“State Mandated Sexual Assault”

“State Mandated Sexual Assault”      June 16, 2019   Dr. Roger Ray

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 “No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.”  Margaret Sanger

There are things you talk about in public. There are things you talk about among close friends. And, there are things you just don’t talk about. . . and the latter is what I need your permission to talk about this morning. I don’t expect any part of this to be comfortable for any one of us. However, our governor started it.

I have had the good fortune for many years of having a physician who was a personal friend. Which is great when you need some medical attention in off hours or with some immediacy. However, once a year, there is an uncommonly uncomfortable moment when the ultimate “exit only” orifice of a man’s body calls for what the medical profession calls a “digital exam.” Now, “digital” typically means electronic and on a small screen but in this case, it involves my friend’s index finger, which can make eye contact rather difficult on the way out of the office. 

It is not like the pelvic exam that women have to endure in the process of a physical. Similar, in terms of vulnerability and awkwardness but, in any reasonable analysis, a more brief and slightly less personal interaction. The only thing that makes a man drop his drawers and bend over is that it is a necessary medical exam that might be a matter of life or death. However, if my physician or anyone else should propose such an exam for any other reason, it would be the height of inappropriate. 

Imagine, gentlemen, that your dentist proposes including this procedure in your semi-annual checkup. Or if your pharmacist suggests that this is a part of standard procedure for getting your prescriptions filled. There is no point in a man’s life in which we are asking for one kind of medical service and, in order to obtain it, we are asked to, for no medical reason whatsoever, to drop our drawers, bend over, and allow ourselves to be violated. 

Can you imagine the litigation and controversy that would be created if anyone ever tried that?

So, imagine my surprise, when I was sitting in John and Di Churcher’s living room watching the BBC last week, which was, I don’t mind saying, tirelessly covering the visit of our president to the UK, and painstakingly pointing out in fine detail what an immoral and mentally deficient person that he undeniably is, but, as if bearing that burden of my uniquely American shame in London was not enough, the BBC presenters turned their sights on Missouri.

In the race to moral bottom among red states trying to legislate away a woman right to elect to terminate a pregnancy, Missouri pulled into the definitive lead. The state government has been trying to find a way to close down the last remaining abortion provider in the state, so that Missouri would become the only state in the union with no legal and safe providers anywhere, but our governor and his public health official, Dr. Randall Williams, announced that any woman seeking an abortion had to submit to a medical pelvic exam . . . no, wait a minute, not one pelvic exam, they have to submit to two pelvic exams. 

The first one, maybe, has some medical plausibility. The second one adds expense, time, and, well, humiliation. This is an attempt at increasing the cost of obtaining an abortion to put up a barrier to low income women, but making it an invasive vaginal exam is intended to scare off others who are unwilling to endure what can only be called a state mandated sexual assault. If you insist that women must have instruments and a stranger’s fingers inserted into their vagina for no medical reason in order to exercise their constitutional rights to not be forced into motherhood then, that is, in anyone’s universe, sexual assault. 

I have asked Dr. Gil Mobley to be our liturgist today because Gil actually has some professional history with Dr. Williams and it will be very interesting to hear what Gil has to say about him, which will not be all bad, by the way. Williams has done some laudable work in the past. However, what Rachel Maddow made internationally known about his past is that in 2016 the state of North Carolina hired him to be their public health officer so that he would reverse a warning against consuming water contaminated with the coal ash. 

This byproduct of coal mining contains mercury, arsenic and other toxins which were found to be at levels threating to human life. Williams, however, was willing to assure the public that their drinking water was safe, when it clearly was not. So, Dr. Gil, I’m sure he has done some good work but you can also put lipstick on a pig and I’m pretty sure it is still bacon on the cloven hoof. 

What we see in Dr. Williams is a glaring example of someone who is willing to set aside what he knows about medicine, and even to set aside what he knows about truth, integrity, honestly, and decency in order to bow to the throne of power. We see this all of the time in national politics. One of the most disappointing examples is Senator Lindsey Graham who, very honestly, called Trump a “kook who is unfit to be president” during the 2016 primaries, but almost as soon as Trump was inaugurated, he changed his tune in a total reversal, deriding the media to insinuating that Trump is a kook who is unfit to be president. As a church, we try to be and to do a lot of things to make the world a better place but the single most important thing that we do is to speak truth to power. Elected officials often do, what Lindsey Graham confessed to in a recent interview . . . they say and they do what they need to do to be re-elected. People like Dr. Williams say and do what they have to do to obtain and keep a government appointed job. I get it, almost every priest and pastor in this country is stuck in the same spot, either have the integrity to tell the truth, or tell enough lies to keep your job. You have to think that being forced to tell obvious lies is why people like Sean Spicer and Sarah Huckabee didn’t last very long as White House press secretaries. 

