The Importance of Bodily Autonomy – Gay in the CLE
Can you imagine being told you cannot wear certain types of jewelry
You wake up tomorrow and learn that it is illegal for you to wear makeup.Up until this morning, you always got up and put on your makeup before you went to work, go shopping, or hang out with friends. No one ever told you that you could not do this because it was something you did to your body and only affected you. Suddenly, you awoke in a world that has decided that wearing any form of make up is against the law and now punishable by fine or jail, depending on the severity. How do you feel?
Hey y’all. Nick here, your friendly neighborhood bisexual Satanist back at ya with another tenet to discuss. Can you imagine being told you cannot wear certain types of jewelry, clothes, cant get tattoos, piercings, or have to have approval from the government to start having children? Or maybe you are told that you can no longer have sex. Any action or thing that you used to be able to do to your body has now been stripped from you and is regulated by a legal committee who decides what you can or cannot do. How would you feel about this?
Today, we will dive into the third Tenet of The Satanic Temple in an article i like to call, Taking Back Our Bodies: The Importance of Bodily Autonomy.
Tenet 3
“One’s body is inviolable, subject to one’s own will alone..”
Inviolable is such a strange word and one you dont hear thrown around, often. All the same, it is one you are familiar with, even if unknown. To help clarify it a bit more, we need to understand what violable means. At its root, violable means the likelihood that something can be or capable of being violated. By that, inviolable would mean not capable of being violated. So there you are, the tenet basically means that your body should not be violated by anyone other than yourself and your own choosing.
Done. This article is over and you can go about your day. Thank you!
What was that? You are a bit fuzzy over what that means, in general? Okay, okay. We can go into it a bit more, in the name of science — after all.
To water it down a little more, no one should have the right to tell you what to do with or how to do with your body, but yourself. This goes beyond just the physical body and includes choice, as it pertains to your body. That is a lot to unpack, so we are going to go into some deets about it.
My body, my right
Your body is your’s and your’s alone. It is the very vessel you spend your entire life in. You know your body better than anyone else can or will. So it stands to reason that the only one who should make decisions about it is the one that lives inside of it. But yet, every year there are laws that are put into place that allow someone else to make decisions about the body in which you inhabit. Even worse is that these people dont know you and really don’t care much about who you are, as a person. They only align with who is giving them money to do a certain thing, pass a specific piece of legislation, or whatever.
If you dont believe me then let’s look at a recent change in law when the Supreme Court removed Roe V Wade. The Supreme Court is the governing body who put it into law and removed it and the majority of those on that panel are old, white, rich men. Those men are making laws about what a woman can or cannot do to her body. These are men who have never been women but they somehow know what is best for a woman, when it comes to pregnancy. These men feel that there is no reason a woman should terminate a pregnancy, not for rape, not for health concerns, or anything other reason. Is their decision based in any form of science?
Then comes the issue of transgender folx. We are at a point in history where people who have no understanding of humanity, as it relates to gender differences, are making decisions about other people’s bodies. I dont think anyone of those Supreme Court justices understands what it is like to wake up, everyday, in a body that does not feel like your body. To look in the mirror and not see yourself looking back at you. Instead, they are more concerned with religion and some screwed up way of thinking that male predators will use this as a means to infiltrate women’s room for doing harm to women or children. They sit there on their elected thrones deciding who deserves what and when. They sit in judgement that the only people who could benefit from this are sexual predators and allow for easier access. Well, lets not forget the added aspect of somehow cheating in sports. The odd thing to point out here is that the majority of this argument is predicated on Transgender women. They have this mindset that men will use this as a means of competing in sports they shouldnt, gaining access to women’s locker rooms to sexually assault them, and a plethora of other backwards mindsets.
Let’s take a different approach to this. Tomorrow you wake up to hear that the Supreme Court has passed a law that tattoos are illegal. The reason is that the only kinds of people who get tattoos are criminals or miscreants. By removing the ability to tattoo people, you remove the chance for good, upstanding citizens to be dragged into a world of criminal activity. From there they decide that video games are also illegal because they promote people to use weapons against others and act out in non-upstanding citizen ways. That leads to a bill to remove all music that is considered troubling or could influence people to have negative and illegal thoughts. So, there goes any form of rock n’ roll, hip hop, and a host of other music that everyone enjoys. Once that is all made illegal, they realize that art and literature makes people question authority and act out in irrational manners. Across the world we watch as the government moves to close down museums and libraries. All the books, sculptures, and artwork are destroyed on live television so that people can see what will not be tolerated any longer. Pretty much the entire movie of 1984 or Equilibrium. Most of us would be outraged to see such a cavalier approach at subjugating an entire population to the whims of a select few.
Your body, your choice
We live in a world where everyone thinks they have some kind of right to tell people how they should think and what they should do with their bodies. The only time anyone should be advising you of what your body needs or such, besides you, is your doctor – within reason. Whether its the choice to get a tattoo, have sex with multiple people, become the person you know you are on the inside. or opt for an abortion, it is your right because it is your body, alone, and no one else’s.
What is your take on this tenet? Do you agree with it or not? How do you feel when you see our government trying to pass laws that tell you how, what, or when you can do anything to your body? Let me know in the comments below and I will holler at you in the next article where we discuss Tenet 4. This one is a doozy.