Christian Privilege and Flying

I recently got into a disagreement with someone who insisted that Christians are treated badly in the US and that non-Christians pretty much always have it better. So, I did some looking and found that there is a Christian Privilege List out there, much like the white privilege or male privilege or think privilege lists. Overall, it’s a pretty good list. The one flaw I saw (and that others pointed out) is that a lot of the items are only accurate if you’re on whichever side of the Catholic/Protestant divide is favored in your local area or social group, because a lot of the privileges don’t fully apply to Catholics who are surrounded by Protestants, at least from the experiences of Catholics I know, and from my experience around Evangelical Christians who tend to say dumb stuff about Catholicism. (Presumably, vice versa too, but I don’t have the experience of being a Protestant somewhere with a Catholic majority, so I couldn’t say from personal experience.)

The privilege at the very bottom of the list, “I can openly display my religious symbol(s) on my person or property without fear of disapproval, violence, and/or vandalism,” struck me today, because I’m flying for work. And like I always do when I walk into situations where I expect (reasonably or unreasonably) to be treated crappily, I use clothing as armor. I dress nice, I put on make-up, I wear jewelry. And it occurred to me that wearing one of the pretty cross necklaces that I own would probably be useful in creating the impression I want to create, and might make it less likely for me to get pulled for the dreaded extra pat-down or get bumped off a flight. It seemed crass, and borderline blasphemous, to callously use a sacred symbol that way, though, so I didn’t. But it occurred to me how unpleasant it must be to know that your religious symbols mark you as an other, as someone to watch and be suspicious of. And I imagine that there are people getting ready for their own flights, wondering if they should try to “pass” so they don’t miss their flight. And I think about the Saudi kid at the Boston Marathon, just another victim doing what the other victims were doing, and getting tackled solely because of his “suspicious” appearance.

The Boundaries of Religious Freedom

So, when the GOP and the Catholic bishops started screaming that Obama had “declared war on religion,” he announced that if employers had religious objections to birth control, insurance companies would pay for it directly instead. Sounds good to me. And yet, for many, that still wasn’t good enough. “What about the insurance company’s freedom of religion?” I’m sorry, if paying for health care is against your religion, methinks you should not be in the insurance business. (Plus, pretty much every health insurance company out there has finally figured out that BC is cheaper than abortions or pregnancy and would much rather insure a woman who has access to contraception than one who doesn’t.)

I’m a really strong supporter of religious freedom, but I don’t think it means the freedom to force your beliefs on other people, or the freedom to not do your job and continue to be paid. I mean, I have every right to convert to Quakerism tomorrow and decide I don’t want to support the military anymore, but I don’t have a right to expect a defense contracting company to keep paying me while I sit around playing Solitaire or rearrange my job so I don’t have to participate in the company’s main business.

My big argument with the outrage about requiring Catholic schools and hospitals to cover contraception is that if a religious organization wants to be an employer, they should be held to similar standards as secular employers. There are already *lots* of concessions to religious freedom for religious employers. Like the church school that got to ignore the ADA and fire a teacher for having a medical condition. Because it was a religious position, they don’t even have to pretend with a straight face that they had religious reasons for firing her.

But secular employees should be treated like…secular employees. If the church doesn’t require someone to be of the same faith to serve in a particular role, that role should be subject to all the rules of employment law.

Let’s not even get into the fact that what the President mandated has already been required by the EEOC for any employer that offers prescription coverage, on the basis of equal treatment of the sexes. Lots of Catholic schools and hospitals already comply with this rule, but it’s convenient to ignore that for political purposes.

Another issue with the whole idea is that there are Catholic-approved uses of hormonal birth control. Have PCOS and take the pill so that you don’t get cysts, or so you actually have periods? That’s not considered a sin. Similarly, as I understand it, married Catholic women who have severe health risks from pregnancy can generally talk to their priest and have him okay contraception. (The second is according to my Catholic sister-in-law.)

So, we aren’t even talking about something that automatically violates their religion, just something that can. Meaning they want to not only deny employees something because it violates their employer’s religion, but that they’re okay with denying it to good Catholics* who need it for other reasons (either that or they think you should have to reveal private health issues to your employer to get insurance coverage).

