Catholic Professor: Bishops “Un-Christian” on Coverage for Contraception

Cardinal Newman Society ^ | May 8, 2012

[NYer]

A sociology professor at Fordham University has blasted U.S. bishops and Catholic universities that uphold the Church’s teaching on contraception as “un-[C]hristian.” Writing in the Huffington Post, Associate Professor of Sociology Jeanne Flavin accused the bishops of showing a “staggering disregard for young women’s everyday lived reality, and their futures” for their stance against providing insurance coverage for contraceptives.

Flavin, the author of Our Bodies, Our Crimes: The Policing of Women’s Reproduction in America, seems incensed by the recent decision by Xavier University to stop providing contraceptive coverage and the bishops very public struggle for religious liberty against the HHS contraceptive mandate.

Flavin concludes her piece for the liberal website even more bombastically, saying:

The principle of cura personalis (or “care for the whole person”), central to the mission of Catholic schools, does not come with a qualifier that says “unless you are sexually active” or “except if you are a woman.” While Catholic social teachings communicate powerful and uplifting messages about the dignity of the human person, the contraceptive coverage ban (not to mention the Vatican’s recent rebuke of the American Catholic nuns for not promoting the “Church’s biblical view of family life and human sexuality”) shouts volumes about women’s second-class status in the Catholic Church. This disrespect for the women who are here — in our midst, on our campuses — being shown by a powerful minority of conservative Catholics in favor of purported concern for the unborn must be called out for what it is: profoundly un[-C]hristian.

And, of course, no piece slamming the bishops would be complete without at least one mention of the sex abuse scandal, which has nothing at all to do with providing contraceptives to college students. She wrote, “the ban contributes to a climate of shame and stigma surrounding sexuality that — as we learned from victims of the widespread priest sex abuse scandal — can be incredibly harmful.”

Flavin wrote in The San Francisco Chronicle in 2008 that then-presidential candidate Barack Obama made her heart “flutter, nay, pound”" when he said he had an abortion litmus test for Supreme Court nominees. She also described the practice of late-term abortionist George Tiller as “compassionate.”

Flavin contended in her piece in HuffPo that colleges and universities must take the place of dysfunctional and struggling families. She writes that “to do otherwise is to fail our students.”

In light of the Pope’s recent statement that “the Christian vision, presented in its breadth and integrity, proves immensely appealing to the imagination, idealism and aspirations of the young, who have a right to encounter the faith in all its beauty, its intellectual richness and its radical demands,” perhaps, in the end, it is Fordham that is failing its students.

[NYer]

Jeanne Flavin, Ph.D. 
Associate Professor of Sociology (at Rose Hill)
B.A., University of Kansas; M.A., Ph.D., American University, 1995

Dealy Hall 408C
441 E. Fordham Road
Bronx, NY  10458-9993
tel: (718) 817-3863
fax: (718) 817-3846

jflavin@fordham.edu

Research Interests
Criminal justice; feminist criminology; prisoner re-entry; HIV/AIDS; currently collaborating with NGOs in New York City and elsewhere on research related to incarcerated women.

Biography
Jeanne Flavin's research draws attention to the myriad ways in which the state enforces gendered social arrangements through its criminal justice and other formal policies and practices.  She documents how the system’s responses to battered women, incarcerated women, and women who are addicted to drugs restrict some women’s rights to conceive, to be pregnant, and to bring up their children.  She proudly chairs the board of directors for National Advocates for Pregnant Women, which advocates for the social and civil rights of all women, but especially low-income women who are pregnant and parenting.  In 2009, Jeanne received a Fulbright Award to study  women's pathways to prison in South Africa. 

[NYer]

How difficult is this? If you disagree with the teachings of the Catholic Church .... LEAVE IT!.

[ReformationFan]

Your statement shows common sense, something that liberals lack in abundance.

[Gay State Conservative]

Well,Jeanne...as they used to say in those Hebrew National ads:

WE ANSWER TO A HIGHER AUTHORITY

[Tax-chick]

Absolutely everything she says is so 100% totally dead wrong that it has no connection to human reality. You can’t argue with people this crazy ... just hope they get struck by lightning some day (as it were) and wake up back in the real world.

[hinckley buzzard]

This kind of arrogant stupidity has to have been made, not born.

[FormerACLUmember]

Buh bye genius.

Murder babies in some other “christian” manner. just leave us Catholics alone please.

[ConorMacNessa]

She's a sociologist, ergo, full of B.S. Fordham is another school that should be cut loose from the Church if it hasn't already been.



Nos genuflectitur ad non princeps sed Princeps Pacem!

Listen, O isles, unto me; and hearken, ye people, from far; The LORD hath called me from the womb; from the bowels of my mother hath he made mention of my name. (Isaiah 49:1 KJV)

[Vigilanteman]

She is exactly what Kevin Williamson said about a Ms. Erickson in this splendid National Review article:

She is the Mormon equivalent of a familiar Catholic type, the disillusioned ex-believer who thinks that having a last name ending in a vowel makes one a Vatican scholar, the my-Irish-grandmother school of theology.

Except that Flavin doesn't have a vowel on the end of her name and isn't even honest enough to leave the Catholic Church.

[353FMG]

Them Jesuits really know how not to pick ‘m.

They used to be so much better than today.

[the invisib1e hand]

kansas seems to have become the epicenter of the culture of death.

[A.A. Cunningham]

Why do lesbians care about contraceptives?

[02slider]

As a Fordham graduate 40+ years ago, this makes me so proud - not!

[NYer]

Ah yes ... “Forward” with Obama who has taken this country backward. Yesterday’s local elections are a powerful testimony to what O can expect in November. He just hammered the final nail in his coffin today, by admitting that he supports gay marriage.

[Mrs. Don-o]

`

[Coleus]

Ex Corde Ecclesiae

APOSTOLIC CONSTITUTION
OF THE SUPREME PONTIFF
JOHN PAUL II
ON CATHOLIC UNIVERSITIES

[Coleus]

Why do lesbians care about contraceptives? >>

You’re right, I never thought about that, lol.

Sadly, it’s all about the culture of death, socialism, secular humanism and feminism. This perosn shouldn’t be teaching at a Catholic university.

[Coleus]

aka, flaming liberal

Jeanne Flavin, PhD.

Jeanne Flavin is an associate professor of Sociology at Fordham University. Her scholarship and advocacy mainly examines the impact of the criminal justice system on women. She is author of Our Bodies, Our Crimes: Policing Women’s Reproduction in America (NYU 2009), co-author of Class, Race, Gender & Crime, 2nd ed. (Rowman and Littlefield, 2007) and co-editor of Race, Gender, and Punishment: From Colonialism to the War on Terror (Rutgers, 2007) as well as many articles. She also is 2008-09 Fulbright Award recipient to study gender, family and crime in South Africa.

http://advocatesforpregnantwomen.org/
and check out their fb page

[Zionist Conspirator]

Such was the stultifying cultural conformity of small-town life in Reagan’s America: Nigerian-American Mormons performing the music of sexually ambiguous pop icons for the Future Farmers of America.

That there's one of the funniest things I have ever read.