The Disorientation of Same Sex Attraction, Theology, and Science

In the debates that have sprung up on the place within the Church for homosexual and lesbian persons, many point toward the argument over a biological basis for sexual orientation. Apart from the fact that there is no real credible science regarding a biological basis for orientation, the argument misses the mark by a mile… on both sides.

I often ask students to consider that heterosexual orientation and sex drive is in all likelihood rooted in brain structure, as well as biochemical and genetic function. If that is true, then a biological basis for same-sex attraction can be stipulated (if only for argument’s sake). Such stipulation does not rule out the effects of child rape and imprinting as a neurological mechanism that follows on environmental factors. In that case, a biological mechanism can rightly be seen as an intrinsic disordering of normal function.

But let’s stipulate, for a moment that sexual orientation, especially heterosexual orientation is indeed biologically rooted and determined.

What has this to do with moral law, or reshaping moral norms?

It is a fallacy put forth by homosexuals that biological orientation ought to be the basis for changing the rules on marriage and sex within the Church. It supposes that all heterosexuals are free to marry by dint of orientation. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Every diocese in the United States has a Marriage Tribunal with stacks and stacks of active annulment files on any given day. There are all manner of impediments to the valid exchange of vows, and it is the investigative work of the tribunal to ascertain whether any impediments existed at the time vows were exchanged.

Among the impediments to marriage is impotence on the part of the male. If a man cannot engage in intercourse, the couple cannot consummate the marriage. These denials of applications for holy matrimony between two people who love one another with all their hearts are some of the most difficult to deal with. Homosexuals and lesbians cannot consummate their “marriages,” cannot enter into that physical exchange of radical self-donation that brings forth new life from such an embrace. They cannot consummate God’s wise design. Neither can many other heterosexuals.

There are people who cannot marry because of emotional or developmental disability or delay. There are many who are developed enough to desire the good of marriage, and KNOW that they are not deemed desirable enough for marriage. It is at once heartbreaking and at the same time an opportunity for channeling the desire to love, to sacrifice for another. There isn’t a false dichotomy between marriage and an “everyone else” category, with everyone else living in limbo. There are all sorts of dynamic single states.

That is where our priests and religious, our consecrated single laity are the examples of credibility. Not all are called to, or capable of marriage. “Some freely renounce it for the Kingdom” (Matt 19:12), and the Church has a long and rich history in doing it all very well.

So arguments over biological basis of orientation are really irrelevant within the Church. God has a wise design, and that wise design excludes many heterosexuals from sacramental marriage and leads them into equally fulfilling lives of sacrificial love outside of marriage. There is no room within that design for surrogate motherhood, with childless couples of any orientation using women as broodmares and bitches, reducing the glory of womanhood to that of human livestock.

There is no room for lifestyles that have as a celebrated principle that motherhood and mothers are entirely unnecessary in the life of a child.

There is no room for lifestyles that have as a celebrated principle that fatherhood and fathers are entirely unnecessary in the life of a child.

The only orientation that matters is God’s wise design. There are all manner of moral means to bring oneself into conformity with that wise design. The difference between virtue and vice is the assertion of the will toward or against God’s design.

Biology has nothing to do with it.

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Girl Scout Leaders Lie About Relationship With Planned Parenthood

After my post detailing the news of Planned Parenthood handing Girl Scouts outrageously offensive sex-ed literature at a UN workshop, a commenter posted a reproval of me for not checking my facts. This person, writing under the pseudonym Catholic Leader, reported a GSUSA refutation to the widespread reports.

What follows is Catholic Leader’s comment and my rebuttal, complete with data to the contrary.

Catholic Leader
Below is the official GSUSA Response. It’s too bad that people don’t check up on the “facts” listed in a lot of these Blog sites.

The Girls Only Workshop that Girl Scouts of the USA recently co-sponsored at the United Nations was supervised by adults and included no distribution of any brochure or collateral of any kind. The only participants were adults from GSUSA, Girls Learn International and The Grail, as well as 30-35 teenage girls. No materials were handed out.

The Girls Only Workshop was jointly hosted by Girl Scouts of the USA, UNICEF’s Working Group on Girls, Girls Learn International and The Grail as part of the 54th Session of the Commission on the Status of Women at the United Nations. The workshop was a group conversation conducted to formulate a document that would express girls’ perspectives on global issues affecting girls.

