Obama's Contraceptive Kulturkampf

One issue exercising Catholic opponents of the HHS mandate is whether to emphasize the attack by the Obama Administration on religious liberty or take the substantive argument about contraception (as well as sterilization and abortion) to the public square and argue from reason and the actual experience of the sexual revolution unleashed by the pill (see on this Mary Eberstadt, The Vindication of Humanae Vitae, and her recent book,  Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution).

The mandate is indeed a serious attack on religious liberty, an assault on the freedom of Americans to practice their faiths without intrusion by the federal government.  There is no compelling state interest in compelling Catholics to violate their conscience, plenty of other exemptions have been granted to other groups - including other religious groups like the Amish who are exempted from the entire law - and, as pointed out earlier, the measure has all the marks of a bitterly anti-Catholic cram-down reminiscent of the tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who compelled Jews in the 2nd century BC to eat pork on pain of torture and death.  The contraceptive and abortifacient drugs ingested aim to prevent or kill babies and have nothing to do with health, except to harm it.


But Catholics and other opponents of contraception reject artificial birth control and abortifacient drugs not simply as a religious peculiarity like the proscription on eating pork or the requirement to circumcise male infants.  It was indeed the norm for all major Christian groups from the time of the apostles to 1930 - but the reason for rejecting it is not a distinct command of God for Christians but arises because contraception is contrary to the flourishing of human beings regardless of faith, if any.  


It is harmful to women, to children, and to the family, as Eberstadt shows, and appears to have serious medical side-effects too.  It treats the normal healthy functioning of a woman's body in pregnancy as if it were a disease state and needed to be 'treated.'  It treats children as a burden to be prevented or eliminated for the sake of adults.  It separates sex from parental responsibility for children and changes the power dynamics between men and women, to the disadvantage of women.  It lies behind the explosive increase since the 1960s of paternal desertion, single parent families, cohabitation, divorce, and abortion, with negative results for women and children, especially but not only the poor and minorities, in every area of life.


As Eberstadt shows, this is a compelling argument that needs to be made, not ducked.  Seeking exemptions on religious grounds is necessary but by no means sufficient.

The White House’s Contraceptive Kulturkampf

May 17, 2012

Leroy Huizenga

Franciscan University of Steubenville just dropped health insurance for its undergraduates, thus becoming one of the most prominent early victims of the Department of Health and Human Services mandate requiring all health plans to cover contraception, sterilization, and abortifacient drugs. Today the Catholic Church has found itself engaged in a new Kulturkampf, a cultural struggle initiated by State aggression against the libertas ecclesiae, the freedom of the Church to manage her own affairs so that her members might flourish in virtue and serve their fellow citizens freely. 

READ MORE AT FIRST THINGS

Obama's Propaganda War on Women

“Tell President Obama to respect a woman’s choice to practice her beliefs…not his.”

A Defining Moment and a Larger Task

Standing Fast on Conscience This Lent

By Chuck Donovan

WEDNESDAY, 14 MARCH 2012

An important meeting of the U.S. Catholic bishops’ administrative committee is underway this week, and the gathering should be an occasion of concerted prayer for all who care about the future of religious liberty, as well as Catholic charity in the United States. Adding one more intention to the Lenten period should not create too large a burden for an issue of such great moment.

Critics of the Church’s strong stance against President Obama’s preventive services mandate have intensified their pressure with bits of semi-personal nastiness, as the Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne did here in a column taunting the U.S. hierarchy as fresh recruits to the Tea Party.  

The preventive services mandate and its requirement that Catholic institutions guarantee their employees “free” coverage of abortion-inducing drugs, sterilization, and contraceptives is only the latest item in a logical progression. In 2006, the Commonwealth of Massachusetts drove Catholic Charities out of the adoption field with a new mandate that it offer child placements with homosexual couples. 

Just four years later, the District of Columbia took the same step, while heaping additional burning coals on the Church by threatening to deny it eligibility for public grants for its services to the homeless and others in need, because the Church refused to provide marriage benefits to same-sex couples. 

Rather than acquiesce in the violation of its conscience over the nature of marriage, the Church dropped health benefits for spouses of future employees. Illinois soon chimed in with similar adverse action against Catholic adoption agencies.

