religion

from Talk to Action

Amarillo, Texas isn't the kind of place where most people would expect to find a rock star. Amarillo invites visitors to "enjoy our wide-open spaces and stay a while" because that's what Amarillo has the most of – wide-open spaces. But that is about to change. This dusty little city of 176,000 on the high plains of the Texas Panhandle is poised to become a new anti-choice Mecca as the world headquarters of one of the Catholic church's most influential proponents of judicial status for embryos, the man who has been called the Pope's "vicar for life," Fr. Frank Pavone.

Judaism, Christianity, Islam ... among others ... say there is only one God, and by the way, "it's a man."

Moreover, in the Judeo-Christian telling, God created a male first, and the female came out of the male, when just about everyone knows that females bear the young.

That God is a male is an uncritical belief held by many. It is not surprising this faith would appeal to males. What is surprising to some, is that this story is believed by women - that the All Mighty is a male.

Men justify their dominance of women and control of women's wombs based on these religious tracts.

It wasn't until the early 1800's that people figured out how the sperm worked in co-ordination with the egg. Prior to that, the "moment of conception" was not discussed in terms of sperm-and-egg. Prior to that, one of the prevailing views (adopted by religion) was that there were complete beings within the mother, and the act of sex caused one of the complete beings to gestate. Yes, sex caused the being to grow, but there was no "moment of conception" just because a man showed up.

The modern scientific understanding of impregnation came first, then a religious significance was attached to a scientific insight.

Nowhere in the Bible is the impregnation of an egg by a sperm mentioned, because this concept was not around until several thousand years after the Bible was first penned. Certainly, the idea that "life begins at conception" cannot be found in the Bible in the terms the anti-abortion forces mean it. In fact, during the Middle Ages, the Roman Catholic Church believed that a baby did not have a soul until three months after the birth!

The church is shifting ground in the details, but still maintaining the view that men are in charge of everything, including wombs.

As folks in South Dakota know, when a man places his seed into your womb, that's that. His seed must at all costs grow there ... his property ... and let no woman dare tamper with a man's property, even if afterward he has no interest in participating in the raising of the child.

That "life begins at conception" is, as I suggest above, a religious view and a recent one at that. What is troublous is that this doctrine is being forced on people who do not share this modern "faith."

Looking back at the story of Genesis, women play no part. It is when the man "does his thing," that life begins.

In short, life begins when a man says so.

...make the count, while it can still be done with the fingers of one hand: '03, '04, '05 and now '06. Soon, another bitter summer of heat and battle. Blood in the sun, flies, dogs, crowded morgues, too little water, too little electricity, the children fed with sweets too close to US tanks.

A child walks out through a bullet-riddled
entrance hit during a US army attack in the
town of Samaraa on December 1, 2003.
[AFP/Ahmad Al-Rubaye]

How many domes will be left in 10, 20 years when the region rises up and ruthlessly, just as ruthless as we have been, kills our (supported at home but abandoned in theatre) troops?

I don't mean picks them off in ambush and unprotected roads well salted with IED, I mean wipes them out.

Soldiers patrol the streets of Samarra
on Oct. 8, [2004] following the U.S.
offensive, "Operation Baton Rouge."
[U.S. Army photo by Sgt. W. Wayne Marlow]

Order, peace elusive in Iraqi city of Samarra

By Tom Lasseter

Knight Ridder Newspapers

SAMARRA, Iraq - The gunfight by the Tigris River was over. It was time to retrieve the bodies.

Staff Sgt. Cortez Powell looked at the shredded jaw of a dead man whom he'd shot in the face when insurgents ambushed an American patrol in a blind of reeds. Powell's M4 assault rifle had jammed, so he'd grabbed the pump-action shotgun that he kept slung over his shoulders and pulled the trigger.

Five other soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division scrambled down, pulled two of the insurgents' bodies from the reeds and dragged them through the mud.

"Strap those motherf-----s to the hood like a deer," said Staff Sgt. James Robinson, 25, of Hughes, Ark.

The soldiers heaved the two bodies onto the hood of a Humvee and tied them down with a cord. The dead insurgents' legs and arms flapped in the air as the Humvee rumbled along.

Iraqi families stood in front of the surrounding houses. They watched the corpses ride by and glared at the American soldiers.

Samarra 2004 [OC Register]

Fifteen months earlier, when the 1st Infantry Division sent some 5,000 Iraqi and U.S. soldiers to retake Samarra from Sunni Muslim insurgents, it was a test of the American occupation's ability not only to pacify but also to rebuild a part of Iraq dominated by the country's minority Sunnis.

More than a year later, American troops still are battling insurgents in Samarra. Bloodshed is destroying the city and driving a wedge between the Iraqis who live there and the U.S. troops who are trying to keep order.

Violence, police corruption and the blurry lines of guerrilla warfare are clouding any hopes of victory.

"It's apocalyptic out there. Life has definitely gotten worse for" Iraqis, said Maj. Curtis Strange, 36, of Mobile, Ala., who works with Iraqi troops in Samarra. "You see Samarra and you almost want to build a new city and move all these people there."

Samarra March 2005 [lenta.ru]

In the middle of town, in an abandoned schoolhouse, Sgt. Powell, 28, of Columbia, Mo., lives with his fellow soldiers from the 2nd platoon of Bravo Company in the 101st Airborne's storied Rakkasan Brigade. Patrol Base Uvanni is named for Army National Guard Sgt. Michael Uvanni of Rome, N.Y., who was killed in the city on Oct. 1, 2004.