The Girl Scout organization does not take a position on family planning. Our membership is a cross-section of America with regard to opinions on religious and social issues and practices. We believe these matters are best decided by girls and their families.

The Girl Scout organization has no affiliation with any political organization.

Girl Scouts of the USA has never had a relationship with Planned Parenthood

Dr. Nadal
The GSUSA document is a bald-faced lie. There, I said it. The person who concocted that document has a black tongue and an even blacker heart. The following links show that there have been all kinds of collaborative efforts between the two groups. The document quoted by Catholic Leader is full of parsed language and lies by omission.

Here is Austin Ruse on what happened last week in NYC.

Then there is this admission from a March 5, 2004 Today show interview with Kathy Cloniger, CEO of Girl Scouts:

“HOLT: But you call it bullying. Did it not work? In fact, the Girl Scouts have ended this relationship?

“MS. CLONINGER: The Girl Scouts in Waco, Texas, really made a decision based on local community context, they decided that in this particular situation that it would be in the best interest of girls and their families to discontinue the relationship with Planned Parenthood. Girl Scouts is the largest voice for, and advocate for girls across the country. Know that girls grow up with very complex issues facing them. And so we do, across the country, tackle the issues of human sexuality and body image and all of the thing that’s girls are facing. And we partner with many organizations. We have relationships with our church communities, with YWCAs, and with Planned Parenthood organizations across the country, to bring information-based sex education programs to girls. “

Read the rest here.

I could go on and will if people want. However, a Google search of GSUSA and Planned Parenthood will yield a bumper crop of reading about the extent of the local GSUSA Councils relationships with PP.

Alternatives to this nest of vipers in the next post tonight.

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Girl Scouts, Planned Parenthood, and Recovering Our Lost Dignity

Gerard from Illinois writes the following in the comboxes about Planned Parenthood and the Girl Scout Leadership:

“The Centers for Disease Control report that fully one quarter of our nation’s adolescents have contracted some form of an STD. There are those who would say this is precisely why we need more sex ed and the types of things PP and the Girl Scouts are promoting.

“Others, myself included, contend that the hypersexualization of our society contributes to the scandalous statistic cited above. Where is the outrage?
Is there no outrage because our major media outlets, entertainment venues, and academia join with the likes of PP in perpetuating myths about human sexuality, that we are free to follow what feels good without consequence? Well, that certainly seems to be the sitution today. Meanwhile more and more of our kids are condemned to suffer their whole lives through in some instances due to those diseases even as PP and the Girl Scouts throw gasoline on the fire and no one is held responsible.”

Gerard gives us a great deal of truth to meditate on as Lent lurches inexorably toward Holy Week. As I read his words, I was reminded of Pope John Paul II’s words in his first Encyclical:

Ioannes Paulus PP. II
Redemptor Hominis
To his venerable Brothers in the Episcopate
the Priests
the religious families, the sons and daughters of the Church
and to all men and women of good will
at the beginning of his papal ministry

Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it. This, as has already been said, is why Christ the Redeemer “fully reveals man to himself”. If we may use the expression, this is the human dimension of the mystery of the Redemption. In this dimension man finds again the greatness, dignity and value that belong to his humanity. In the mystery of the Redemption man becomes newly “expressed” and, in a way, is newly created. He is newly created! “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free, there is neither male nor female; for you are all one in Christ Jesus”64. The man who wishes to understand himself thoroughly-and not just in accordance with immediate, partial, often superficial, and even illusory standards and measures of his being-he must with his unrest, uncertainty and even his weakness and sinfulness, with his life and death, draw near to Christ. He must, so to speak, enter into him with all his own self, he must “appropriate” and assimilate the whole of the reality of the Incarnation and Redemption in order to find himself. If this profound process takes place within him, he then bears fruit not only of adoration of God but also of deep wonder at himself. How precious must man be in the eyes of the Creator, if he “gained so great a Redeemer”65, and if God “gave his only Son “in order that man “should not perish but have eternal life”66.

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Allstate v. Planned Parenthood. Are YOU In Good Hands?

This post has a few links that need to be read and worked through. The rewards for our youth are incalculable.

Allstate Insurance and Planned Parenthood have a few things in common. Both want our teen and young adult children in their hands. Both seek to make money by doing so. Both would have us believe that they have our loved ones health and safety in mind.

Do they?

