I know that it is a settled fact that Brett Kavanaugh is on the United States Supreme Court for as long as he lives. However, sexual assault, rape and child molesting are no more acceptable to me now than they were last week. Neither is the continual verbal hazing of women by the President of the United States, who is himself a sexual predator, that has gone on for the past two years. I am disgusted to my core by the moral blackmail that has been used against pro life people in an attempt to coerce us into supporting monsters for high positions in this country. When religious leaders join in with it, it is spiritual abuse, and I am way past tired of that, too. Being pro life does not mean accepting rape and supporting putting rapists in positions of power. The very thought is anathema.
I posted that paragraph on my Facebook page on Saturday. A reader responded with the latin phrase “anathema sit.” This phrase means “he is anathema” and was used in times past to express that someone had been excommunicated.
I don’t think the Church does this kind of showy excommunicating anymore. The closest I’ve seen was when Pope Francis excommunicated members of the Mafia a few years ago, and even that wasn’t like the scene in the old movie Beckett, with its candles, black robes and thundering pronouncements.
Still, “anathema sit” is a fine Biblical phrase, especially today. So far as I’m concerned it applies to every rapist-loving, sexual-assault-supporting, child-abuse-backing walking barrel of dirt on the planet.
I tried to make a play on the phrase “anathema sit” last Saturday. I pulled out my hillbilly Latin and my faulty memory of Scripture and typed “si quit per falsum evangelii ipsi anathema sit.” The feeble little joke fell flat, as it should have. But I still think my point was valid.
Anthema sit means “he is anathema.” It comes from Scripture. I think it’s from one of the letters St Paul wrote. He said (and I paraphrase and misquote) “a man who changes the Gospel is anathema.”
I thought that applied rather elegantly to the situation at hand. Pro life people have, for half a century, been blackmailed on peril of their immortal souls to act as Stepford voters. We’ve been told over, and over, and over that we must ignore every other issue, and, as it turns out, every moral precept, in order to support the push to get five justices on the Supreme Court who have been vetted by our religious and moral leaders to be “the ones” who will overturn Roe.
If we ever, for any reason, stopped marching in line long enough to consider the wrecking ball that our movement has become to our democracy, or the dastardly people that we are being asked to blindly support, then we were told that we had become fellow travelers with the long knives and bloody butchery of abortion.
Thinking for ourselves, caring about basic morality or the common good, were verboten in the Stepford voter world of pro life politics. Stepping out of line would make us guilty of mortal sin and doom our eternal souls to hell. That was the story.
That is how the Republican Party has managed to transfer so much of the wealth of this nation to a few extremely wealthy campaign donors. It is how we’ve gotten a Supreme Court that has given Constitutional Rights to corporations, adjudicated a national Right to Work and opened the floodgates for people of wealth to literally buy our government with dark money that no one tallies and no one has to tell they are using to buy election after election.
It is also how Christian people have been bamboozled, bullied and blackmailed into turning their backs on the Gospel. It is how political-whore religious leaders have reduced Jesus to a get out of hell free card and used Him as a club to beat and batter anyone who fails to support their work as political operatives for the Republican Party and extreme right wing policies.
This almost total abandonment of the Gospel of Christ for the gospel of Republican Party worship has driven people away from Christ in massive numbers. We are losing whole generations to Him because we are preaching, teaching, and following a false political god.
Si quit per falsum evangelii ipsi anathema sit indeed.
Something terrible happened last Saturday. But something wonderful also happened.
The United States Senate put an attempted rapist and sexual predator on the Supreme Court. That’s the terrible.
The United States Senate put the fifth hand-picked, signed, sealed, and delivered golden boy, anointed by the pro life movement, all the political preachers, and legions of screaming Stepford voters as The One on the Supreme Court. Justice Kavanaugh, we were told over and over, is The One. Not only that, but he is the only One who can fill this position.
He will overturn Roe v Wade and Casey. That’s why pro life people had to support him, no matter what he had done. It is why no one else could be nominated to fill this spot. God sent a sexual predator to overturn Roe because, evidently, God has a sadistic sense of humor and despises women just as much as the political preachers and the President of the United States who nominated The One.
The fact is that there are now — count them — one, two, three, four, five handpicked, vetted, promised ones on the Court. We have paid with our souls, our ability to think, our fidelity to Christ, our witness for Him, and our country. But we have five votes that we have been promised over and over and over again will overturn Roe v Wade and Casey.
But that isn’t the wonderful thing that happened. The wonderful thing is that we are now free. We don’t have to be Stepford voters ever again.
We can pay attention to other issues, such as protecting social security and health care, rebuilding our infrastructure, taking the power back from the wealthy and giving it to the people again, keeping our kids safe in schools and providing every child with a first-class, free education. We can end this endless war and finally live in peace. We can reclaim our sanity and stop blindly hating one another. Maybe we can even begin to follow the real Jesus Christ of the real Gospels. We can be Americans again.
There is a catch to this. We have five justices on the Supreme Court who were put there, not to support the sanctity of human life, but to make America a government of the wealthy, by the wealthy and for the wealthy. Their real job isn’t overturning Roe. That’s just the hook in our mouths that the power brokers have used to drag us around. Their real job, and why they were nominated, is draining every last drop of blood out of the people of this country and putting it into the coffers of a few obscenely wealthy people. We have a Congress that labors in the same vineyard. Indeed, we have an entire political party and most of our religious leaders who are nothing but whores for the rich.
The moral destruction to this nation has been immense. And the almost total annihilation of the witness to Christ from our religious leaders has become rock hard and set in concrete.
There’s a lot of power to be had in the moral blackmail and spiritual abuse to which pro life people have been subjected this past half century. The holders of this power aren’t going to free us willingly.
But we can free ourselves. We just have to be very stubborn and tough about doing it.
I think this whole deal may falter. It won’t surprise me if we aren’t given some sort of King’s X story about how we must, on pain of committing the mortal sin of supporting abortion, continue to vote like a bunch of blind, totally amoral rabbits. But that’s a lie. Five votes are enough. And if they’re not enough, then why did we give away everything to get them?
I think it’s very possible that the five chosen ones will not perform as pro life people have been told they will. It’s a real possibility that they will punt and not overturn Roe. I know that the power brokers on the right need legal abortion so that the moral blackmail can continue.
I expect that pro life people have become so accustomed to Stepford voting, non-thinking, and sleazy what-about-him amorality that they won’t want to let it go. They’ve become habituated to following the easy false Gospel of vicious self-righteousness and condemnation that these liars and manipulators have taught them. I think that many pro life people will never be able to think, live, function as free people again.
A huge number of people, both inside the churches and outside of them, have been lost to Christ because of “religious” leaders who preach an anti-Christ political gospel. There is murder of the body, and there is murder of the soul. These political religious leaders are murderers of the soul on a mass scale.
Si quit per falsum evangelii ipsi anathema sit. A man who teaches a false gospel is anathema.
That is the judgement of Scripture on those who twist the Gospel for their own ends.
As for me, I am on a new path. I know that many of my pro life brothers and sisters will never leave their prison. They will allow themselves to be morally blackmailed and spiritually abused for the rest of their lives. They will continue Stepford voting and heaping hate on everyone their political preachers tell them to hate.
But I am a free American again. I’m going to work to reclaim my country for the common good, including an end to rape, sexual assault and child abuse. I am going to work for the sanctity and the dignity of all human life, from conception to natural death, including the lives and dignity of women. I will not allow anyone, no matter their collar, to subject me to moral blackmail and spiritual abuse ever again.
Will you join me?
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In