So How’s He Recovering, Then?

I’ve heard you can supposedly reverse homosexuality and even get your virginity back, but this is a new one – Governor Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota has proclaimed April to be Abortion Recovery Month. Now on first impression, the very name connotes ghastly images of fetuses being fished out of a dumpster somewhere – obviously the kind of holiday that could only be thought up by a male pro-lifer, the kind of idiot who thinks babies are produced the way it was portrayed in 1950s movies, after about fifteen minutes of a man pacing outside a delivery room door while smoking a cigar. I mean, what could these sick bastards possibly want with your old abortions?

But wait – it’s not that at all. Apparently Abortion Recovery Month is designed to honor all the abortion recovery programs in the state of Minnesota – which must surely have no other concern than for the mental and physical well-being of patients who have undergone abortions, right?

Well probably not. Just like those Crisis Pregnancy Centers that promise objective compassionate assistance to young pregnant women and then do everything they can to cajole, terrify and guilt-trip them into carrying their pregnancies to term, the abortion recovery counseling programs I Googled seem like religious rackets with a pro-life agenda, sometimes in the open and sometimes not so obvious.

Worst of all, they certainly doesn’t seem to be offering real counseling. If a therapist were to say to me, “In America we have a big drug problem, and we don’t realize it’s because of abortion,” I’d conclude that person was in more need of help than I was, starting with what constitutes a provable statement and what doesn’t. But these same counseling organizations offer certificates in abortion counseling after nothing more than a fraction of a semester of completely religious training.

Maybe Pawlenty’s proclamation really does honor some few souls out there who specialize in helping women get over the emotional trauma of abortion – and they doubtless deserve recognition. But right now the field seems dominated by proselytizing vultures who, with no actual secular training, descend on hurt and confused young women intending on converting them to faithful guilt-ridden tithing machines who can be counted on to vote against letting anyone else have the choice they felt was necessary at the time. And those charlatans don’t need recognition, because their reward is in heaven – whatever simpleminded, dogmatic, shrill millstone of a heaven happens to take them.

Location of St. Paul's Grave Less Certain than Evolution

Some bone fragments inside the purported tomb of St. Paul (aka Saul of Tarsus) have been carbon dated to the general time period of his death. This, according to Pope Benedict XVI,

“…seems to confirm the unanimous and undisputed tradition that these are the mortal remains of the Apostle St. Paul.”

Well, no – they don’t confirm anything. Rather, they’re consistent with the assumption that the remains are those of Saul of Tarsus. They could also be the remains of his neighbor, his papyrus deliveryman or some farmer who happened to die around the same time. It rules out that these were the bones of William Shakespeare, Helen of Troy or any of the billions of people born in the last few hundred years. Of course, since the sarcophagus stands in the Basilica of St. Paul, originally built by Emperor Constantine over the saint's purported grave some 250 years after Paul’s execution, this doesn’t really tell us anything more than we already knew. And the pope would know that if he knew how science worked.

Unfortunately, the head of one of the world’s largest denominations thinks that science should be secondary to faith. Not that this is surprising – it’s the error committed by most faith-based thought, from religions to political philosophies to fads like The Secret and numerology. But science starts with facts and only declares an overarching concept valid if the facts are preponderantly in its favor, and only then on a probationary basis pending any contradictory evidence. Religion and other forms of sloppy thinking start with the overarching concepts, then pick and choose the facts they want to support their idea. One of these ways of thinking has found out more in the last 400 years than the other has done in the last 10,000 – you decide which should trump the other.

So if the pope wants to learn something about religion, he should start by trying to understand science. And if that leads him to understand how religion can be so consistently wrong about so many things for such a long time, then so much the better.

Excommunication Breakdown

Too often in America we see faith portrayed as an unmitigated virtue, a means of making us good people even though our understanding of what makes up that goodness only reaches about the third grade level. Christians accept Jesus’ assertion of “love thy god with all thy heart and love thy neighbor as thyself” is the basis for all of the law, although this makes little sense alongside some of the more bizarre proscriptions in Deuteronomy or the salacious rantings of Saul of Tarsus. Ultimately a morality based solely on circular reasoning and argument from authority, as most faith-based moralities are, leads at best to confusion and opportunism. At worst, faith manages to take the misery of the human condition and use it as an excuse to inflict even more pain and suffering.

Such is the case with a nine-year-old girl in Brazil who was repeatedly raped by her stepfather for years. Recently, on a doctor’s visit after complaining of stomach pains, it was discovered that she was four months pregnant. With twins. She was given an abortion because even under Brazil’s restrictive abortion law, which allows the procedure only in cases of rape or danger to the mother, the girl met both conditions.

The laws were applied and the girl was given an abortion while her abusive stepfather – who is also suspected of molesting the victim’s physically-handicapped older sister – was arrested as he was trying to flee town. And then, from the 14th century, the Catholic Church weighed in and excommunicated the girl’s mother and doctors:

Now a Church spokesman says all those involved, including the child's mother and the doctors, are to be excommunicated.
The Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Jose Cardoso Sobrinho, told Brazil's TV Globo that the law of God was above any human law.
He said the excommunication would not apply to the child because of her age, but would affect all those who ensured the abortion was carried out.

In the ensuing row, Brazil’s President Luiz Ignacio Lula da Silva, also a Catholic, disagreed: “In this case, medicine is more right than the church,” he said. While the qualifying “in this case” seems pretty superfluous – in what instance has faith shown to be better than science at finding anything out? – Lula’s sentiment is reasonable if not painfully obvious. The Vatican, however, has backed up Archbishop Sobrinho. The cardinal in charge of Latin American bishops, Giovanni Battista Re, justified the decision on the grounds that the fetuses were innocent and had a right to live. Even if a nine-year-old girl suffered and died as a consequence. And even if her twins ended up dying as well.

And as a final illustrative outrage comes the complete silence on the church about the responsibility of the girl’s rapist stepfather. While it’s obvious to the archbishop and cardinal – and their brethren with a long institutional history of enabling and covering up pedophilia – that any Catholic performing an abortion deserves excommunication, the pedophile father who put a minor, her mother, and several doctors in this situation seems to have escaped the church’s attention entirely.

It’s certainly true that human laws can be draconian and outrageous. But at least human laws have in them an inherent basis for change. An informed electorate can overturn them; judges can overrule them; even in a dictatorship, another arbitrary leader can come along and negate them. Not so with the Catholic Church and, to extrapolate, all other societies where morality and law are identical and morality is handed down by revelation from an uncontactable being that won’t explain itself.

Think about that the next time some religious fundamentalist argues that the United States is a Christian nation and that the Constitution ought to be brought in line with the Bible. The Enlightenment Humanism on which our Constitution is based is vastly more compassionate, reasonable, and egalitarian than a concept of morals that deems itself “above any human law.”

Update: Archbishop Sobrinho actually did think about the father -- and concluded that his crime was less serious than getting an abortion: "'It is clear that he committed a very serious sin, but worse than this is the abortion,' Sobrinho said." How such barbarians have any claim to morality is one of religion's great mysteries.