Respect for murderesses Sunday
October 2, 2016 § 42 Comments
Today is Respect for Life Sunday. Most people assume that this implies an anti-abortion theme, which will be reflected in parish activities and also in the homily at Mass. That assumption probably rests on the naive idea that the mainstream pro life movement is actually anti-abortion as opposed to pro choice.
Since we live in the land of lies where every day is opposite day, the homily I heard today was not really about respecting the lost lives of unborn children murdered by their mothers. Very little was actually said about the victims, and nothing at all about the terrible injustice perpetrated against them by their own mothers and their mothers’ co-conspirators. Rather, the entire presentation was designed to generate sympathy for the murderesses as opposed to their victims.
The first half was all about domestic ‘abuse’, in all of its motte-and-bailey indefiniteness. There was an obligatory ‘if you are a woman or a man who is abused’ nod to egalitarianism, but we all know who are the main abusers.
The second half was about how choosing to murder a child is its own sort of victimhood. It was even stated that harm to the mother and harm to the child are inseparable. This is true, of course: the very concept of a murder victim makes no sense without a murderer.
We were assured that the murderess is always harmed by her choice to murder, despite all the denial of this by many secular voices. This of course is also true: murderers like all sinners can find forgiveness in Christ and the Sacraments, but they do terrible and irrevocable things to themselves when they commit murder.
We were treated to a scenario wherein an older woman is depressed and ashamed because she participated in the murder of her own child when she was a young teen, at the behest and encouragement of her parents. This seems perfectly natural to me. People with diminished capacity who are roped into a conspiracy to commit murder by stronger personalities are victims, of a sort. Of course they are also murderers, if they freely chose to carry out the act or to co-conspire in carrying it out.
Perhaps we ought to suggest a homily on how rapists are victims too, at some point in the future. Perhaps we could establish a Respect Chastity Sunday, wherein we will be treated to sympathetic stories about rapists. Men are born with a natural propensity to violence in order to protect their families, and with an intensity of sex drive that women cannot fathom. The rapist is a victim too, and deserves ‘mercy‘: that is, reassurance that it isn’t really his fault that he chose to rape.
Deception paints its cubist distortions of reality from a palate of truths.
So what did you hear on respect for murderesses Sunday?
Zippy Catholic 
This is the weakness in the anti-abortion movement. It doesn’t admit that women share the blame for abortion. It is, after all, a woman’s crime and sin.
We live in a society in which a married woman could abort her child and drive her husband into such despair that he kills himself and she’d still be considered the victim.
Not at mass (which was a wonderful discussion apropos to the Feast of the Guardian Angels) but afterwards during a pilgrimage of sorts I heard that because we’ve been so obsessed with “pro-life causes” we’ve turned a blind eye to equally important life causes, such as something about genocide in Africa and the Middle East. Not agreeing or disagreeing I guess. Just seems fishy given the millions of dead babies in our backyards.
Mike’s comment really says it all.
OT – TLM attendee here. We didn’t get a respect for life speech today. We got THE DEBATE was a colossal fail for the evil twins, the woild is bad bad EVIL, but there is still hope speech.
However, the other thing that really bother’s me about the “pro-life” movement is the inability of the woman-are-angels crowd to refuse to shame women for their responsibility in the continued cultural degradation that leads to promiscuous behavior and the concomitant “need” to obtain an abortion.
I figure even if a person doesn’t have the stones to approach a woman and call her a “slut” for dressing like one, the least these “pro-life” people could do is call a skank a skank in their private conversations and encourage others to do the same.
I tell my daughters all the time, “do not dress like a slut, act like one or talk like one.”
Roman Lance:
The pro-life movement means well but has been neutralized by numerous factors, including the ongoing hostage crisis and a kind of stockholm syndrome.
As a result mainstream pro-lifers manage to think of themselves as being against abortion when in fact they are pro choice.
@zippy
Agreed. And please accept my apology if my previous post seemed a bit crass. Twas not my intention, I just wanted to illustrate that we shouldn’t be afraid to call a spade a spade and that sometimes it may require the use of “mean” words.
God bless.
“So what did you hear on respect for murderesses Sunday?”
Mother Teresa’s many admonishments to stop abortion including that abortion is the greatest destroyer of peace (how can we tell people to stop killing one another when a mother can kill her child?) and America suffers from the greatest poverty in its fear of the little children.
semioticanimal:
OT: did you delete your blog?
