Wearing Your Sin

While I like to rant about things out of my control, like the pollen, I also feel entitled to rant about other things as well.

One of the things that should be in everyone’s control is parenthood. Whether or not to have a child should totally be up to the parents. I guess in a perfect world we would want two happy well adjusted people who really loved children and would do right by them to be parents. Failing that, at least one of the parents should meet that criteria. In my mind, you have to have the mother’s total 100 percent buy in, or it’s a nonstarter. I don’t think I’m being sexist, or old school, I think I’m being pragmatic. If the mother can’t commit to 100 percent love and devotion to a child, she should have an out.

No, I’m not talking about adoption or orphanages. The horror of state run orphanages and places like depicted in the Magdalene Sisters are well documented. The potential mother should have a choice about when to exercise her lifetime commitment to raising a child, if ever.

Obviously what got me started thinking about this again is the law in Texas making abortion vigilantes out of the anti-abortion folks. They want to punish the mother and anyone associated with a woman exercising her rights over her body. How mean, how hateful, how non-Christian, how non-conservative.

Non-conservative, you say? Yes, because, while the Repubs have created their “Big Tent” by drawing in every hateful nut job in America from bigots to misogynists under the label of “conservative values”, actually being a fiscal conservative has not come in to play. How so, you ask?

As far back as 1972, the Rockefeller Commission determined that a liberalized abortion policy superseded a reduction in crime eighteen years in the future. The statistics were further confirmed in a study done by Steven Levitt of the University of Chicago and John Donohue of Yale University in 2001. Their study concludes that the states with a high abortion rate have also experienced the greater reduction in crime. You can’t argue the facts, unless you’re a Republican political candidate.

How can the Republicans, “true conservatives”, ignore the study commissioned by one of their own? The study conclusively points out that unwanted children become society’s burden in the future. It would seem that true conservatives should be in favor of molding a society where the “unwanted” children would not be disrupting classrooms, creating crimes of varying degrees of sophistication and violence before finally being moved into the prison system. The average cost to house a criminal in prison is $32,000 a year. It would seem that true conservatives would prefer these children to be taxpayers, not taxtakers.

The only rationale that I can come up with the Republicans disconnect from a demonstrable conservative issue is the “holier than thou” elements they’ve attracted over the years. These folks would like for us to turn back the clock to the “Scarlet Letter” days. Rather than a letter sown onto their dress to signify their sin of fornication, the “modern” Christians would prefer the woman have a child to carry as a constant reminder of her sin. I think all of the concern about “fetal pain” and the “beginning of life” are just red herrings designed to draw us away from their true motivation. These people want the woman to pay for her sin, and they are not content to wait for Judgement Day. They want her to pay now, and in the hereafter. They want her to wear her sin.

I’ll finish this one up by saying I’m for free, on demand birth control, whatever shape it takes. There should be a Planned Parenthood office every hundred feet if necessary to keep unwanted children born. Bob Barker used to end each show by reminding everyone to have their pet spayed or neutered. Are we more concerned about unwanted pets than we are children? God, I hope not.

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