I think that if an employer has decided to provide insurance to its employees, what they do with that coverage is between them, their doctor, and the insurance company. It’s a benefit that belongs to the employee in exchange for work performed, and the employer has no more right to tell you what to do with it than they do to tell you how to spend your paycheck.

And if we can’t have a public option for health coverage because “oh no, socialism!” then it’s reasonable that the government set some standards on what actually counts as insurance in order to get the crazy costs and lack of care under control. Requiring all insurance to provide cost-saving preventive care free of charge (as part of the coverage that the employee and employer are paying for) is reasonable based on that. While insurance companies save money from birth control, that doesn’t mean they won’t charge for it too if they’re allowed because, hey, they can.

I like the proposed solution; I just don’t think it should have been necessary. I also don’t think it will be enough to satisfy people who think their freedom of religion means that no one should get to have contraception.

*I’m neither Catholic nor opposed to birth control, so please don’t take that as my saying that the ninety-some percent of Catholic women who use birth control are bad Catholics.

Why I’m in Favor of Same-Sex Marriage

I posted on Facebook why I don’t eat at Chik-Fil-A (i.e., because of this), and I got slammed, snarked, and condescended to by one person. My first thought was to reply in kind, my second was to inform them of the location of the useful little X button on Facebook posts and suggest that if they don’t like what I have to say, they avail themselves of it. But then I decided to try for something more like Amp’s approach here. I’m not sure I was successful, because I wrote a huge essay that I doubt the other person will do more than skim through, and because I didn’t really do enough to tie it to the other person’s experiences (though I tied it to mine), but I can hope.

Anyway, here’s what I wrote:

Now that that’s* out of the way, I don’t think they’re bigots for believing, in good faith, that homosexuality is a sin. I think they’re bigots for actively fighting against marriage equality and for denying LGBT people the use of their facility.

I think that even if you are fully convinced that homosexuality is a sin, it’s still wrong (and unChristian) to try to continue denying gay people equality under the law. It means real tangible harm and cruelty, like not letting people visit their sick or dying partner in the hospital, or taking kids away from people who’ve raised them. This happens even when the couples in question have seen a lawyer and spent the tons of time and money to get the legal documents that were supposed to be “just as good” as legal marriage. It also means letting kids languish in foster care or group situations when there are adoptive parents who would give them a loving home, but happen to be gay.

The second reason I’m in favor of SSM is that America is not and was never meant to be a theocracy. I also don’t see anything in the Bible to suggest that it’s the job of American Christians to try to make it one. This isn’t Old Testament Israel, where our nation’s laws came straight from God, and nowhere in the New Testament do I find a word about how we’re supposed to force our non-Christian neighbors to live by our beliefs. There’s a lot of turning the other cheek and shaking the dust off your feet and showing love.

And if America wasn’t meant to be a theocracy in 1776, when it was inhabited mostly by Christians and a handful of Jews, how much more wrong would it be to make it a theocracy now when it’s a country of people of every religion and no religion. We’ve been effectively a theocracy in a lot of ways because of a Christian majority and because of some deep-seated prejudices toward people who aren’t Christian, but that’s changing. As a Christian, it makes me happy, not sad, to see that change, because I believe that matters of faith are between an individual and God, not something to be shoved down their throat by whatever majority happens to have power.

I also find it telling which beliefs we feel we have the right, even the imperative, to make others live by. Tons of marriages happen every day that many Christians would define as not Biblical for one reason or another. But we’re not rushing to invalidate the marriages of the divorcees, or the people marrying outside their faith, or the people who have had premarital sex with someone other than the person they’re marrying. Heck, if we want to give all of Paul’s directives about marriage legal force, my marriage to [my husband]** should be just as illegal as the marriage of any two men or two women, because it’s an egalitarian one–I promised to love and honor, but not obey. And on the flip side, there are plenty of Christian denominations that have no problem with same-sex marriage. Even if we were to be a Christian theocracy, whose brand of Christianity gets to be in charge?