In dealing with each of these billion dollar corporations, we borrow Allstate’s slogan: Are YOU in good hands?

From a full-page Allstate ad in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal:

Why do most 16-year-olds drive like they’re missing a part of their brain?

Because they are.

Even bright, mature teenagers sometimes do things that are “stupid.” But when that happens, it’s not really their fault. It’s because their brain hasn’t finished developing. The missing part is called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, and it plays a critical role in teens’ decision-making, and understanding of future consequences. Problem is, it doesn’t fully develop until their 20s. This is one of the reasons why 16-year-old drivers have crash rates three times higher than 17-year-olds and five times higher than 18-year-olds. Car crashes kill more than 4,000 teens every year. And injure nearly 400,000. Is there a way for teens to get their driving experience more safely? Is there a way their brains can be given the time to mature as completely as their bodies?

Allstate thinks so.

SUPPORT THE STANDUP ACT

The Standup Act (H.R. 1895) creates a National Graduated Driver Licensing (GDL) law that would give teens on-the-road experience gradually while helping them avoid risky conditions. When states have implemented comprehensive GDL programs, the number of fatal crashes among 16-year-old drivers has fallen by almost 40%.

Let’s help our teenagers not miss out on tomorrow just because they have something missing today. Please tell your congressional representatives that you support the STANDUP Act. Go to allstate.com/STANDUP.

For an excellent Washington Post article on the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex in teens and young adults click here.

The International Planned Parenthood Federation (IPPF) has their own document, similarly named, Stand and Deliver. In the document, traditional morality is denigrated as ‘taboo’, and children as young as 10 are targeted for comprehensive sex education and contraceptives. From the document:

“IPPF uses the terms young people, youth and adolescents interchangeably to refer to people who are between 10 and 24 years.”

“Greater investment in primary and secondary education for girls, comprehensive sexuality education for boys and girls, both in and out of school, which can break down gender stereotypes, and provision of youth-friendly services that ignore taboos and stigma around intimacy and sex will empower girls and young women. Young women, like young men, must be given the freedom to assume leadership and responsibility for building a better world.” -Dr.Gill Greer Director-General of IPPF

“I am pleased that this report addresses a number of the critical issues facing young people today, particularly their unmet needs for comprehensive sexuality education and sexual and reproductive health services. Young people have the right to be fully informed about sexuality and to have access to contraceptives and other services. These rights are enshrined in various internationally agreed human rights conventions and treaties, but – unfortunately – they are still not universally respected.” -Bert Koenders, Minister for Development Cooperation of the Kingdom of the Netherlands.

So what’s a parent to do? What does one make of these two organizations? Allstate tells us what has been widely known in neurophysiology and psychology for years: The center in the brain responsible for forming judgements about behavioral consequences does not form fully until the early 20’s. Allstate cites sobering statistics about the accident-prone nature of 16-year-olds, while IPPF is pushing aggressively for teaching children as young as 10 to be sexually active and to use contraceptives.

If giving a 16-year-old the keys to the car gives us pause, what sane adult would hand condoms to those of similar age, much less 10-year-olds? The medical folks at IPPF are all too aware of the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and its developmental timeline. In fact, they’re banking on it, literally.

Last year when Abby Johnson left as director of a PP ‘clinic’ in Texas, she told us of PP’s push for abortions, as contraceptives have a lower profit margin. The big money is in the abortions.

Driving a wedge between children and their parents’ traditional mores is step one. Step two is to involve younger children for whom contraceptive failures will approach 100%. Then step three is to argue for abortions in such children whose lives will be claimed to be endangered by pregnancy so young, and who would be forever economically disadvantaged by a baby.

That’s their game.

Kudos to Allstate. Safety is a money-maker for them. Planned Parenthood talks a good safety game, but the fact is they thrive on the failure of the contraceptives they know to be intrinsically ineffectual. See these posts here and here for all of the CDC data that prove this point. They know these data better than anyone.

It isn’t that IPPF is clueless. They’re bloodless.

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Planned Parenthood and The Destruction of Innocents

Here are the CDC data that show what a horrifically effective job Planned Parenthood and their fellow travelers have done in destroying the lives of our young people, corrupting them in their innocence and fertility.

The data are from the Sexually Transmitted Diseases Surveillance, 2008. These data are presented as a follow-up to yesterday’s post on Planned Parenthood In New Initiative Targets 10 Year-Old Children With Condoms That Don’t Work. This is the new initiative by PP to finish off our children, pushing all-out for comprehensive sex education down to age ten.

