Several matters in the current public discourse of the United States are mired in the trenches of the cultural wars because the liberals and progressives are terrified of upsetting religious leaders and the religious faithful. Approximately 83% of people in America consider themselves affiliated with religion of some sort, and between to 60% and 76% (depending on your sources) consider themselves Christian. These are formidable numbers, when a mere plurality wins most elections. But even among those numbers of Christians, you have Catholics, Greek Orthodox, Russian Orthodox, Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Protestants; with the latter group being divided up further between Baptists, Pentecostals, Lutherans, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans, Adventists, Holinesses, Evangelists, and more: each of whom have their own their own beliefs and practices amongst themselves. And this is not to mention the millions of people composed of other faiths: Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Vodun, or others.

But what should not be discounted is the growing segment of Americans who are agnostic and atheist. Despite what some faithful people believe, these Americans have the same right to believe that humanity is alone in its collective enterprise and not guided by a mystical force. There is value in these differences of personal conscience, and American liberty has always favored leaving such decisions to each person; and, when contrasted with the capacity of any one group to tyrannically impose its faith onto the others, it is clear why the Founding Fathers of this country established that no law, no regulation, should touch the issues of faith that lie solely between each person and his or her god, and believed that a wall of separation should exist between church and state: to protect faith as much as liberty. Yet, today, when each and every one of us has become no more than a piece of the greater economic machine that drives this country, so few of us have the time or liberty to ponder these issues, let alone fully understand them and debate them with the mental capacity of our Founding Fathers; so people listen to talk radio and opinionated television personalities, and are content with being TOLD what to believe.

But numbers, opinions, and even loud radio diatribes cannot change the law. So why liberals and progressives are working so hard to placate religious powers, instead of relying upon the law, is baffling to me. For example, religious conservatives believe abortion is murder: that is what their faith tells them. But the law says otherwise. Generally, until the fetus becomes independently viable, abortion is legal. Therefore, it is NOT murder. "Murder" is not something that can be established by moral grounds alone; "killing" can be; but murder is defined in every state's criminal code. So repeat this with me: no state's criminal code's definition of murder includes abortion. Thus, regardless of some people's religious beliefs (via the 1st Amendment's guarantee of the free exercise of religion), there is no, nor can there be any endorsement of those beliefs by the state (via the 1st Amendment's prohibition on the establishment of religion). Thus, abortion is not "murder"; it does not involve the intentional act of taking a "person's" life. Medically, and legally, abortion simply ends the potential to create a new person. So why tip-toe around it? Are we back to morality?

Hillary Clinton once made the mistake of calling abortion a necessary evil. She was wrong. It is just the removal of fast-multiplying cells. According to the law, to science, that's it. Are we really to believe that a poor, but intelligent 17-year-old, who finds herself pregnant, with the father-to-be abandoning her in fear of the ethical and moral responsibility is better off keeping that baby, rather than aborting the pregnancy, finishing high school, educating herself, getting a good job, becoming independent, and finding a good, responsible man (or woman) to have a child with in a loving, caring, financially capable relationship? No. Both her and her child are better off in the latter situation. No values are absolute. You have to consider the circumstances.

Religious conservatives, though, do believe it is all black and white, yes and no, faith or the end of the world. But they're wrong. They've always been wrong. I mean, let's go back to murder. It's ALWAYS wrong to kill someone, right? Incorrect. Only if it's "murder." How many religious conservatives have you seen lining up to condemn each individual who has served in the Iraq and Afghanistan military conflicts? But they've killed people, right? Oh, that's different. What about the woman faced with a cracked out junkie, looking to murder her, rape her corpse, and then steal her pocket change for his next fix? She killed someone, right? But, when that fool pulls a knife and tells the woman he's going to murder her, do the religious conservatives damn her for pulling a gun out of her purse and shooting that crackhead dead? Or do they thank their god for the Second Amendment? Exactly. Yet, if that crackhead didn't pull a knife, and just beat her to the ground, did rape her, stole her purse (sans gun in this hypothetical), and left her with enough genetic material to create life; then, should she desire to ask her doctor to excise a few cells from the inside of her uterus, left by that crackhead rapist, then SHE'S the murderer? Oh, and she should also "thank god for the little life growing inside her." The Lord Works In Mysterious Ways. Don't worry, Jesus will someday turn that crack-infested sperm into a little bundle of joy! Gross. And no thank you. But if you're not just believing blindly what someone else told you, it's easy to see the inconsistencies in these positions on "murder."

