Via RHRealityCheck.org regarding the case of a Bishop who's demoted and reprimanded a nun and a doctor for performing a life-saving emergency abortion on a mother of four.

Now, Bishop Thomas Olmstead of the Diocese has written a letter to the hospital in which he doesn’t deny that the procedure saved the woman’s life, but nevertheless deems it morally wrong and asks the hospital to promise that a life-saving abortion “will never occur again at St. Joseph’s Hospital.”

...

Bishop Olmstead and the Roman Catholic Diocese are steadfast in their insistence that physicians and hospital administrators acted immorally when they saved the life of a pregnant mother of four children and are determined to ensure that pregnant women are not safe in the hands of Catholic hospitals across the country.

Source: RHRealityCheck.org

The irony here is that, somewhat like Machiavelli, Bishop Olmstead seems to love his doctrines more than he loves his own soul.  Consequently, the next woman to die as a consequence of his intentional policy of medical neglect will very likely go to Heaven where Bishop Olmstead seems extraordinarily $%@*#! unlikely to join her.

One bit of good news stands out:  First, the doctors and the hospital are having none of it.  They say their work was in fact both moral and just and that, furthermore, they won't promise anything of the sort.

The other day I mentioned my passionate conviction that if there was anything to them (besides being one more front for bashing feminism) then so-called Men’s Rights groups should be taking the lead in calling for investigation, prosecution, exposition, and shaming of the systematic abuse of boys by priests in the Catholic church.

In that post I briefly mentioned that evidence of abuse of women and girls might turn up as well. Sounds like that other shoe has now dropped — on my non-figleaf Facebook account I found the following link from my progressive but also sensibly-religious sister-in-law.

Angela Bonavoglia: The Catholic Church: Abusing, Endangering, And Intimidating Women

It was indeed outrageous that Reverend Raniero Cantalamessa, in his Good Friday homily at St. Peter’s Basilica, with Pope Benedict in eyeshot, compared the public denunciation of the Catholic Church hierarchy for harboring child molesting priests to the homicidal viciousness of anti-Semitism.

But there was another reason to be troubled by that homily: Cantalamessa also talked about the need to end violence against women, which is crucial, but he did so without any acknowledgment of the Church’s own culpability in the abuse, endangerment, and intimidation of women.

Cantalamessa talked about the need to end violence against women, which is crucial, but he did so without any acknowledgment of the Church’s own culpability in the abuse, endangerment, and intimidation of women.

Source: Huffington Post

Bonavoglia goes on to point out that in addition to what amounted to casual disregard for female victims as well as male ones, these are the same people who absolutely condemn birth control, abortion, and use of condoms to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS.

If my sister-in-law is ticked off enough to post about this, publicly, on Facebook, then resentment and revulsion has got to be running pretty deep in the rank and file

Summary: The way we construct gender and morality screws both women and men: women for failing to be bastions of virtue, men for having no virtue at all.

It’s a step in the right direction. The staff at Lemondrop.com conclude an article on hetero men’s reaction to their partner’s infidelity with a list of women celebrities who’ve had (publicly acknowledged) affairs.

That’s a good thing because the chronic meme has it that only men are unfaithful to their partners who, invariably are blameless women who wish only to mother children and also, I guess, wear crinolines and eat crustless cucumber sandwiches. Leaving the (cough)Rule #1(cough) question of who, then, they’re being unfaithful with.

Getting across the idea that women are really people, real people, instead of marble fixtures and magazine-cover decoration has to happen sooner or later.

It’s a step in the wrong direction too, though. The main focus of the Lemondrop post was about how men are way less forgiving of their partner’s infidelity than women are.

If I started quoting disappointing paragraphs from the article I might never stop. So go read it yourself.

Here’s one, though:

“Men can forgive themselves for their indiscretions but find it harder to forgive their partners for the same,” therapist Phillip Hodson explained to England’s Daily Mail. “For a betrayed woman, an affair is an offense against her dignity. For a betrayed man, it’s an offense against his manhood. It goes right to the core of his identity.”

