President Lyndon B. Johnson signing the Medicare Bill at the Harry S. Truman Library in Independence, Missouri. [Wikipedia.com]
Posted on 01/09/2015 2:18:28 PM PST by NYer
One of the profound changes wrought by LBJ's landmark program was a huge increase in government-sponsored family planning at home and abroad.
President Lyndon Baines Johnson had spoken the words “Great Society” before, but on January 4, 1965 he brought the pieces together as a legislative package for Congress. His State of the Union message stirred a remarkable flurry of congressional activity that in short order produced major new programs in civil rights, health care, and anti-poverty.
In the half-century since then, the Great Society and its offspring have made profound changes in American society. A huge increase in government-sponsored family planning at home and abroad is one of these. Fifty years later, it’s worth considering how Church leadership responded at the start, not just as a history lesson but for the light it sheds on the Church’s response the growing federal embrace now of things like abortion and same-sex marriage.
My principal source is a book called Intended Consequences: Birth Control, Abortion, and the Federal Government by historian Donald T. Critchlow. The heavily-documented volume, published in 1999 by Oxford University Press, has information otherwise not readily available on crucial events in the not so distant Catholic past.
Pressure for government birth control was rising before LBJ. Although President Dwight Eisenhower had famously remarked that he could think of nothing less appropriate for government involvement than family planning, private conversations on the matter took place during the Kennedy administration.
Meanwhile the population lobby labored to win Catholic support. An important part of this effort was a series of conferences from 1963 to 1967 at Notre Dame University, with the Ford and Rockefeller foundations paying and attendance by foundation people, population groups and Church organizations. Critchlow writes: “Both sides knew what they wanted: a liberal forum to create an oppositional voice within the Catholic Church on the issue of family planning.”
Johnson came to the presidency determined to make birth control an integral part of his War on Poverty. Congress agreed. But LBJ, canny politician that he was, feared a Catholic backlash if he moved too fast on the domestic front and therefore stressed family planning to fight the much-ballyhooed “population explosion” abroad. Quiet expansion of existing welfare and health programs was to be the tactic at home.
Two administration Catholics—presidential aide Joseph Califano and Office of Economic Opportunity director Sargent Shriver—were given the job of cultivating the Catholic hierarchy, especially its Washington-based organization the National Catholic Welfare Conference, predecessor of today’s U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.
A key moment occurred in early 1966 when the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now Health and Human Services) for the first time issued guidelines for family planning grants to the states. The NCWC administrative board responded with a statement protesting “threats to free choice of spouses.” But an NCWC official privately assured Califano this was only “the last trumpet of the older American bishops.”
The White House then concluded that non-coercive family planning was acceptable to the hierarchy. The following year brought expanded support for birth control abroad, along with Social Security amendments for the first time authorizing grants to private groups like Planned Parenthood—a breakthrough long sought by the population lobby.
By the time Johnson announced he wouldn’t seek reelection in 1968, federal funding of family planning was in the multi-millions and rising fast. And the bishops, Critchlow writes, had “tacitly” agreed to accept federal birth control, provided only it was “noncoercive.” It’s unlikely they could have prevented what happened—public opinion, including Catholic opinion, was against them—but they might have gotten a better deal.
Is there a lesson here today as Obamacare abortion grows?
Ping!
Look at the amount of money that has been poured into the “Great Society” programs, some $15 TRILLION or so since 1965.
Look at the size of the Federal national debt of the US, some $18 TRILLION.
Coincidence? I think not.
AND that poverty has not been impacted one whit.
Its the same or worse than when these programs to redistribute the wealth were passed.
P#ss on the graves of those who are dead and on the heads those who yet lived who were involved in this rape.
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The Truth about The Church's Teaching about Contraception.
Letter from Archbishop John G. Vlazny on the matter of freedom of conscience and decisions by HHS
Bishop Olmsted's Letter to Catholics [Catholic Caucus]
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Sex Speaks: True and False Prophets — Part 4 of 6 [Open]
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How did it come about that
the Archdiocese of Chicago undercut Catholic legislators
resisting contraception programs targeted against
Chicago-area African-Americans?
Again, we have to turn to our declared enemies—in this case a journal trumpeting the contraception and abortion line—for a candid account of the betrayal of our cause by our own leaders.
In 1963, the non-Catholic governor of Illinois, Otto Kerner, appointed a non-Christian millionaire, auto-parts industrialist and art connoisseur Arnold Maremont, to chair the Illinois Public Aid Commission, successor to an Emergency Relief Commission created in the Depression.
Maremont was adamant that contraceptives be provided at State expense, explicitly targeted at African-Americans, first in the Chicago area, with plans to go statewide later. In this he was resolutely opposedby Catholic lawmakers—a majority of whom were Democrats—who passed legislation in the Springfield statehouse outlawing the plan.
But defeat was suddenly snatched from the jaws of victory (to mix up a metaphor) when, after a confidential meeting in the back of a proverbial, black limousine between a high official of the Archdiocese of Chicago and a population-control official, the Church inexplicably okayed Maremont’s plan.
Confused Catholic lawmakers went along with this stark reversal of the continuous course of Church teaching since the beginning. Today, two generations after the detritus of the sexual revolution has settled down, the proportion of European-American children born to single mothers stands at about 40%, the same as the rate of non-marital births during the 1960s to African-Americans. Thus we see that, in the treatment of our society’s less privileged members, “what goes around comes around”.
We might expect that members of ecclesial communities who have departed from the Catholic fold would fall for this, especially after the confusion sewn by the 1930 Anglican Lambeth Conference permitting contraception within marriage.
But in acquiescing to the spirit of the age—an evil spirit, as Pope Paul VI warned—officials of the Archdiocese of Chicago shirked their duty and paved the way for the organized and coordinated dissent on the part of 600 Catholic “Theologians”—many of whom weren’t theologians at all —against Humanae Vitae, the Church’s 1968, authentic reiteration of its ancient, ordinary magisterial teaching on the inviolability of the transmission of human life in the marital embrace. The Chicago Archdiocese’s arrogant cowardice would bear bitter fruit a decade later, in the Roe and Doe decisions which have cost the lives of more than 50 million American children.
yeah.. the lesson is that big government doesn’t work..... THE GREAT SOCIETY is a GREAT FAILURE and trillions HAVE BEEN WASTED.... there are more poor percentage wise than at the start of this socialist/commie oriented program. INDIVIDUALISM and self reliance and CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNMENT as intended by the FOUNDING FATHERS are what is required. Big government has solved nothing except creating a 47% parasite population in the USSA WITH 92 MILLION OUT OF THE WORK FORCE...
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