Nothing, absolutely nothing, riles me as much as hearing or reading about pompous male politicians dressed in black suits, power ties and invincible ignorance, and even more pompous celibate priests also in black, talking with the authority of their God, or their man made scriptures, telling women what they ‘should’ be doing. You can substitute ‘Threats’ for Advice in the title and it may be a more accurate picture.

The alternative healing fields are crammed with women. They are naturally nurturing and able to sense human need in a person who needs physical help rather than a lecture about sin or the free market. It’s women who know, without taking a college course, that their baby needs to pee or is hungry. They don’t need an authoritative letter from some male figure. They know, and the male often doesn’t, and cannot understand how knowing without studying can come about.

The word is ‘intuition,’ knowing directly. Women with both sides of their brains connected with many more connections than the male brain, can do this sort of thing much better than men, even though they can’t explain it in terms that the linear brained male can understand.

The ultimate human male authority that many of the perpetrators hide behind has just told the masses of people suffering from AIDS in Africa that condoms don’t work in preventing AIDS and can actually be harmful. When the top dog barks nonsense it may be wise to be checking what exactly the lesser dogs in the pack are barking about. Maybe we could talk of the P-brain effect.

There, now my bias is out front. Nobody can accuse me of hiding it behind elegant phrases or clever spinning of words, which is what the first two groups have done for ever.

If you read my last short posting about the local bishops and archbishops telling their flock that they should not practice the healing art of Reiki, you will know that I regard that as the thin end of the wedge. All dogma based changes are brought about by constant pressure on the religious faithful.

Next it will be Catholic nurses who do Healing Touch, which the male doctors could not understand, but whose effects they could not ignore. And many other ways that could help will be included in an ever widening net unless women ignore nonsense, no matter how well dressed or educated the source. But that pressure can work both ways. And you may not have noted how that has happened fairly recently in favor of the righteous, the healers and helpers.

So before I get into the current frenzy among authoritarian Christians, Catholic and otherwise who feel that their authority is being flouted by ‘women’ of all people I shall mention from my own archives an example in which public opinion eventually altered the thrust of the screaming minority of bigots, even in this country where their access to the media and politicians makes them powerful voices against progress. The result has benefited women tremendously, and should be taken as the method we must use to counter the latest bunch of nonsense from the power hungry, and often ignorant religionists, who want to keep women in their place as definitely inferior creatures.

Read this as history from February 1999 when I wrote it in a Council Chat health column to warn women about the opposition to their health being organized by the ‘authorities,’ all men I must add. This is now thankfully out of date because women said ‘No’ in spite of all the religious pressure, and ignored the creeps. That is what I hope will happen this time too. But it did work. Remember that. Read it through to see how the attempts of the anti-women groups were thwarted. The article begins and ends at the –o0o- sign.

“ This article was written at the request of some women readers of Council Chat who couldn’t find out anything at all from their doctors about the drug RU 486, which I mentioned as being used all over Europe with great success, along with other effective medical treatments that never reach people over here.

Since I am writing this in the first week of the George W. Bush Presidency it is likely to be very timely, since male Republican politicians find it impossible to avoid messing legally with the bodies and rights of women. Maybe our darkest suspicions are correct, and some of them never had mothers. Perhaps they were quarried. The level of their mental processes certainly reminds me of rocks and stones.

Yes, I am biased about this particular matter. I do not think that men should have ANY say in anything to do with the birthing process. The midwives did well for centuries until they were persecuted almost out of existence by the males in the AMA who treated pregnancy as a female disease that only the marvelous male doctor/priests could cure, in an expensive hospital of course.

It was in 1982 that the French drug company Roussel Uclaf reported that their new drug RU 486 could be used to safely terminate pregnancies. In 1988 the French Ministry of Health approved the general use of the drug and was immediately under fire from the anti-abortionists of the religious right. These people organized protest marches through Paris and called the druga chemical weapon against the unborn.

They made such a fuss about it, news of course, that Roussel took the drug off the shelves. Fortunately for the women of the world, the French government happened to own 30% of the shares in Roussel and weren’t going to let a loud mouthed, anti-science minority affect their income. The government ordered it back on the shelves as the moral property of women.

Roussel is owned by Hoescht, which does about $7 billion a year in drug sales to the U.S.A. and its president was a devout Catholic who was afraid of similar and probably much more violent boycotts here, in the violent American society.

Some feminist groups lobbied Roussel to get the drug into the States but without success. Even the AMA, in 1990 argued that the drug should be available here because effective, non invasive procedures are always preferable to a surgical operation. Note that a drug was involved. There are many non invasive procedures that the AMA fights against in alternative medicine, but drugs with physical effects they will tolerate, if they are patented.