Finally, I never said that Chik-Fil-A deserves to go bankrupt and frankly***, if the few bucks I might spend on fast food is going to do in my local chain, they’ve got bigger problems. But I don’t think I’m somehow obligated to have my money go toward things I think are wrong. If it’s okay for Christians who are against homosexuality to boycott Disney for having gay pride days, how is it not okay for me to do the same based on my deeply held beliefs?

I *like* the fact that Chik-Fil-A is closed on Sundays. I like the fact that a lot of the restaurants play Christian music. I would love to be able to support them, but this is an issue that’s important enough to me that I would not feel right eating there.

*”That” was telling him that I didn’t appreciate his sarcasm or condescension. Just because I’m trying to have a better conversation doesn’t mean I won’t tell the other person when they need to knock off the rudeness.

** Hubby’s full name redacted, since this is a public blog and not my “some vague semblance of privacy” Facebook page, where everything I posted is limited to my two-hundred-and-ninety-something “friends”

**He said, among other things, that I was arguing that Chik-Fil-A’s owners are horrible people and deserve to go bankrupt for “acting on what [they] know to be true.”

All things bright and beautiful

I just got back from an amazing week in England. We saw a lot of the typical tourist things, the Tower of London, Stratford, Bath, and it was fantastic. So many beautiful buildings, so much history.

Bath Abbey is beautiful, and it actually made me cry. Between all the memorials for the deceased, and the diptychs, particularly the one for the crucifixion, I had tears running down my face.

I wanted to actually attend Sunday services in one of the beautiful churches, which I thought would’ve been really nice, but I didn’t end up doing that.

I remember thinking that I would probably be more motivated to go to church if I had a beautiful place to worship. There’s something inspiring about vaulted ceilings and stained glass windows that’s missing when your church holds services in a high school auditorium.

I’m sort of of two minds about that feeling. Part of me thinks, “Wow, how superficial of me, that’s not the sort of thing that should be important at all.” And yet, I believe that making beautiful things for religious purposes is an act of worship. Cathedrals, hymns, the Book of Kells. The work and skill put into those, to create something beautiful to honor God.

I don’t quite know what I’m going to do with that feeling. I wouldn’t join a denomination because their churches are pretty, but maybe I’ll spend some time listening to religious music and looking at pictures of cathedrals and illuminated gospels. And maybe go read the KJV version of some of the Psalms. (I’m a fan of later modern translations for actual study, but poetry is in part about the beauty of the language.)

On Speaking Up

I really have trouble speaking my mind, especially around people who I know will disagree with my opinions or think less of me for them. In working with my awesome nutritionist, I realized that I tend to deflect or shy away from conversations about fat or politics, or anything else where I know I have an “out-there” opinion.

Problem is, everywhere I go, I have an “out-there” opinion. I’m a liberal in a conservative county, a fat acceptance advocate in a dieting world, and a feminist Christian.*

Part of my reluctance comes from bad experiences with people proselytizing. For their religion, their diet, their politics, it doesn’t much matter which, it all leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

So, I’m looking for the balance. Not hiding my light under a bushel, but not shining it in people’s eyes either.

So, I’m taking baby steps. I linked my blog to my twitter account (my twitter no longer has my real name, but I certainly have twitter friends who know me in real life–I’d like to keep a little separation between my “personal” online life and my “professional” one.)

I e-mailed my church explaining why the comment from last week’s service was so problematic.

I e-mailed the commissioners of the next county over about their proposed breed-specific regulations, and I’ll be attending the meeting where it’s discussed. Maybe some time I’ll write a post about what breed-specific laws have in common with fat hate. There are similar over-generalizations and disregard for experience (and often scientific studies) in both, and a similar focus on quick fixes.

*How much of an issue that last is depends enormously on the denomination, of course. At the church I grew up in, *huge* issue. At an interfaith church whose main pastor is a Southern Baptist, it tends to be an issue some of the time. At Quaker meetings, much less so.

Gender and God

So, I went to church this morning, for the start of a sermon series called “The Secret of the Sexes.” I winced a little when I saw that, because I was expecting it to be filled with sexist tropes. Basically, I figured I’d try to keep an open mind, but I expected to do a lot of eye-rolling.