Then in 2011 the Obama Administration canceled a national grant to the Church for its work assisting with the rescue of trafficked women. Despite the fact that the Church’s application to continue assisting victims of trafficking scored much higher than those of competing agencies, Kathleen Sebelius’s Department of Health and Human Services imposed a new requirement, not found in the underlying law, that grantees provide trafficked women with “access” to all legal reproductive health services (e.g., abortion and birth control).

With each of these steps, the Obama Administration and its allies executed maneuvers that collapsed the space available to Catholic institutions to “be Catholic,” even outside the arena of government grants and contracts. The terms of state licensure, as in Massachusetts, have been enough for the state, through thesweeping application of sexual orientation non-discrimination laws, to destroy Catholic involvement in the social services field.

           Cardinal Dolan: Who’ll define the faith?

As aggressive as these measures against the Catholic Church’s self-understanding have been, they pale against the violations committed now in the name of the ambiguous clauses of the 2010 health care reform law. Based on a vague “prevention” amendment adopted in committee and neither debated nor voted upon in a 2,500-page bill, Obama and HHS reinvented pregnancy as a disease, created a religious exemption so narrow it has no precedent in American law, and rebuffed all attempts to correct the problem by charging that the Church was now suddenly embarked on a “war on women.”

For all of these reasons, it should be clear by now that the Church’s entire framework of corporal works of mercy is at risk, and that this is no side-effect of new social mores but an intentional by-product of policies and laws that seek hegemony over the very definitions of life, marriage, health care for women, and now even charity. 

Yet another spurious “accommodation” from the Obama Administration, should one be issued (with, no doubt, a post-election completion date), should not mask the fact that, by its very design, the 2010 health reform law is an affront to both the First Amendment and core Catholic social principles.

HHS states that Catholic entities are not actually implicated in subsidizing immoral practices because, after all, contraception saves insurers and insured parties’ money. HHS would have us believe the only issue here is efficiency not constitutional liberty. That brute calculation is offensive to religious sensibilities in its own right, but note how it could be applied as precedent for the next mandateto cover abortion of the disabled, drugs to euthanize the sick, or assisted suicide. 

In these latter instances, after all, real illnesses are involved. Would this or a future administration never insist that Catholic universities, hospitals and soup kitchens underwrite their employees’ abortions or death pills? If that seems incredible, how incredible is it that the Church now faces such scorn from an administration policy establishing the principle that Catholics may not operate their institutions in conformity with their understanding of the moral law?  

The HHS rule, as Cardinal Timothy Dolan noted in his March 2 letter, "seeks to define what constitutes church ministry and how it can be exercised." He who defines, he who funds, controls.

That is why this is a defining moment in the pews as well. We must stand for continued religious freedom on behalf of Catholic institutions as well as each person of faith, regardless of that person's place of employment.  We must also defend the constitutional protection of religious freedom in all matters involving health care decisions, from conception to natural death.  We must press for the reversal of all policies that hamper the Church's capacity for works of service in health care in accord with Catholic social teaching. 

To accomplish these goals is a larger task than merely reversing the preventive services mandate, but that reversal must come. We also must reset our focus to promote future changes in health policy that will achieve the goals of preserving and expanding access to health care and social services while protecting religious freedom and conscience.

Chuck Donovan, a new contributor to The Catholic Thing, is the president of the Charlotte Lozier Institute in Washington, D.C.


Retrieved March 14, 2012 from The Catholic Thing.

© 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org

Here comes the Catholic Church!

A powerful response to PP's Cecile Richards.  Reminds us of the tens of millions who never got to have a say thanks to Planned Parenthood.  A stirring call to arms.

Gloria Purvis - HHS Mandate is Anti-Woman

Dr. Marie Anderson - HHS Mandate is Bad for Women's Health

On February 27, the Catholic Information Center and the women's web-magazine Altcatholicah cosponsored the panel discussion, "Women Challenging the HHS Mandate." Here, panelist Dr. Marie Anderson, MD, OB-GYN discusses how the mandate affects women's health.

Watch the full panel event here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcKiUxXVoO8

Some sources for the bad health effects of contraception:

http://cebp.aacrjournals.org/content/18/4/1157.full
http://jenngiroux.com/2012/02/14/deadly-health-risks-for-women-the-unspoken-side-of-the-obama-birth-control-mandate/’
and
http://www.sacredheartmercy.org/wh.html

Exposing Obama's Big Lie(s)

“This isn’t about Catholics or contraception”

by Sheila Liaugminas | 11 Mar 2012 | 

“This is about the government coercing religious institutions to violate their own beliefs.”

