Recently, in one of the few resolutions of its kind actually released to the public, our El Paso County Board of Commissioners resolved to name the week of Jan. 20-27 “Sanctity of Human Life Week in El Paso County.”

Apart from the time and taxpayer money expended in the development, writing and production of this resolution, if it had anything to do with respecting life at all, it might have been an admirable thought.

Of course the resolution has very little to do with respecting life. It is, in fact, a mission statement by the Dominion Christian movement to re-establish its control of a woman’s reproductive system by cleverly issuing it through a government organ to give it more validity. The fact that this violates the very constitution our stalwart Commissioners have taken an oath to defend seems not to be an issue to them.

The resolution is just one more anti-choice device to repress a woman’s right to safe and legal abortion guaranteed by the US Constitution and confirmed by the United States Supreme Court in Roe vs. Wade.

The text of the resolution contains the statement: “all children should be welcomed in life.” And assuming the “children” are actually that – fully formed, intended fetuses with proper pre-natal care – let the welcome begin.

But if we are talking about a few cells, a disposable egg, a shot of sperm and a Christian operative peering in your bedroom window, then, no matter how you may dress it up in dogma, it’s not a child.

Yet in the warm glow of their self-righteousness, our Commissioners, beaming with the opportunity to demonstrate their abject obedience to religion, presented this resolution ceremoniously to local Catholic Bishop Michael. J. Sheridan.

Sheridan, if you recall, issued a pastoral letter recently saying that American Catholics should not receive communion if they vote for politicians who defy church teachings.

This bit of managing the flock by threat is just another in a long line of Christian doctrines that are routinely foisted on the public. Opus Dei will be proud.

And our elected County officials? They are prepared to abrogate their elective oaths in solemn dedication and servitude to Christian Dominionism. In league with the purveyors of patriarchal dogma, they reinforce the archaic and arcane provisions of a male-dominated society in which morality has become distorted to condemn a woman to slavery and bondage to the male. In this distorted morality, the woman carries and bears children at the pleasure of the male and is beholden to his whim.

Perhaps one day instead of requiring the woman to “submit” to her male counterpart, as is demanded of her in scripture, we might see a “County Vasectomy Day!” in which all males wishing to help lower the abortion rate get snipped. Maybe our esteemed Commissioners could sponsor an El Paso County “Birth Control Day” or “County Emergency Contraception Week.”

But I wouldn’t count on it, for it is not abortion our good leaders wish to curb. It is the right of American women to remain inviolable.

The Commissioner’s time would be better spent resolving to round up wayward fathers and getting them to pay for women’s thankless nine months of bond servitude and the eighteen or so years of raising the children following delivery.

The Sanctity of Religion in Politics - by Richard Baker: May 2008