Always Freedom And Sunlight
I composed an email in reply to a friend. The exchange between us had to do with the contentious pro-choice vs the pro-life viewpoints. Pragmatically the subject has to do with a woman’s rights of privacy and health care choice. To engage with another male friend about the subject causes an unsettled feeling. What can this male know of any woman’s stake in the matter? Males are at a remove and strictly speaking ought to leave this topic as the purview of women. That includes male legislators, and pastors who are male.
Language is slippery, words can be used to obscure, sow confusion — as words can also be used to illuminate. I suspect the stronger the belief, the less we are apt to know what one is talking about.
The quotation from Nietzsche conveys my sense of the pro-life “true believers.”
I find those people disagreeable
in whom every natural inclination immediately becomes
a sickness, something that disfigures them
or is downright infamous:
it is they that have seduced us
to hold that the inclinations and instincts of humankind are evil.
They are the cause
of our great injustice against our nature,
against all nature.
There are enough people
who might well entrust themselves to their instincts
with grace and without care;
but they do not, from fear
of this imagined “evil character” of nature.
That is why
we find so little nobility among men;
for it will always be the mark
of nobility that one feels no fear of oneself,
expects nothing infamous of oneself,
flies without scruple
where we feel like flying,
we freeborn birds.
Wherever we may come there will
always be freedom and sunlight around us.
–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 4, Section 294 by Friedrich Nietzsche
