It’s Time to Cancel Adam — yes THAT Adam
How retrograde religious authority and clueless Democratic leadership led to the Roe disaster
While the following memo could come straight from the Dept. of Duh, it feels bizarrely important to state that damn near all unwanted pregnancies are the fault of men. Drunk men; lazy men; selfish, thoughtless men who couldn’t be bothered to pull the fuck out. Only why should reckless men be incentivized to practice personal responsibility when they know that the shame — along with the lion’s share of work and responsibility — will disproportionately fall on women?
For this toxic imbalance, I blame The Bible.
That anyone might derive their moral code from the men in The Old Testament is something I don’t understand because that book is riddled with degenerate scoundrels who, by the way, also owned slaves. If The Old Testament were being shown on Netflix, your TV screen wouldn’t be big enough to display the laundry-list of content warnings, which would include Graphic Depictions of Sex, Violence, Torture, Attempted Child Homicide, Misuse of Natural Disasters, as well as the disclaimer that Several Million Frogs Were Harmed During Filming. As for the men of The Bible lacking moral character, Adam brings it right out of the gate. Because if Adam were instead a stand-up guy, once he learned that Eve had eaten of the Forbidden Fruit, he would have taken her hand and stood alongside her before calling out to God:
“Hey, God? It’s me…Adam. Hey, so I’m down here with Eve and uhhhh…well…that snake back there really caught her off guard. I mean, Jesus Christ, the thing was TALKING, and I just want to tell you that we are really, REALLY sorry.”
But of course Adam — our Basic Bro O-G — lamely took his own bite and then blamed the whole thing on The Woman.
You may have noticed that this caught on.
In addition to being a weasel of a husband, Adam didn’t stack up any better as a father. Now, I recognize that parents tend not to appreciate when parental advice/criticism comes from people without kids, but I’m sorry to say that when you raise a homicidal maniac incapable of managing his feelings, and then leave him unsupervised to murder your other son, you done effed up as a parent.
But since followers of Abrahamic religions believe that all humanity stems from Adam, his spinelessness might best explain our current state of affairs. (Perhaps that’s the problem with religious fundamentalists — they lack decent role models.) Meanwhile, Americans now lack a majority of decent, upright, non-perjuring Supreme Court justices. Quite aside from the corrupt and bogus path that led to Roe’s repeal, it’s just so damned backward. With forced birth now the law in half the country — and an unstoppable 6–3 majority that hasn’t even gotten to its best stuff yet — will their next session legally grant fathers “first dibs” on their daughters? Forced birth is just as shameful and embarrassing as all the stuff the Saudis don’t let women do, and it would be a real treat if the people who work themselves into hysterics over protecting the United States from Sharia Law would stop bringing something that feels a lot like Sharia Law to the United States. Wilhelm Reich once said, “Fascism is the frenzy of the sexual cripple.” I used to think that a strange definition but when I now look at Samuel Alito, Brett Kavanaugh, and Clarence Thomas, their black, priest-like robes barely cloaking their base desire to control women, I wonder if Wilhelm Reich wasn’t on to something.
Of course, Catholic bishops and cardinals across the country hailed our fundamentalist court’s ruling, and that’s altogether fitting because the Catholic Church has been on the wrong side of science, progress and justice for SEVERAL HUNDRED YEARS now. You people need to spend a little less time protecting the “unborn,” and a little more time protecting actual children instead of systemically serving them up to your predator priests. (Not to mention that you could solve that problem TOMORROW if you’d let go of your pathetic and contorted sexism and let WOMEN become priests.)
Meanwhile, the Evangelical Church’s record on protecting real, live children isn’t much better, as confirmed by recent news of The Southern Baptist Church (America’s largest Christian denomination) having a list of 703 known abusers. Instead of fueling frantic fears about trans people in bathrooms, maybe direct that energy toward protecting already-alive children from rapist youth pastors. Just know that it’s never too late to walk the walk and actually be Pro-Life.
Then there’s the Democratic Establishment. That you never developed a long game the way Republicans did fifty years ago is partly how we got here, but how exasperating to learn that you didn’t even have a short game. Your complete lack of preparation for something we all knew was coming, only to then treat us with resignation and — even worse — YOGA POSES is beyond appalling. I’m all for self-care, but what a perfectly awful metaphor for the Democratic Party’s unwillingness to effectively strategize or message than an upside-down guy looking like he’s trying to literally shove his head up his own ass. (And just like organized religion, the DNC needs your donation — otherwise something really, really bad will happen.)
Finally, I’m sorry, Women. I’m sorry for what we’ve done to you since…well…pretty much always. I’m sorry for the knuckle-dragging atrocities of our past, I’m sorry for our unconscionable present, and I’m sorry for the retrograde criminality — cloaked in cherry-picked legal scholarship — that you can be damn sure is still coming down the pike. (Does Costco sell contraception?) Also, I would particularly like to apologize to you, Eve. I’m sorry that on the Seventh Day, God didn’t instead say “Let there be singles’ bars!” so that you might have mixed it up with a better class of men — the kind of men who might have stood by you and tried to help you — instead of throwing you under the bus. I’m sorry that you literally had no other options because aside from being pretty hot in most depictions, you seem like you’re up for an adventure, and that’s a quality that men (at least the ones who don’t feel threatened by women) tend to appreciate. I’m sure you could have done better. Meanwhile the rest of us would do a whole lot better to stop putting blind faith in broken and toxic institutions taking us backward and down. With apologies to MLK, the arc of the moral universe is long, but right now it is bending toward Fascism.
On this Fourth of July, may we the overwhelming majority of decent, non-fundamentalist Americans solemnly embrace the dignified truth that whatsoever you do to the least of my sisters, that you do unto me. May we courageously align ourselves and our common-sense values in the long, hard fight for true Independence for everyone.
Lord hear our prayer.
Peace be with you.
Pass the pork chops.
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