Mike Luckovich on Political Game of Republicans and Bishops: Make Martha Jump

Another brilliant cartoon this week by Mike Luckovich at Truthdig commenting on why the U.S. Catholic bishops have teamed up with the Republicans right now to make women's healthcare needs a culture war issue as the 2012 elections approach.

And as we try to figure out what seems to be, on the face of it, a positively insane political move on the part of the reverend gentlemen on one side wearing elephant suits and those on the other side sporting frilly lace and basic black, there's this that should never be discounted: not a few powerful men of either constitution--whether elephantine or clerical--actually get their jollies out of seeing women jump.

This bears repeating: there are men whose self-image is so fragile, so undeveloped, that they enjoy seeing women (and the "weak" in general) tormented in one way or another.  In the Catholic world, those men are, I'm sorry to say, a dime a dozen because of the Catholic church's overweening investment in patriarchy--an investment that now virtually determines the definition of Catholicism for increasing numbers of people who imagine that the scriptures and Christian tradition are primarily about God's revelation that the world is divided into rigid and quite fragile (but immutable) categories of male and female, with males on top.  And everything will tumble back into primordial chaos if this divinely established order is in any way disturbed.

And so back to the question of the seemingly baffling political miscalculation of the political party now dominated by bankers and corporate executives, the Catholic bishops and their co-belligerents, and right-wing white evangelical men (and Mormons): there are men--lots of them--in each of these camps who take positive delight in seeing women scramble, suffer, beg for necessities they themselves take freely for granted as gentlemen.

There are men whose self-image is so heavily invested in feeling more powerful than women (and other underlings) that they will actively provoke situations designed to demonstrate, yet again, their lordship and women's obligation to submit to said lordship.  The clerical club has long been wild about such behavior, especially at the very top levels of the Catholic church--even (or perhaps especially) when it issues its misogynistic statements while wearing elegant basic black frocks accessorized with frothy bits of lace.  Or long scarlet trains attended by lots of fabu frou-frou. . . . 

There are men for whom these dynamics of ego-erection are so powerfully appealing that they will even, through their unabashed enjoyment of the thrill of exercising power over the weaker sex, run the risk of subverting the very power the dynamics are all about lifting up and extending.  Without even recognizing that they are deflating their own power at the very same time that they imagine they're inflating it, as they derive such divine pleasure and get such guilty erotic kicks from bullying women and beating them into submission.