A near-fatal horse mutilation in Fife, Scotland has the local authorities scrambling to find a culprit.

“A four-day-old foal has been slashed across the neck at a farm in Fife. Police and the Scottish SPCA said the black and white mare is lucky to be alive after the incident near Cupar. Authorities believe last week’s attack was deliberate. Fife Constabulary have launched an inquiry and are considering whether the attack may have been carried out by pagans…”

How terrible that this has… wait a minute, did he say “pagans”? Why would he think it might be Pagans?

“…the attack may have been carried out by pagans dabbling in the occult ahead of the summer solstice on June 21 – a key date in the occult calendar. A police spokesman said: ‘We certainly will not be discounting the line of enquiry that it is related to satanists.’”

So is it Satanists or Pagans, I’m confused. They must have some evidence other than “near the Summer Solstice”, right?

“It is one isolated incident at the moment and we can’t immediately tie it to anything specific.”

Ah, so it’s merely a theory then. No actual evidence. Not that this stopped a sensationalistic (and slanderous) story from getting printed, or police from basing possible suspects on a random guess instead of actual physical evidence. Then again, maybe Pagans and Satanists roam the countryside in Scotland slashing at horses in the run-up to the Summer Solstice, and I’m just missing out on this well-known tradition.

“Through our own abortion experiences, we came to reject the dichotomy of abortion politics that would require women to choose between two beliefs: that pregnancy is a miracle, the fetus’s life is sacred, and therfore abortion is wrong; or that pregnancy is merely a physical event, the fetus is just a mass of tissue, and therefore abortion is insignificant. As feminists and Pagans, we believe that women are literally a gateway between worlds and that abortion is a responsible exercise of the sacred power of choice.” – Minerva Earthschild and Vibra Willow, The Pagan Book of Living and Dying

I’m not really sure I want this discussion, I could be talking about Pagans in Iceland, or the latest stupid exploits of “The Impaler”. But ever since the murder of late-term abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, I’ve been unable to really focus on anything else. Maybe it’s because my wife’s a doctor, and I take the murder of doctors seriously. Maybe it’s because I’m fed up with hearing earnest pundits place Tiller and his sociopathic assassin on equal moral standing because they both have “blood on their hands”. Whatever the reason, I don’t feel I can go any further without saying something. Without reiterating again, a Pagan view on abortion, and the primal right of women to be the final arbiters of carrying a pregnancy to term.

I agree with Starhawk when she says that pregnancy and birth is a profound and holy mystery. That it is an encounter with goddess (or The Goddess), where weighty decisions concerning life and death are made, and that outside attempts to legislate or control a woman’s pregnancy and birth is to deny her “deepest spiritual self”. Sometimes, in the crux of that holy moment, a potential life is rejected. We may not always agree with or like this situation, but the sacred power of choice can’t be denied, lest we deny a woman’s moral agency in the matter of birth. Throughout recorded history husbands, rulers, family, religious leaders, and various laws have tried to regulate and control that agency, but despite this, women have found ways to choose the time and manner of bearing children.

“…when couples have children in excess, let abortion be procured before sense and life have begun; what may or may not be lawfully done in these cases depends on the question of life and sensation.” – Aristotle, Politics 7.16

While I see the issue of abortion’s morality and legality one that centers on whether women are allowed and able to control their own reproductive process, the current climate in which doctors are killed and clinics bombed is partially a political construct designed to garner votes and split former alliances.

“Abortion (or more accurately the battle over legal access to an abortion) is the biggest red herring in the history of politics. Shortly before Ronald Reagan took office, conservative Christian groups (disappointed with Carter’s liberal form of Christianity, and reeling from the Nixon years) were looking for an issue to help galvanize their base and move them forward. They realized that abortion was the ticket. It not only created some great sound-bites (child genocide, etc etc) and helped define the “them” (evil secular humanists and liberal Christians), but it also helped erode the traditional Catholic support of the Democratic party (the modern Catholic church since around 1917 was soundly anti-abortion).”

In the years since abortion was politicized, we’ve grown used to inflammatory rhetoric like “baby-killer”, “genocide”, “murderer”, and “butcher” being used to describe doctors who perform abortions. Then those same groups who paint the doctors as genocidal tyrants are “shocked” when someone takes them seriously. After all, who wouldn’t want to kill Hitler, right? Not realizing the complex ethical and emotional decisions behind each and every one of these controversial procedures.

