Anti-Choice, Patriarchy, Religion, & the Supreme Court

Conservative Evangelical Christians and other anti-choice and anti-LGBTQ zealots are downright gitty and literally ecstatic over the possibility of finally receiving some of the promised dividends for selling their souls to the Devil in sacrificing all their “deeply held religious beliefs” by standing with Donald Trump throughout his unambiguously morally-reprehensible actions and policy directives.

They have stood with him from the time of his destructive and epithet-laden tweets, to his promise of constructing a wall on our southern border that “Mexico will pay for,” to the Access Hollywood tape, to revelations of his payoffs to quiet a porn star, to separating babies and young children from their parents and putting them in cages.

Throughout Trump’s bully-in-an-America-shop candidacy to his plowing into the White House, his expectant base of supporters ran like the excited sprinters in the annual Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, all with the hoped-for remuneration of Trump packing the judicial branch with decidedly right-wing judges and justices.

The wall with Mexico was merely one of the many structures Trump promised to build. When he asserted during the campaign to punish women who have abortions and their doctors who perform them, he was figuratively walling-off women from their reproductive rights.

By committing to reproduce the Supreme Court with an untra-conservative majority and promising to reverse both Roe v. Wade and marriage equality, he gave social conservatives the vision of seeing a gigantic concrete and barbed-wire structure suspended high into the Heavens separating women and LGBTQ people from their bodies and from their civil rights, and, certainly, from their humanity.

If Trump fulfills his promises, the impact on religious conservatives will have even wider-ranging implications than a 2014 Supreme Court decision.

The owners of the businesses have religious objections to abortion, and according to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients.

Justice Samuel Alito, in the majority opinion, Burwell v. Hobby Lobby.

We can add “Justice” Samuel Alito, “Justice” Anthony Kennedy, “Justice” John Roberts, “Justice” Clarence Thomas, and last, but certainly not least, “Justice” Antonin Scalia to an oxymoron list since this Supreme Court decision amounted to anything but justice for women.

The five men voting in the majority denied the rights of women, most particularly working-class women employees at “closely-held” (family owned with a limited number of shareholders) for-profit corporations, which includes most U.S. corporations, control over their reproductive freedoms generally extended to women at other companies.

The case involved the owning families of the national chain of craft stores, Hobby Lobby, plus a Christian bookstore chain, and Conestoga, a Mennonite family-owned woodworking company who claimed and won the argument that the 2010 Affordable Care Act, and in particular, a few specific contraceptive devises covered by health insurance companies, violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 stating that “Government shall not substantially burden a person’s exercise of religion….”

The decision follows former 2012 presidential candidate Willard Mitt Romney’s assertion that “Corporations are people my friend,” and clearly shows that million- and billion-dollar corporate families certainly exist more humanly (they are more of a person) and have more rights than workers.

When patriarchal social and economic systems of male domination attempt to keep women pregnant and taking care of children, they can restrict their entry, or at least their level and time of entry, into the workplace, and ensure women’s dependence on men economically and emotionally.

As women produce more and more children, expanding numbers of little consumers emerge to contribute to the capitalist system ever increasing profits for owners of business and industry.The patriarchal imperative to control women and LGBTQ bodies amounts to imperatives to control their minds and life choices.

And when patriarchal social and family structures converge with patriarchal religious systems, which reinforce strictly defined gender hierarchies of male domination, women and girl’s oppression and the oppression of those who transgress sexuality and gender-based boundaries became inevitable.

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The post Anti-Choice, Patriarchy, Religion, & the Supreme Court appeared first on The Good Men Project.

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