While there were some things that were problematic, overall I was pleasantly surprised. There was a lot of emphasis on equality between men and women and on the women who played a major role in the Bible.

One thing I thought was really cool was that the pastor pointed out that the common perception of the Garden of Eden story is that it’s just Eve and the snake at the tree, with Adam absent, but that’s not what the text says. (Gen 3:6 NIV When the woman saw that the fruit of the tree was good for food and pleasing to the eye, and also desirable for gaining wisdom, she took some and ate it. She also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate it.)

That little bitty phrase changes everything. I liked the pastor’s description of Adam as maybe being chicken, letting Eve try the fruit first, so he could make sure nothing bad happened to her before he tried it. It definitely fits with the weaselly buck-passing “the woman you gave me gave it to me.”

I also appreciated the mention that God made male and female both in his image. The standard fundamentalist line seems to be that *men* are made in God’s image, and women are second-tier, less than, and the source of everything bad. A big emphasis in the sermon was that everyone deserves respect as someone made in God’s image, and that ragging on the other sex is dissing someone who was made in the image of God.

The things I didn’t like were the emphasis on differences between men and women, with the implication that those differences are universal or inherent. A huge focus was that “understanding the differences between the sexes” is the key to pretty much all relationships, but I think that misses the mark a little. I think trying to understand “men” or “women” is impossible and you just end up with overgeneralizations and assumptions. I think the real key to relationships is understanding individual people *as individuals.*

The sermon did touch on that a little, actually. The verse (which I now can’t find) about different parts making up the body of Christ but all working together, and each part doing what it’s supposed to do. The pastor related that to each person being uniquely made and every individual being who and what they’re supposed to be.

As much as I like that, the generalizations about gender differences really run counter to that emphasis on people being made uniquely as they’re supposed to be. Even with a little throw-away comment about generalizations not applying to every individual, the more you emphasize those generalizations, the easier it is to marginalize people who don’t fit them, or to shove people into boxes.

One comment I really found problematic was a bit about women getting upset with men “for being men,” with the example of his wife saying “why are you always touching me?” and him responding with “maybe if you stopped being so hot.”

So so very much to cringe at in that. For starters, the trope that men are horny and women aren’t severely irritates me and is just not true. Secondly, touching someone in ways or at times that they’re not comfortable about isn’t just “a guy being a guy”–it’s disrespectful and rude in a particularly sexist way.

Overall, there was more good than bad. For me, the “Amen” to “WTF” ratio was pretty high. I’m going to miss next week because I’m off to see Wicked in DC, but fortunately for me, the sermons are downloadable. Yay for technology.

How I became pro-choice, part 2 of ?

Things are still going on with HR3 (they dropped the bit about “forcible” rape and left all the other badness intact) and HR 358 is even worse. HR 358 protects doctors who don’t want to perform abortions (yet decided that obstetrics was a good career choice anyway), if they decide to let a woman suffer serious complications or die. You know, in any other field, when people are injured or die because you chose not to do your job, you get fired or sued, probably both. But doctors, who take a fricking *oath* to help people, somehow get a free pass when they choose not to do that. And in cases where the choice is abort the fetus or let the mother and the fetus both die, somehow two deaths are seen as the “moral” choice. Like the hospital that lost its Catholic status and had the nun who heads its ethics committee excommunicated because they saved the life of a woman who was 11 weeks pregnant. On what magical sci-fi planet are these church leaders living that they think an 11-week fetus is going to survive the death of the mother, or that someone too sick to be moved to another hospital is going to somehow make it another couple months so the fetus has a (slim) shot?

So, because of this, I wanted to link a couple really good posts on the subject and also talk about my own pro-choiceness.

One of the things that made it clear to me that women need to be able to end pregnancies was when I actually started getting treatment for my anxiety. Lexapro has been a godsend for me. I still have the occasional panic attack, but the general inclination to worry obsessively about everything ever has subsided. And usually I have enough time before full-out crying and hyperventillating meltdown to notice what’s happening, step back, and do some sort of relaxation exercise to prevent a full scale panic episode. Which is really nice, because they suck.