They said it here.

Men can “forgive themselves?” Hello? Everybody can forgive themselves for stuff they want to do! From cookie jars to corporate corruption people practically have “just this once won’t hurt” tattooed on their foreheads, backwards, so they can feel reassured every time they look in the mirror.

Screw that.

And Hodson gets his attribution completely backwards. For a betrayed woman an affair is an invitation for everyone else on the planet to impugn her dignity. For a betrayed man an affair is an opportunity for everyone else to question his “manhood.”

Screw that too.

Circling back to my first point, affairs are supposed to be an affront to women’s dignity (as opposed to, say, a simple uprooting of her trust and sense of place in her relationship) because up on those pedestals women are supposed to be dispensing virtue, restraint, and other civilizing influences on the men and children in their lives. In that mindset men’s infidelity is “solvable” by even more virtue and more scolding. That plus, having vested all that corrective authority in women society is likely to stand behind her whether she stays with or separates from him.

Meanwhile, I guess the idea must be, if a woman is unfaithful to a man there really isn’t much corresponding social scripting. Outside of a few very conservative, very patriarchal and primarily religiously-focused subcultures there’s not much tradition of men correcting women’s morality. In fact there’s really not a lot at all men in particular or society in general is supposed to be able to do about a “fallen” woman. Instead in social terms the man who’s hoisted the wrong moral beacon up onto his particular pedestal has no option but to drop her and replace her with someone more reliably stalwart.

Thus the proscriptive “intolerable” clauses in the bogus Two Rules of Desire.

Another step in the right direction, by the way, might be the startling idea that no individual adult is responsible for the morality or the behavior of another, and that therefore no one adult is ever responsible, nor is their dignity or “manhood” injured by the actions of another.

(Note: that this concept of individual responsibility is perpetually overlooked by Bill Bennett, Newt Gingrich, and myriad other social conservatives is yet more evidence of the inconsistency of their positions.)

Another point about California State Assembly member Michael Duvall’s recent nominally self-flagellating (but actually self-serving) resignation announcement wherein he said

“I am deeply saddened that my inappropriate comments have become a major distraction…”

The comments, of course, weren’t comments so much as explicit bragging into what turned out to be an open microphone to a colleague about sex he was having with two lobbyists for a company his committee oversees.

Duvall had, until his resignation, a 100% favorability rating for “family values” from a right-wing group associated with the ultra-conservative Focus on the Family. And like many similar right-wing politicians Duvall had frequently capitalized on his good standing on morality issues to advance himself into a position where he could… easily have things to brag about to his colleagues, I guess.

That’s not at all uncommon. I’m pretty sure there are still whole websites dedicated to tracking the low crimes and misdemeanors of conservative politicians and public figures.

But! As I mentioned in the previous post check out how Duvall also uses the right’s scripts of disapproval of sex to deflect attention away from his much more serious, and also much more conventional transgressions: misuse of office, exploitation of power for personal gain, and public corruption.

If you find yourself talking about the salaciousness of his remarks (“eye-patch” underthings, dripping-wet legs) or the hypocrisy of his “sanctity of marriage” stands against Proposition 8, you’re buying into his framing of the transgression. Worse, you’re tacitly agreeing with the “family values” crew that that twittery rather than substance should be the emphasis on the next guy. And the next. And the next. Because they’ll be more, apologizing to their constituents and to their wives for hiring their “gals” from Central America (Randall Tobias) instead of pushing abstinence-only HIV prevention in Africa, wearing their diapers with escorts (David Vitters), cruising their airport bathrooms (Larry Craig), hiring the prostitutes they said they were arresting (Eliot Spitzer) instead of misuse of funds, and kiting off on the Appalachian Argentinian Trail (Mark Sanford) instead of dereliction of duty, and so on. And each time counting on the fact that while we’re squealing and squeezing our knees together over stuff their side says is immoral but that’s often not even illegal we’re disregarding their real scandals, which often are illegal… but they don’t seem to understand is immoral as well.