This is why blindly following faith over your own reason is foolish. Even to Jesus, the inconsistent application of exceptions to "Thou Shall Not Kill" wouldn't make sense. And that's even assuming an abortion was killing something: which both the law and science say it is not. The only way one can believe that it is killing, or murder, is if he or she believes the zygote, come blastocyst, come embryo, come fetus is a human being—which is everyone's Constitutional right—but it is an exercise of belief, of religion; not law, not science, and not something which any American has the right to impose on any other person. There is a reason that the Founding Fathers did not want to parse matters of the conscience. As Thomas Jefferson said, "the rights of conscience [were] never submitted [to the government]...The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no god." Abortion is no different. Some may believe it wrong, some not, but the law says it is not "murder." End of story.

Religion rears its ugly head with Contraception too. Some religious people believe it is against God's will. That's nice. But the state, who has a Constitutional obligation to treat all people the same, and considering that all Americans must now have health insurance, must be treated equally. Thus, provided men of all faiths have their insurers pay for their vasectomies on one hand, and their viagra on the other; women can have their tubes tied and be given contraception under the same coverage. Ninety percent of women have used or do use contraception, so clearly social conservatives who are fighting this battle aren't going on demographics, but the undeterrable tenets of their religious conviction. That's nice. But, again, inappropriate in a country that has, since its foundation, declared itself to be ruled by secular principles. As Thomas Paine wrote in 1776: "As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of government to protect all conscientious protesters thereof, and I know of no other business government has to do therewith. How some social conservatives can declare undying affection for the Founding Fathers, yet have no fucking clue what they believed, is astounding.

So let's talk about what these social conservatives are really getting at. Power. Sex. Misogyny. Rush Limbaugh accused a Georgetown law student who advocated the new contraception insurance rule before Congress of being a prostitute and a slut, and wondered how much sex she was having. His misunderstanding of how contraception works aside, this is the man arrested for coming back into this country with a bunch of Viagra that had not been prescribed to him. So, if you want contraception, you're a slut, you're sleeping with everyone (which is, apparently, evil). If you get pregnant during having such sex (all the more likely when religious authorities fought to keep contraception from you), they tell you that you are a sinner, that you should have abstained, and that you must live with the "consequences" of your actions. But that's when they are talking about the "sin" of sex. Because when they turn the other cheek and talk about the wonder of the child-to-be, then it is a glorious "gift" from God. Some would say the gift came from the person depositing the semen, but I digress. What we are talking about is the religious degradation of sex.

In the mid-1990s, a huge push was made to combat "teen pre-marital sex," led by many religious conservatives. Yet, when the same people were asked about "adult pre-marital sex," those same people had no comment. But isn't the commandment against sex religious? (And, really, it's against adultery.) So what's going on here? Consider that most religious conservatives will admit that post-marital sex is "God's gift," rather than "sin," irrespective of whether the intent is to procreate. So, in that situation, why would contraception be evil? Two married, consenting adults, having (of course) missionary sex? What's the evil? Okay, now step out of marriage. Two, consenting adults, having (for the sake of a controlled variable) missionary sex: in their home, in their bed, (of course) with the lights out. No one else watching. Not even creepy pets. Is that evil? Take a poll. I dare you. Poll each member of Congress. Ask them three questions: (1) would the two adults in that scenario be committing any moral wrong; (2) are they committing any legal wrong; and (3) do you believe the state has any right to tell them that they are doing something morally wrong (according to some people) if it is not proscribed by the law? I would guarantee you will get some yeses to #1 (but less than the nos); no yeses to #2; and, sadly, some yeses to #3, but only by the most religious conservatives who believe that proselytizing is part of their faith (which they have conflated with their duty as statespersons). But, in, say Louisiana, what if the consenting adult is 20 years old, and the other consenting person is 16 years old? Is that wrong? According to the law, it depends on whether the difference in age is 4 years or more. That is, if the difference was 4 years and 1 day in age, it is a felony; if the difference was 3 years and 364.5 days in age, it's legal. Of course, in Louisiana, if the same two consenting people wait until they are 21 and 17, it's all good, regardless. This is the nuance on which the law works. But it is exact. It applies to everyone equally. Religions may have different nuances in interpretation of sex too, but that can't be legislated; it is between the conscience of each person and their god.