A different name is painted in black on the door to the company's tactical operations center: the Alamo.

The 2nd platoon and two others - about 120 men total - are based at the Alamo and at another base on the edge of town. They replaced three companies from the 3rd Infantry Division that had a total of more than 400 soldiers.

"If they ever figure out that we don't have many guys here we'll be in trouble," said 1st Lt. Dennis Call, who commands the 2nd platoon. "If we're out on patrol with just seven guys, like usual, and we take two casualties we'll get messed up."

US soldiers Samarra October 2005 [Pravda]

As Call sat in the schoolhouse, preparing to go out, he heard two loud bursts from the .50-caliber machine gun on the roof.

Specialist Michael Pena, a beefy 21-year-old from Port Isabel, Texas, had opened fire. Boom-boom-boom. Boom-boom-boom.

Call and his men dashed out the front door. Pena had shot an unarmed Iraqi man on the street. The man had walked past the signs that mark the 200-yard "disable zone" that surrounds the Alamo and into the 100-yard "kill zone" around the base. The Army had forced the residents of the block to leave the houses last year to create the security perimeter. [...]

Looking at the man splayed on the ground, Call turned to his medic, Specialist Patrick McCreery, and asked, "What the f--- was he doing?"

McCreery didn't answer. The man's internal organs were hanging out of his side, and his blood was pouring across the ground. He was conscious and groaning. His eyelids hung halfway closed.

"What ... did they shoot him with?" McCreery asked, sweat beginning to show on his brow. "Did someone call a ... ambulance?"

The call to prayer was starting at a mosque down the street. The words "Allahu Akbar" - God is great - wafted down from a minaret's speakers.

The man looked up at the sky as he heard the words. He repeated the phrase "Ya Allah. Ya Allah. Ya Allah." Oh God. Oh God. Oh God.

Samarra December 2003 Grand Mosque of Ali Adi
[Richard Werly]

He looked at McCreery and raised his finger toward the house in front of him.

"This my house," he said in broken English. [...]

Looking into the dying man's eyes, the medic said, "Haji, haji, look at me," using the honorific title reserved for older Muslim men who presumably have gone on Hajj - pilgrimage - to Mecca.

"Why? Why?" asked the man, his eyes beginning to close.

"Haji, I don't know," said McCreery, sweat pouring down his face.

An Iraqi ambulance pulled up and the Humvees followed. They followed the man to the hospital they'd raided a few days earlier. The soldiers filed in and watched as the man died.

An Iraqi boy gestures in front of a burned-out
car in Samarra, 100 km (60 miles) north
of Baghdad, December 1, 2003. [...]
Attacks across Iraq at the weekend also killed
seven Spanish intelligence agents, two South
Korean contractors, two Japanese diplomats and
their Iraqi driver, a Colombian contractor
and two U.S. soldiers.
[REUTERS/Zohra Bensemra]

Call said nothing. McCreery, a 35-year-old former foundry worker from Levering, Mich., walked toward a wall, alone. He looked at the dead man for a moment and wiped tears from his eyes.

A few days later, Call's commander asked him to take pictures of the entrails left by the man Pena had shot, identified as Wissam Abbas, age 31, to document that Abbas was inside the sign warning of deadly force.

McHenry, who was driving, told him, "There's not going to be much left, sir. The dogs will have eaten all of it."

Pena was up on the schoolhouse roof manning the same .50-caliber machine gun. He didn't say a word about the man he'd killed. As he stared at a patch of earth in front of him, at Samarra and its wreckage, he couldn't contain his frustration.

"No one told me why I'm putting my life on the line in Samarra, and you know why they didn't?" Pena asked. "Because there is no f------ reason."

A US soldier inspects a store after its door
was blown off in the industrial section
of Samarra. [AFP/POOL/Stefan Zaklin]

from Talk to Action

Last week a rape victim who was denied emergency contraception finally saw justice done – even if it was only on TV. On February 14, ABC aired an episode of Boston Legal entitled "Smile" in which an 18 year-old girl, pregnant because she was denied access to EC at a Catholic hospital after being raped, insisted on suing the hospital and taking her case to trial. And since this case was tried in TV-land instead of in a real-life courtroom, she won.

But even that one fantasy victory over Catholic policy on contraception for rape victims was too much for some people to bear.

It's rude to tell someone that you think that they are inferior to you. It is political suicide to tell the majority of voters they are inferior to you.

If a politician believes that men are better than women - even if only in aggregate - that politicians may win the cheers of some men, but risks alienating other men, along with many women.

So code words are used. Remember those? "Family values." "Moral Majority." "Americanism." They really mean something else. One of those code words is "Right to Life."

Who controls a woman's body? Can the State "harvest" her baby, even if she does not want to serve in the lofty purpose? Must she serve involuntarily?

There are people who think that they know better. They have certain beliefs about what a woman is and what her role must be, but these leaders aren't coping to their inner values that devalue women.

Can't win elections if they REALLY said what they think.

I can't get it out of my head that Bush, the lesser, is telling Americans how we must fight in Iraq, yet he has two children who are old enough to serve - but they are dodging the draft ... oops. Forgot, no draft. I guess, like father, like daughter.

What people think and what they say, especially in the halls of power, are miles away from reality.