So, what does this have to do with abortion? Well, Lexapro causes birth defects. So I’m really really not supposed to get pregnant. When the husband and I decide we’re ready to reproduce, I’ll wean off the Lexapro gradually before going off birth control.

This was the first time that I had an inkling of how, even married and with a good job, pregnancy could be a really problematic condition. I coped with anxiety most of my life without pharmaceutical help; I could probably do it again if I absolutely had to. It’s kind of a scary thought, and it’s one of the reasons that the hubby and I have put off the kid thing for so long. But learning about mental illness also helped me understand that the crossed wires in my head are *mild* compared to what a lot of people deal with. I’ve never wanted to kill myself. I don’t have panic attacks for no reason, or ones that I don’t fully recover from for days. Plenty of people have those issues. For plenty of women, an unintended pregnancy would mean they have to choose between going off sanity-restoring meds or risking serious birth defects. Or, ending the pregnancy.

I know that if you believe completely that human life begins the instant egg meets sperm, this seems a little “off.” Better to risk birth defects than to kill the kid outright, right? But the thing is, that’s just it, a belief. There’s no way to prove it, no way to measure when a soul comes into being. Someone who believes that might well decide to go off the meds to protect the kid, or to take their chances with the meds. But to require someone who doesn’t believe that to go through a pregnancy that’s deeply damaging to her mental health, based on something you can’t prove–that’s wrong.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to believe that life begins at conception. I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to define the start point as quickening, or viability, or any number of other possibilities. What’s unreasonable is to force others to adhere to the most extreme definition, without any regard for their own physical or mental well-being.

Even if a fetus–or an embryo–is a person, it’s worth pointing out that a pregnant woman is a person too.

On a lighter note…

I was approving comments, and I happened to look at a post’s word count. Thinness is Not a Religious Duty has exactly 666 words. See, dieting really *is* evil. Or maybe I am, I’m not sure.

Controlling Our Bodies

Lesley over at Two Whole Cakes wrote a brilliant piece on fat, eating disorders, and the desire to control our bodies.

A culture that supports weight loss by any means necessary is a culture that supports eating disorders. It is a culture that supports the sickening and weakening of us all, in the name of improving our health, the very thing that we sacrifice. It instructs us either to succeed or be destroyed by the effort.

To some extent, eating disorders are a compulsive urge to control the uncontrollable — one might as well try to lasso the ocean. At a certain point, past denying, past deprivation, we don’t have intellectual control over our bodies any longer. No matter how hard we try, no matter how fierce our conviction. We don’t have control. The only way to win the fight with our bodies is to die. The winners are the ones who are dead. They are the ones who have triumphed, decisively, over the needs of their bodies, forever.

Every diet I’ve ever been on has had that same motivation at its heart, that desire for control. This is not to say that everyone who diets has an eating disorder (though I think deliberately eating less than your body needs is disordered eating). It’s just that they’re manifestations of the same thing.

It also doesn’t matter whether it’s about beauty, health, or some of both. It still comes down to what Lesley said about controlling the uncontrollable. In our culture, we have the idea that health is controllable. If you eat the right foods, do the right exercises, live “virtuously,” you will be thin and healthy for 80 or 90 years. And if you’re unhealthy, you must have done something to deserve it, and if you start doing the right things, you can fix it. Again, at its heart, it’s about control. We don’t have near as much control over our health as we’d like to, and we can’t get around the fact that everybody gets sick and everybody dies.

Part of me feels like faith, or more faith, would correct that. “Let go and let God” is the common saying in a lot of Christian circles. Relax, trust, and accept that you don’t control the universe, you were never meant to, and that’s okay. And maybe on an individual level, for people with that particular sort of faith, that’s part of it. But the focus on control–particularly on controlling the body and ignoring its desires–is deeply intertwined with Judeo-Christian religious ideas. Half our focus on controlling our bodies so strictly is because we think they’re sinful. I talked about it a couple days ago, about a devotional urging Christians to quit being fat.

DRST expanded on Lesley’s post, talking about the role of religion in the cultural push to beat our bodies ruthlessly into submission.

