Interview on January 9, 2025, with Gaby, who is studying painting, outside Girvetz Hall at University of California Santa Barbara.
Do you consider yourself religious?
Gaby: No, but I did grow up in a Catholic household. We never really had time to practice it, but my parents did put me in Catholic school for elementary school for a little bit. We’re Mexican and Middle Eastern, so it’s a huge family. My grandma would read the Bible every night and my grandpa always had a rosary on or something.
But my mom got sick when I was little and my parents had to pull me and my brother out of Catholic school because it was too expensive, and we kind of just stopped. Life got too busy to focus on anything other than my mom trying to live. My little sister still reads different verses and she does her best to stay connected to God, but me and my brother and my dad don’t do much.
Do you believe there is a God?
Gaby: It depends on the day, if that makes sense. I don’t know what to believe. I’m under the impression that everyone’s right in their own religion, everyone has the right to believe whatever they want to believe, and I don’t think that anyone’s necessarily wrong or that anyone’s necessarily right.
It is just whatever gives people faith and peace of mind. I think that there is something to a degree higher than just this. It gives me hope. I don’t necessarily know that I believe in a Christian God or a Buddhist god or something like that.
Do you believe you have to be good to go to heaven?
Gaby: I’m not necessarily sure that it’s “good people go to heaven,” because how do you judge that? Good is deemed solely on what you think is good. With everyone having different morals and ethics, how do you deem if you’re good enough to go to heaven? I think there’s definitely some truth to it. Maybe the afterlife’s more enjoyable, the cooler you are, the better you are to people. There are definitely people who don’t deserve to have any sort of pleasure in the afterlife.
The ancient Greeks thought whatever happens to you happens tenfold for a thousand years, whatever you did, good or bad. It’s sort of like that, maybe. How good of an afterlife you have depends on whatever you did. I don’t necessarily know that there’s a specific heaven or a hell determined by God. But I think that there are definitely consequences to your actions, whether there is an afterlife or not. Whatever you do on earth is going to have an impact. It’s going to affect people after you die.
Do you use the Ten Commandments to figure out what you think is good and bad?
Gaby: I’m just trying to figure it out. I’m just doing whatever I think is right in the moment. I feel like life’s too short for me to be completely hung up on a set of rules and to follow them and to be hard on myself if I break one. My mom died when I had just turned 15. She was 47. It’s too short for me to be strung up on a set of rules from a book written thousands of years ago that I don’t fully understand or fully agree with.
Especially growing up Catholic, there’s a lot of stuff within the community that I just really don’t agree with, especially depending on the area you’re in. If I were to go to the south and go to a Catholic church down there, I’d probably struggle more than going somewhere here in California. It’s just difficult for me to believe that good and bad is so clear cut, especially in humans. We were made to make mistakes. So it’s difficult for me to follow a complete set of rules like that and to determine my entire life on them.
Is it true to say that a biological man who identifies as a woman is in fact a woman?
Gaby: I think gender is a construct that’s completely made up. In my time doing a series on the afterlife I learned a lot about how people see different classes, different groups of people. There are so many cultures that, before they were colonized by Europeans, spoke about people having different gender identities. There are cultures in Africa that have 25 plus genders. I think gender’s made up. I think gender is interchangeable. But if you were biologically born a male, you’re forever kind of stuck having biological things that are male. If you transition into being a woman, you can’t give birth. But to say that women have to be able to give birth or have to be able to have all of those parts to be identified as a woman isn’t true.
I know a lot of people who are infertile who can’t have babies. It took my aunt 20 plus years of IVF to just finally be able to conceive a kid because she was missing parts of her ovaries. So if I were to apply that same logic that a lot of people who are anti-trans have to just regular people who are cisgendered, I don’t think it’s fair. I don’t see her as any less of a woman, as I do my friends who are transgender. I think as long as you’re happy, if you’re not hurting anyone, if it makes you feel more comfortable to identify how you please, then life’s too short to be damned about things.
You said as long as you’re not hurting anyone, it shouldn’t matter what you do. What do you think about abortion?
Gaby: I am completely pro-abortion. It doesn’t matter what stage of the pregnancy it is, s*** happens. Sometimes there’s nothing you could do. Are you willing to both die and never have a chance to make another God-given child? If I were to have a kid and they were only given a couple days left to live, I don’t think it’s fair to see something so helpless suffer. I think if I have the option to save something from suffering, whether it’s myself or a child, I would do it. But also, it’s not my business. It’s not my decision to impose my beliefs onto someone else and take away their freedom to make their own decision whether I agree with it or not.
My brother for the longest time was extremely anti-abortion, and we always went back and forth on it, but his wife ended up having a really, really bad miscarriage at a really young age. And he realized it’s not fair to see someone suffer like that and to impose his belief onto them when they have the choice to make themselves or another living being feel better. I just think it’s not my business whether or not someone gets an abortion. It’s not my business the reason they get it. I always thought that if I was in a predicament where I couldn’t afford a child or wasn’t mentally a stable enough for a child, then it’s not meant to be. I don’t want to put a kid through that, especially coming from a really low income area, I see a lot of my friends struggle and wish that their parents never had them.
