Isn’t It Romantic, by Martha Thomases – Brilliant Disguise

February 11, 2012 Martha Thomases 11 Comments

Just in time for Valentines Day, we’re enjoying a political fight about contraception.  The Catholic Church doesn’t want to pay for health care costs for its female employees that includes birth control.

The Right insists this is an assault on religious freedom.  The Catholic Church opposes contraception, therefore it should not have to pay for it.  

However, in this case, the employees are not priests, or nuns, or church administrators.  Instead, they are professors at universities, janitors at hospitals, and others who serve the public at large, not Catholics exclusively.  The hiring practices of these institutions, which are tax-exempt (and therefore, supported by the taxes of the rest of us), embrace the entire community, not just the faithful.

Most Catholics practice some kind of medically-assisted birth control, whether it’s the pill, the IUD, a diaphragm, or abortion.  The vast majority are pro-choice on the issue of family planning.  It’s the all-male hierarchy that is organizing against it.

As someone who supports religious freedom (because the First Amendment is one of my favorites), I disagree with the Church in this case.  They have every right in the world to preach to their congregations against contraception, and to try to persuade the rest of us, too, if they like.  However, they have no more right to tell an employee at St. Ellizabeth not to use birth control than Beth Israel Hospital has the right to tell an employee not to use parts of her salary to buy bacon.

In fact, there is already precedent for exactly this kind of fairness.  You can believe in any tomfoolery you like, but you can’t use public money (including non-profit status) to discriminate against parts of this same public.

There are a lot of Catholics in this country, and their leadership seems to think that places them above the law.  They act like the rest of us have to obey their rules, but they don’t have to obey ours.  This is not religious freedom.  This is religious tyranny.

It’s certainly not love.

In our capitalist society, Valentines Day is largely an occasion for greeting card sellers and florists and chocolatiers to make a bunch of money.  It’s a day for single people to feel sad.  It’s a day for straight white men to feel exploited (and, by the way, since when do we need a special occasion for “Steak and Blow-Job Day?”  I’m a woman who eats hardly any red meat, but even I know five or six places where you can buy these any day of the week).

The problem, I think, is that there are seven billion of us, but we think love is always the same.  Love has to be two people (some would insist on a man and a woman) who have the same feelings for each other at the same time.  They must want to spend their lives together, exclusively, in one home, as long as they both shall live.  They must at all times find each other desirable and amusing.  They must believe that each is the only other person s/he could love.

That’s not love.  That’s brainwashing.

In my experience, every person’s relationship is different from every other person’s.  What I want in a romantic companion is most likely different from what you want.  Some relationships are a success for a lifetime, others are a success for an hour.  It’s up to the participants to agree on what makes it successful, not me and not you and certainly not the Catholic Church or the Republican Party.

It’s taken me decades to come to these conclusions.  When I was a girl, I believed all the fairy tales, and expected that someday my prince would come, carrying me away on a white horse to a castle for Happily Ever After.  Swallowing this hype inevitably left me broken-hearted.   I found a man I love who loves me.  I’m sure we both could have had quality experiences with other people, but that’s not the way it worked out.  Whatever else happens in our lives, I know there isn’t another person who will spend 35 years with me, day in and day out, listening to me kvetch and make cooing noises at the cat.

My husband hates Valentines Day, but he’s really good at it.  Over the years, he’s given me (among other things) Lucille Ball earrings, a red shirt with “Fabulous” written across the chest in glitter, and a Coach bag full of underwear.  Maybe you don’t think those are romantic gifts, but we do.  

That’s all that matters.

Martha Thomases, Media Goddess, has never been able to figure out good Valentines for the men in her life.