  Email

So clarifies the Becket Fund for Religious Liberty in their feature‘The Truth Should Not Be A Secret’. It aims to debunk the top myths that quickly circulated out of spin control centers from the administration and their complicit media partners.
I’ve heard every one of them and have had to counter them with facts, time and again, so this post by Becket Fund helps center and ground the debate.
Take this one, for instance:

Myth #5: The federal mandate actually protects women’s health because it increases access to free birth control.

Truth: Access isn’t the issue. 9 out of 10 employer-based insurance plans already cover these services. There is no need for the government to force religious groups to provide these services against their religious convictions.

One could launch a whole debate just on component parts of that sentence in Myth #5.
And then a whopper:

Myth #6: In a recent poll, 98% of Catholic women said they already used artificial birth control anyhow. So what’s the big deal?

The ‘lie repeated often enough’ that is not only addressed succinctly here but nailed perfectly by Michael Cook here.
The government would just prefer that we focus on Catholics and their beliefs about birth control. Because that deflects attention from the far less winnable battle for the Obama administration over denying fundamental religious liberty in America for individuals and institutions.
But that’s what the controversial HHS mandate is about. Which is why so many religious leaders and scholars are speaking out.
Like Dr. Timothy George and Chuck Colson.

The Catholic bishops in America have responded quickly, decrying the Administration’s decision for what it is—an egregious, dangerous violation of religious liberty—and mobilizing a vast grassroots movement to persuade the Administration to reverse its decision.

We evangelicals must stand unequivocally with our Roman Catholic brothers and sisters. Because when the government violates the religious liberty of one group, it threatens the religious liberty of all.

And Rev. Dr. Matthew Harrison, President of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, who testified by a House Committee on the mandate.

While we are opposed in principle, not to all forms of birth control, but only abortion-causing drugs, we stand with our friends in the Catholic Church and all others, Christians and non-Christians, under the free exercise and conscience provisions of the U.S. Constitution.

“Religious people determine what violates their consciences, not the federal government. The conscience is a sacred thing. Our church exists because overzealous governments in northern Europe made decisions which trampled the religious convictions of our forebearers.

They’re facing off with an overzealous government in the US with either a short memory or deliberate defiance of fundamental founding principles or both. And, as President Harrison told me at the end of the week, opponents of this mandate are not going away. There’s too much at stake.

Retrieved March 11, 2012 from MercatorNet http://www.mercatornet.com/sheila_liaugminas/view/10431

Pray for the Mandate?

Predictably, I suppose, the Obama administration has perverted the Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships by turning it into a community organizing and lobbying arm...of the Obama administration.  In violation of legal ethics, they are organizing faith-based organizations to demonstrate outside the Supreme Court as it hears oral arguments about a case to which the federal government is a party.  Yuval Levin has a nice comment at NRO:

Pray for the Mandate By Yuval Levin March 9, 2012 12:31 P.M.

As the date for Supreme Court oral arguments in the Obamacare case draws near, the White House is working to orchestrate demonstrations in support of the law. The New York Times today reports:

On Wednesday, White House officials summoned dozens of leaders of nonprofit organizations that strongly back the health law to help them coordinate plans for a prayer vigil, press conferences and other events outside the court when justices hear arguments for three days beginning March 26.

Looking over the constitutional arguments offered by the administration’s lawyers in defense of the individual mandate, it is perhaps not too difficult to see why the White House deemed itself in need of prayer. But the irony is pretty stunning nonetheless.

 ____

Get compliant faith-based groups to pray for an egregious attack on religion!  As Levin goes on to say:

___ 

The Obama administration has just put into force a new regulation under Obamacare that amounts to the most far-reaching instance of governmental religious intolerance since the Blaine Amendments. There is no other word but intolerance to describe what the rule aims to do: It doesn’t say that people should have the freedom to use contraceptive or abortive drugs—which of course they do have in our country. It doesn’t even say that the government should facilitate people’s access to these drugs—which of course it does today and has for many years, at great public expense.