A glance at the data tells the story. Children 10-14 have the lowest rates of STD’s as well as pregnancies. Recall when PP center Director Abby Johnson turned her life around last year and reported how PP is pushing hard for abortions, as they are the principle source of income.

Now link to yesterday’s post, linked above, and look at the data on STD’s and condom efficacy. Condoms don’t work. Even CDC and Planned Parenthood’s own contraceptive bible state as much.

Now consider how much higher condom failure rates and early teen pregnancies would rise after PP gets done completing the corruption of our youth.

As we say in the lab, the data don’t lie. The age groups are in the center of the graphs with the incidence per 100,000 for men and women going to the left and right respectively. The disease being reported is at the bottom of each graph.

Chlamydia — Age- and sex-specific rates: United States, 2008

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Gonorrhea — Age- and sex-specific rates: United States, 2008

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Primary and secondary syphilis — Age- and sex-specific rates: United States, 2008

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Human papillomavirus (HPV) — Prevalence of high-risk and low-risk types among females 14 to 59 years of age from a national survey, 2003–2004

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Genital herpes — Herpes simplex virus, type 2, seroprevalence in non-Hispanic whites and non-Hispanic blacks by age group from national surveys, 1976–1980, 1988–1994, 1999–2004

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Ectopic pregnancy — Hospitalizations of women 15 to 44 years of age: United States, 1997–2006

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Finally, the abortion data. These data are from Abortion Surveillance — United States, 2006, Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Reports, November 27, 2009 / 58(SS08);1-35

White Bars=Number of abortions per 1,000 live births.
Blue Bars=Number of abortions per 1,000 women aged 15–44 years.
Black Bars=percentage of total abortions, by age group of women who obtained an abortion — selected states, United States, 2006§

§Data from 48 reporting areas; excludes California, Florida, Louisiana, and New Hampshire.

The age groups may not be so visible along the bottom of the graph. They are, from left to right:

Under 15
15-19
20-24
25-29
30-34
35-39
Over 40

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White Mice and Abstinence

Don’t think about white mice. Don’t give white mice another thought. Really, if white mice come to mind, just stop thinking about those cute little white mice. It really isn’t hard to stop thinking about white mice. When you start thinking about white mice, just start telling yourself that there are far more important things to think about than adorable little white mice. And don’t let that computer mouse make you think about white mice.

I’m lucky, I have a track pad on my laptop, so I don’t think about white mice. Although when I see the dish of cotton balls in the bathroom it reminds me of white mice sometimes. When I think of white mice, I usually remember the elevator in grad school that always seemed to have a pharmacy grad student with cages of white mice being brought from the animal care center. Then I repeat over and over, “stop thinking about white mice“.

But I digress, don’t let elevators or cotton balls make you think about white mice. Don’t even let little white baby shoes remind you of white mice. Remember, when these things remind you of white mice, just keep telling yourself that you’re not going to think any more about white mice. Not even when you hear a door squeak or a child’s squeaky toy, or even when you see a scooter. Forget the white mice. White mice are just not important.

That’s the way it goes with comprehensive sex education, and with ‘value-neutral’ abstinence programs. The more we discuss sex, the more we think about it. The more we discuss ways of avoiding the consequences of sex the more empowered we feel about sallying forth into carnal bliss.

Discussed in such a permissive manner, trained in the culture of readily available ‘protection’, there isn’t an inclination to defer gratification.

Small wonder then that this week we’ve heard of the latest study telling us that the more we discuss white mice, er, sex, with kids the more they go out and have sex.

William Kilpatrick cited several such studies well over a decade ago in his book Why Johnny Can’t Tell Right From Wrong.

Abstinence education works somewhat better than comprehensive sex education, by as much as 30% in some studies. If abstinence, however, is nothing more than saying no to primal urges, it’s inherently problematic. Such a ‘just say no’ approach is to the development of mature sexuality what a bread and water diet is to developing healthy nutritional habits over a lifetime.

Authentic sexuality is about subordinating one’s self to God’s wise plan for ALL of His creation. When such subordination achieves the status of habit, one is more rightly disposed to the self-mastery requisite for marital fidelity. Our bodies are not our own to do with as we will. Entering marriage after a lifestyle that caters to just that understanding, that our bodies are our own to do with as we will, predisposes us to disaster in marriage.

