That is a great observation and it is refreshing to see this in conjunction with the insight into the Gnostic parallel. Although I have not read Bloom’s book, I find the parallels between ancient Gnosticism and today’s contemporaries very compelling when observed by Hans Jonas, the author of The Gnostic Religion, Eric Voegelin in his analysis of “the gnostic mass movements of modernity,” and Christopher Lasch at the end of my edition of The Culture of Narcissism. Many others have made this observation by now including my friend Gil Costello on this site.

I am reminded by the term “war on women” of the epithet against early Christians as being “enemies of humanity” – in this case it is half of humanity, minus the girls aborted for ‘women’s rights.’

I am impressed by the way in which this ‘women’s rights’ rhetoric isolates a woman- it tends in the minds of many men to make the choice to conceive entirely hers, and so her responsibility; it also configures emotional isolation from the baby in her womb, the objective distancing from her bodies history and the life within her in order to make a choice; it also sets up a kind of antagonism toward her own body by making the urbane modern woman promoter of taking the type one carcinogenic pill the majority of her fertile life. There are lots of more nuanced observations that have been made about this than I can muster. I am struck by the individualistic, disembodied, non-communal nature of this rhetorical construct.

First, contraception is a big issue in this election, and “pro-life” doesn’t mean “anti-contraception.” The vast majority of women of childbearing age use contraception. It is difficult to deny it belongs among “women’s issues.”

Second, the Republican Party Platform appears to be opposed to abortion in all circumstances. If you are a woman of childbearing age and you are “pro-life” but nevertheless believe a woman should be allowed to have an abortion in cases of rape, incest, or threat to her life, you may still very well be concerned about abortion rights.

Third, many pro-life women will no doubt be too far to the right to even consider voting for Obama. As the cliche goes, Obama needs to “energize his base” to get out and vote. If he ignores abortion as an issue, he is a lot more likely to lose pro-choice Democratic women than he is to gain pro-life Republican women.

For the love of Pete, our great country MUST find a way to keep 30-year-old GU law student Sandra Fluke stocked with free contraception at all costs. She must not be made to carry this great burden alone. Our nation once carried off the Apollo space program—I am sure we can ensure, somehow, that Sandra Fluke gets the Pill (or little rubber things) for free.

When the DNC puts her front and center at their convention, I am sure we will all see the priority of her need, and understand the need to surrender some of our First Amendment rights. I hope they make a really cool poster—suitable for framing— to explain it all.

Thus in considering the material creation we look for physical laws as the postulates from which we can reason about the physical creation. In politics we write constitutions making them the postulates from which all other laws must flow (or, at least, which other laws must not contradict). In Christianity we adopt Sola Scriptura, making the Holy Scriptures the postulates from which all authoritative doctrine must derive. In effect we build axiomatic models of the physical creation, of government, and of Christianity, treating them as so much geometry; and we then identify the realities with our models, treating the models, in effect, as ideals in Plato’s sense, as higher truths realized more or less imperfectly in the world around us.

Ideologies – whether traditional ones like communism, capitalism, democracy, and (C.S. Lewis’s favorite) “progress,” or the more modern ones you mention – are simply models of reality, models taken to be truer than reality itself, models to be imposed on a recalcitrant reality. The trouble is that, for reasons I do not understand, a model never preserves the nature of the reality it models. Thus conforming reality to a model inescapably involves subverting, warping, and ultimately denying the nature of the reality. This is particularly grievous when the reality is man, himself, whose nature is conformity to the image of Christ. Once that nature is denied, man is just so much raw material to be shaped according to his own will, or according to the will of those who have the power to do so, and the result becomes increasingly hell on earth, regardless of whether the intentions are good or bad.

Um, because it’s an issue of women’s bodies – you know, wombs and vaginas and so on.

What’s even more pathetic is that professional victim Sandra Fluke will probably get a book deal and Lifetime movie made out of being called the s-word by Rush Limbaugh.