It says, rather, that the Catholic Church and others who have religious objections to the use of such drugs should facilitate people’s access to them. It says that we will not tolerate an institution in our society that, for religious reasons, is not willing to actively put into effect the views of those in power regarding contraception, abortion, and sterilization——that we won’t just let it be and find other ways to put those views into effect but will compel the dissenting institution itself to participate in the facilitation of access to these things on behalf of the people it employs, or else we will levy a heavy fine against it. We cannot abide even passive disagreement.

That is a refusal to exercise even a moderate portion of toleration toward religious believers and institutions. It says, in effect, that the substance of religious convictions merits no regard from the state. And yet it seems that the forms of religious practice can be marshaled in the service of political objectives. The prayer vigil as PR stunt is expected to coexist with rank intolerance as public policy, and the White House itself is encouraging the stunt. READ the whole post here.

As the first post in the combox notes,

The president and attorney general are both attorneys. It is improper for attorneys to lobby judges or justices who have jurisdiction over a case in which they are representing a client, ie. the U.S. government. 

The White House coordinating the lobbying of the Supreme Court on a case before it is unethical.

The Washington Post Had It Right - in 1931

The Catholic Thing, March 7, 2010

New Challenges on “Birth Control”

By Howard Kainz

The Catholic Church claims to be the “rock of Peter,” and the Obama administration seems to come up against this “rock” recently when it moved toward universal availability of free contraceptives, even in Catholic institutions.

In order to understand how Catholics could be caught in an ostensibly counter-cultural position (“against birth control!”), we have to be aware of the extraordinary sea change that has taken place since the Anglican Lambeth Conference in 1930, the first Christian group to allow limited uses of contraception. A person in our day reading the March 23, 1931 editorial of theWashington Post in the aftermath of that conference would no doubt consider it a forgery.

Yet the following excerpt reflects prevailing opinion among Christians at that time, as well as among the editors of that newspaper:

It is impossible to reconcile the doctrine of the divine institution of marriage with any modernistic plan for the mechanical regulation or suppression of human birth. The church must either reject the plain teachings of the Bible or reject schemes for the “scientific” production of human souls. Carried to its logical conclusion, the committee’s report if carried into effect would sound the death-knell of marriage as a holy institution, by establishing degrading practices which would encourage indiscriminate immorality. The suggestion that the use of legalized contraceptives would be “careful and restrained” is preposterous.

What was the basis for this widespread belief in the 1930s? In part, there was the Bible, but the belief was due in large part to a long tradition of Christian ethics, not just in Catholicism, but also in Protestantism. Little by little, however, after the Episcopalians, Protestant denominations accepted contraception. Methodists, Presbyterians, some Lutheran synods, Mennonites, and others followed suit in the following decades.

Why is Catholicism a “holdout?” Here again, the source is not just the Bible, but a long tradition from Patristic times. Yes, in the early Christian era, contraceptive methods were available – many of them even riskier than modern pharmaceuticals, and contraceptive by causing abortion. They were the subject of frequent condemnations by Fathers of the Church and theologians – St. Clement of Alexandria and Tertullian in the second century, Minucius Felix and St. Hippolytus in the third, St. Augustine, St. Basil the Great and St. Jerome, as well as the Council of Ancyra in the fourth. In the Reformation era, Luther and Calvin both vehemently condemned contraception.

Some Christian resistance has historically been based on the Bible, especially the narrative about Onan (Genesis 38:8-10) who practiced coitus interruptus and was punished by God for the act. But Catholicism, which published the canonical Bible 1700 years ago, is not “based” solely on the Bible, and the arguments of the Fathers are not just derived from the Bible but from natural law – the unwritten law prevailing, sometimes in bare outlines, among all religions and cultures – laws against murder, theft, adultery, etc.

The Catholic Church does not prohibit “birth control,” based on Natural Family Planning, such as Dr. Fehring’s Marquette method, or Dr. Hilgers’ Creighton method, or Dr. Billings’ method, which identify a woman’s fertile periods, and have also proven effective in helping infertile couples to become pregnant. But it can also be used to “space” pregnancies by abstinence during fertile periods.

         The Lambeth Conference, 1930

Although NFP, has been proven in various studies, and in particular by documented research by the Paul VI Institute, to be as effective as the “pill,” it is not popular because of the periodical abstinence required, or in individual cases where treatment for irregular periods, etc. requires consultation with specialists.

