There are many places, good, bad and indifferent, where religion and politics blend. Public policies like civil rights, health care, and war have moral implications. Religious judgments, like ones that define homosexuality, contraception, miscegenation as evil, have political ramifications.

As part of the political structure, religion operates at an advantage. Tax exemptions allow churches and their officers to engage in political activity, to be paid for lobbying, to provide space, supplies and advertising for those who want to turn their theology into law. These same religions demand a share of public money in the form of school vouchers, in the form of commandeering public services and space for their parking lots, segregated housing developments, in taking over sidewalks in front of clinics or closing several streets for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Anti-choicers will sign a girl up for welfare rather than sign a pledge to pay for the woman’s health care or for the child they demand she bring into the world.

My family has been active in the anti-choice movement for years. That the core of the “pro-life” movement is religion gone rotten is not a surprise. The Catholic Church has supported anti-choice, anti-contraception, anti-sex organizations in for years. Birthright, an organization that markets itself as an alternative to abortion, is a front for a group whose thuggish tactics include offering to take pregnant women to the doctor, then take the woman – or girl – to a doctor who scares and humiliates her.

I was trained to do just that.

I wasn’t any good at it, so I didn’t last. The women who were good at it rose to near the top – men are always at the top - of groups like the National Right To Life Committee and the secretive, reactionary Opus Dei, which claims Justice Alito as a member. These same women made jokes saying the joy of being pregnant was that you didn’t have to have sex for nine months.

If sex is, like childbearing, a duty, it is not only no fun, but a requirement of marriage and marriage a required status. If sex is a service for reproduction, then women are servile to men. Men are not limited by pregnancy, so, to follow the logic of the procreation popularists, it would be moral to fertilize as many women as often as possible and to end a marriage when the woman is no longer fertile.

Having a child for God instead of choosing to have a child can’t be healthy. It must separate mother from baby. The baby is, from the get go, a command, a demand, a burden not a joy or a chosen responsibility.

There is something anti-human and inhumane in organizations that intentionally twist facts to power their movement to the High Moral Ground. The distinction between behavior and belief is lost on those who view morality as motive, who think they are affected by what a person believes, as opposed to how a person behaves. That they cannot expand their version of “pro-life” to include protesting the War in Iraq, prison reform, eradicating poverty, or providing universal health care undermines their moral, if not political, authority.

Law provides recourse to cope with unsocial acts; it cannot make or measure goodness. Law can prevent those with cruel, hateful agendas disguised as decency from gaining power. Our duty is to take people like Mary Worthington seriously enough to hold our lawmakers responsible to the ideas and ideals set down in the Constitution, not to her sad and disgusting version of reality.