Personhood

Two of fifty states have now codified government-mandated sexual assault. Texas and Oklahoma, I'm looking at you while my skin crawls and my internal organs quiver in fear. Virginia is on its way to becoming the third member of this misogynistic, utterly abhorrent club.

Because it is incredibly unhealthy to be a rageball all the time, I am working assiduously at setting aside my anger at the very idea that the government is mandating vaginal penetration with a foreign object for women seeking a legal medical procedure. But let me just say that one more time, so that it sinks in for all of you following along at home:

The government is mandating vaginal penetration with a foreign object for women seeking a legal medical procedure.

Why is this ok? I'm seriously asking. I want to know why this is ok.

I find some of the quotes from people defending these laws to be instructive as to the kind of mindset that makes things like this ok. For example, "They already chose to be vaginally penetrated." Again, setting aside the initial rush of rage, I can start to unpack that statement. Choosing to have sexual intercourse once makes anything that happens afterwards consensual. It's something like a chaste/virgin doctrine: once intercourse occurs (once the hymen is broken?) there is no protection for your ladybits. By breaking the seal (so to speak), you lose claim to any protections. Consent to sex is something that can only happen once, and it can never be revoked. Once you've lost virginity, you are ever-after "open for business" to anyone, including the government! It's the fallen-woman doctrine, gussied up for modern times.

Another came after a Virginia legislator was asked about exceptions for rape and incest. His response? "Sometimes incest is voluntary. The woman becomes a sin-bearer of the crime, because the right of a child predominates over the embarrassment of the woman."

First of all, I am not kidding.

Second, can someone please find me a breakdown of "voluntary" incestual relationships versus molestation and rape by a family member? I would like to know more about this voluntary incest.

Really, I don't think this guy defines "voluntary" in the way that you and I do. Voluntary sex is any sex that happens because you don't kill yourself rather than be defiled. And sex, itself, is always a defiling act. Sex is dirty.

And that's really what all this is about, isn't it? The deeply-seated belief of many people that there is something inherently, irrevocably wrong with sex. The body is dirty, because it is corporeal and not spiritual, and acts of pleasure for the body are naught but devilish distractions from the work of cleansing the soul.

It's a sad, tragic outlook. My well of compassion is almost emptied, thinking about all these people that think the pleasures of touch and give are evil. Women are by necessity nothing but uteruses, because to acknowledge the entirety of a woman would be to acknowledge desire.

Sex is not shameful. Corporeal joys are not lesser than spiritual ones.

And the government has absolutely no right to be enforcing such arcane and deeply personal beliefs. You may wish to hold onto your notion of sex as something that is capital-W WRONG, but you do not get to codify your beliefs. Mandating sexual assault and making birth control inaccessible are inexcusable abuses of power. Women are more then uteruses, and our uteruses are not yours to make decisions about. I get to decide who and what enters my vagina, not a legislature. I get to decide whether I have sex, and whether I want the possibility of progeny to come from that sex, not a legislature. Those are my decisions to make because I am a complete person, with the ability to reason and choose.

You want to talk about personhood? Let's start with the personhood of women.

I am tired of constantly having to defend the existence of my brain, my character, and my capacity for moral decision-making. Women are complete beings. Accept it. And stop treating us as if we are not.

Evil Exists. But.

I was raised Catholic. In many ways, I still am Catholic. It's something that will never leave me. Over the years I've gravitated towards the mystic traditions of Christianity, towards the Teresa of Avila's and the Thomas Merton's. I've found myself drawn to the notion of personal, ecstatic experience of the divine and the exhortation to "Love thy neighbor as thyself." These are the tenets of my faith. These are the central pieces.

I spend more time than most of the people I know engaged in meditation, which often makes people think I'm all Zen and stuff. I'm into balance, calm, acceptance. But I'm still Catholic.

And the thing about Catholics: We believe in evil.

We believe absolutely that evil exists. It roams the earth. The Devil is merely an anthropomorphized personification of this evil. He's a boogeyman. The evil actually exists within us, within each of us, and it is the responsibility of each of us to find that evil within ourselves and accept it, absorb it, so that we don't commit evil.

Theologically, God is our help in this endeavor. Baptism, communion, prayer, regular Mass attendance and confession are all ways in which God (through his representatives on Earth) aid us in our quest to accomplish this. We will fuck up a lot. That's why forgiveness is God's greatest gift, and such a central piece of the Catholic cosmology.

I believe in evil. I believe absolutely that evil exists in the world. I believe absolutely that it is my duty, as an aspiring moral being, to combat this evil. Because of my propensity towards mysticism, I believe that I must start with the evil within me. It's not a matter of casting it out, since such a task is impossible, but rather of absorbing it. When you are aware of the negative impulses, you can control them, and thus refrain (knowingly and purposefully) from committing evil.

To me, the "knowingly and purposefully" caveat is quite important. We can accidentally stumble into good works all the time; it doesn't take much. It is akin to what philosopers refer to as "narcissistic altruism" in which we do good things for others because we are addicted to the rush of righteousness that comes along with it. We're really doing good things for ourselves, for our own selfish reasons.

I believe in evil. I believe in true good.

But the world is not a perfect dichotomy, and there exists a whole spectrum in between evil and good.

Narcissistic altruism, for example. It's not true good. You are not being selfless; your primary concern is your self and your own feelings. But it's also not evil. It's dangerous because once you get into a pattern of doing things for the way they make you feel rather than the way they make others feel, it's hard to get out, and this prevents you from growing as a person. This prevents you from reaching stages of awareness in which you could fully embrace and therefore neutralize the evil within you.

But it's not itself evil to do good things for the wrong reasons.

Evil is far, far worse than that.

I was recently chit-chatting idly with a friend when the conversation took a turn for the serious, and this friend honestly began to put forth evidence of their own evilness. I was slightly aghast. Evil is not a joking matter, for one. I am Catholic. But also I was deeply saddened that anyone could have lived and come to the conclusion that they were evil simply because they'd made mistakes. What kind of culture do we live in that anything as human as making mistakes, even mistakes that cause pain, make one categorically evil? Evil is something I take far too seriously to classify it on par with human weakness. If human weakness were evil, there would be no salvation or comfort for any of us, and we would all be incapable of doing good as soon as we were born.

Evil is not temptation succumbed. Evil provides the temptation, and we will and do succumb. But to be an evil person, you have to look at whatever the fallout from that mistake was and not be hurt yourself by it. Evil is the inability to feel in yourself the effects of what you do.

As long as you can still feel, as long as you retain empathy, you are not an evil person, and you can grow.