Well, if you are considering or even participating in the good deeds nuns and Dorothy Day-type Catholics are doing around the world, there is nothing wrong at all--to the contrary, more power to them. But if you're considering the imperious, power-hungry bishops, well, that's another story. It's the story, if fact, of this article.
These bishops stirred up a hornet's nest--I think they are the ones who will be stung the most--by their accusation that the Obama administration is severely restricting religious freedom by requiring that all health insurances comply with doctors' orders, including, of course, prescriptions for birth control. Never mind that many Catholic institutions had been doing just that, the bishops decried Obama's alleged curtailment of religious liberties. Deeply offended by the administration's alleged anti-religious stance, Ross Douthat, the ultraconservative columnist, wrote:
If you want to fine Catholic hospitals for following Catholic teaching...then don't tell religious people that you respect our freedoms. Say what you really think: that the exercise of our religion threatens all that's good and decent, and that you're going to use the levers of power to bend us to your will.
To whose will? An old friend of mine, the great poet Samuel Menasche, wrote in one of his most famous poems, "Zion ground down must become marrow." In other words, governments must strive to pass laws that reflect the very essence of religion. Every religion has at least a few non-humane tenets. Everything should be done to avoid a showdown, but when one occurs, the decision must be in accord with love and wisdom. What is the essence of religion? Compassion; perhaps best expressed in the biblical injunction to love one's neighbor as oneself. And you can't love your neighbor while destroying the world.
Is the desire to prevent the use of birth control in accord with this quote from Leviticus? I can understand the opposition to abortion, but opposing both abortion and birth control is nothing short of immoral. We are already sharing the planet with six, almost seven billion people. The environment is being decimated; due to overpopulation, ours is the greatest period of mass extinction of wildlife since the age of the dinosaurs. Before birth control and medical advances which greatly increase the lifespan, women had many children. Just like baby crabs, though, many didn't survive. Can you imagine if every married woman had a dozen or more children today--not to mention those mothers who never marry? The admirable progress toward gender equality would vanish overnight: what mother could balance a career with a dozen kids at home? I remember I once treated the fifteenth child of a thirty-four year-old woman in a pediatric clinic. I looked over her record, and found out that she had been pregnant every year since marriage except one. She was an Irish Catholic. How long would civilization last if everyone behaved like that? If loving one's neighbor includes neighbors not yet born, and I am sure it does, unprotected sex is a very heinous policy. In this case, being a good Catholic makes for being a very bad citizen. (We don't have that problem today, because very, very, very few Catholics and others follow the immoral teaching that birth control is wrong--98% of American Catholic women, in fact, have used birth control at some time during their reproductive lives.)
One of the central characters of Jonathan Franzen's good novel, Freedom, is a bird-lover and ardent defender of nature. Every year he sees the birds' habitats being decimated by encroaching suburbia. He views the Catholic Church as public enemy number one--and he has a point. Life on this planet would become unbearable within a few generations if one followed the Church's teaching that birth control should never be used.
Perhaps, you might say, that this teaching is God-inspired and thus should be followed no matter the consequences? But if a teaching is not in accord with love and wisdom, it is certainly not God-inspired. Let's examine the flimsy theological reasoning behind the ban. (Before Humanae Vitae, a papal encyclical from 1968, there was no ban on birth control.) The Catholic view (or should I say the Vatican view) is that God made the genitalia for procreation. Any use of the genitalia that abrogates the possibility of conception--including masturbation--is therefore immoral. This view, I think, is ridiculous. Let's consider, to make an analogy, the mouth. The mouth, as the first part of the digestive tract, has the essential function of introducing nourishment into the body. The mouth is also used for communication--who could speak without one? It is also used in sexual communication. If God has given the mouth at least three purposes, how can one be so sure that He only gave the genitalia one? Is it not possible that God created genitalia with the additional purpose of communication between two individuals who love each other? If the genitalia has an additional purpose than procreation, birth control is certainly not sinful. I think banning it is as silly as teaching that the mouth should be used only for eating, and not for singing.
The self-righteous bishops, who are more interested--at least in regard to birth control--in power than in love and wisdom, should be humbled on at least three accounts: 1. How can you be so sure that you're right when virtually no other religion agrees with you on this issue? 2. How can you advocate the ban on birth control which would endanger if not destroy civilization and the environment including all living creatures? 3. How can you ban birth control on such shaky religious grounds?
The last thing the Obama administration wants to do is have a dispute with the Catholic church. This is why he pussyfoots around the issue. The administration won't say that banning birth control is immoral, since this would provoke a war with parochials with parochial views, but religious tenets that harm people must be opposed in the name of the Greater Good, namely in the name of God Himself.
