Posted on 08/27/2010 6:52:49 AM PDT by markomalley
Having seen an inordinate number of eloquent commentaries delineating the moral evils of the recent United States District Court decision nullifying the will of California voters on Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage, I am nonetheless left wondering why none of the commentators was able to connect the dots.
Obviously, same-sex “marriage” or even same-sex “civil unions” are a bad idea, particularly if legitimized by a court system that previously put its stamp of approval on contraception and abortion. But why isn’t anyone pointing out the obvious root cause of this latest moral and legal debacle? Why isn’t anyone hammering on contraception?
In April of this year, months before this decision, Jenn Giroux, executive director of HLI America, explained to readers that the public acceptance of contraception has led to (among other things) “[s]maller and more broken families, rampant homosexuality, pornography, and China’s coercive one-child policy.”
Earlier, wise teachers such as Professor Janet Smith emphatically linked a rejection of Pope Paul VI’s profoundly wise encyclical Humanae Vitae to a wide acceptance of homosexuality. In her 2003 comments, she pointed out what I believe is the real problem—one that very few will admit: “Rather than holding to the Christian and common sense view that sex belongs within marriage between a male and a female committed to each other for life and open to children, our culture thinks that sex is quite simply for pleasure—and that almost any combination of consenting individuals may morally seek that pleasure without any commitment, without an openness to children.”
In 1998, Father John Hardon, SJ, who is sorely missed by many of us who were his students, pointed out in “Contraception: Fatal to the Faith and to Eternal Life,” “The spectacle of broken families, broken homes, divorce and annulments, abortion and the mania of homosexuality—all of this has its roots in the acceptance of contraception on a wide scale in what only two generations ago was a professed Catholic population.”
Clearly, many wise people have understood—and warned us about —the cost of contraception. But not everyone is on this page.
For example, rather than setting forth facts regarding the nature of sexual sin and its tragic consequences, many members of the Catholic clergy have either been totally silent or have said things that not only confuse fact with fiction but further marginalize Catholic teaching. This, in turn, makes Church doctrine less palatable to a sexually saturated culture, even though Catholic teaching is now and always will be worthy of belief and obedience—because it contains the fullness of truth.
During their November 2006 meeting, for example, the U.S. Catholic bishops “acknowledged that most married Catholics—96 percent, according to their own estimate—use birth control, and the bishops said they recognize that the [C]hurch’s teachings on homosexuality are contested in American society.”
Excuse me, but those percentages do not change truth. In fact, they should drive more bishops back to boldly teaching their people instead of gauging the content of their message on public acceptance of what they have to say. It’s the type of posturing that perhaps led to Cardinal Francis George, current U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops president, saying (in response to the judge’s decision allowing same-sex marriage), “Marriage between a man and a woman is the bedrock of any society. The misuse of law to change the nature of marriage undermines the common good.”
He did not say nor did he make reference to the obvious fact that this very sad state of affairs would not exist in the first place if contraception had been rejected long ago. He was simply silent on the point.
This is why I recommend that rather than dialoguing, as a whole, every Catholic bishop and every Catholic priest should be teaching, preaching and exhorting. Nobody really knows what America or its court decisions would look like today if the Catholics of this nation had been properly catechized for the past 42 years on matters pertaining to human sexuality.
What we do know is that today America and, most importantly, Catholics, are sliding toward a moral hell.
It’s high time many more Catholic leaders in the U.S. stood up and clarified the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, sinfulness and sinlessness. Why? Because the only treatment for the deadly bacteria raging through the veins of this society is a very strong dose of the same message Christ gave to His disciples a very long time ago: “Try your hardest to enter by the narrow door, because, I tell you, many will try to enter and will not succeed” (Luke 13: 24).
The narrow door is always open, and frankly, anything less than fighting tooth and nail to get there will not heal this ailing body politic we know as America.
Sin dulls our senses and clouds our ability to discern truth. Contraception allows us to sin more easily.
After all these years, with so many using it or encouraging others to us it, we are a different people. May God have mercy on us.
I am not a perfectionist, though sympathetic to this post. All four of our kids came by short cut (C-section) — and we felt that we had bagged our limit. It’s major surgery — and I wasn’t about to give up making love to my wife.
“Progress” implies a movement to a better condition of things. Is it better than monogamy has been replaced as a norm by casual sexual relationships?
Well, it does depend on the effect, does it not? Is chemically induced sterility good for the human body? Does not the use of a condom—which was after all invented to prevent prostitutes from getting pregnant—not affect our attitudes toward our wives? Does not the use of contraceptives—and abortion—affect our attitudes toward the children we do have?
1 Cor 10:13 NIV: “No temptation has seized you except what is common to man. And God is faithful; He will not let you be tempted beyond what you can bear. But when you are tempted, He will also provide a way out so that you can stand up under it.”
