Our subject is America, what is happening to us and what the future will bring.
Last time I focused on Trump voters who blame everyone else for feeling disrespected when in truth they have no one to blame but themselves because they feed themselves on a diet of Fix News propaganda and hate talk radio that tell them over and again how much liberals and Democrats hate them.
In this blog I want to focus on the largest Trump supporter groups, evangelical and Catholic Christians, and more specifically, their position on abortion rights which they say in and of itself justifies their support of Trump.
That support, by the way, seems to be paying dividends. Just this past week Trump rewarded them by proposing a rule barring federal funding to any clinics that provide abortions or refer their patients to abortion providers, specifically aimed at Planned Parenthood.
That came after Iowa Republicans passed a law making abortion illegal once a heart beat is detected, which is around six weeks, and Minnesota Republicans passed one that requires doctors to ask women if they want to see an ultra-sound image of the fetus before having an abortion (Democrat Governor Mark Dayton vetoed it).
These actions are what is called T.R.A.P. laws (Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers, something I discuss in detail in my book, Evangelicalism and the Decline of American Politics, that I invite you to read, if you have not done so.
Here I want to expand on the material in the book to say that the view of the Catholic Church and evangelicals on abortion rights is less about abortion and more about their attitude toward women.
Specifically, what cannot be overstated is the fact that their view on abortion rights is grounded in what I call mild misogyny.
The Catholic Church and evangelicals don’t hate women. That would be all out misogyny. No, they don’t hate women, they just value them less than men.
This is why they also believe women are not capable of making decisions for themselves, especially when it comes to their bodies.
Let me support this charge with this illustration.
Imagine scientists doing a test tube fertilization of a woman’s egg they would then have the capacity to incubate in an artificial womb like structure that would be able to simulate nourishment a fetus would receive from a woman’s body for nine months, and then there would be a “birth.”
In this imaginative scenario, aborting the fetus at any point during the “pregnancy” would be an entirely different moral question than it is now.
Why? Because only one life would be at stake, that of the fetus.
Catholics and evangelicals would have a simple and easy argument to make. No abortion on any grounds.
But, of course, a real life pregnancy is NOT that simple for the most obvious reason – there is not only one life to consider, there are two, the fetus and the woman, and that is the real point here.
A woman’s life counts as much as that of a fetus, and, in fact, counts more because for 24 weeks a fetus is totally dependent on the woman’s body to survive.
In other words, the woman’s life exists apart from the fetus, but the fetus cannot exist apart from the woman. Yet, the Catholic Church and evangelicals value a woman’s life less. They of course insist they don’t, but their attitudes and actions say equivocally that they do.
And that makes them guilty of mild misogynistic and accounts for why they oppose Roe v. Wade.
Thankfully, the majority of Americans don’t agree with them, supporting Roe v. Wade by a wide margin, and for good reason.
It was a very moderate decision wherein the Court chose to limit the right of choice to 12 weeks rather than 24, and allowing states thereafter the right to regulate abortion rights as long as they don’t abrogate the right of choice within the first trimester (12 weeks).
I believe it was a decision that will continue to stand. One reason I say that is because one of the unexpected by-products of the Roe v. Wade decision is that it is now giving many Republicans cover.
They support T.R.A.P. laws precisely because they know Roe v. Wade is there to prevent any law from eliminating all abortion rights. With most Americans supporting abortion rights, if Roe. v Wade were struct down, they would be far less inclined to enact any law that would outlaw abortion rights altogether.
But what is truly ironic about the inflexibility of the Catholic Church and evangelicals is that the rate of abortions among both groups is about the same as that of the general population.
As many would say, it takes some real brass to try to impose on everyone else a belief not even your own people affirm, but we all know that doesn’t matter to them.
After all, the appearance of righteousness among Christians has always exceeded the actual presence of it, and appearance is about all the Catholic Church and evangelicals have left.
Which brings us full circle to say that Trump Catholics and evangelicals are just like all other Trump supporters. They refuse to think, refuse to look at facts, refuse to seek compromise, refuse to see the bad stuff that is actually happening to our country and the role they are playing in it.
But no matter what they believe, a post-Trump America is coming, and that is what the rest of us must work toward and prepare for, not least because there is going to be a serious mess for us to clean up.
More next time.
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