Schizo

Every sperm is sacred,
every sperm is great;
if a sperm is wasted,
God gets quite irate.
--Every Sperm is Sacred, Monty Python

The management of fertility is one of the most important functions of adulthood
--Germaine Greer

Hypocrisy: Prejudice with a halo
--Ambrose Bierce

Morality become hypocrisy if it means accepting mothers
suffering or dying in connection with unwanted pregnancies
and illegal abortions--and unwanted children living in misery
--Gro Harlem Brundtland, Director General of World Health Organization
__________

The fundamentalist-Republican stance on life is schizoid in that it claims to be pro-life, yet its practices are often anti-life. You can't have it both ways.

They are pro-life when it comes to their stance on contraception or abortion. They love the fetus, but hate the child. It is a logical variation of love the sinner, hate the sin. In this case, the sinners are pre-birth--the faultless egg and sperm, which unite under heavenly sanction to form the fetus. The sin is the product, or the child. After all, in their dogma, we are all sinners, produced as we are from original sin, also known as biological imperative.

They have yet to reconcile the dictate to go forth and multiply with the reality on the ground, which is that it needs occur with assistance of a bit of the nasty. Unless, of course, it is to be an immaculate conception, and only Mary, Komodo Dragons and a few other sundry organisms have yet to achieve that feat.

They are also pro-life when forcing the bodily existence of brain dead individuals like Terri Schiavo, Jeb Bush's cause celebre.

Yet when it comes to alleviating the pain or burden of a life--say, when it comes to allowing for stem cell research, which holds out the promise of cure for so many terminal illnesses--they are rabidly against scientific inquiry. I suppose that unless the misfortune has befallen them and theirs, it is just God smiting you, so buck up.

Apparently, science is good if it allows prolonging the existence of a body sans brain, or if it allows a painfully premature fetus to survive, which will endure a lifetime of physical and psychological burden, but it is not good if it seeks to alleviate the suffering of a viable human life.

They celebrate the war, and the miracles in medicine wrought there. But I cannot be happy for a serviceman who has lost half his brain, and lives under a helmet, or a plastic skull carapace to keep things intact, but whom cannot recall his mother or his wife.

That is no miracle, that is a grave tragedy and a miscarriage of justice. That is allowing this venal administration a pass, to call a lethal casualty an injury. Preserving bodily functions does not necessarily mean preserving a human being.

They are against a life of quality, or ease, as that is solely the domain of those whom God has favored with economic access. In a sense, it is the idea of blessings via good works--a mindset which the fundamentalists, who cleave to the concept of an elect salvation, would ordinarily reject. If thou hast gone forth and prospered, then you win in life's lottery. They are Jamesian economically, Pauline otherwise.

Then we have the loss of the Civil Rights initiatives which were introduced to level the academic, and therefore, economic playing field, programs like Head Start and Upward Bound, which have taken hits every year of GWB's administration. So the economically poor children are denied a leg up. Pro life, just not a very good life.

But if they get to high school, there will surely be a recruiter to offer a way out of the barrio or the housing development. And since it is likely that student will suffer on the standardized achievement scores due the trials of a deprived upbringing, he or she will be most well-suited for the grunt positions upon enlistment. Dangerous positions, which means if they didn't get taken out on the front end of life, their demise will only be deferred by a couple of decades.

Here is where the fundamentalist's anti-life occurs. They are thirsty to send these individuals off to be killed, and kill others, in a patriotic war. So their agenda is not strict conservation of life. It is more like an enlightened self-interest. Fetuses are good for what they might buy the defenders: salvation, entrenched classism, a disempowered working class, bodies to be sacrificed on a nationalist altar. Fetus activism makes economic and theological sense to the activists.

It behooves the religious conservatives to advocate for fetuses and against women's rights--but not because they wish to surrogate them. Far from it. It is out of their own economic self-interest. The health care behemoth will be fed by ministering to the blighted existence of the medically condemned, the lower echelon jobs will be filled by each new generation, and the military complex will be fed by the more physically fit specimens.

This will allow for future profiteering on the backs of the matured fetus's life. For the lifetime managed care of the damaged; in their death, by the swell of patriotism so necessary to keep the military juggernaut rolling.

The neocons buck every effort to lighten the load of the neediest, ergo reducing food stamp benefits and medical assistance, and increasing the bureaucracy to obtain those benefits, providing an insurmountable wall for many to scale, hence the victory they can claim over producing shrinking welfare rolls. The absence of universal health care continues to leave the working poor to fall between the cracks. Yet still, these individuals function to keep the economic machine well-greased through their abject neediness and desperation.

Rather than being a blessed event life, and death, becomes a governmentally regulated production line. As our Court turns more conservative, the coercion will become more strong arm in tactic.

--Lisa