Our laws impose our beliefs on others all the time. What do you think about laws against drunk driving, controlling what someone can do with their body?
Gaby: I think with abortion it’s a little bit different. It’s your own personal body. You’re really not hurting anyone else. It depends if you look at a child as living when it’s in utero or not. I don’t even feel comfortable calling a fetus a child because they’re not really conscious until some weeks later. I’m a little standoffish about an abortion in the third trimester, the really late second trimester. I think that should be saved for only when it’s absolutely dire, they’re both going to die, the woman’s going to die, something like that.
But when it comes to something like drunk driving, inherently you’re risking your life and someone else’s through no fault of their own. That person is conscious. They’ve made memories, they’ve touched the lives of people. They’ve put their mark on the earth already and they’ve had some years to do so. I think if you’re going to go be an alcoholic and you’re going to do all this reckless stuff, knowing that you’re potentially and purposefully putting people in danger for your own pleasure, I think that that is different than choosing to have an abortion for whatever reason.
What makes human beings valuable?
Gaby: I see human beings as valuable not just because they’re simply existing, breathing. I think it depends how much they’ve been able to touch the lives of their family, their friends, the things around them. I know some people who I would not say are valuable human beings because they’ve done more harm than they have done good. There is a degree, when you’ve been alive for 20, 30 years, any amount of years really. You’re conscious. You’ve touched someone. Someone would be upset if a drunk driver came and took your life because they simply wanted to get drunk and have a cool Friday.
I think that the value of life really depends on how much you’re choosing to do with yourself. If you’re choosing to be happy and you’re choosing to make a positive mark is completely different than if you’re choosing to inherently do things that are aggressive and deplorable. Then that comes down to the meaning of life. For me, it’s just to make memories. Life’s too short to strive for something that’s going to change the world completely. Some people never get that chance, no matter how much they try, but I think to make any change in anyone’s life, for any period, is good enough.
Watch a short excerpt of Gaby’s interview.
Has anyone gone for a swim in the new Gulf of America yet?
She contradicts herself in the space of only a few paragraphs. She has no core convictions, no center, only a stream of consciousness. Oh, but I bet she hates Trump and Republicans.
Gaby would fit In with Pilate’s What is Truth? With her what is Good?
I’m thinking more she has the potential to be another redeemed Samaritan woman by the well. Poor thing lost her mom at 15. Praying that she has an overwhelming experience of Christ in her heart and mind in the very near future.
What an addle-brain.
UCSB
U Càn Study, Buzzed
The act of abortion always kills the innocent unborn. End Abortion Now! Adoption is the option.
CCD-here’s an interesting story you guys might like to pursue: the Auxiliary bishop of the San Diego Catholic diocese has decided to suspend the diocean Cursillo organization for an entire year due to years of internal strife with the leadership.
“Gaby: I’m not necessarily sure that it’s “good people go to heaven,” because how do you judge that? Good is deemed solely on what you think is good. With everyone having different morals and ethics, how do you deem if you’re good enough to go to heaven?”
That question goes to the heart of the dilemma of the left: What is the nature of good and evil? Is there any objective measure of it when “good is deemed solely on what you think is good?” When the good for one person is evil, or at least objectionable, to another? In such a culture the concept of good must necessarily extend to all that is subjectively deemed so by its members. The transsexual’s sense of good belongs to the same party platform as that of the liberal Catholic prelate even though these concepts of good may be in contradiction to each other. That’s the nature of inclusion.
Now Gaby holds contradictory concepts of good and evil. She holds the drunk driver blameworthy for driving drunk but excuses the abortionist who kills the unborn baby (though skittish about 3rd trimester abortions yet saying “It doesn’t matter what stage of the pregnancy it is, s*** happens.”).
Perfect words, Daniel.
I used to live a couple of miles from U.C.S.B. at St. Raphael Parish in Goleta. Some days, we could smell marijuana at the parish. A Santa Barbara County Sheriff told me that they would find students passed out on the roads from drug use. But there was a group called “Campus Crusade for Christ,” which brought light into some of the student’s lives. They flourished, and the more they studied the practices of the early Church, the more they moved toward solid Christian teachings. That was back in the late 1980s. Now, they have built a beautiful Orthodox Church across the street from St. Raphael’s. Their Website is https://www.stathanasius.org/
Love to get mailings from top faithful, orthodox Catholic colleges, like Thomas Aquinas College. They always have wonderful stories about their students, who all usually end up highly successful in their pursuits. Many become priests or nuns. These are honestly the outstanding future leaders of tomorrow! Their stories are deeply inspiring. These fine Catholic students and their stories, belong in interviews, posted on good Catholic websites. Nothing else belongs here.