So the Catholic objection is not against “birth control,” but against artificial contraception, i.e., blocking procreation by artificial means. However, in common parlance, “birth control” has become synonymous with contraception, which goes beyond “control” to blocking births.

The objection that Catholics use contraceptives as much as the general public is just a new form of the “everybody does it” moral principle. But the objection is also not factual, a recent “fact-check” column in the Washington Postdiscovered. The widespread statement, “98 percent of American Catholic women have used contraception in their lifetimes” is actually based on 2006-2008 interviews by the Guttmacher Institute of 7,356 females aged 15-44, in which 68 percent of the Catholic women had used some form of contraception. The 98 percent figure was based on tables in the study that were misinterpreted. The Guttmacher Institute came out afterwards with statistics to correct the misinterpretations.

Pope Paul VI’s 1968 Encyclical Humanae Vitae warned against four inevitable results of the widespread use of contraception: 1) an increase in conjugal infidelity; 2) a “general lowering of morality”; 3) loss of respect for women by men, and a tendency to treat women as “mere instruments of selfish enjoyment” rather than cherished partners; and finally, 4) the massive imposition of contraception by governments.

Hardly anyone would deny that the first three predictions have come to pass. In regard to the fourth prediction, for most of us the example of Communist China, with its forced “one-child” policy used to come to mind. But now we are confronted with the unthinkable: that the United States government may impose contraception, directly or indirectly, through insurance or taxation, or out-of-pocket funding by self-insurers, upon Catholic universities, hospitals, and other institutions.

Sandra Fluke, a Georgetown University law student, recently complained to Congresswoman Nancy Pelosi that she has to pay about $1000 a year for contraception. President Obama, in a telephone call to Fluke, offered her his personal support. And he has framed a mandate that will, if successful, grant individuals like Sandra Fluke the funding they are seeking.

The handwriting is on the wall. The American people, whether they support contraception or not, are now being asked to come to the aid of those who do not feel they should have to pay for contraceptives. We’re seeing the logical working out of what even the Washington Post could see in 1930 and, it seems, only a few religious people can see today.

Howard Kainz is emeritus professor of philosophy at Marquette University. He is the author of many books, including the recently published The Existence of God and the Faith-Instinct.

© 2011 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to:info@frinstitute.org



Retrieved March 8, 2010 from http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2012/new-challenges-on-birth-control.html#comments

PA: The Catholic Church held firm when others folded, but not in practice very firm.  For decades bishops allowed priest-confessors to ignore or oppose Church teaching while cashing the Church's paycheck.  The Church fell into moral laxity of its own as the morality of the sexual revolution pervaded seminaries and theology departments and catechesis fell into neglect.  Obama depends on this weakness within the Church   to launch his attack on religious liberty and turn it into an election issue.  Sandra Fluke is no fluke (sorry).  Apart from being a Democratic dirty trick to undermine the House hearings on the administration's attack on religious liberty, it is unimaginable that in another era, even with anti-Catholic bigotry nearly as rampant as it is today, that someone would have the gall to tell the world that she chose to attend a Catholic law school--i.e., one that is at least in the tradition of a Christian faith that always condemned pre- and extra-marital sex and artificial birth control--but she expects the school (and faithful students through their fees) to subsidize her contraception.  I am not sure what is more astounding--her sense of entitlement or the Administration's promoting her and her story to attack the Church.

Incidentally, Fluke's figures seem to be wildly inflated and she could get a much better price at Walmart, Target, or even the more expensive Planned Parenthood.

How Griswold morphed from a right to privacy to a right to public provision

The point Professor Howard P. Kainz wishes the GOP debaters had made in response to Stephanopoulos's question at the January 7th debate. 

The right to privacy, in other words, which prevented a state from banning contraceptives and the government from banning abortion, has evolved into a publicly-applicable right to contracept or abort, which all citizens must respect and support. Even if there are religious objections, religious institutions must not stand in the way of full implementation of these rights, for example, by withholding funding for them, directly or indirectly.  

The citizenry is now ironically pervaded with public imposition of things that used to be considered too private to interfere with. Catholic institutions are being asked to publicly provide support for strictly private contraception, abortifacients, and sterilization; the government wants to include public funding for women’s purely private choices to abort. 

