Tag Archives: religion

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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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.

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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.

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Whose living room is this?

As far as discussion on the internet goes, a common analogy is that someone’s blog or website is basically their living room. It’s used both to encourage people to be polite, and to remind folks that, no, the first amendment has nothing to do with speech on someone else’s site, and yes, a site owner or moderator has every right to kick you out if you act like a butthead.

With most sites, the analogy works just fine. And then there’s Facebook. Facebook is this weird trans-dimensional space where everyone’s living rooms overlap. I post something to my wall, it shows up on yours as an update.

This means that when people say things that are hateful, in their own space, as they more or less have a right to, it shows up in my “living room” too. (I say “more or less have a right” because Facebook’s terms of service are supposed to prohibit hate speech, but they aren’t necessarily always applied.) I’m not sure how to deal with this. If someone were really truly in my living room (or on my blog), I’d have no problem telling them to stop, or politely but firmly disagreeing. But they’re not. They’re in their own space, and yet what they say gets into my space as well.

My problem is not just that these sorts of comments irritate me, though that’s a huge part of it. I also feel that if I sit back and say nothing when people are saying things that are hate-filled and verifiably untrue, that I’m essentially accepting those things. And yet, at the same time, it’s not my place to be the Facebook cop and make everybody play nice based on my standards of “nice.”

I made the mistake, recently, of saying I thought a post about Park51 was in bad taste because it was really disrespectful toward someone else’s religion. That unleashed a stream of vitriol from someone I don’t know, which I’m not really sure how to respond to. I don’t think I was out of line, though it probably would’ve been wiser to keep my mouth shut. So, part of me wants to smooth things over, but I don’t know that there’s any way to do that without apologizing for being in favor of religious tolerance. Or without ignoring, and essentially accepting, some of the totally baseless assumptions that came out (for example, talking about people “moving to this country and the complaining” as if there aren’t plenty of Muslims who are natural born citizens). The other part of me would like to actually call out that sort of BS, but I know I can’t do that without it getting even uglier.

From a technological standpoint, the thing that irritates me is that there’s no way to hide one specific post of someone else’s from my wall. It would be way easier to deal with if I could do the same as I do with obnoxious e-mails, delete and move on. But the X button on another person’s post hides them from your wall completely. I did have to do that with one person, but I’d prefer not to as a general rule. I’m not really sure what the right answer is in this situation.

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How I Became Pro-Choice, Part 1 of ?

So, for a while now I’ve wanted to explain how I went from being extremely anti-abortion to being pro-choice. This took place gradually over years, and there were a lot of reasons for it, so I wasn’t quite sure how to start putting it together. So, I’m breaking it into smaller pieces. I’m not certain how many, really. As many as it takes.

The order won’t necessarily be sequential, either. This post, for example, talks about one of the last nails in the coffin of my pro-life-ness. I’d previously defined myself as pragmatically pro-life, basically acknowledging that a lot of women’s options as far as preventing pregnancy are crap, and as long as we’re going to teach abstinence only in schools, and have insurance companies cover viagra but not birth control pills, and do a crappy job of helping out people who can’t afford to raise a kid, having abortion be illegal would be complete BS.

A couple years ago, I started reading Shapely Prose. Not only did I learn about the revolutionary concept of fat acceptance, I also got an education in the basics of feminism. I had considered myself mostly a feminist before that, without knowing more than a rough summary of what that meant. And I usually caveated it with “not that I really count as a feminist, because I’m pro-life.”

Anyway, it was after I’d developed a major blog crush on Kate Harding that Dr. George Tiller was murdered. And I read about Operation Rescue’s comments, which can pretty much be summed up as callous and evil: We really hope this doesn’t negatively affect our ability to keep intimidating and harassing people. So…terrorism. You’re for it, then. Nice.

Between reading that, and reading these stories about the situations people are actually in when they have late-term abortions. This was a sad and scary revelation for me, because all I’d ever heard on this topic was the rhetoric around partial-birth abortion, nothing about the fact that it’s pretty much always done for major medical reasons, not somebody changing her mind at the last minute. In a lot of cases, these abortions are essentially taking a baby who isn’t going to survive off life-support, rather than condemning them to a short and excruciatingly painful life. That analogy brings up a whole host of other contentious subjects, but when the life support apparatus is a *person,* it should be her call.

Around the same time and from a lot of the same sources, I started reading about crisis pregnancy centers, and learning that they are often sources of misinformation and manipulation.

I went to an evangelical church since I was a teenager, and having heard that crisis pregnancy centers were there to help women in desperate and difficult situations. I remember thinking that they were a good thing, a “money where your mouth is” kind of pro-life stance that was actually compassionate and helpful.

So, between those two things, the realities of late-term abortion and the dishonesty used by crisis pregnancy centers, I felt betrayed in a pretty personal way. I thought about the change I’d collected in those little baby bottles for CareNet, in a program sponsored by my church, and I felt kind of ill.

I already had more than a little bit of cynicism toward the more fundamentalist parts of Christianity at that point. And I was familiar with the evil and vitriol spewed by guys like James Dobson and Jerry Falwell. So I suppose I shouldn’t have really been surprised that I’d been lied to, systematically and deliberately.

And as much as I felt used and betrayed, all I’d been conned out of was some spare change. How much worse for a pregnant woman who goes to a crisis pregnancy center who lies to her about the risks of abortion, or withholds her test results to make it harder for her to get one. Or promises support and provides help, right up until the point where she can’t abort, then tosses her out to fend for herself.

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Some Positive Notes

I’ve been losing a lot of faith in humanity reading about the huge opposition to the Muslim community center in NY, the planned Koran burning (which was at least called off), and other isolated bits of hate and stupid.
But amidst all that, there have been some pretty striking notes of tolerance and decency.

The Massachusetts Bible Society has promised to give out two Korans for every one burned. And now that the Koran-burning didn’t happen on September 11 and doesn’t look like it will, they’ll still give out Korans using the donations they’ve received.

The Gainesville Muslim Initiative spent September 11 distibuting food and hygiene supplies to folks in need. They also had a book drive, a blood drive, and a candlelight vigil. I can’t applaud this group enough for being awesome, for answering the ugliness that gets thrown at them with such kindness.

And on one little corner of the internet, someone who said a bunch of bigoted and ill-thought-out stuff *listened* to the counter-arguments, reconsidered their position, and apologized.

It’s all little stuff, but sometimes that’s all it takes.

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Enough with the religious discrimination already

Oh, look, Disney sent one of their employees home without pay because–GASP–she was wearing a Muslim headscarf, and that apparently doesn’t comply with their “look.”

Good for her for filing a complaint.

I think some diversity training for their management might be in order. I recommend having them ride “It’s a Small World” for a good eight or ten hours. One of two things will happen–either they’ll gain an appreciation for other cultures and beliefs, or after hours of hearing THAT SONG on endless loop, they’ll give in just to make it stop.

I haven’t written anything about the people protesting against the “Ground Zero Mosque” (in sarcastic scare quotes because it’s neither a mosque, nor at Ground Zero), but that infuriates me too. Like this, but more so. Much, much more so. For right now, I’ll content myself with pointing out that, contrary to popular belief, the First Amendment does not contain the phrase “except for Muslims.” Really, it doesn’t.