Rule Your Life

You want to be the one ruling your life. Yet, we all realize that's not the reality; living in a community demands from us that we allow some of our rights to be limited so we can all get along. But still, there are some things we must be able to decide on our own, some decisions are ours, and ours alone.

Here's some of those decisions: who we have sex with, who we marry and what's done to our bodies. No one should ever have anything to say about what happens between the sheets and behind closed doors between two (ore more) consenting adults, except the adults involved. No one should have a say in which consenting adults of what sex, gender, race or social standing are to be married to one another. And no one but myself decides what's done with or put inside my own body. And for the most part these basic preconditions for individual freedom are respected in modern society. There's no such thing as "forced vaccination," there's always a choice, and as with all choices this choice can have consequences. But it's your choice nonetheless.

There's a group of people however who do not respect these individual freedoms. They are hell-bent on ruling your life for you. They have a book, the Bible, that tells them exactly what to do and what not to do. "Thou shalt" and "thou shalt not" statements from that book are translated by those people into political ideology, disrespecting the separation between Church and state. What I do with my body is for me to decide, as long as I'm not bothering anyone else. Any existing, living breathing persons that is. This is all very easy for me to say, because I'm a man. But for women there's a risk of becoming pregnant, by choice, chance or force, and once that's happened there's a chance they lose control over their own body. Especially if you live in the United States of America in this day and age, when far right conservative forces, mostly white men like me, want women to carry pregnancy full term and deliver the baby. They prioritize the rights of a yet non-existent person over the rights of a living, breathing woman.

This is wrong, no matter what the Bible says (it actually says nothing explicitly about abortion, as I've reported two months ago in my post Biblical Abortion). But it fits perfectly with the GOP's trend towards ever more authoritarianism. They use the excuse of "state rights" to implement whatever authoritarian policy they want; right after the overturning of Dobbs v. Wade, they said that they didn't ban abortion but just left it to state legislators. Technically this is true, but this means that red states have effectively banned abortions, something that I've discussed a lot on this blog. United States senator from South Carolina, Lindsey Graham, said exactly that right after the SCOTUS decision in May. He said it's the constitutional thing to do, to leave abortion legislation in the hands of individual state legislators. Well, I guess he doesn't think much of the Constitution, as he's now proposed a federal law to ban abortion after 15 weeks of pregnancy, with exceptions only for rape, incest or to protect the life of the mother.

I guess he thinks that's being reasonable. It's not. The only reasonable position is to leave the decision to the women. It's a private matter, to be decided only in conversation with medical experts. I'm not going over the whole pro-choice versus pro-life debate again; that's settled in my mind and the pro-choice side wins every time. Instead I'd like to point out the hypocrisy of Lindsey Graham, and how his party is slowly but surely eroding individual freedoms we've taken for granted for so long. Next they'll go for marriage-equality or interracial marriage. The GOP makes no secret of their disdain for same-sex couples or transgender people. Watch the below linked video to see how fast and how easy Graham contradicts his own statements. The party of "small government" is in fact the exact opposite of what they claim to be, almost every time.

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