Virginia Congressman Eric Cantor is a misogynist, but oh how he loves money! 

Last week, he promised religious conservatives gathered at the ironically-named Values Voter Conference that he promised to work to overturn a woman’s right to choose what to do with her own body.  Critics complain that the US Congressional dust-ups over abortion rights and Planned Parenthood are actually nothing more than cynical attempts at raising money from these so-called values voters.   After all, just about everything the Republican Congress does can be connected, in one way or another, with campaign donations and scoring relatively meaningless political points. 

And, sure enough, yesterday, the US Congress wasted yet another chance to do something about the 15 million unemployed Americans in favor of passing some sort of symbolic bill that would, should it become law, allow hospitals to refuse to treat pregnant women who are either miscarrying or bleeding from their wombs.  In other words, “compassionate conservatism”. 

The US Congress under the leadership of both Rep Cantor and Ohio Representative John Boehner has tried this transparent rabbit trick no less than seven times this year alone.  While Boehner yesterday announced that, yes indeed, he is listening to voters whose number one concern is jobs, he then turned around and pulled-off yet another pointless exercise in allowing religious beliefs to trump state action.    

Something’s not adding up. 

For one, what in the world is Congress doing to legislate against legalized abortion in the first place?  Anyone who knows their history knows that Roe v Wade was passed because the alternative, illegal abortions, had killed hundreds of thousands of women.  No one was ever saying abortion is moral or even the responsible thing to do.  But rather than mandate that women refrain from choosing whether to abort or not, the US Supreme Court, which was much more reasonable in the 1970s than it is today, decided that federal oversight of abortion practices was the safer option. 

In other words, back then, Supreme Court judges were thinking of women and choice.  Freedom of choice.  Individual sovereignty.  Valuing individuals.  Today, however, as Tea Party apologists unjustifiably compare themselves to the US civil rights movement of the 1960s and continue to complain about another mandate, this one making it mandatory that citizens buy healthcare insurance, they’re also rabidly in favor of mandating that women not be allowed to choose. 

Some contradiction, eh?

Conservatives in Congress have attempted to pass bills that validate their belief that life begins at contraception, have attempted to force the US to refuse to fund the United Nations Population Fund, which seeks to lower out-of-control population growth (because abortion is one tactic being used to help populations control their size), has sought to force women to view sonograms of their unborn babies and have even tried to pass bills that mandate that unborn fetuses are citizens. 

The jobs question?  Apparently the economic problems confronting those of us who are already alive have to take second place to some pie-in-the-sky notion that, somewhere in Heaven, there’s a factory of baby souls ready to be implanted into pregnant women and that those souls have rights.  In other words, religious beliefs, especially the belief that all things are determined by God—something that implies humankind is not free—are driving the inane issue called “right to life” to insidious degrees all across the nation.  This year has seen more anti-abortion legislation, especially in the statehouse, than any year prior. 

I personally have no problem with people having such religious notions.  But I do have a problem with them trying to force their notions onto others.  That, my friends, is the essence of totalitarianism.  And the New Right won’t stop until we have some kind of combination of the Pope and the Presidency in a one-party system that, present situations considered, would be excessively autocratic and freedom-killing.  

At the same time these enemies of freedom pat themselves on the back for being “pro-life”, they cheer at Republican presidential debates when Rick Perry defends his compulsion to kill with his power of the pen.  Furthermore, they defend the killing of over 300,000 people in Iraq and Afghanistan as if nothing’s wrong with that at all.  After all, some of them seem to be thinking, those people in Iraq and Afghanistan are going to Hell anyway because they haven’t chosen Jesus Christ as their only personal savior. 

At a time when the world’s human population—estimated at this time to be around seven billion individuals—is getting too big for civilization to be sustainable in the long run, some of these anti-freedom zealots want to outlaw contraception altogether.  And they’re trying to use the powers of the state, particularly the judiciary, to do this.  Three ardent Catholics now sit on the US Supreme Court.  It’s as if they were pushed through Catholic law schools for just this sort of religious intrusion into the workings of a secular society on purpose. 

I was having a discussion with one of these zealots on Facebook, for example, and she said this: “Shame on those who allow abortions for victims of incest or rape!”  Later, she was on local news here in Dallas, along with 118 other women protesting contraception in front of one of many zealot-beleaguered Planned Parenthood locations.  Funny thing was, the ACLU donated $119,000--$100 for every protester—to help Planned Parenthood serve the community as it was designed to do. 

When are women going to start protesting churches that advocate cutting back freedom? 

Eric Cantor, who hates women so badly he’d allow them to die in a hospital emergency room rather than allow them to miscarry a child, doesn’t care about freedom either.  He advocates a deterministic worldview in which the rich control everyone else in a Big Brother scenario where, as Orwell wrote, Ignorance Is Strength. 

Occupy the churches!  Your hard-bitten taxes at work!