The Newtish one really screwed the pooch on Meet the Press, when he accused President Obama of being at war with the Catholic Church. It seems that the Newted thing, joined later by the other GOP candidates, took a quote from Cardinal Dolan attacking Obama’s backing of a healthcare resolution that would withhold funding for any hospital, or school that refused to provide contraceptive information and services to its employees.
For those of you thinking that this is a patriarch standing up for the principles of his office, I can only ask what principles he was standing up for when he was protecting pedophile priests as they continued to abuse the children who attended the schools that were the not so good Cardinal’s responsibility? What’s the name of the game here, pick your cause?
The Catholic Church is dead set against abortion but also against the principal protection against it; contraception. Could there possibly be a more brain dead stance? Right now, the Catholic Church is being run by a cabal of octogenarian, pretend virgins who haven’t had a new thought in fifty years and haven’t a clue as to the needs of their female constituents, 96%of whom use some form of birth control. The big new thing that has come out of Rome is a change in the liturgy. Boy is that significant in today’s world.
And for those who can’t figure it out by themselves, Obama didn’t attack the Church. He simply clarified the point that when the Church steps out of it ecclesiastical posture and into the business world, into hospitals or schools they simply have to play by the same rules as all the other businesses that inhabit that particular model. Nobody’ saying that the Church can’t dictate what goes on in its overblown temples of worship. What the president was saying was that if the Church wants to be in a commercial business it has to play by the same rules as those that aren’t churches. The current law says that universities and hospitals must provide contraceptive services and information to all their employees. If the church doesn’t want to live by that law then they should get out of the school and hospital business.
The Church can surely do that, which would give them more money to pay off the lawsuits being pursued by abused kids, but this would hardly be a Christian move. There is no denying the great work that has been done by the Catholic Church in the fields of medical care and education. The hierarchy of the Church is now faced with a Christ like decision. Do they yield their antiquated principles the way they did with Hitler during WWII or do they hold tightly, like a spoiled child that demands its way, and abandon all the good work, possibly the only good work, they have achieved in our present society?
One more thought. I’ve read the bible, not lately and I‘m certainly not a biblical scholar, but except for the spilling of seed part and I always thought that had to do with masturbation, I can’t seem to remember any specific quotes about contraception. Maybe that’s because they didn’t have it in those days but more probably it’s because they needed children in the rural societies that existed at that time. Babies grew up to be labor and labor was the strength of any community.
That is no longer true. We live in a world where the population explosion is threatening to destroy the planet. It simply can no longer sustain. The reasons to be against contraception, like the reasons for not eating pork or meat on Fridays, no longer exist in a practical world. Times and the planet’s requirements have changed. More than a one for one birth/death cycle is now detrimental to the earth. Unfortunately the sexual drive that is the power behind man’s reproductive urge has not changed, so now we must come up with something that regulates it. Holding an Aspirin between the knees, just saying no and high school virginity societies are the ludicrous answers of the seriously retarded or the religiously fanatic. There is only ones sensible answer, contraception and everyone except the Catholic Church seems to recognize it.
It’s time the Catholic Church stepped gracefully out of the 2nd century and joined the rest of the world.