The state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation..neither has the church

 

the state has no business in the bedrooms of the nation

Pierre Trudeau's historic insight demands recall in the face of the current U.S. Supreme Court's consideration of the potential limiting or erasure of the protections for women under Roe v. Wade.

Trudeau's statement focused on decrimilizing homosexuality; it also has relevance to the abortion debate.

Before your pitch your phone/laptop to the wall, hear me out.

My argument is based on the premise that not all aspects of human existence can be, should be, ever reduced to a statement of law.
At the heart of that premise lies the ubiquitous, inescapable feature we commonly call "love"...agreeably the most complex, evasive and yet indisputable sine qua non of our individual and our shared existence.

The church has tried, and failed abysmally, to put a moral "fence" around the experience and expression of love in the vain pursuit of staking out exclusive territory for their control and management under the umbrella of "sacred theology". Marriage, traditionally exclusive to members of the opposite gender, is the most prominent liturgical feature of this "theology" which also embraces the exclusive right and responsibility of procreation and parenting.

Not only has that "man/woman" law fallen into the warranted trashcan it deserves, but the whole premise that the church "fathers" had/have/can prophecy.. the veracity of the mind and will of God is pretentious and invalid.

Even through an intellectual/academic/epistemological definitional parsing of agape, Platonic, storge and sexual intimacy, we are still  left with a "domain" of human existence (including its discernment and comprehension) that defies embodiment in any kind of regulatory premise, save and except the obvious exclusion of all forms of abuse.

And it says here that the radioactivity of the experience of "love" is exacerbated in part by and through its inclusion in and reinforcement of the constrictions of church and state (The state, if course, can and will fall into the "perceived halo" of religious and sacred premises.)

Removing  intimate loving relationships from the supervision and sanction of the church, first, and the state, second, offers the prospect of a degree of integrity and authenticity to the limits of the powers of those institutions...and the implications of such a limitation are potentially bountiful for the ordinary people.

We all know the history of "banned books" listed for the ostensible reason that they were "filthy" and that meant sexual references that the church considered unfit for consumption by their lay and clergy members and employees respectively. Sales and secret reading if those titles rocketed through the roof.

Sex, through the church's commandeering and sanctioning of its use and expression, has sabotaged the healthy life of both the institution and millions of its adherents. Celibate clergy is only the most visible and tragic piece of evidence of that tragic appropriation of human nature. Exclusion of divorcees from receiving the Mass is another. Papal concurrence for divorce and the manipulation if the justifications for marriage failure are two more.

It is, however, the dominant impact on a culture that is, has been and will continue to be the most tragic impact of the masculine-based interpretation of the mind)will of God.
Seen from the perspective of male theologians, monks, scholars and the "fathers" and administrators of the church, the pursuit of order and control and the elimination of all evidence of the "savage" bifurcated and imposed a colonial, domineering and rigid rule on individual humans.

Oscillating far past a medium, balanced and sustainable ethic into the extremes of purported perfection, the church has reached beyond its legitimacy.
And the conception, gestation and delivery of that perfectionism is in effect a metaphoric abortion in that it infantalizes believers and renders ecclesial "blessing" and forgiveness through the Crucifixion and Resurrection the atonement for sin and its concomitant shame, through grace, the ineffable and undeserved gift of God.

However, transactionalism is not the business of a deity worthy of the name. Classical conditioning, critical parenting and the imposition of such moral and ethical power is itself a perversion if the "holy".

At the heart of Christian belief is the love of each human being, in ways and in words and depictions far beyond human capacity to explain or to comprehend.
Colliding with that ineffability and the continuing "revelation" and  discovery and disclosure of the deity is the incontestable absolutism that lies embedded, ensnared, in the dogmatics of the church's sustainability.

Of course, the theology of the church argues that we live "in the between" between the secular and the sacred. It says here, we are and have been far to fearful of the "not-knowing" and the mystery of the holy, and have clung to those tangible and extrinsic pieces of evidence that provide what Eliot calls the "objective correlative" if the novel or poem in which the poet hangs his/her words.

Freedom is not reducible to protections under the law. Freedom exists when the state openly acknowledges its natural limitations and trusts the better angels of the people, trusting that an ethical and moral and spiritual incubator embracing limits to state and ecclesial power can and will open the door to the other sine qua non of a healthy culture, authentic respect of each by all.

Reliance on institutional overreach, whether that overreach is by the state or the church infantalizes too many.

Let's tell each other the hard truth that those masculine conceptions of God's mind and will which have brutalized millions in God's name, is inexcusably hubristic and unjustifiable.

And whatever ruling comes down from Mount Olympus (U.S. Supreme Court) cannot and will not change that legitimate hope and goal