See the whole post at First Things. 

In the deadly sights of an all-controlling state

Separation of Church and State Revisited

By James V. Schall, S.J.

MONDAY, 05 MARCH 2012

“The strangest accusation in this manipulated public discussion has the bishops not respecting the separation between church and state,” Francis Cardinal George of Chicago wrote on February 26 in the Catholic New World. “The bishops would love to have the separation between church and state we thought we enjoyed just a few months ago, when we were free to run Catholic institutions in conformity with the demands of the Catholic faith, when the government couldn’t tell us which of our ministries are Catholic and which not, when the law protected rather than crushed conscience.”

The long history of what is called “separation of church and state” has come full circle. It began over concerns with too much interference by religion in politics, though the opposite was usually the danger. The United States was almost the only country in which bishops could be appointed without government interference and in which Catholics were free to have and run their own institutions.

The Catholic Church has hammered out an incisive understanding of the claims of secular and spiritual power. Both have a proper place. Within the last months, however, the Obama administration actively claims practically full control over most aspects of public life, including religious life. The administration not only seems to have no respect for the Catholic position, but no sympathy for the tradition and Constitution of this country itself. 

The Catholic Church became comfortable with the historic arrangement of practice and principle. Suddenly the Church, with the institutions she has worked many generations to establish, is in the deadly sights of an all-controlling state. Many of the principal actors pushing for this state aggrandizement are Catholics. They, of course, claim a “right” to explain what the Church and the state really are. Optimists expect help from the courts or the electorate, but it’s rash to count on it.

Cardinal George’s analysis is incisive. “This year, the Catholic Church in the United States is being told that she must ‘give up’ her health care institutions, her universities, and many of her social service organizations. This is not a voluntary sacrifice. It is the consequence of the already much discussed Department of Health and Human Services regulations now filed and promulgated for implementation beginning August 1 of this year.” The issue is no longer abstract.

Cardinal George does not speak only for himself. Most other bishops have realized the same threat, as has the Holy Father in recent ad limina visits of U.S. bishops to Rome. Some few bishops, most of the Catholic university world, and much of the laity still cannot or will not believe that it has come to this. But it has. Bishops are being forced to be bishops in a way few ever anticipated, not a bad thing, really.

          Caesar: Render unto me the things that are God’s.

Some Catholics who voted for Obama now feel “betrayed” by this new policy. That is mostly deliberate blindness to far-reaching social policies that were fostered by this administration from the beginning. It is just no longer possible to hide. The agenda of the administration is to change the Church so that it conforms to the corrupting principles motivating these regulations. It looks like the bishops understand that their very theological nature is being put to the test in the public order. 

What will happen? Cardinal George gives four possibilities: 1) The Catholic hospital or university can voluntarily secularize itself to deny any relation to the bishop or Catholic inspiration. Cardinal George calls this “theft.” 2) Huge fines can be levied to avoid paying for insurance that covers abortion and other mandatory ills. 3) The institutions can be sold to non-Catholic groups or local government. 4) Close them all.

The irony is that the issue being fought on both sides is in the unholy name of “social justice.” Many elements of the so-called Catholic left have long striven to make morally legitimate the practices that are being most objected to – abortion, contraception, euthanasia, gay marriage. One side says such things are matters of “social justice.” The other side defines “social justice” in another way.

Accepting what the administration understands as “social justice” would make the Church a bulwark, not an opponent, of this all-caring state. The Church would only have places of worship, as in most totalitarian, Muslim, or socialist states. All the “human” things would be the state’s to define, enforce, and govern.

“Many will recognize. . .a tactic now familiar in our public life,” Cardinal George observes, “those who cannot be co-opted are isolated and then destroyed. The arguments used are both practical and theoretical.”

This nation was once called the “land of the free and the home of the brave.” The brave and the free are now those who fear being “destroyed” by the state that once “separated” the two powers. We are being asked to render to Caesar the things that are God’s.

James V. Schall, S.J., a professor at Georgetown University, is one of the most prolific Catholic writers in America. His most recent book is The Mind That Is Catholic.