There’s a whole thread deeply involved in body policing that stretches back to Judeo-Christian religious philosophy and sin and how we must control ourselves at all times and resist all temptations – this mindset that hails a God that supposedly created us in His image, which means we are like God in all ways, but simultaneously put in us urges to do all sorts of things that are inherently ungodly (like stuff our faces and have lots of sex) and the way we prove our devotion to that God is to deny the most basic urges He supposedly put into us. It sets everyone up to fail from the start, basically, because what we’re programmed (by God) to want to do is somehow sinful and the only way to be really faithful is not do things we want to do. This is, IMNSHO, a really sadistic view of God. I mean, what kind of person/being/whatever would do that to anyone?

This is a hugely important point. We fear our bodies, we fear our desires, we think they are sinful, and we think God wants us to live in a constant state of denial and deprivation. And that has so thoroughly soaked into our cultural consciousness that we still talk about this denial in religious terms. Chocolate is described as sinful and sex as impure and salad as virtuous in completely secular contexts.

I wish we didn’t have this focus on control and rigid discipline. I wish that my first church had had two or three God loves you, warts and alls for every Thou shalt nots.

Religion and health are alike in that we pursue them in ways that are drudgery, when they should be joyful.

Thinness Is Not a Religious Duty

Kataphatic’s post about dieting as an anti-gospel really resonated with me.

And then I read this, a devotional about how taking care of your body (by which the author mostly means losing weight) is a spiritual discipline. The author starts with a statistic about how many people are “obese” and how many people will die of chronic diseases “due to being overweight.”

First off, there is not a single disease that fat people get that thin people don’t. Not heart disease, not diabetes, not anything. Weight is a risk factor, not a 100% certain cause. And for things like thyroid issues, PCOS, and other diseases, it’s neither a cause nor a risk–it’s a symptom. But we assume, automatically, that if Person X is fat and Person X died from Disease Y, fat caused disease Y.

“Your body is God’s temple. If you were walking down the street and saw some gang vandalizing a church, you’d do something about it, right? When you don’t take care of your body, you are vandalizing God’s temple.”

Wow. Just wow. The body as a temple, sure, I won’t argue with that. But we’re equating eating a donut or failing to go for a jog with throwing a rock through a stained glass window. Seriously. Not. On. The. Same. Level.

You want to talk about vandalizing God’s temple? How about skipping lunch day in and day out? How about walking a mile or three in dress shoes, wrecking your heels and ankles? How about gall stones, or ruining your metabolism?

Also, the idea of a religious duty to be healthy is all kinds of problematic, because it creates the idea that if you’re sick, it’s your fault. Oh, and not only did you fail yourself, you failed God. That attitude reminds me of nothing so much as Job’s so-called friends telling him how his troubles are his own fault, and he must have offended God in some way. This article seems to imply the same of people with diabetes or heart disease, that they’ve offended God, and ill health is some kind of divine punishment for eating “sinful” foods.

What makes conflating religion and the pressure to be thin so dangerous is that believing that God wants you to do something can thoroughly side-track your common sense. That’s not a bad thing, in and of itself. Common sense helps you interact with the here-and-now physical world, and faith goes beyond that. I mean, it wouldn’t have gone real well for Noah’s family if he’d been focused on the likelihood of that amount of rain falling, instead of getting his tail in gear on the construction and rounding up critters.

But when the message isn’t actually from God, that same derailing of logic can have awful consequences. Even without religious reasons, people do really dumb things to try to be thin. Make it a religious duty, and the potential for self-harm just increases.

One other thing about the “body as a temple” metaphor. I’m not finding the reference right now (it’s somewhere in 1 Kings, I think), but if I recall correctly, God was supposed to have told Solomon what the dimensions were supposed to be, what the building materials were supposed to be, and how it was to be laid out. To me, there’s a huge parallel there with the fact that body size is largely genetic. God sets the size and composition for each human temple too. And if the body is a temple, is it respectful to the builder to try to force it into another shape from what he created? Sure, we try to change our bodies in all kinds of ways, to fight nature for all sorts of reasons. Some good, some bad, some pretty much neutral. But I don’t think you can use “your body is a temple” to argue that everyone should view thinness as a religious discipline without addressing the issue of whether God *wants* his temples remodeled to human specifications, and probably damaged in the process.