Witchy Womb-an

I recently wrote about a Ten Commandments bill, which has since been shot down in the North Dakota State Legislature. Then I wrote about Mike “The New Moses” Johnson by way of the Old Testament story of Moses and the golden calf. Readers are probably beginning to wonder if I just sit around all day leafing through Exodus until I’m inspired to write, but that is not the case. Religion is not my area of expertise or my primary subject matter. Unfortunately, Republican politicians keep sticking their pseudo-Christian chocolate into the political peanut butter.

The concurrent resolution calling for North Dakota to “acknowledge of the Kingship of Jesus Christ” is still alive. It is sponsored by State Representative Nico Rios, who said that he introduced the resolution because eleven years in North Dakota had caused him to come home to Jesus. (Temperatures outside my house this morning could have caused anyone to find religion in eleven minutes.) Rios added that he will be confirmed in the Roman Catholic Church this Easter.

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Before I could be married in a Catholic ceremony at the U.S. Naval Academy Chapel a very long time ago, I had to go through a marriage preparation course that included instructions on Natural Family Planning (NFP), so we could avoid the sin of using birth control. The chaplains brought in two couples to talk about their experiences employing NFP, and their stories were remarkably similar: They were going to put off having children, but then they went on their honeymoon, and the timing was bad, so they talked and prayed about it—possibly over fruity island drinks—and decided that maybe it was the right time to start a family. And that’s how they ended up with babies in their arms and toddlers pulling on their clothes as they spoke to half a dozen engaged couples on a Saturday morning in Annapolis, Maryland.

I think Nico Rios is intentionally ahead of the game on the NFP part of Catholicism. As long as he keeps his current haircut, he is guaranteed to never face the procreation conundrum. Every Catholic couple intent on waiting a while before they start a family should make the groom an appointment with Rios’s barber before their honeymoon. Then, no amount of fruity island drinks will undercut the blushing bride’s commitment to delaying parenthood.

Even taking into account Nico Rios’s abomination of a haircut, even considering his homophobic and anti-immigrant slurs caught on video during a DUI arrest and his antisemitic social media post about overthrowing the “Jew” president of Mexico, Rios and his “Kingship of Jesus Christ” resolution are not the most whacked-out, Church-Lady-ish religious nonsense to emerge from this session. That honor would go to State Rep. Lori VanWinkle’s wombs-of-America rant.

VanWinkle, who represents my district in the state legislature, rose to defend her bill granting personhood under the law from the moment of conception, a bill which supporters loudly proclaimed would not outlaw in vitro fertilization (IVF). VanWinkle took an axe to that argument all by herself¹:

“Mr. Speaker and members of the assembly, perhaps we have a workforce shortage because we’re killing our children. Perhaps women are going to the IVF clinics because judgment is on their womb, and God has effectively closed their womb because we are murdering massive amounts of children in our nation. And if we would repent and do the right thing, maybe these people would actually get pregnant.”

VanWinkle’s version of God is a horror-movie warlock busy sewing up the wombs of Voodoo dolls from a shelf marked “American women.” He is also a handy appeal-to-authority figure for ending all debate on any issue. In earlier testimony, VanWinkle pointed out that another legislator “couldn’t quote an actual scripture” in defense of his position.

Of course, that legislator shouldn’t be quoting scripture on the taxpayers’ dime. Not everybody believes in VanWinkle’s merciless version of God or her Christ-as-a-cudgel fan club for the self-righteous. If she bothered to show up for legislative forums, she would have seen how the majority of us feel about her dour sermonizing summed up by one member of the Souris Valley Democratic-NPL bearing a sign:

But Trygve a Coffee!

I wish I could have been there, but I had a funeral to attend. Plenty of my friends were there, and there will be a more of us at the next one. We are not going to hide or be quiet or accept that debate ends when the hypocrites invoke God. We have also been calling and emailing our Senators and our Representative in Congress, and many of us have submitted testimony to the state legislature. We may not be able to do a whole lot here in North Dakota, but we can and will do something.