Either you believe the Bible or you don’t. Sometimes I wish I could edit the Word, but He provides a way out of that temptation also.
You are correct. I would suggest that access is already granted from a legal private and or business perspective -the term is partnership -in this case it would in essence be a non-profit private business relationship...
You rightly identify by implication the flawed premise underlying the legitimatizing efforts to institute homosexual marriage being one of sexual activity between the two parties who would 'partner'. Society does not grant two business partners that enter into a contracted partnership special privileges and accommodation if they have sex -why should two that enter into a private business contract be any different?
You carry this posit one step further by suggesting that sexual free partnerships comprised of elderly father and son living together, Mother and daughter, two middle aged ‘friends’ of any sex, etc., are just as valid as the homosexual flavor. In essence, orifice exploration adds nothing fundamentally substantive to the argument for or against...
I suggest you complete the task of carrying the arguments forward to their conclusion and realizing that civil unions are not inevitable. In reality, homosexual civil unions are non profit partnerships that may provide economic benefit to the parties but provide no economic benefit or value to society.
Society has spoken on this as evidenced for centuries in custom, tradition, institution, common law and codified law. The participants in the moral free market have decided that traditional marriage is valued by society while other partnerships although legal provide no value --they are nice, they are legal; however, they are no more worthy of societal privilege, subsidy, and reward than any other business or personal partnership contracted to accommodate and benefit its partners...
The legal and economic status of family relationships - and any other economic or social partnership - has changed a great deal in the last century. For example, marriage is no longer even a contract in our legal system, and efforts to create binding contracts, through prenuptial agreements or attempts to “contractualize” a religious understanding of marriage, have often been thwarted by the courts.
The intervention of government in the economic relationship of parent-child-grandchild, or siblings, or other biological family, has left us with the situation where a sibling can’t insure another sibling, or a grandchild can’t insure a grandparent.
To me, this reinforces the basic premise that economic arrangements should be made by the affected parties, not by government or by government-designated intermediaries (employers, in the case of health insurance). If I want to take economic responsibility for anyone, blood-relation or not, that should be *easily* managed by contract ... but it is not, because government sets the terms, not the private parties involved.
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An extremely interesting topic. I'm falling asleep at the keyboard and will be back to have my say tomorrow.
And what led to the acceptance of contraception?
The moral decay that people seem to think followed.
It’s backwards. The moral decay was there first.
Acceptance of contraception is a symptom. One of the earliest, no doubt, but not the cause of moral decay.
I agree somewhat; I would say that there was definitely moral rot, but the acceptance of contraceptive as normal and even healthy sped up the process.
Sort of like modern art - it is a symptom of cultural depravity, but it also increases the depravity.
Probably poor analogy, I’m tired and off to bed!
(Hope you’re feeling somewhat better, mm!)
Unfortunately you are objectively correct. I would suggest that though that 'it' has not changed but rather it has been changed -changed by the same method we see now being employed by the homosexual agenda activists. We see government imposed morality that is based upon an illegitimate form of pluralism --illegitimate in that morality is only deemed legitimate if rationally premised and is necessarily devoid of religious and or faith premised morality. In essence the freedom to practice religion is being curtailed by government under the premise that it is irrational as a basis for law...
The obvious question is what then about those unalienable rights endowed by the Creator?
A couple things you might find interesting that I have posted on similar discussions:
Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church
-excerpt:
572. The principle of autonomy involves respect for every religious confession on the part of the State, which “assures the free exercise of ritual, spiritual, cultural and charitable activities by communities of believers. In a pluralistic society, secularity is a place for communication between the different spiritual traditions and the nation”. Unfortunately, even in democratic societies, there still remain expressions of secular intolerance that are hostile to granting any kind of political or cultural relevance to religious faiths. Such intolerance seeks to exclude the activity of Christians from the social and political spheres because Christians strive to uphold the truths taught by the Church and are obedient to the moral duty to act in accordance with their conscience. These attitudes even go so far, and radically so, as to deny the basis of a natural morality. This denial, which is the harbinger of a moral anarchy with the obvious consequence of the stronger prevailing over the weaker, cannot be accepted in any form by legitimate pluralism, since it undermines the very foundations of human society. In the light of this state of affairs, “the marginalization of Christianity ... would not bode well for the future of society or for consensus among peoples; indeed, it would threaten the very spiritual and cultural foundations of civilization.
How about something, a different way of looking at things, that may blow your mind?
As a conservative I assume you believe like many including myself in the inherent benefits associated with the economic free market system.
The free market is pretty much a spontaneously generated self regulating complex system comprised of many variables and individual inputs that by its very nature rewards value generation and discourages value destruction. It promotes competition, success, innovation, and efficiency -creating wealth along the way.