Regarding this issue, you now know why that I, a religious person, am on the side of President Obama--and why, in the struggle between truth and power, I am on the side of the nuns.
These bishops stirred up a hornet's nest--I think they are the ones who will be stung the most--by their accusation that the Obama administration is severely restricting religious freedom by requiring that all health insurances comply with doctors' orders, including, of course, prescriptions for birth control. Never mind that many Catholic institutions had been doing just that, the bishops decried Obama's alleged curtailment of religious liberties. Deeply offended by the administration's alleged anti-religious stance, Ross Douthat, the ultraconservative columnist, wrote:
If you want to fine Catholic hospitals for following Catholic teaching...then don't tell religious people that you respect our freedoms. Say what you really think: that the exercise of our religion threatens all that's good and decent, and that you're going to use the levers of power to bend us to your will.
To whose will? An old friend of mine, the great poet Samuel Menasche, wrote in one of his most famous poems, "Zion ground down must become marrow." In other words, governments must strive to pass laws that reflect the very essence of religion. Every religion has at least a few non-humane tenets. Everything should be done to avoid a showdown, but when one occurs, the decision must be in accord with love and wisdom. What is the essence of religion? Compassion; perhaps best expressed in the biblical injunction to love one's neighbor as oneself. And you can't love your neighbor while destroying the world.
Is the desire to prevent the use of birth control in accord with this quote from Leviticus? I can understand the opposition to abortion, but opposing both abortion and birth control is nothing short of immoral. We are already sharing the planet with six, almost seven billion people. The environment is being decimated; due to overpopulation, ours is the greatest period of mass extinction of wildlife since the age of the dinosaurs. Before birth control and medical advances which greatly increase the lifespan, women had many children. Just like baby crabs, though, many didn't survive. Can you imagine if every married woman had a dozen or more children today--not to mention those mothers who never marry? The admirable progress toward gender equality would vanish overnight: what mother could balance a career with a dozen kids at home? I remember I once treated the fifteenth child of a thirty-four year-old woman in a pediatric clinic. I looked over her record, and found out that she had been pregnant every year since marriage except one. She was an Irish Catholic. How long would civilization last if everyone behaved like that? If loving one's neighbor includes neighbors not yet born, and I am sure it does, unprotected sex is a very heinous policy. In this case, being a good Catholic makes for being a very bad citizen. (We don't have that problem today, because very, very, very few Catholics and others follow the immoral teaching that birth control is wrong--98% of American Catholic women, in fact, have used birth control at some time during their reproductive lives.)
One of the central characters of Jonathan Franzen's good novel, Freedom, is a bird-lover and ardent defender of nature. Every year he sees the birds' habitats being decimated by encroaching suburbia. He views the Catholic Church as public enemy number one--and he has a point. Life on this planet would become unbearable within a few generations if one followed the Church's teaching that birth control should never be used.
Perhaps, you might say, that this teaching is God-inspired and thus should be followed no matter the consequences? But if a teaching is not in accord with love and wisdom, it is certainly not God-inspired. Let's examine the flimsy theological reasoning behind the ban. (Before Humanae Vitae, a papal encyclical from 1968, there was no ban on birth control.) The Catholic view (or should I say the Vatican view) is that God made the genitalia for procreation. Any use of the genitalia that abrogates the possibility of conception--including masturbation--is therefore immoral. This view, I think, is ridiculous. Let's consider, to make an analogy, the mouth. The mouth, as the first part of the digestive tract, has the essential function of introducing nourishment into the body. The mouth is also used for communication--who could speak without one? It is also used in sexual communication. If God has given the mouth at least three purposes, how can one be so sure that He only gave the genitalia one? Is it not possible that God created genitalia with the additional purpose of communication between two individuals who love each other? If the genitalia has an additional purpose than procreation, birth control is certainly not sinful. I think banning it is as silly as teaching that the mouth should be used only for eating, and not for singing.
The self-righteous bishops, who are more interested--at least in regard to birth control--in power than in love and wisdom, should be humbled on at least three accounts: 1. How can you be so sure that you're right when virtually no other religion agrees with you on this issue? 2. How can you advocate the ban on birth control which would endanger if not destroy civilization and the environment including all living creatures? 3. How can you ban birth control on such shaky religious grounds?
The last thing the Obama administration wants to do is have a dispute with the Catholic church. This is why he pussyfoots around the issue. The administration won't say that banning birth control is immoral, since this would provoke a war with parochials with parochial views, but religious tenets that harm people must be opposed in the name of the Greater Good, namely in the name of God Himself.
Regarding this issue, you now know why that I, a religious person, am on the side of President Obama--and why, in the struggle between truth and power, I am on the side of the nuns.
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