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In America, Where There’s Religious Smoke, There’s Usually A Capitalistic Fire

Once upon a time on this floured concord grape of a planet, religious conviction and apostasy was at the crux of human conflict and devastation. Dissenters were burned at the stake, excommunicated over heresy, and bloody wars were fought that endured for decades.

Since the beginning of contemporary history (or post World War II) that kind of religious fervor has quelled substantially. Even the religious patriarchal gaze still aimed at Islamic women, in stable Middle Eastern societies, is beginning to blink profusely – as their women advocate for equality, under a new empowering and ever-developing 21st century status quo, inspired by the unflinching feminism pervading the G 7 countries of the world. This modern devout reality makes the recent legislative bullet, fired at the distaff citizens of Texas, by a hegemonic catholic regime, rather unconventional and hard (for ME) to fathom.

For forty-eight years the women of the Lone Star State (and abroad) have utilized their “Right to Privacy,” allotted via Roe versus Wade, with grace and diligence. So this antiquated regurgitation of “right to life,” for me, reeks of nothing more than typical American subterfuge. Being ensconced in the abundantly generous Information Age, political chicanery, even under the honorable guise of religious conviction, is not difficult to recognize. To do so, all one has to do is dwell, intellectually, in the chasm between statistics and intuition – while never relinquishing the inescapable fact that America was constructed with the inhumane mechanism of, cheap labor.

Although I am usually not a proponent of employing statistics to buttress a perspective, (especially if the subject entails things like, subtextually administered racism) the details I’ve found in thisparticular situation are glaringly telling:

According to a Kaiser Family Foundation (KFF) 2018 poll, titled: Reported Legal Abortions by Race of Women Who Obtain Abortion by the State of Occurrence – 39% of Hispanic women, living in Texas, had abortions, along with 27% of Black women and 7% recognized as “Other,” a minority demographic collectively forming 73% – juxtaposed to the 27% of White women that chose to have the procedure, in the same calendar year, in the same conservative state.

Supporting those numbers, with what will likely be the next state to sanctimoniously infringe on the rights of its adult female citizens, in the same 2018 poll, 29% of Floridian Hispanic women had abortions, along with 34% of Black women and 4% Other, totaling 67% – compared to the 33% of White women who wanted to take advantage of their Right to Privacy, as well.

Anyone capable of basic critical thinking can look at that data and experience a rainbow trout-like fragrance flooding their nostrils. However, if one is attuned to this country’s inhumane wealth gap, and its bequeathed love affair with economical employment, a more insidious scent and picture begins to develop.

Having absorbed those numbers, what my intuition then communicates to me about Texas’ theocratic Senate Bill 8 is, that this country, (the only country, by the way, when confronted with the demise of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, resisted with a savage five year act of treason – a country, and its alliance of southern states, that never truly conceded to defeat and a new ethical way of life) could have finally found a guileful way to implement, what can accurately be characterized as, Slavery 2.0: A new way of corralling a particular demographic into second class citizenry, which in turn could cultivate and sustain, a new, yet familiar way to secure generational wealth – by exploiting a never ending supply of cheap, undereducated, homegrown labor.

Catholicism, with its rich history of zealous parishioners, more than willing to exact moral authority on believers and nonbelievers alike, provides great cover for those unwilling to purchase anything beyond face value. But those willing to spend more time considering the numbers I presented, and the necessities that capitalism demands, (necessities like Labor Force) will find it difficult to believe, that a country that welcomes the rise of atheists and agnostics, will force them to conform to a law grounded in a religious principle – will find it hard to believe, that a country who admonishes Islamic regimes for their religious stronghold over its female citizens, is preparing to enact, what amounts to a biblical law, on its on female population – will find it perplexing to believe, that an intelligent  21st century woman like, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, is (more than likely) about to knock the contemporary feminist movement backwards into the 19th century, by terminating Roe vs Wade, with what was recently, Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Right to Privacy vote…

I am fully aware of Justice Barrett’s esteemed Catholic roots, but the Dark Money that contributed to her expedient trek towards the Supreme Court intrigues me more. After all, on the capitalistic chessboard called America, a country where the dollar bill is worshiped like a god, even a prestigious historic institution like The Roman Catholic Church, is susceptible to being reduced to the vulnerable strategic status of… a pawn.