Individual market participants uncoordinated acting primarily to further and advance their own welfare determine value and price of goods and services based upon needs, wants, supply, and demand. The end result of uncoordinated individual advancement within this system of insurmountable complexity is an advancement the common good...
OK -now what about the moral free market?
Ask yourself --what is the rational basis for Beta to win out over VHS or for SUVs to win out over compact cars of for that matter any thing to be valued over anything else and to succeed or fail in the economic free market?
Now go one step further and ask yourself WHY all of the sudden must that valued in the moral free market require a rational basis? The answer should lead one to conclude that those suggesting such are simply those that seek to destroy the moral free market -in essence, they seek to take away individual freedom of market particpants...
Some may be familiar with F.A. Hayek who wrote a book I recommend to any free market conservative --he is noted for his writings on the inherent benefits associated with the free market system and the inherent flaws associated with socialism. It is no coincidence that underlying legitimate individual freedom are premised not only his arguments on the value, benefits and sound reason for the economic free market but as well arguments regarding the value, benefits and sound reason for the moral free market e.g. society -its historically proven successful and historically observed traditions and institutions...
Hayek on Tradition(40 Page PDF Document)
-excerpt:
Traditional morality is rejected today as commonly as it was once taken for granted. And if the specific content of that morality, especially where it touches on matters of sexuality, is widely regarded with contempt, the meta-ethical notion that one ought to respect a moral code precisely because it is traditional gets even worse treatment: It is held to be beneath contempt. Modern educated people take it to be a sign of their modernity and education that they refuse to accept the legitimacy of any institution or code of behavior, however widespread, ancient, and venerable, which has not been rationally justified. Traditional morality stands doubly damned in their eyes: It is not rationally justifiable, and its adherents fail even to attempt to justify it so. The traditional moralist, they take it, is a slave not merely to the “conventional wisdom” but to the conventional wisdom of people long dead. He is in the grip of irrationality, superstition, and ignorance; worst of all, he is out of date.
Read it, if you like it --use it, and pass it on...
For those interested on what Hayek says about big government socialism: Readers' Digest Condensed Version of the Road to Serfdom (in PDF format(40 Page PDF Document)
“Sort of like modern art - it is a symptom of cultural depravity, but it also increases the depravity.
Probably poor analogy, I’m tired and off to bed!”
It’s a good anology!!
Freegards
Because you created a breach in human sexuality; now it’s strictly for pleasure. It WAS a Christian tradition, now it’s only the Catholics who are supposed to recognize this Truth. If sex is merely for pleasure how could homosexuality be considered wrong?
Amen, sister!
wow. At any given time a human being can suffer, a child, a teenager, middle aged and older. Myself in my 50’s am disabled because of a disease with sickness and pain and I wonder how many people, progressives would consider me and those like me as taking up space. It is difficult but rewarding because if our Lord suffered and brought redemption with it for all, then too I can accept the suffering with him and offer myself up in prayer of thanksgiving. No one gets away from suffering. My mother in law just had a stroke after just a few years my father in law had a stroke. he can no longer talk and had complications. It’s the love of one another through the example of Christ that we are to give to the world. With birth control which was planned parenthood’s answer to minimizing the numbers of abortions was a lie since the introductions of BC many women still have abortions. I know women who went through abortions, more than one for most of them, some wanting to replace the child they had aborted only to abort another child. For many years these women still grieve for their children but women never think of the children they lost through some forms for BC. But the darkness is never settled with just abortion or just BC it spreads out to bring more darkness to the world, adultery, divorce, gay marriage. Homosexuals say of heterosexuals if they can abort and practice BC why are we held to a different standard because we can’t have children?
I agree...sex outside of marriage is wrong, but contraception isn’t.
ed
I know several Christian couples that are very moral, will never divorce and stayed chaste till their wedding, yet practice birth control.
Ed
Very interesting points. I read most of Hayek recently, but it was due back at the library. I’ll get my own copy if I see it in the used book store.
I believe that one can readily defend traditional morality on a rational basis, if anyone can be found who is willing even to discuss it. (As we see on the thread, most “defenses” of contraception are “I do it and it’s okay,” which is not exactly a deep discussion.) However, that’s not the same as morality’s being “rationally premised,” starting from a base of pure reason.
One wonders why that would even be a goal, given the real-world outcome of systems claiming to be based purely in human reason. Even a strict materialist would have to look at revolutionary France, for example, or Soviet Russia, and say, “FAIL,” on strictly utilitarian grounds.
Well-said. Also, for those uninformed people who think contraception reduces the number of abortions, in actuality more contraception leads to more abortion. This is the same link as the contraception-homosexuality link. Those who contracept want to divorce sex from childbirth, and then use the Final Solution when their ungodly plans don't work.
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