Fidelity is a virtue. And virtue as we know is a MORALLY GOOD OPERATIVE HABIT. Vice is a morally bad operative habit.

We need to be instilling these very concepts in our young. Morality, Goodness, Habits: Those qualities that define one’s character.

Just saying no, without the tempering influence of a larger moral vision can degenerate into trying in vain not to think about white mice.

Teaching them to cave to inpulse, to eschew morality, to indulge the self in a moment’s notice is simply the wrong preparation for when one’s spouse simply isn’t up to gratifying needs on demand.

This is so much more than ‘staying safe’. It isn’t sitting and saying that I won’t think about white mice. It’s about attaching one’s yearning to a love greater than oneself. It’s about dying to self in order to live for God and one’s future spouse, before we have even met him or her. It is the grain of wheat falling to the ground and dying as a grain so as to yield far more grain in due season.

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Our Sons and Daughters

Little girls are unburdened. There is a lightness about little girls in those golden years before adolescence that is unmistakeable. Its unblemished beauty is like a rose bud, with all of the promise of the splendor about to unfold.

A florist once shared that rose buds exposed to a sudden and extreme chill will not open. They wither in their unrevealed potential.

So it is when youth is corrupted, when our daughters and sons are lured into sex before they have established their own ego boundaries, when sex forges bonds that youth cannot sustain, when the inevitable is heartache-and often times worse. Their blossoming is interrupted by confusion, anger, guilt and shame. The inability to sustain the powerful bonds created by sex leads to feelings of inadequacy and isolation, self-reproach and depression.

The very people holding themselves out as the solution have been the problem all along. Planned Parenthood is aggressive in its efforts to cut our sons and daughters off from trusting in us, playing to their youthful cravings for autonomy. They and their fellow travelers in the Culture of Death have for too long pumped them full of estrogens, stuffed their pockets full of condoms, and lured them to abort their babies when the inevitable contraceptive failure occurred. In the process they have filled them with a false sense of security and left them utterly unprepared for the emotional and spiritual fallout. The girls are not the only ones to suffer.

Contrary to popular belief, boys are not aloof. It’s an act. Boys are as devastated in a breakup as girls. The macho act is just that: whistling past the graveyard. But is the damage irreparable?

Blessedly no for most of it.

It starts by focussing on the true meaning of purity. I’ve treated this in other posts, notably Purity and Play and in, Of Bridal Veils and Little Girls.

Purity of heart, mind, body and soul is the very essence of a child’s spiritual rhythms. It isn’t that sex is dirty, it’s that the beauty of sex is caught up in an entirely different set of rhythms; those of radical self-donation to one’s spouse. It is the inability to deliver on the promises made in physical union that becomes dysrhythmic, and psychologically destabilizing. Sex is a great good that many parents themselves have not always seen or honored as such.

So, first we must reconcile with our past and with God. Then we must be ceaseless witnesses to the great good of sex, appealing to the bonds of love and intimacy created during sex as one of the exclusive goods of marriage. Those who have been sexually active will intuitively grasp that portion of the message.

Young people know how pathetic older adults look when they try to be cool, using the slang of teens; they get what dysrhythmic means when presented objectively in the reversal of roles. They also get it, and are relieved when they are brought to understand that they are simply not ready to deliver on the depth of the promises made in sex. These powerful emotional realities, properly explained, demystify for teens what has been to that point a nebulous angst.

Properly restored to their rhythms they become unburdened again, the unfolding of their potential restored in its function and beauty.

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Photo via mylittlegirlsboutique.com

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Of Cardinals, Cathedrals, Condoms and Cretins (Part IV)

John Cardinal O'Connor

WARNING: The subject matter in this post deals candidly with sexually transmitted infections and diseases and their modes of transmission. Minors and persons easily upset by the nature of such discussion are advised to skip over this post.

Cretins. No other word better encompasses those who set their sights on John Cardinal O’Connor and the American Catholic Hierarchy for their refusal to advocate condom usage as a means of attenuating the impact of HIV/AIDS, especially in light of the steady news stories published in The New York Times during those years. What other word encompasses a whole movement of people who reject Apostolic Authority, distort the plain meaning of the Scriptural injunctions against homosexual and extramarital sex, and then disrupt Mass and desecrate the Blessed Sacrament and a cathedral all because the Apostolic Successors would not bend to their will?

