What’s been lost that our “Christian” founders put in place?

The answer, of course, is that nothing has been lost, and the Christian Right knows it. What evangelicals really want is something that never was, and that’s an explicitly sectarian statement of commitment to Christ worked into the warp and woof of national law and public policy. What they want is the Christian theocracy that the founders explicitly rejected. For all their political thundering against the intrusive ways of “big government,” what evangelicals yearn for is strict legal codification of their version of Christian values. What never occurs to the Christian Right is that if the founders in fact *had been* Christians intending to create a commonwealth faithful to Jesus’s teachings, the United States today would be a nation quite different from what evangelicals think it should be. There would be no standing army, no divide between rich and poor, no ethnic hatred or closed borders, no persecution of religious dissent, no national chauvinism, a lot less holier-than-thou finger-pointing, and a lot more forgiveness and compassion.

Now, that *would* be a shining city built on a hill.

“In the end the state owns no one’s genitals so you can do with them as you please.”

Whoa there. In my state, the Virginia legislature claims ownership of all female genitalia, and the right to force even pregnant pre-teens to endure punitive, non-medically-relevant vaginal rapes with a plastic 8 to 10” wand if they dare to seek a legal abortion. That’s why we call our executive Governor Ultrasound.

In Michigan this week, the state legislature punished an elected representative, Lisa Brown, because she said she was tired of their prurient and tyrannical interest in her vagina and wanted them to respect her right to say no. She was punished by being officially condemned and silenced.

Ron Paul’s “libertarian” views include nationalizing *every* fertile uterus in the country, denying *every* fertile woman the right to terminate a pregnancy. What is a woman forced to bear against her will? She’s a slave. She’s property. And in the cases I’ve cited, she’s the property of the state.

So now we have yet another bogus excuse for the banning: it wasn’t about saying vagina, or how she said vagina, at all. It was because Rep. Brown said “no means no.” As in, women are saying “no” to draconian restrictions on their health care. It’s women saying “no” that is now the problem, that is so very offensive that true gentlemen would never speak such words in the presence of ladies. For this offense, for saying “no,” Rep. Brown deserves a “time out,” as if she’s been a naughty child—instead of a grown woman who has been elected to office and has the right and obligation to represent her constituents.

Is this really the argument Michigan Republicans want to make? A woman who says “no” to men is offensive. A woman who says “no” must be silenced “to ensure the proper level of maturity and civility are maintained on the House floor.” A woman who says “no” needs a time out.

They should have stuck with the “vagina is offensive” argument.