So, Williams, who is evidently not an untalented physician, is willing to do monstrous things in order to hold onto a place in government. I couldn’t do it. I trust that you couldn’t do it. We exist to try to bolster people’s awareness and commitment to not doing this kind of thing, but this sort of hypocrisy is as common as dirt in our chapter of history. It is disgusting but it is a fact.

So that is who we are dealing with, and just to help to put this into perspective, let me take a moment to mention Dr. Larry Nassar of Michigan State fame.

I am not going to show you a picture of Dr. Larry Nassar, but rather I want to show you a group photo of some of his victims – 80 are here gathered at one time to testify against him for his crimes of sexually assaulting them when they were young athletes sent to him for medical treatments. 

Without being too graphic about it, what Larry Nassar did to these young women is essentially what Governor Parson and Dr. Williams have mandated for women seeking an abortion… pretending to conduct a medical exam while actually just invading a woman’s vagina for no medical reason. And as shocking as it is to see these 80 women in this group photo, and mind you, Nassar was sentenced to 175 years in prison for what he did . . . but there are about 3000 abortions in Missouri every year . . . Nassar sexually assaulted a hundred young women, Williams and Parson are mandating assaulting 3000  women this year . . . so, tell me if I am wrong about this, but shouldn’t they each get a prison cell next to Nassar? And, check my math on this, but that would be for about 500 years, right?

Maybe it is not my place to judge, but if Gov. Parson or Dr. Williams are in any way morally different from Dr. Larry Nassar then I am going to have to have someone explain to me why that would be so. To be clear, I am not talking about the clinic doctors who don’t want to perform this unnecessary exam. They apologize to the patients and, in most cases, the patients apologize to the doctors for being forced to do something that is unnecessary, unprofessional, and could end up getting them into trouble with the AMA because, everybody knows, they shouldn’t be doing it . . . they are putting their careers at stake to help women who are being abused by the state.

Now, maybe I have taken too much time to make this point quite so clearly but let me sum it up for you: The state of Missouri, in order to create greater barriers for women seeking an abortion, have mandated an invasive pelvic exam to be repeated twice, adding expense, humiliation, and trauma and what could easily be understood to be one of the hardest days of any woman’s life and it is being done with the tacit approval of our legislature. 

However, if the Gov. and Dr. Williams were to mandate, for example, a digital prostate exam for men who were seeking a prescription for erectile dysfunction medication, an entirely unnecessary but precisely similar requirement, then the male dominated legislature of this state would, no doubt, begin impeachment procedures immediately. Men will not tolerate state mandated sexual assault against themselves. What I am asking you to consider is, why would we not tolerate it for men but we do tolerate it for women? 

I am sorry that our internet audience couldn’t be here to hear Aiyana Williams sing our anthem which is a rather baudy English melody written more than 300 years ago in which a young woman euphemistically speaks of how many men have tried to seduce her but she insists that “her thing is her own,” and it very cleverly goes through many verses asserting that women are in charge of their own bodies and that men need to keep their hands off of their private parts. Of course, it has a lot of verses, most of which neither Sean nor I were brave enough to ask Aiyana to sing in church but those here got to hear enough to image what the more explicit verses might have said. I find it fascinating that this awareness of women’s empowerment was being so cleverly made popular in England in the early 1700’s. Patriarchy, it seems, is not an easy thing to kill off, even when it has been identified, labeled, and condemned.

But it was more than 100 years ago that Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in New York, for which she was promptly arrested. However, let me end where we began today with her famous quote: No woman can call herself free who does not own and control her body. No woman can call herself free until she can choose consciously whether she will or will not be a mother.

I get that a lot of people, and not just Catholics and Evangelicals, but just a lot of people have very passionate feelings about abortion. I am a father only because abortion was not legal in South Korea in 1988 when my daughter’s birth mother decided to put her newborn up for adoption. For that matter, I am alive at all because abortion was not legal in the USA in 1956 when I was the last and most unintended child born to my parents. I get that there is an argument to be made against abortion but what we are trying to say here, in the midst of this horribly controversial and complicated matter, that in a free nation the choice belongs to the woman who is pregnant, not to Missouri’s governor, not to the health department administrator, not to Catholic priests or evangelical ministers, not even to the parents or lovers of the pregnant woman. Her thing is her own and our agreement or consent is not relevant. And, if I may call upon my 18^thcentury English vocabulary, a pox on anyone who says otherwise.