Noem: Foisting her religious beliefs on all
By Professor Elizabeth Cook-Lynn
Native Sun News Today Columnist
The events we see happening on the political scene today WHATEVER they are, send us all a signal of who is in charge that means empowerment.
Kristi Noem, our governor, has taken it upon herself to tell us that she is the one who is in charge and she makes no bones about what she has to offer.
Thus, from her desk she
writes the following proclamation and sends it forth from her remarkable tax paid website, April, 2019. In the process she even bad mouths her Democratic fellow governor from New York.
Whereas: on the 46th Anniversary of the day of Roe V. Wade, the Honorable Andrew M. Cuomo, the governor of New York, signed into law an act that permits the nearly limitless abortion of a child in utero, even if the last moments before that child’s eyes see the light beyond the womb.
Whereas:Other states in our Union may seek to follow this path. All life is sacred and that every person has dignity and worth. We are speaking of fully formed babies. We are speaking of human beings with fully formed hearts and lungs, eyes and mouths, hands and feet; utterly indistinguishable from our own children and grandchildren.
Whereas: Life is sacred from the moment of conception.
Now, Therefore, I, Kristi Noem, Governor of the state of South Dakota, do hereby proclaim May 4, 2019, as
A Day of Prayer and Fasting For All
The proclamation strikes me not as the work of a political governor who represents all people, but rather, as the
work of a religious fanatic. Governor Kristi Noem, a long-time anti-abortionist, who has worked long and hard for many years with the Republican Party as well as with much of the church community to defeat the women’s rights law called Roe v. Wade, now feels free to speak publicly and officially in defense of her own religious interests.
We are all dedicated to our own truths and I hesitate to condemn the religious faith of anyone. Yet, this expression from the governor’s office reveals a religious position that has no place in the political arena of a country where one of the signal traits of its Democratic ideals that the separation of church and state is the foundation of equality. The religious rights faction of this country now flies the American flag over its churches even though the flag is a nationalistic symbol rather than a religious one, and it has become so commonplace, there is no rejoinder from an unconcerned public.
Meanwhile, Noem has lost no time in expressing the hypocrisy of her faithless leader Donald J. Trump as he “cleans the swamp.” And the mostly evangelical Christian white women who are said to have voted for both Noem and Trump in great numbers are expected to cheer as one of the few female executives takes over the office of the South Dakota governorship in Pierre. These new women executives are part of the sweeping, new societal change we are experiencing.
What is new about failing to understand that a woman who chooses to end an unwanted pregnancy is a human being and not just a potential “host for a fertilized egg?” What is new about failing to understand that if some law can prevent a woman from having an abortion, it can also force her to have one? What is new about failing to respect a woman’s civil rights? Every woman of child bearing age who reads this proclamation should know that she is the one who decides her own destiny, not a governor, a church, bureaucrat, a husband, Tinker Bell, or an egotistical billionaire.
We talk all the time about “violence” against women, yet there is no movement more violent against women than the so-called “anti-abortion” movement which is the ultimate discrimination against the right to make human, personal decisions.
Contact Elizabeth Cook-Lynn at ecooklynn@gmail.com
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