INSOMNIA And NIGHT THOUGHTS CAN be an opportunity for serious thinking and last night it helped me do what I hadn't done while fully awake, put together the thoughts from two posts on the difference between owning our bodies and owning money and what Fr. Dan Donovan said about the ways in which great wealth impedes us fulfilling our moral obligations and, so, "makes it so difficult for those who possess a great deal of it to fulfill their human and Christian responsibility." Not only that but Fr. Donovan said great wealth, "makes it so difficult for those who possess a great deal of it to fulfill their human and Christian responsibility." Think about that the next time you think about what Peter Theil or Elon Musk is up to, or the recent tax-cheat 1.6 billion dollars that a billionaire gave to the legal-sleaze who ratfucked us into a Republican-fascist Supreme Court majority. That our Constitutional system allows that level of financial corruption of our basic governmental institutions proves that it will either be changed to prevent that or American democracy is doomed.
We use words and ideas like owning something without ever really thinking about what that means and how much of it is actually based on nothing much but artificial and imaginary rules behind human practices. The ownership of an investor in the gain they get from their speculations and manipulations is entirely artificial. There is no law of nature, no law of God that gave any of the billionaires a "right" to claim ownership of the wealth generated by the workers who actually produced anything that was sold or to a cut of everything the artificial entities that are the companies and corporations workers produce wealth under "earns". The entire structure of capitalist economics is an artificial structure to organize the generation of profits and to extract as much of that wealth for those who are said to "own" them through lending money under laws that will always tend towards the runiously usurious, something which there is quite an obvious ban on in Scripture. Beware the virtues claimed by those who spend years mastering the mythology and lore of moneygrubbing that both economics and such a huge amount of the civil law is. Even the nicest of them are apt to unnoticingly support the worst moral atrocities due to their mastery and what it gets them. Be even more careful when it's the corporate media and those who would like to get well paid in it.
The habits of thought we get into by never considering what owning something means and the imaginary structure that most ownership concists of while we use the word to mean very differnt things, a muddle that someone as sophisticated in thinking as Stanley Hauerwas got in with an inapt comparison of the entirely natural ownership of someone to their own body and the ownership of the artificial entity, money, which is a creation of generally artificial and generally very corrupt legal schemes, espcially in how those with more of it can con or weedle or force those with less of it to give it to them. The extent to which that structure of imaginary legalism is always to be suspected of corruption reaches something like an ultimate degeneracy when it comes to the enslavement and wage-enslavement of other people compelled under legal penalties, punishments and, ALWAYS IN THE END, VIOLENCE, which underlies all of slavery and only to a lesser extent wage-slavery.
Balzac famously said that there was always a great crime behind the possession of great wealth, something which would have been even more impressive if it were not an observation of the Scripture that had been the basis of most of the moral civilization that someone like Balzac was still reflecting. Still, considering how the hundreds of millions and billions of us go about our entire lives trafficing in these fictions and putting up with the appalling results and the incredible injustice of it, it's impressive that he noticed that. The extent to which you can life a life compromised to Mammon while others and you think of yourself as good and viruous is on full display when the white-washing, white-supremacist, whited supulchres like any Republican-fascist who professes Christianity while being a full blown temple whore in the cult of Mammon. Male and female temple prostitutes, such as the entire Republican-fascist caucus in the Congress, yes, including Liz Cheney, though some of them at least have the taste to not call attention to their hypocrisy quite shamelessly as Boebert or Taylor Greene. I would say that at least a half or more of "white evangelicals" and "traditional Catholics" are fully in with the Boebert-Greene side of things in that regard. So are a number of the Democrats.
I think that possessions tie us to the limits of life, especially lots of them, especially great wealth. You can't carry that baggage to heaven. Being tied to it in life, more tied to holding that excess than in sharing it with people who need basic sustainance - the poor who Jesus told the rich, young man to give the proceeds of selling his possessions to - is like the boxes chained to Marley in Charles Dickens story, they enslave you in life and enslave your soul till you purge your sins of omission. It's like the mud on a rope that can be cleaned by pulling it through a knot hole, St. Macrina's analogy made on her death bed while she talked to her brother St. Gregory about the Soul and Resurrection. Jesus said it was better to get rid of it and share the wealth now and avoid that. David Bently Hart, currently one of the most prominent advocats of Christian universalism said that he believes in a hell of limited duration - making good arguments from Scripture for that point of view - but that hell is a terrible place and he hoped everyone avoided it. I have to admit that I kind of like the idea that Bobert and Green and their ilk will have to get it purged from them, which I'll probably have to have purged from me. Not everything that has to be given up like that can be sold for charity.