“My wife and I spent a week in Dr. Tiller’s care after we learned our 21 week fetus had a severe defect incompatible with life. The laws in our state prevented us from ending the pregnancy there, and Dr. Tiller was one of maybe three choices in the whole nation at that gestational age. My wife just called with the news of his murder, weeping. I can’t really come up with some profound political statement just now, so let me just list some memories of Dr. Tiller. I remember him firmly stating that he regarded the abortion debate in the US to be about the control of women’s sexuality and reproduction … I remember being puzzled about a T-shirt he was wearing, which said “Happy Birthday Jennifer from team Tiller!” or something similar. Turns out it commemorated the birthday of a fifteen year old girl who was raped, became pregnant, and came to Tiller for an abortion. As luck would have it, she was in the clinic the same week as her birthday. So the clinic threw her a party. The walls of the clinic reception and waiting room are literally covered with letters from patients thanking him. Some were heartbreaking – obviously young and/or poorly educated people thanking Dr. Tiller for being there when they had no other options, explaining their family, church etc. had abandoned them.”

Now this man has been eliminated. Murdered, assassinated, snuffed-out, because he had been labeled a murderer and a Nazi by anti-abortion groups looking to inflame their followers, and cable television hacks looking to boost their ratings share.

As Pagans, whether we personally agree with abortion or not, we do agree that no singular moral teaching should control us all. That we know and acknowledge the existence of many paths, many powers, and many teachings. That in a world where people worship different gods and hold to different ways, co-existence and tolerance is the key to survival. We should see the murder of someone for holding and practicing a different (and legal) point of view on the question of life as a tragedy that undermines our attempts at working together in a secular society. I yearn for a post-Christian America because I yearn for a country where no one group feels privileged and empowered enough to interfere with the lives and medical decisions of women.

The Supreme Court is holding a private conference this Thursday to decide if they will review a recent decision in the ongoing legal battle between a coalition of 13 Native American Tribal Nations (and various environmental groups) and the National Forest Service (and a ski resort) over the use of treated (but non-potable) wastewater snow on the San Francisco Peaks. A mountain range that the tribes consider sacred land, and that using waste-water on it would be “like putting death on the mountain”. The Obama administration is opposing review of the case, while the petitioners want to remind the government that they have a sacred responsibility towards the land they took from the tribes.

“It is worth remembering that our government took the Peaks from petitioner tribes. It placed the tribes on reservations and pledged to respect their cultures and traditions. It is hardly implausible that Congress passed a law in 1993 providing under these rare circumstances that the tribes’ religious liberty should be respected.”

So far, lawyers and judges haven’t been very respectful towards the tribes opposed to pumping wastewater onto sacred land just so a single ski resort can stay open longer. A Ninth Circuit judge said is was merely a case of “damaged spiritual feelings”, while government lawyers have been outright insulting towards Native belief systems.

“Courtroom observers were dismayed by the lack of cultural sensitivity on the part of government lawyers. After a witness described how the spraying of wastewater to make artificial snow would defile the sanctity of medicinal plants gathered on the mountain, a government lawyer asked if the medicine man knew he could purchase herbs at health food stores. A government lawyer also questioned a witness by going down a long list of sacred sites one by one and asking if a particular site was on federal land. In each case, the witness, a Hopi man, humbly replied, “I don’t know.” Eventually, the witness told the lawyer that his culture doesn’t view land in that way, that there is no concept of land ownership. The lawyer did not acknowledge his statement in any way, but instead went back to the list, unapologetically asking the same questions in the same manner.”

You have to wonder if Barack “Black Eagle” Obama of the Crow Nation knows and approves of what Elena Kagan and the Department of Justice are doing in his administration’s name. Will it damage his popularity among Native American Indians, many of whom supported him in the 2008 elections? If SCOTUS decides to hear the appeal, will it be on a Supreme Court that includes Sonia Sotomayor, a judge who is a seeming advocate for the rights of minority religions?

In 1994, Judge Sotomayor ruled in favor of two prisoners who claimed to practice Santeria, a Caribbean religion that involves animal sacrifice and voodoo, saying that “distinctions between ‘traditional’ and ‘non-traditional’ religions” are “intolerable.”

Whether SCOTUS decides to hear the appeal or not, it could have lasting implications regarding the application of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and questions of how we approach issues of religious freedom and religious rights when the land itself is sacred and holy. I’m hoping SCOTUS doesn’t decide to punt on this one, and allows the case to be heard. If not, I guess “screw your sacred land, we want to ski” will be the rallying cry of our government and court system. For more information on this case, check out the round-up of official documents regarding this case at the SCOTUS Blog. You may also want to peruse the official Save The Peaks site.