Morality and Sexuality

 

Reality Check: 7 billion people on the planet

Pro Who’s Life? Quality over Quantity is my choice

Politicians Have No Business Legislating Morality

 

Moral Morality

It is not the job of any democratic government to regulate morality and especially to not make laws based on any particular idea of what morality is. Dictatorships and Theocracies legislate the morality of the land, democracies recognize the individual as the social unit of consequence and part of freedom and liberty is managing your own morality; leaving government to legislate our interactions with each other, such as in contract law and the criminal code.

The anti-abortion lobby is a moralist lobby – they are seeking to enshrine their morality into secular law in a democratic nation under the false belief that America was founded as a Christian nation. And their reasoning is that they beleive that morals are external to humans and handed down in absolute form by a deity.

In the Jesusverse, original sin is the knowledge of good and evil – in other words, being able to make moral distinctions is original sin and treading on an area reserved for god.

So in claiming that there’s a god and thus absolute morals because while god knows better than us, yet is incapable of providing credentials, we are all supposed to put aside what our experience and reason tells us about moral distinctions on the say so of people who are more concerned about their absolutist morals being imposed on the population rather than how that would restrict the freedom and liberty guaranteed by the foundational documents of the land – the constitution and bill of rights.

That morals vary widely demonstrates that there are no absolute morals – only degrees of worse or better, relatively speaking. There are many different systems through which people understand morals and morality; although most systems of morals do not consider a person’s underlying motivation, which to my mind, makes them lacking in force or meaning

The idea that morals should trump actual living people is appalling; yet, this is what religious people regularly do – hold their claimed morals above people. This is why they are consumed with the unborn and comatose rather than a living person who needs social assistance for a hand up in the world. The unborn and comatose aren’t demanding and can’t participate in decisions – and it’s the being in charge of decisions that the religious want to take away from people.

Imagine that your spouse, parent or child was in hospital and you weren’t able to make decisions for their care and treatment, especially end of life treatment, because this ability was legislated away regardless of the doctor’s assessment and medical reality.

Living in a democratic country means you get to decide for yourself what happens to you in your life. Whether you marry, whether you have children – these are important decisions that we all have to determine for ourselves.

Yet, anti-abortionists would tell you that they know better than you do about what you should allow to happen within your body.

Part of the anti-abortion sentiment arises from anti-sex attitudes, that if you don’t want to risk pregnancy that you should keep your legs shut – an outdated,  controlling and unrealistic desire to maintain the illusion that there’s girls you marry and girls you have fun with – something that benefits only the girls who say no and no one else.

Really, if we want to reduce the divorce rate, we should be encouraging people to be in touch with their sexuality and to marry someone they are compatible with. Sexual incompatibility leads to marriage problems and often to divorce.

We learn morals from our parents, our experiences and what the society we live in tells us is moral within the context of the society. Being educated and learning about more cultures, it’s not hard to see that morals are context sensitive and relative to circumstances – and you can determine what’s moral or not with a broader perspective – what’s common morals to cultures through the ages and what’s clearly okay or not based on a macro view.

Morally capable adults do not depend on fairy stories to know how to behave, they can and do distinguish between unacceptable and acceptable under certain conditions. There is no list of absolute morals that can be memorized and attempted to be applied in life – moral lists generally fall apart over rule conflicts – can you lie to spare someone’s feelings or to save a life?

When it comes to morals, you have to do the work yourself – and when you can do that, you don’t need any gods and certainly, you don’t need your morality legislated by people who have no consideration of your life. So why should their morals be respected or enshrined, when they are absolutely heartless and ignore the circumstances of making a life changing decision.

Because collective and individual survival and thriving is best ensured by cooperative behaviours – which is balancing both people’s needs, interests and morals – applying an absolute rule would make genuine cooperation difficult.

 

a person who is moral, is moral with or without an audience

if you can’t determine morals on your own, then no amount of obeying social rules or laws are going to make you moral

Personhood defeated in Mississippi

CNN reports that Mississippi voted 58% against designating fertilized eggs as having personhood.

With voters supporting either side were split evenly, the 11% undecided vote were inundated with campaigning – however, it is likely that outgoing Gov. Haley Barbour “expressed that he was undecided about the issue, saying it was ‘too ambiguous’;” was what swung the undecided to vote against the measure.

Personhood USA, the group behind this attempt to establish a basis in law to eventually challenge Roe v Wade, vows to continue their fight to provide the same legal rights to the unborn as to the mother. Unsurprisingly, when people raised concerns about what exactly does that mean, Personhood USA asserted that this was scare tactics.

Except, what does it mean is a valid question.

If the unborn has the same rights as the mother, that effectively removes the mother from being able to make reproductive decisions as being in a conflict of interest between her rights and her unborn fetus.

Giving a fertilized egg equal rights to an existing person without consideration of who gets to speak for the rights of a particular fertilized egg is an important question – and until there’s an answer, there should be no more such referendums because people are only voting for an idea, with little or no consideration to the ramifications:

What will it mean for women’s reproductive rights? What does it mean about the decisions a woman can make with her doctor? Will it mean women will be at the mercy of the state when it comes to everything from taking certain birth control pills to trying to conceive if a couple is infertile? What happens to those fertilized eggs for IVF treatments if they aren’t used? And would people be facing prosecution if they did any of those things?

It is not acceptable to turn back the clock and make women beholden to boyfriends, husbands, fathers or even rapists to make reproductive decisions on behalf of the fertilized egg.

Pregnancy is one of those zero sum game situations, there is no accommodating both parties if the woman doesn’t want to or can’t go through pregnancy.

Either the woman is a person under the law, entitled to make decisions about her body and have personal sovereignty or she does not.

There is no one more qualified or better able than the mother to determine if pregnancy is an option or not for her.

This idea that strangers should get to decide what you can or cannot do with your own body should be loathsome and unthinkable.

This is what the real harm of religion is – putting ideas above actual living breathing people – and worse, by coddling religious sensibilities and acting as if religion was a valid worldview despite that religions are not based in evidence or reality – people have become entitled to the idea that their particular religion should inform the law of the secular land and be imposed on people whether they accept that religion or not.

The Magna Carta freed the peasants from the whims of the king by establishing rights and responsibilities in law. The American declaration of independence made individuals the social unit of consequence and guaranteed everyone life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness and Roe v Wade, more than getting to vote, assured women of their right to personal sovereignty.

Personhood USA wants to take that personal sovereignty away and reduce women from being persons under the law to being chattel beholden to men again because their religious views have entitled them to decide who’s a person and who’s not.

Fertilized egg yes, women, not so much.