A few things
stand out after reading through the federal Supreme Court’s Dobbs v Jackson decision, along with its
concurrences and dissent, which returned the regulation of abortion to each of
the 50 States.
-Beginning
with the dissent, it becomes clear that the insistence on a ‘right’ to abortion
is deeply rooted in the desire of some women to reject their place in the
hierarchy God created. Pro-abortion
women do not want to be mothers, caregivers, or subordinates to and dependents
upon husbands; they want to make themselves into the equivalent of men by being
able to kill their children if and when it is necessary so they can pursue
their careers, participate in the economy, etc., just like men.
The sin of
envy is clearly at work here. The Holy
Fathers of the Orthodox Church have some memorable things to say that bear
directly on this situation. St John
Chrysostom (+407) says that envy leads to murder, which needs no further
comment:
https://www.orthodoxchurchquotes.com/2014/10/09/st-john-chrysostom-envy-is-the-mother-of-murder/
The Holy
Elder Anatoly of Optina Monastery (+1894) relates the following:
‘Wherever
God is — there is peace. And the opposite is self-evident: where there is envy,
enmity, impatience, self-love — there is the devil. Wherever the devil is —
there, everything is ruinous, proud and hostile.’
https://www.orthodoxchurchquotes.com/2015/08/18/st-anatoly-of-optina-wherever-god-is-there-is-peace-and-the-opposite-is-self-evident/
Ruinous,
proud, hostile – this is a good description of family life in the age of
feminist/abortion ‘rights’. When men and
women reject their places in the God-ordained hierarchy of the family and
society, there will be chaos. But
different roles for men and women do not mean that one is more valuable than
another. Men leading in the family, in
politics, in the Church; men being the primary bread-winners; men acting as
protectors of their wives and little ones; women nursing and raising the
children, watching over their homes, giving support to their husbands; the children
obeying both mother and father – these are all equally noble when done in the
spirit of Christ-like love and humility.
The Orthodox
Church speaks quite powerfully on these points.
‘"Equality
is known to produce strife. Therefore God allowed the human race to be a
monarchy, not a democracy. And the family is constructed in a similar way to a
monarch’s army, with the husband holding the rank of monarch, the wife as
general, and the children also given stations of command."
‘— St John
Chrysostom, Homily 34 on First Corinthians.’
And from a
contemporary priest, Fr Sergei Rybakov:
‘"A
lot depends on how the the hierarchy is setup. Previously, families had a
patriarchal structure, in which a wife traditionally came to her husband each
morning to request a blessing for the day. She also brought the children,
who would receive blessings from their father. He would bless each of them
with his right hand. This is the patriarchal way of the Orthodox family.”
‘“But
then, due to spiritual impoverishment and the influence of liberal ideas, the
man ceased to be recognized as a patriarch. As a result, a modern woman rarely
fulfills what the apostle has commanded — not to teach, but to learn from her husband at home (1 Timothy 2:12; 1 Corinthians
14:35). There is no one to
learn from now, and worldly wisdom is not enough. The soul of the woman remains
hungry, and thus a kind of madness begins. She desires to seize power in the
family. The child is often used as an excuse."
‘"And
thus there is a restructuring of the entire family. The child becomes the head
of the family, who is served by the mother. The child becomes an idol, the
woman becomes his priestess, and the man becomes an economic appendage. As a
result, the entire family structure is destroyed, and the man leaves the family
to find a place where he feels more comfortable. Thus the family falls apart.”’
The sources
of the two quotes have much more of value in them on this subject:
https://russian-faith.com/hes-king-shes-queen-christian-marriage-patriarchal-community-n1926
https://russian-faith.com/family-values/patriarchy-preserves-christian-families-feminism-destroys-them-russian-orthodox-priest
The family
as God made it is bright and beautiful and joyful. To apply the hammer of renovation to it only
brings ugliness and sorrow. The
miserable condition of the family in the uS offers abundant proof of that.
-For all the
common sense in the Dobbs ruling, there is a horrible absence: The words God, Christ, and Christian are
nowhere to be found in it. It is an
entirely secular decision, which confirms yet again that the ‘American
experiment in ordered liberty’ is not a Christian enterprise. It uses Christianity (and religion in
general) to prop up the political and economic systems that it finds desirable,
but its usefulness ends there.
This is an
inversion of the traditional view of Church and state, wherein the state acts
as a protector and supporter of the Church.
And it is a perversion of the end for which man was made: union with God through Christ and His Body
the Church, preparation for the next life, not an earthly life of comfort and
happiness through the acquisition of much property, not the creation of a
this-worldly utopia.
The sparsity of
monasticism
in the States illustrates fairly clearly where the focus of their peoples
is: this world, this life, not the life
after death where we will be forever in the presence of God.
-One word
that is very much present throughout Dobbs, however, is the word ‘nation’; it
is used 113 times according to Adobe’s PDF search feature, which is a little
more than once every two pages. This
shows a gross misunderstanding of the federal Supreme Court justices about the
nature of the united States. They are
not one nation, indivisible; they are 50 nations joined in a voluntary union; they
are several unique cultural regions, co-existing with one another. If more people held a broader view of what the
States are and how they should be organized and governed, there would probably be
fewer nightmarish rulings like Roe to contend with.
***
We are glad,
of course, to see the cancer of Roe v Wade and its offspring cut out of
the body of uS law, but what Dobbs ultimately shows is that the South, New
England, and the rest of the States have need of more, not less, repentance in
the weeks and years ahead.
Yet this was
already the case. For the effects of
murdering 63 million babies are not quickly nor easily cleansed from our
collective soul.
--
Holy Ælfred
the Great, King of England, South Patron, pray for us sinners at the Souð, unworthy though we are!
Anathema to
the Union!