True Believers

 Annamaria used to be one!

My 4th grade class, Our Lady of Lourdes School

"I went to Catholic school."  In meetings I sometimes say this - to comic effect - to explain why I am compulsively following a rule.  Sometimes, after a pause, I add the line, "For seventeen years."  I have gotten a lot of laughs with these lines.  People who have a similar education history laugh loudest and nod in camaraderie.

In the wake of this week's US Supreme Court decision, I confess that today I am not playing that line for laughs.  Fair warning: I am beside myself angry.

It is a fact that from ages 5 to 22, most of the major influencers in my intellectual life were nuns.  Contrary to the popular stereotype, at least 80% of them were kind, supportive, and great at their jobs.  There were a few harsh ones, but I would imagine that would be true in any kind of school in those long-ago days.  When I finished college, I left that milieu a well-educated and deeply devout Catholic.

Same kids, same steps, 4 years later

Then, however, by the time I was thirty-one, I had given up the faith.  For a while I called myself an agnostic.  Now I am an atheist.

St. John's High School, some of the same kids

But I remember vividly a great deal of what the nuns taught me.  Today I want focus on what they taught about the separation of church and state. When I was in the fourth grade, back in the time of the Peloponnesian Wars, there were still many European countries that had state religions.  Most notably for us kids, Italy and Ireland -birthplaces of most of our grandparents - were Catholic countries.  "Is that better than what we have here - separation of church and state?" Sister asked.  "No" was the right answer.  Why?  Because if the government could dictate a religion, and if it chose a different one from ours, we might end up being required to practice a religion dictated by the government.  We were much better off living in a country that granted everyone the right to worship (or not) as they choose. This was the very essence of freedom.

Freshman class, College of St. Elizabeth

Convent, New Jersey

The good sense of this was made abundantly clear when we studied, in history class in college, what went on in Great Britain at the end of the Sixteenth and the beginning of the Seventeenth centuries.  When heads, quite literally, rolled: Protestant heads chopped off by Catholics and Catholic heads chopped off by Protestants.    

I never belittle or dismiss what people believe and how zealous they feel about the tenets of their faith.  After all I, my educated self believed in the virgin birth until I was thirty.  If people's religion teaches them that an abortion anytime after conception is a form of murder, I absolutely believe they should be free never to have or to perform an abortion.  If the government tried to take control of their right to have children, I would lay down my life to preserve their freedom to be left alone to do so, regardless of the circumstances.

All those people rejoicing over the death of Roe v Wade in the streets today...  Does it never occur to them that if their beliefs can force today's women - even a fourteen-year-old girl who has been raped by her father - to give birth to a child, that one day, when the tables turn, it could force them to abort a child for whatever excuse the government trumped up.

It kills me that many of these same "Right to Life" people will defend an eighteen year old's right to own weapons of war and body armor, even though we know that some of them will murder children in school or deliver the death penalty to people guilty of grocery shopping while black.  The right-to-life crowd do not want those young people stripped of their rights to tote AK47s.

FIVE PEOPLE DECIDED!

This past week, 51% if the citizen's of half the states in the U.S. had a right and a freedom ripped from them. By five people.  One. Two.Three. Four. Five.

A minority of the citizenry demanded the decision.  Five powerful people with nothing to lose agreed with them.  And the rest of us are forced to live with it.