I will admit that I cringe whenever I hear someone say, “Guess what? We’re pregnant!” The phrase really rubs me the wrong way. I think it’s because I never romanticized the whole pregnancy process, so to me “we’re pregnant” just feels so corny and cloying. Couple that with my bit of anal insistence on proper language use and disdain of malapropisms, and the eyes tend to roll back into my skull — not exactly following the rules for politeness on hearing such joyous news from a friend (perhaps that’s why I don’t have many of them).

So imagine my reaction reading this piece from the L.A. Times about a Christian group — quelle surprise — that’s trying to “change abortion’s pronoun”:

These days, he channels the grief into activism in a burgeoning movement of “post-abortive men.” Abortion is usually portrayed as a woman’s issue: her body, her choice, her relief or her regret. This new movement — both political and deeply personal in nature — contends that the pronoun is all wrong.

“We had abortions,” said Mark B. Morrow, a Christian counselor. “I’ve had abortions.”

I don’t doubt that some men may feel a sense of loss, but slapping a label on it and treating it like some sort of syndrome is a bit much, is it not? He goes on:

Morrow, the counselor, described his regret as sneaking up on him in midlife — more than a decade after he impregnated three girlfriends (one of them twice) in quick succession in the late 1980s. All four pregnancies ended in abortion.

Years later, when his wife told him she was pregnant, “I suddenly realized that I had four dead children,” said Morrow, 47, who lives near Erie, Pa. “I hadn’t given it a thought. Now it all came crashing down on me — look what you’ve done.”

What have you done? You prevented yourself from lining up “baby mamas” like you were P. Diddy, that’s what. I was prepared to write it off as a guy a bit too much in touch with his feelings until I read that this melodrama was part of a bigger plot — to use the passionate stories to try and influence the Supreme Court:

Therapist Vincent M. Rue, who helped develop the concept of post-abortion trauma, runs an online study that asks men to check off symptoms (such as irritability, insomnia and impotence) that they feel they have suffered as a result of an abortion. When men are widely recognized as victims, Rue said, “that will change society.”

Abortion rights supporters watch this latest mobilization warily: If anecdotes from grieving women can move the Supreme Court, what will testimony about men’s pain accomplish?

“They can potentially shift the entire debate,” said Marjorie Signer of the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice, an interfaith group that supports abortion rights.

I say not to worry — we all know that when a large group of privileged white men feel they are suffering an injustice, nothing is ever done about it, right?

Oh, shit.

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When atheists and Christians raise children together, the result is often times competitive and humorous when the atheist tries to squelch the faith that the Christian tries to nurture. My mother, an Evangelical Christian, uses every opportunity to influence our children to the disgrace of their atheist father. Knowing that her Christian-in-theory-and-not-practice daughter and her heathen son-in-law aren’t going to properly “church” her grandchildren, Grandma has taken it upon herself to save them from the wrath of darkness, evil and hell. She does this, oh-so-subtly, by mailing us Christian inspired merchandise tucked in between other gifts like a t-shirt or toy. One of the recent offerings was a CD of Christian songs sung by a group of children.

My children love this CD, bestowing upon my husband a feeling of helplessness and pure annoyance. Not only does our 3-year-old love to turn it up like it’s Freedom Rock, both our kids sing along with robust glory and without inhibition.

As I said before, I’m a pseudo-Christian (I believe from afar — Sundays are for laying on the couch until noon) so I find this incredibly amusing. Prescott — not-so-much.

One of their favorite songs is Who built the Ark?, a ditty about Noah and his wacky adventures. The chorus is supposed to be, “Who built the Ark? Noah, Noah! Who built the Ark? Brother Noah built the Ark!” Prescott, however, has bastardized the song and worked his influence into an innocent and spiritual moment by teaching the kids new words to the song. We now have kids that, while in public, have no problem belting out, “Who built the Ark? No one! No one! Who built the Ark? No one really built the Ark!”

So, it’s gonna be like that, huh? Wait until I sell Holden on God-camp this summer. We will see who’s able to influence these young minds more.

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As I was driving him to school today, my 7th grade son wanted to talk about science and what he was learning about the thinker and scientist, Gallileo. My son was amazed how this man and his new discoveries and his promotion of the Copernican doctrine had been met with hostility and mistrust from the tiny, threatened minds of the church and its subsequent Inquisition which, at the time, dictated what could and could not be called historical or scientific “fact”. His then-radical theory which proposed that while two dissimilarly-weighted objects, if dropped, might fall at different rates on Earth, the same objects, in an airless atmosphere, would both hit the ground at the same time.

The Church, incensed that Galileo would dare to challenge the “wisdom” of the day concerning gravity as well as his theory that the Sun– not the Earth–was the center of the universe, felt Galileo was nothing less than a heretic. After 18 days of formal interrorgation (and using threats of torture), Galileo confessed under duress that he may have worded his support for the Copernican case a little too strongly. Despite this, he was placed under house arrest in 1633 where he remained until his death in 1642.

At the end of the last Apollo 15 moon walk (1971), a live demonstration was performed before the television cameras by Commander David Scott using a feather and a geologic hammer. Because the atmosphere on the moon did not provide the same air resistance that one finds on our planet, both objects–released at the same time– fell at the same rate and landed at the same time. Despite this very public demonstration which is preserved on tape, the Church did not see fit to formally reverse its stance on Galileo’s theories until 1983. You read it right, people…1983!!

My son was aghast that anyone would be treated in such a manner for merely encouraging the broadening of intellectual thought and for daring to promote new scientific theories. I told him that this was why his father and I are such strong advocates of the Separation of Church and State. “No church, regardless of denomination, should have the power to decide what is or is not accepted or studied as scientific or historical fact or to censure those who promote such knowledge,” I said. “It would be tremendously naive to believe that what happened to Galileo could not still happen, in some form or other, in our country now.”

You think I’m being an alarmist? Then consider the following two things:

1) The steady encroachment of fundamentalism in this country. Make no mistake, fundamentalism means the death of intellectual growth, regardless of which religion it attaches itself to. There are people being elected to the highest of public offices who maintain that Abraham lived to be several hundred years old and that the world, according to their religious views, is only 6,000 years old. Especially worrisome are the words of Evangelical guru and former head hypocrite of the National Association of Evangelicals, Ted Haggard. Haggard, who “was asked to leave” his post after it was revealed that, despite his attacks on homosexuality, he had engaged in a three year sexual relationship with a male prostitute who also sold him methanphetamines. (Yes….THAT Ted Haggard!) The evangelist, in a taped interview, warned esteemed British ethologist/evolutionist, Richard Dawkins, that it wouldn’t be long before the majority of people understood the 6,000 year theory to be TRUTH. If that doesn’t frighten you, then I have a “science textbook” to show you that is used by fundamentalist homeschooling parents here in Texas. I hope I’m dead when the day comes that public school teachers are required to teach your child that there were pairs of dinosaurs on the ark and that Noah used bags of fireflies to light the dark lower chambers of his watercraft.

2) The present administration just made it legal for the government to torture people. The same government that is presently led by men who–if one believes the public boasts of Haggard–lend their ear to Pastor Ted (who claimed he spoke to George Bush on a weekly basis) and others like him.

NOW are you scared? You ought to be.

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