I decided we all have the same God, we just went about dealing with him in different ways.  But we don’t.  Christians do not all have the same God, never mind people of other monotheistic (which Christianity decidedly is not with 3-in-1, and 1 made up of 3) religions.

I have taken the study of religion and how people need and want it seriously in my academic life. I joined a Jewish congregation for a time, but the rules were just so onerous for being able to join in a faith experience or make it a part of my life.  I brought my children up to know they are Jewish because my mother was and I am, besides my mother’s colorful history, my DNA tests say so. But we are not believers in a spiritual figment of human imagination that tries to shield us from the vicissitudes of life, prepare us for what comes after our life is over, and persuade us to perform rituals that show we belong. God is a creation of humans. People need him to ameliorate their fears and satisfy their needs – or make them happy for the sacrifices they must make and the traumas they suffer. But mostly they need him to quell their fears about what else they were brought into the world for. It must be to live to have an everlasting life in some sphere because being just dead and buried is too much for our egos to handle.

Now people in this country, this state, are being pressured to show off their Christian bona fides. Nothing matters as much as guns, women for serving men, pregnant women becoming mothers, and wealth. And post that American flag because it shows you are an American. We might not know it otherwise. God’s warriors are on the humble and terrible mission to make sure all of us behave as they would have us behave. Freedom is meaningless. There is no freedom with religious ideologies forced upon us. But above all we must maintain our rights to threaten, shoot and kill people who get in our way (uh, the Bible says so), be real men who have sex with girls and women whether they want it or not because it is our right as men (uh, the Bible says so)  chain those women to motherhood when the man’s act changes her life forever (right, the Bible says that, too), and prevent knowledge from penetrating our minds because it might challenge beliefs (definitely what God wants).

Pennsylvanians, we cannot allow a man like this to rule, because that is what he will attempt to do – rule, not govern.  And we cannot have the woman who stands with him on this pedestal think that women’s rights are the rights to be born. (Do men have equal rights here?) But carrying a gun is a critical women’s right. She hasn’t a clue, except that she knows exactly what she is doing, pandering. This can’t happen.

Make noise. Show up. Make politicians hear your story. They don’t think about individuals. They don’t really care. They want the power to legislate your lives.