IT MIGHT BE the decisive turning point in what has become my loss of faith in secularism, the Buckley vs. Valeo case in 1976 in which the Supreme Court overturned the truly bipartisan attempt of Democrats and Republicans in the Congress to prevent the corruption of big money and combined money in American politics, opening not only the then flow of corrupt money such as had been revealed in the crimes of the Nixon campaign and administration but set in motion further rulings of the Supreme Court which have totally corrupted American democracy, leading directly to the overt buying of the American government by billionaire and multi-millionaire oligarchs, INCLUDING THE DICTATORS OF RUSSIA, CHINA, SAUDI ARABIA, ETC. all in the name of First Amendment "free speech-press." That is the reason that in 2025 and for the past decade the biggest fattest proponents of "free speech-press" have been exactly those buying and corrupting American politics. The whirlwind we are reaping is the direct consequences of that elevation of "free speech-press" over everything else, including honest government and the protection instead of the destruction of democracy. American democracy died on the altars of the First Amendment and, ironically, on the alter of the now known to be false god, the "rule of law." I've mentioned how little stomach I have for the civic pieties of the MSNBC style lawyers who had told us for the past six years to put our faith in the legal system, now that that has turned out to be the primary vehicle in enabling the crime spree of the Trump crime gang.
My once childlike, then adolescent then adult faith in secularism is a casualty of fifty years of witnessing the failures of the liberal-progressive-left side of that faith, best symbolized in the part that the "civil liberties" industry, the ACLU and its allied institutions have played in that ultimate corruption of our laws based on the phony reverence for the secular legal order, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights the main idols of that "civic religion" to use a hideous phrase from a corrupt member of the Supreme Court. I wish there were some way to get back the donations to such outfits as the ACLU that I was stupid enough to give them, even after the role they played in Buckley v Valeo. They conned me out of it.
In thinking more about the consequences of, finally, taking the inescapable theological dimensions of political life and action seriously, I'm not going to minimize the problems of doing that. One of the most obvious of current crises in that, apart from the lawyerly, Supreme Court sanctioned privilege given to lying for gain, is the issue of abortion. In that an allegedly overt theological issue as defined by those who oppose Women practicing bodily autonomy, the same Court which has created the democracy destroying "right to lie" has abolished that right to bodily autonomy. And if there is one thing that is clear in the 2024 election, that demotion of Women as subjugated People, having that most basic of rights to bodily autonomy taken from them WAS NOT DECISIVE AS A REJECTION OF THAT IN THE WAY THAT MANY OF US ON THE LEFT NAIVELY BELIEVED IT WOULD BE.
The fact is that not all issues of morality can or should be subject to legal prohibition, there being no overriding public or state interest that can be asserted to match the right of a Woman to decide what happens inside of her own body. The right to decide whether or not she will carry a pregnancy and give birth. The consequences of the state intervening in that by the law is a catastrophic denial of everything from bodily autonomy up to permanent injury and, in fact, death of Women so subjected to such legal usurpation generally by male politicians, judges, prosecutors, etc. And once such laws are in place, they are kept there no matter what the body count and horrors experienced and reported on, the indifference of those not impacted by them, all men (with the exception of a few who care about the Women so impacted) and not a small percentage of Women who either have not or are not yet impacted or who, once they have stopped being of child bearing age, don't care about what happens to such Women. The same indifference that pervades the legal profession as the "justices" and judges and lawyers on the make advocate and rule in matters which are of little to no concern to them as the lead their privileged, affluent lives within the well upholstered, well paid ranks of that rank profession.
Politics is certainly not the most important area of life in which such theological dimensions are to be played out. It was one of my early conclusions about the reaction of the Catholic clergy in the aftermath of the Roe decision that if they were really intent on ending abortions, the most effective way to do that would be to advocate, as strongly as possible, for the education in using and the availability of contraception. To those who have bemoaned the tens of millions of abortions in the United States during the legal administration of abortions, such early and widespread promotion of contraception would certainly have prevented most of them. Yet such alleged moral experts, such theological experts, chose not to make that morally obvious choice. That also led me to wonder how, once they had regained the status quo from before Roe, as we now have, they would try to prevent the many illegal abortions which had so noticeably not been a major concern of them, even as such illegal abortions were widespread in the pre-Roe period. It would seem that before Roe, as while Roe stood and now that we have reverted to the coat-hanger- motel room period of abortion, they never really cared much about preventing abortions, only in making such abortions that they knew would happen, illegal, dangerous and deadly. There was everything wrong with that application of the theological dimension to the question of abortion. That it was uniformly males, in the earlier period and males and right-winger women past child-bearing years who have reimposed that on the country, is an indication that the defects of men and those unaffected by the political imposition of such defective theology in an inegalitarian regime.
But I'll point out that the decision to overturn Roe was done not by theologians but by Ivy League trained lawyers, lawyers trained and indoctrinated in the secular law, not one of whom I'd take their sincerity as believers in religion seriously, certainly not as compared to their sincerity as members of that lucrative orthodoxy and profession. If there's something I've got to complain about with the present membership of the U.S. Catholic Conference of Bishops, the leaders of "white evangelical Christianity" it is that they have far too much in common with the cauistical practices of the secular law.
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