The Conservative Republicans, most of whom I point out again, are men, applied pressure to the Bush administration to ban the introduction of RU 486 here.

In 1993 in the next administration, President Clinton ordered Donna Shalala, the Health and Human Services Secretary to investigate the possibility of bringing RU 486 into this country.

Roussel was so afraid of the viciousness of the religious right here that they donated the U.S. patent rights for the drug to a non-profit research group, the Population Council to avoid lawsuits against Roussel and its products.

The Council immediately began clinical trials and reported them to the FDA, which in 1996 gave a qualified approval to the use of the drug whose chemical name is mifepristone.

Then a manufacturer had to be found to make the drug. That wasn’t easy, because it’s a relatively low revenue producer. Women don’t have to take it for life, which is the manufacturer’s aim for many drugs. Have you thought of that long term view of the drug companies…customers for life. Also, the political and religious climate here is particularly savage.

The Stock Market got into the act too. There are several mutual funds that have anti-abortion agendas. They said they would refuse to carry in their portfolios the stock of any company that made the drug. The reasons given were in high toned language about morality and ethics, which coming from Wall Street is a real joke.

But the Population Council has licensed the Danco Group to make the drug and Danco has found people to manufacture it and make it available to physicians in the U.S.A.

Male politicians are still doing undercover work to try to stop it happening. For example, last year (1998) Rep. Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma slipped an amendment into an agricultural bill that was designed to prevent the FDA from using any public money to approve any drug that could produce an abortion.

Male Republicans also tried to stop the confirmation of Jane Henney as FDA Commissioner because they thought that she was in favor of the drug.

Both of these attempts failed, but women, take note of their source. The fact that they were tried is important to the women of America.

Last September the Kaiser Family Foundation did a survey of physicians and found that 54% of all obstetricians and gynecologists said they would offer mifepristone if it were available. This yes vote included 45% of those who don’t currently perform abortions.

How the drug works is simple to explain. It stops the hormone progesterone from reaching the cell receptors of the uterus. Without progesterone the uterine lining cannot give nourishment to the fertilized egg, which eventually detaches.

A couple of days later the woman takes a drug to cause uterine contraction, usually misoprostol, and the contents of the uterus are expelled as in normal menstruation.

Research so far suggests that this method works best within seven weeks of the woman’s last period. In this country, over 730,000 abortions a year are performed by the ninth week.

About one third of French women choose the non-surgical drug option. And these report that they are very satisfied with the results.

The U.S. group researched by Danco were alse very pleased. In one study 96% of the woman said they would recommend it to others, and of those who had already had a surgical abortion, more than 70% of them preferred the drug treatment.

About 2 million women world wide have so far used the drug. There has been only one reported death, and that occurred when a different uterine contractor was used. Surgically, about 80,000 women die each year from botched abortions.

When mifepristone is finally approved there will be other applications. Research suggests that it will be beneficial in other womens’ health issues such as endometriosis, fibroid tumors, and even a specific kind of brain tumor.

Most of the promising research had to stop in these areas when the researchers ran out of the drug, but when it is available again the research will continue.

The eleven year delay in giving this choice to women has been entirely due to the anti-abortion groups, mainly Catholics, whose compassion for a fetus doesn’t seem to include the mother.

My own view about the matter is succinctly expressed by two bumper stickers. IF YOU DON’T LIKE ABORTIONS DON’T HAVE ONE, and KEEP YOUR ROSARIES AWAY FROM MY OVARIES. It’s the insane urge to control other people’s behavior that is the problem.

In this country some 86% of the counties have no provision for abortion procedures. And this is once again due to the insanity of the anti-abortion factions who can’t keep their views and precepts among themselves, and lose all sense of ethics and morals when their dogma is ignored as the nonsense it usually is.

On January 7th 1999 a case opened in Portland, Oregon that interests those who wonder if inciting people to murder someone is not really what is meant by ‘freedom of speech.’

There is a Web site that calls itself The Nuremberg Files.

It features photos of mangled fetuses and lots of blood, and calls doctors who perform abortions ‘The baby butchers.’

After the lead in shock tactics the site then lists the names of doctors who perform abortions, the owners of clinics where they occur, workers at the clinics, and judges who don’t think the same way as the owners of the site.

People who log on are invited to send in photos, videos and data about doctors, their cars, their friends and their children.

Four doctors and two clinic workers who have been killed by the true believers are shaded in grey. It doesn’t take decades of worldly experience to see that this is intimidation. The owner of the site has a spin on it of course. Said owner says that its purpose is to collect data on doctors just in case they were put on trial, as the Nazi war criminals were, at Nuremberg.

Planned Parenthood, a clinic, and five doctors are suing the creators of the site, because that sort of action in this violence prone nation tends to result in murder. It already has.