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"you sound as if there's something wrong with abortion"
Someone complained that I presented abortion as if there's something wrong with it even as I said it should be safe and legal and that no one had the right to tell a woman that she must remain pregnant and force her to be.
I remember back in the primary season of 2008, when Hillary Clinton (my candidate in that election) was running for president, there was a similar slam against her when she sensibly said that abortion should be safe, legal and rare, implying that needing or wanting an abortion was something to be avoided.
I asked one of the Women who were slamming Hillary Clinton (as I recall she was an Obama fan) if she really believed anyone ever aspired to be in the position of someday needing or even wanting to have an abortion, if any woman who was not pregnant wanted to be in a position to have an abortion. As I recall the question went unanswered.
I doubt such a woman exists but, clearly anyone who aspires or wants to get into the position where she will need, want or have an abortion, to need such a medical procedure that could certainly not be considered as pleasant, would be rightly suspected of having rocks in her head.
Wanting to be in such a position is as bizarre an idea as the rumors of "bug chasers," the gay men who allegedly wanted to be infected with HIV so they would . . . and I don't believe there were any . . . some of them reportedly wanted to "fit in" with the "HIV positive community." Which thinking would have to rank as a really pathological mental disorder and resulting irresponsibility would mean that such people should probably be under custodial care. I was never really convinced that such a thing really existed though if there's something the internet and unfiltered comment proves, practically every sick way of thinking is practiced by someone with access to a keyboard. The Republican-fascist cult cultivates that among superannuated boys who spend all of their time online and can't get dates and spend their lives online whining to other such boys who obsessively blame all the wrong people for their unhappiness. Such online whiners are certainly ubiquitous online, I spare you lots of such comments here because answering them all isn't healthy. Just for completeness, there were also rumors of HIV people who aspired to infect others, which may have happened but I doubt it was more than a few extremely sick individuals. Most HIV infection happen pretty much the same way that most unwanted pregnancies do. Only I doubt anyone would present avoiding infection as a political controversy.
The challenge should always have be made to anti-choice people in the past fifty-years of trying to get the law to revert to forcing pregnant women to remain pregnant, if they were so opposed to abortions, why didn't they demand and encourage education and provision and use of effective, science based contraception after the passage of Roe v. Wade instead of opposing it. Why don't they now when it's AGAIN becoming obvious that when you make abortion illegal that only means that the abortions performed will be illegal, unsafe and deadly? Clearly they don't really want to prevent as many abortions as possible because the widespread use of effective contraception is the only means of preventing as many abortions as possible. If they really wanted to "end abortion" they would be the biggest, fattest proponents of universal education and provision of and encouragement to use contraception. When they were not and most certainly are not.
Certainly Women who don't want to be pregnant would be better off if a pregnancy that would result in them choosing to have an abortion never happened, if they weren't ever in a position to have to make the decision of whether or not to have one. And, by the way, BOYS AND MEN WHO DON'T OR WON'T BE RESPONSIBLE PARTNERS AND FATHERS WOULD BE BETTER OFF NEVER HAVING MADE SOMEONE PREGNANT. I don't see any huge movement among men to be responsible in their role in it, especially those who are anti-choice. Matt Gaetz, Donald Trump. . . I would bet that a large number of wealthy, conservative male opponents of legalized abortion would not act according to that position if they or their sons impregnated someone they didn't want to spend their money supporting or risk their reputation on. I think it's a safe speculation that a number of them have coerced or paid Women to have abortions in those scenarios, though more have just abandoned their responsibility, which also contributes to why Women choose to have abortions. Clearly they should have been using condoms but didn't want to.
So the position I took, that the best outcome would be if no woman who didn't want be pregnant never was to start with makes the most sense. The kind of sense it would take for someone like Hillary Clinton to express but which, even now, I hardly hear anyone expressing. Any "pro-choice" advocate should certainly be able to navigate the issue to the point where they would understand that even better than the choice to end a pregnancy through abortion would have been to avoid ever being pregnant to start with. To understand that is certainly not the same thing as or anything close to wanting to make abortion illegal, it is to face the full reality of the issue. But, since I know the people who got mad at Hillary Clinton over saying that were, almost exclusively, college-credentialed, it's clear that people with that educational background can find navigating to such a conclusion something of a challenge. I find that's generally the case when you allow ideology to determine the direction of your thinking. When the consequences for other people of your lefty position end up in the same place as your opponents' you really should notice that you really aren't that far apart from them. The consequences are what counts.
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