My priest just gave a straight sermon on today’s gospel, nothing about life issues.
It seems to me that pro-life people want to treat abortion like suicide. It used to be that suicides were treated like murderers, but now they are more likely to be treated like a martyr.
I think the logic for abortion is similar: only a crazy person would do this terrible thing, therefore she must not be responsible for her actions. Also the people she is hurting most are herself/her close family members, so we can indulge her without worry she’s going to attack us next. Pro-life people are big on parental notification laws, just as they would be livid if the school nurse were recommending suicide to teenagers with mental health issues.
If suicide is going to be treated as purely a mental health issue, why not abortion?
Laura:
If that were their logic, they would be arguing that a just society should legally treat women who choose abortion the same way as mental patients who successfully carry out murder.
I doubt it’s one thing. More likely we have a few drivers at the top who are either completely whipped or secretly pro-choice and have been trying to throw out whatever rhetoric they can to get the mother off the hook for abortion, some of which has stuck and some hasn’t.
The logic Laura cited probably WAS used and HAS worked for some people, but I doubt it was believed by the original people who thought it up. They were pushing an agenda.
Malcolm:
I agree: the decision has been made to exonerate the murderesses, and the rhetoric is not about what is true but is just casting about to rationalize that conclusion.
Want to co-sign Mike’s, “Millions of babies killed, women hit hardest” point.
Z-
I attempted to confront a similar set of issues today. Kind of up your alley. Hope you enjoy, Scott.
https://americandadweb.wordpress.com/2016/10/04/peak-subjectivity/
Perhaps we ought to suggest a homily on how rapists are victims too, at some point in the future…Men are born…with an intensity of sex drive that women cannot fathom.
This is wrong because The Manosphere is Filled With Bitter, Bitter Men. I learned at Catholic Answers Forum.
I also learned in the 1990s that Rape Is About Power, not sex. We know that women are not empowered because they don’t rape men. If you think that women are exercising power in choosing abortion you would be wrong also because Women Deserve Better Than Abortion.
Joking aside, it’s pretty clear that Catholics of all stripes generally take it as axiom in any matter touching on sex and society that Women Are Being Exploited. This is where they start and then proceed to filter evidence they will consider, or interpret evidence in front of their faces, based on keeping this assumption safely away from the challenge of thinking about whether it is true or not.
Nothing. Apparently, when the feast day of the saint for whom your parish is named falls on or near Sunday, you can do optional readings relating to the feast day. Perhaps it was better that way.
buckyinky:
CAF is analogous to certain feminine products in its social function, it seems to me. Dispose of it in a safe place, and be aware that it might clog up your plumbing.
*for certian values of “pro-choice” that neither the people who are accused nor those who would describe themeselves as “pro-choice” would accept.
johnmcg:
It is not exactly uncommon for human beings to deny the objective implications and consequences of their own expressed commitments. So the fact that mainstream pro-lifers might object to being labeled pro choice doesn’t alter the fact that the expressed position of mainstream pro life organizations is in fact pro choice.
Also, lots of groups don’t like being ‘lumped together’ with marginally different groups that they don’t like. Nevertheless it is often factually true that they share the same basic commitments; e.g. left liberals, classical- or right-liberals, and libertarians. They may hate each other but they nevertheless share the same basic commitments and are best understood as the same, that is, as liberals.
“OT: did you delete your blog”
No but I did comment from my phone which I guess was not logged into my wordpress account.
“OT: did you delete your blog”
No but I commented from my phone which wasn’t logged into my wordpress account. My other comment was from an old account.
Or maybe commenting from my phone won’t add a link.
FYI when I click on https://semioticanimal.wordpress.com I get a message that the blog has been deleted.
My blog is infinitesemiosis.wordpress.com. That blog was the domain I wanted but I guess it’s gone now.
Ah thanks. That is the link in your sign on here.
That clears it up.
I guess in my account setting it had the semioticanimal.wordpress.com site. Hopefully now its fixed.
They may hate each other but they nevertheless share the same basic commitments and are best understood as the same, that is, as liberals.
Liberalism: the hepatitis of politics.
Good heavens. I use the USCCB website frequently to get the readings for the day – I went on last night to see that it is Domestic Violence Awareness Month, by which is obviously meant Wife-Beating Awareness Month. Pictures in abundance showing sympathetic Everywoman in Distress with Faceless Male Monster in the background or close proximity.
