Persons

I've run across a couple of references to this story in the past day or two, and, as you might expect, it does lead to some not-so-tangential thoughts, including one on synchronicity -- I just happened to have gone back to this post. Yes, in the world of Hunter at Random, these do fit together.

Let's start with the nonsense of Richard John Neuhaus' desperate defense of Catholic dogma regarding homosexuality. Among its other virtues (ahem), it illustrates very well the tendency of Christian apologists to objectify human emotional relationships, especially those of which they don't approve. Actually, thinking about that, it's not necessarily an "especially" -- note the insistence on the idea that sex is purely for procreation and that marriage is the validation -- the social permission -- to engage in sex. Even within marriage, non-procreative sex is immoral. And at the same time, although not, as I recall, explicit in Neuhaus' ramblings, is the idea that the love between a man and a woman is somehow special, and that only Church-approved sex -- i.e., making babies -- can encompass this love. If that's not schizoid enough for you, this comes from an institution that has, historically, been dubious about the natural materialism of science -- the idea that the only acceptable data is that which can be studied and measured objectively and that all natural processes can be described as mechanisms that operate only within the natural, empirical universe. And yet its first reaction to the complexity of human desire and emotion is to reduce it to a bodily function (all the while decrying those such as Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson who suggest that there might be a biochemical basis for all of it).

At any rate, the Christian position can easily be summarized, in a somewhat minimalist but not necessarily inaccurate way, as "people are breeding stock." It's the sort of trap you fall into when you start with the idea that there is -- there must be -- a purpose to everything.

Now, to the Colorado initiative. (And I wonder why it is that Colorado, which is, after all, a fairly cool state, is the one that keeps coming up with the completely anti-American ballot iniatives -- remember Amendment 2? Of course, that's the state that gave us Marilyn Musgrave.) At any rate, a representative of one of the sponsors of a measure that is very clearly designed to outlaw abortion -- and most likely a number of birth-control methods, particularly the morning after pill -- says:

[Kristi] Burton said the initiative would simply define a human.

"It's very clearly a single subject," Burton said. "If it's a human being, it's a person, and hey, they deserve equal rights under our law."

First of all, the gall of trying to define a human being is, while breathtaking, not beyond the capabilities of those who have a hammerlock on The Only Truth. But look at their definition of a "person" -- a fertilized egg.

That's certainly a reductivist view of humanity, now isn't it? A fertilized egg -- which stands something like a 40% chance of never being more than that -- is your equal and deserves all the rights and privileges that you, as a grown-up, thinking, productive member of society expect. (Except those of you who are gay -- it deserves more rights and privileges than you do.) I really wonder how a fertilized egg is going to exercise its right to peaceably assemble.

Barbara O'Brien has this comment about the Christianist tendency to objectify people. She's only one of many to comment on this particular video, and like most, is focusing on the objectification of women, brought about by the unfortunate metaphor employed (I seem to remember that in my high-school days, the accepted non-dirty slang word for vagina was "box."):

Today many people are posting this anti-abortion video and noting the subliminal message — that women are just objects, not people.

The point is, people are just objects. All of us. It's the same thinking -- if you define a fertilized egg as a person, you've elevated an egg to human-being status. You've also reduced the rest of us to the level of a fertilized egg. Women exist to bear children. Gays have sex only for pleasure. Any sex that does not produce children is immoral. It's a purely mechanistic view of humanity.

Needless to say, believing as I do that there is an element of the divine in everything, I can't buy this. That's quite aside from knowing first-hand that men are as capable of loving other men and completely and fully as any man ever loved a woman, and that I am something more than a cock. In fact, I'm a lot more than a cock.