© 2012 The Catholic Thing. All rights reserved. For reprint rights, write to: info@frinstitute.org




Retrieved March 5, 2012 from The Catholic Thing

The Pork Precedent

In the second century B.C., the foreign tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes decreed that all Jews should be forced to violate their religious consciences by publicly eating pork and food sacrificed to idols. “If any were not willing to eat defiling food, they were to be broken on the wheel and killed” (4 Maccabees 5:3). It was a command of gratuitous forced submission as a sign of Antiochus’s supreme authority to compel obedience by a subject people.

Read the whole story - and its relevance to current events - here: http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2012/02/4777

Obama’s Contraception Cram-down: The Pork Precedent « Public Discourse

www.thepublicdiscourse.com

“Contraception” is not exactly the right term. The HHS mandate implementing Obamacare requires insurance plans of religious employers to provide not just contraception but also sterilization and abortion-inducing drugs—“morning-after” (and even “week-after”) pills designed to cause the death of a co...

Ave Maria Files Suit

NATIONAL REVIEW ONLINE          www.nationalreview.com           PRINT

The Pill Is Not Good for Women By Erika Bachiochi & Catherine R. Pakaluk February 21, 2012 4:00 A.M.

The recent Health and Human Services mandate and the ensuing debate appear to have pitted religious-liberty claims against women’s health. But because religious leaders (rightly) focused on the need for a religious exemption, it may appear to some observers that they are unable to articulate a reasoned and weighty response to the administration’s claim that contraceptives are essential to women’s health and well-being.

The Obama administration is wrong on this score as well, and the substantive case needs to be made: The contraceptive revolution has failed to be the unmitigated boon to women or to society that it was hyped up to be.

For the past 50 years, the Pill has demonstrably assisted women — especially college-educated, career-minded women — in the timing of pregnancies and the delay of marriage. But the Pill also ushered in an era of unprecedented (and, as things turned out, unwarranted) confidence that sex could be pursued without risk — most notably, outside of long-term committed relationships.

The Pill, together with abortion as backup, appeared to provide full insurance against pregnancy risks. But as economists well know, full insurance tends to induce greater risk-taking: As people perceive sex to be safer, they pursue more of it. This applies especially to people who would otherwise be most vulnerable to the risks of unwanted pregnancy: the young, the unmarried, and those unable to care for a child. While a tight causal argument is difficult to make, correlations alone do not augur in favor of the Pill:

The rapidly increasing sexual activity of the Pill era correlates with a staggering increase in non-marital births — less than 5 percent of births in 1960 were to unmarried mothers, compared with roughly 40 percent today. A counterintuitive result, perhaps, but a fairly human one nonetheless.

And this points to an unresolved difficulty with the contraceptive revolution, which was supposed to serve women above all: Women on the whole disproportionately bear the burden of the new sexual regime. They are expected to dose themselves with a Group 1 carcinogen for approximately two-thirds of their fertile years. They sustain greater emotional costs from casual sex. They are at greater risk of contracting STDs and disproportionately suffer from their long-term consequences, such as cervical cancer and fertility loss.And even after 50 years with the Pill, as many as half of all pregnancies are still unintended. Women, not men, must make the heart-wrenching choice between abortion, reckoned a tragic outcome even by its supporters, and bearing a child with little to no paternal support. After all, since children were negotiated out of the bargain by the availability of contraception and abortion, men have secured a strong rationale to simply ignore or reject pregnancies that result from uncommitted sexual relations. Nobel-laureate economist George Akerlof predicted nearly two decades ago that this would lead directly to the feminization of poverty, as it ruefully has.

These traumas take their toll. A stunning paper by leading labor economists Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers documented recently that women’s self-reported happiness has declined both overall, and relative to that of men, since the early 1970s. Where women used to report higher happiness than men, they now report less. Stevenson and Wolfers ask, “Did men garner a disproportionate share of the benefits of the women’s movement?” Good question indeed. One may well wonder if the bargain advocated by the feminist elites has made much sense in the end: Were gains for elite women purchased with the currency of a new sexual ethic that has damaged women more generally?

Contrary to a popular misconception, the alternative to the contraceptive revolution is not to roll back the clock on women’s advancement, and certainly not to promote a physically and emotionally taxing outcome in which women have as many children as biologically possible. Rather, the alternative to contraception is to respect biological asymmetry, heal the wound between the sexes, and expect more from men.
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