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.
“Society as a whole gets to decide what is morally acceptable.”
If contraception is the “Bacteria Eating America’s Soul”, then moral relativism is the retrovirus that paved the way by destroying our immune system first.
I can’t tell whether we’re genuinely not communicating, or if you are deliberately responding obliquely to what I’ve posted in order to avoid saying, outright, “There is no right or wrong, only opinions.”
It’s so important that we do...we had a Nigerian priest for a while, and he spoke out on the whole Notre Dame fiasco last year (and the Georgetown thing in the same homily). It was so wonderful to hear him speak out, heavy accent and all, LOL.
However, had you have had 6 kids that you couldn't afford and ended up on government assistance - you would have been told your wife should have kept her legs shut. This is one of those occasions where you're damned if you do - damned if you don't.
Right on target.
Those who think they control the inception of life get drunk with power and then want to terminate lives they don’t want to show up and lives they don’t want to hang around too long.
This article puts it clearly about the Prop 8 argument, that marriage is for procreation. Judge Walker ruled there’s no basis for that argument. He wrong, but, we have made it harder to make our case given that we fell off the cliff on the contraception issue.
The word “matrimony” should prove that marriage is about mothering and the systemic cultural support plan that undergirds it: husband, wife, kids.
The natural means of not conceiving a child is ... not having sex. This is different from taking a pill and then having sex. For example, I’m telling my children to not have sex while they’re unmarried, in order (among other things) to avoid conceiving children.
As further illustration of the different between “contraceptives” and “contraception,” a man’s using a condom while having anal sex is not “contraception,” because there was never any possibility of a child’s being conceived. If a woman athlete is taking a hormonal treatment to avoid having periods, she is not “contracepting,” if she does not have sex. She is simply using a medical preparation (either wisely or foolishly - these drugs are not free of risk, irrespective of sexual activity).
We had a Nigerian priest in Tulsa, and a growing number of seminarians and deacons from Nigeria and couple of other places in Africa. Some did have difficult accents, but they improved over time. And they loved to sing!
Your opinion/interpretation of right and wrong will only match up on certain points depending on who you talk to. Absolute truth, that God gives us, is still up for interpretation by men. Some are better than others at “deciphering” the truth than others. It is through communion and heartfelt discussion that agreements of truth are made when based in opinion.
Over time individuals will forget those agreements and revert to some other state of opinion.
There absolutely is a right and wrong but what that is will always be up for debate among men. I’m not trying to be obtuse just accounting for man’s failings while supporting God’s perfection.
Father Chris had a nice, booming voice (he wasn’t a tall man, but you could hear him lol), and he sang pretty well too. I didn’t find it too difficult to understand him for the most part.
Okay, that clears it up! Doing tax law made me very precise about words, down to the last comma, and I get confused easily when others aren't as fixated ;-).
I agree with you on this, and on what you were saying in some posts above, about how we're all going to fall short in all kinds of ways, needing always to rely on God's mercy toward us.
I think a diocese will get one priest from Nigeria, for example, and then others will come when they learn how it’s working out. Many English-speaking African clergy/seminarians were coming to Oklahoma and Missouri, but we don’t seem to have them here in Charlotte.
My years have taught me that the litmus test of a REAL Christian is marriage and birth control. Real Christians stay married till death and have as many children as God sends. They don't use birth control. If I see a person who calls themselves Christian and is divorced and remarried, I know that they are hypocrites. If I see a couple with no children because they use birth control, I know they have not God's Grace.
How many Christians like that do any of you know? FEW!
So if you refrain from having sex during the time that a woman could get pregnant, is that birth control? Thus not being a Christian? Oey !!
Hmmm, I don’t believe Christ would agree with you. We are flawed, ALL of us, and I don’t think birth control or divorce are the litmus test for a Christian. The only REAL Christian was Christ himself, everyone else is just aspiring to his example.
Placemark for pingout.
Well, I was thinking that if one of the persons in the ‘civil union’ was employed full time and had ‘partner’ benefits, like health insurance, etc., and the other worked part time or possibly did not work (older sister, mother, etc)then those legal benefits should be allowed and one shouldn’t have to be gay to access those rights.
If it were just inheritance or estates and trusts, a will could take care of that. I just think that if Gays get all the legal rights and privileges of a ‘spousal relationship’ in a civil union, then others should have the right to draw up civil unions for the same advantages.
The a civil union should not be necessarily based on sexual preference or lack there of.
You’re right, the health insurance issue is difficult in this context. A change in insurance law, to allow an insured employee to include another adult, would address it. I think it would be reasonable to say the employee could add another adult to his insurance only once a year, unless the other adult were a dependent according to IRS rules.
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