To some, sex a sacred, holy thing. That's great. For others it's sniffing coke off someone's back before fucking doggystyle on the bed, rolling onto the floor and fucking every which way, and pushing up against the wall in the third room over. Because that's how they like it. Government owes people an inherent sphere of privacy, and the Supreme Court has recently declined to penetrate that sphere of privacy: finding that what people do in the privacy of their bedroom has no effect on anyone else. For those jokers that say people that have sex take their own risks and have no right to demand health insurance coverage for contraception, or even abortion, I say you don't understand insurance. Some people work out four to five times a week, eat healthy, and don't smoke. Why should they pay for the billions of dollars that lazy, fat, bad eating chain-smoking people cost them in insurance costs? Should the healthy people be allowed to "opt out" of paying any premium that goes to those people? Or should a corporate gym be able to decline "fat-related" medical treatment paid for by its insurer, because all of its employees are healthy? No. That is not how insurance works. Insurers spread their risks across all premiums, regardless. So just as these private companies pay for the panopoly of health-issues caused by obesity from the premiums of health food companies and gyms, where such people are less likely to be found, they will cover contraception and other sexual-related costs from Catholic employers, and other institutions that decry sex a moral crime. If religious conservatives have a problem with this, they should take it up with the insurance industry, and ask them to allocate specific premiums only to specific costs, and then hold their breath for that. Or, they could use their massive resources to self-insure health costs. Alternatively, instead of making a huge stink until the Congressional battle is over and lost, and then making a huge fit over the next issue, they should continue fighting this battle forever: encourage civil disobedience, don't pay insurance premiums until their insurers drop their coverage, and play the martyrs when the government goes after them for not maintaining mandatory coverage for their employees, and then be willing to go to jail over it. If Christians' only allegiance is to their god; to do any less would be an obvious betrayal of that faith. Or show that the big show put on by social conservatives was all a sham.

Funny how the same people preaching the "sanctity of life" because "God" created it, and who declare sudden, seemingly unfair deaths to be "God's will," and not to worry because "God has a plan," don't see that if their god has absolute control over the cycle of life and death, that souls return to him for judgment, and that our lives here are essentially pointless, then abortion is just a short-cut to God. If religions believe that only sin gets you to Hell, that you are born with Original Sin, it would seem, logically, that an aborted fetus (assuming it has a soul, which they do), who is never born, is without sin and goes straight up. Shit, assuming how fucked up our world is, and packed with misery and suffering, if you really loved your children, you'd sacrifice your own personal connection to them and abort them, sending them straight to Heaven. You'll all meet up eventually, right, and have eternity to get to know and love each other. Ridiculous? Not if you follow the logic. Just keep getting pregnant and aborting it. It'll all work out in the end. Just go to confession a lot, just in case abortion is a sin. That way, you're covered.

Lastly, let's deal with this god itself. Christians believe "Him" to be omnipresent, omniscient, and omnipotent. So why is abortion even an issue? Under this criteria, God would have the ability to sense every unwanted pregnancy, be everywhere at once to act, and would have the power to act directly, or indirectly (though his priests), to move the zygotic/blastocystic/fetal tissue to a uterus of a (married) woman desperate to conceive. Wouldn't that preserve life? And isn't power what deity is all about? Without power, "God" would just be another asshole telling us all what to do. But, He supposedly has this power. Oh, yes, and he has a "Plan." Right. All humans, though, have free will. So, eh, kind of? God gave us free will, but, technically, because He's all-knowing, knows precisely what we'll do with it. Ergo, the Plan. So why would anyone see any need to proselytize? Doesn't that risk interfering with the Plan? How can anyone know what His Plan is? And whether we act or don't act, doesn't he already know it? And regardless of whether we do or do not act, isn't the outcome already predetermined as part of the Plan? And don't you think that if we somehow had the capacity through free will to "screw up" the Plan, that he would take actions to stop us or fix the Plan to ensure the end he wanted? If that's the case, why worry about contraception, abortion, or sex itself? If the people that do these things are predestined to burn, nothing you can do will save them. (Which creates a paradox in God's all-loving attribute: he loves us all, but created some of us with defects that He knew would cause us to rebel and be damned for eternity. That doesn't seem all loving.) Regardless, God has a Plan, and it'll all work out. If you're unsure, go pray to him and wait for the answers.

The rest of us will use what brains we have (regardless of where they came from), and allow millennia of accumulated reason and science to guide us (whether such knowledge was imparted by the almighty or not), and comply with the laws that govern us all. Because that is all we can know and touch. And whatever dictates individuals have of the conscience are between them and their maker (or no maker at all), and are not to be forced on others. The Founding Fathers of the United States of America understood humanity and they understood history; they knew the tyranny that one faith could impose upon others. So they created the laws of this country to govern secularly, and left matters of faith to the faithful. When we are discussing the important issues of our time, we should remember their wisdom.