It takes almost no effort to discover the very relevant fact that women are just as much instigators of what is called domestic violence as men (and I do concede for the record that a man’s unjust pummeling of a woman is a graver thing than the reverse). Yet obviously that effort has not been made by whoever runs the USCCB website. Or it has been ignored.
What is it with the drive to show women in particular as a victim class? Maybe there’s an easy and obvious explanation to this, but I find it baffling. I suppose one might say that those who have held the power before we were all enlightened (in this case, men) are now the ones who are designated the low-life oppressors. But it has never been clear to me that men as a sex have particularly held power over women as a sex. The power women have over men is different than the kind men hold over women, but it’s still there in both cases, though the power women have is often ignored. Of course the denial seems to me a part of the whole dialectic of woman as eternal victim, which of course doesn’t answer the question for me of why women got that designation. If there is the choice between men and women, to my eyes it seems arbitrary, assuming what I know of leftist/liberal doctrine, that women, rather than men, or even a mixture of the two sexes, got the victim status so coveted under our current liberal world order.
buckyinky:
Female power is more in the realm of sex; male power is more in the realm of violence. The former is viewed more as a matter of persuasion and choice, and so doesn’t count as real power or the tyrannical power.
Related: https://zippycatholic.wordpress.com/2013/11/16/why-feminists-think-all-men-are-rapists/
Also:
Agreed, and there is symmetry: women using sex against men is in general worse than vice versa, just as men using violence against women is in general worse than vice versa.
More succinctly, with great power comes great responsibility.
=motte
It is reasonable to suspect anyman is oppressing anywoman with violence. Stop blaming the victim by acknowledging that women often instigate violence themselves.
=bailey
There is a special sort of exasperation elicited when one sees this at the USCCB. I know I shouldn’t be exasperated – I’m working on it.
buckyinky:
Another aspect is that our society still does police unjust private violent behavior, though selectively.
On the other hand our society is explicitly and near-unanimously opposed to policing private sexual behavior. Even right liberals who object to forcing a Christian baker to bake a genital-themed cake for a gay ‘wedding’ bathhouse bacchanal pretty much all oppose traditional (that is, 2003) positive law treating sodomy as a crime.
This makes sense, and while I was tempted to say that men’s private sexual behavior is heavily policed, it is not as sexual behavior, but only inasmuch as said behavior can also be shoved somehow into the category of violent and forcible (see: rape culture).
Society is content to leave the discontentment women sense from men’s part in fornication with them to the relationship advice bloggers and columnists so long as women choose not to exercise the prerogative they have de facto been handed to them to call it also violent.
buckyinky:
Right, and, because violence is the only thing it is permissible to punish, things that the victim classes don’t like (e.g. regrets after mutually intoxicated hookups) become subsumed under violence, and categorized as violence on the part of the oppressor class. Thus ‘rape’ comes to mean ‘any sex a woman does not like at any time before, during, or after she chooses to engage in it.’
@buckyinky
”It is reasonable to suspect anyman is oppressing anywoman with violence. Stop blaming the victim by acknowledging that women often instigate violence themselves.”
They actually do:
http://newscastmedia.com/domestic-violence.htm
Women instigate 70% of the domestic violence against the men when the violence is one-sided.
And women hit themselves also to claim abuse:
infowarrior1,
Women instigate 70% of the domestic violence against the men when the violence is one-sided.
Correct, which is why the effort the left takes to ignore or trivialize this fact is work done in the bailey.
[…] any sort of legal penalty for doing so. Abortion victimizes the perpetrator and is the fault of abusive men; it isn’t a choice made by women who are responsible for their own […]
Rape without brutality and physical harm to the female is a matter of her attitude. If she is willing (consenting) it isn’t rape. If she is unwilling it’s rape.
So the real crime of rape occurs in the female’s mind. How can the purported rapist control what is in the female’s mind??
Why, she can be consenting before the act, consenting during the act, but change herself mind during the act and thereby transform a sexual interlude enjoyed by both into rape. Why, she can be consenting all the way through, but in the morning change her mind and the previous night’s entertainment becomes rape. This transformation doesn’t have to be the next morning, the next day or the next week. It now can be up to twenty years later!
[…] of personal motivations, as with murder more generally speaking, when it comes to murdering (or contracting the murder of) one’s own child. Liberalism (in its feminist aspect) isn’t always and necessarily […]