A jury is going to have to decide whether the Website is constitutionally protected free speech or an incitement to murder. The defendants are saying that the site is merely a form of political protest, and that the lawsuit is intended to stifle debate. What debate? I wonder.

That little run through old history is to reinforce the idea that the adversaries of humane behavior have no restrictions of ethics or morals. They will lie and kill to make other people do their bidding. Waving a Bible in your face is not an acceptable excuse for such despicable behavior, which is so often directed against their favorite target, women who can and do think for themselves.

And you will notice that the same kind of people and their end of the political spectrum who agonize over the possible human death involved in terminating an unwanted pregnancy, have no trouble in supporting horrendous wars that kill thousands of men, women and children. And the criminals concerned are not punished in any way, legally of politically.

The bishops I mentioned as the thin end of the wedge are a small part of a huge wave of mainly illiterate nonsense directed at practitioners of healing techniques. The fact that the nonsense is liberally interspersed with Biblical quotations does not make it less nonsensical.

A Christian Reiki worker mentions several encounters he has had with this attitude. He was giving a Reiki class and one girl said “If my parents knew I am here, they would cheerfully burn me at the stake.” She was, amazingly enough, respectful of her parent’s religious views but also considered herself called by God to become a healer. The religion of her parents contained no resources for training as a healer, and she believes like many, that Reiki offers a way.

Later on the same Reiki teacher had a conversation with his pastor. He asked the pastor’s opinion of Reiki. The pastor replied that he had heard about a Reiki Master who had abused his students in some way, so he didn’t have a good opinion of the practice. The Reiki man pointed out to the pastor the sexual abuse of young boys that had been brought to light in the Catholic Church. He said that people in that Church still believed in Christianity and still went to Church. The pastor took the point, re-thought his position and even spoke with a brain tumor victim about trying Reiki.

In the past three decades Reiki has spread all over the world. The theory of relativity isn’t Jewish, just because Einstein figured it out. Reiki isn’t Japanese just because a Japanese man encountered it and used it. But its Eastern origin is enough for many fundamentalist Christians to dispute it. They never bother about the Middle Eastern source of their own stuff.

There are many Christians who believe that Reiki is their answer to Paul’s gifts of the Spirit, which include healing. Among the early Christians the gift of healing was one of their trademarks, and many people spoke about the powers of the Christian healers. That all changed with Pope Gregory. He had gout, and could not conceal the fact that he had a very painful physical condition. Being a great spin artist he made the best of it and wrote The Book of Pastoral Care,in which he claimed that pain and suffering were things from which the Inner Temple to God could be built. Disease became a blessing in disguise. Healers became persona non grata and the lies of the Church prevailed again.

Most of my readers will know that Reiki people use symbols whose meaning they learn and they then use them as tools to channel healing energy. What you may not know is that according to many fundamentalist teachings the names of the symbols are the names of demons. Reiki works, they say, by invoking demons, the legions of the Christian perversion and invention named Satan. They forget that their own scriptures relate how Jesus was accused by the current spin doctors of using the devil to cure people.

A Catholic priest in Detroit has accused the Detroit Tigers of keeping people from Church because their opening home game is on Good Friday. These people never look at themselves. The only people who could keep the devout from going to Church are the devout themselves. The Tigers aren’t doing anything. Maybe the congregations are falling in numbers because of a Pope who finds Nazis congenial company, and who talks nonsense to the world about AIDS. Leave the Tigers out of it. The problem may be closer to home base, so to speak.

The ads on TV aren’t making me do anything because I never watch TV. And if I did, then I would be responsible for my actions, not the ads.

If you want to see how some Christians regard Reiki as a gift from God look at http://www.christianreiki.org/ Reiki for Christians. If you want to see how illiterate fundamentalists regard Reiki check out http://www.christian-reiki.org/ Reiki and their Demons. Notice that the only difference in the URL is a hyphen between christian and reiki. Probably not a coincidence. The Demons site will get you onto forty more hysterical spins. Go to http://www.reiki.org/ the International Center for Reiki Training to get the genuine Reiki viewpoint, knowing which will give you an informed judgment about what to do about Reiki.

We, the sane few, won out against the anti RU 486 crusade by constant pressure on media, doctors and officialdom, and by refusing to believe the religious nonsense. Prepare for another round now about healers, and remember that a simple statistic shows that women are the target. Particularly women who won’t cave in or conform to the dogmas of ignorant men. Power to all you ladies, particularly those wonderful nurses, nuns and nursing sisters who have dedicated their lives to healing, rather than to the power sought by their male counterparts. My goddess gave birth to their god, so they can’t fool me with their teen age tantrums. I hope they can’t fool you either.