What word better encompasses a group who divested themselves and their community of any personal responsibility for their sexual behavior and its consequences, projecting onto Rome all culpability? Narcissist describes a great deal, but is insufficient when one considers the venom spit at the Church.

As has been demonstrated conclusively in Part I, Part II and Part III, these people had it wrong. Terribly wrong. Tragically wrong. In the early days of the pandemic, gays were being told to lubricate their condoms to facilitate intercourse and reduce strain on the condom which might cause rupture.

Then they figured out that petroleum jellies dissolved the latex, presumably after more disease was transmitted through those condom ruptures.

Then, unthinking, untrained and uncritical activists led the charge for using nonoxynol-9 (N-9), the spermicide that was shown to kill HIV in test tubes (In high doses, a fact they missed), as a lubricant to back up condom efficay, should the condom slip or tear. For whatever reason, it wouldn’t be until several years later that N-9 would be shown to be completely ineffective against the virus in the low concentration used on condoms, and causes ulcerations in the vaginal and rectal mucosa, actually facilitating HIV transmission in case of condom failure.

Were all of that not enough, Part III presented CDC’s own data on condom ineffectiveness.

Seldom in the history of medicine has a movement been so vocal, so organized, and so catastrophically wrong. The public health community has done a slow walk back from those early days of ACT-UP’s message of certitude.

They have abandoned “Safe” sex for the more qualified “Safer” sex.

They have abandoned advocating N-9 as both lubricant and fail-safe.

They have all but abandoned the condom as effective against much of anything in the way of STI’s.

They have embraced the language of abstinence and long-term mutual monogamy as the surest ways of preventing STI’s, including HIV.

In presenting themselves as the true shepherds of the sexually licentious in the face of a killer disease, in establishing the corollary narrative that the Bishops were out of touch old celibates consigned to history’s dustbin, ACT-UP and their fellow travelers no doubt unwittingly led scores of thousands to HIV infection and death.

Theirs is a bitter, shameful legacy.

The Bishops for their part spared no expense in creating hospital and nursing home beds for AIDS patients and received them with compassion. One of those leaders of the desecration converted to the Catholic Church on his death bed and entered eternity sealed with the sacraments. The Bishops would not be swayed by the bad PR, and stayed faithful to their Church, their Office and their God.

It is Cardinal O’Connor’s message that the science has borne out:

“Good morality is good medicine.”

(The promised article on abstinence is itself a new series entitled, “Abstinence Education (Part I)”

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Sanger’s Legacy: The Impact of Abortion/Contraception on the African American Community

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Niece, Dr. Alveda King

If there is one African American woman in the United States who has drunk from the bitter cups of abortion and racism, whose life has been forever changed by both, it is Dr. Alveda King, niece of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Dr. King knows what it is like to be lied to by a Planned Parenthood physician. “It’s just a blob of tissue,” she was told before her second abortion.

In 1966, Martin Luther King accepted the Margaret Sanger award from Planned Parenthod. Hear Alveda King Describe why he did so in this brief interview.

At the time, Sanger’s private communications with Clarence Gamble about the Negro Project had not yet come to light. The issue is detailed here.

The legacy of the project is gruesome for African-Americans. Today, close to eighty percent of Planned Parenthood clinics operate in inner-city neighborhoods. The rationale is that the need is greatest there. Which need? The need to stop these people from proliferating “like weeds,” as Sanger opined, or the need for low-cost, government-funded services for those who occupy the lower rungs of the socio-economic ladder?

In the case of the latter, these citizens have broad access to welfare, medicaid, and a great many to social security disability money; financing streams not available to those with more means. So the financial imperative rationale is a lie.

While blacks constitute roughly eleven percent of the population, they have thirty-seven percent of the abortions, some eighteen million since 1973. Accidental? Consider the sting operation from two years ago where PP centers were accepting donations to underwrite the abortions of Black babies. At 1:30 into the following video, Autmn Kersey, PP Director of Fundraising for the State of Idaho says it all with enthusiasm.

The eighteen million were the babies who were killed. How many scores of millions did PP prevent from being conceived? Worse still has been the lesson taught to young men, that young girls’ bodies are mere playthings, that human sex can be had without consequences, that when contraception fails, PP stands ready and willing to murder the child. This has devastated the community. Close to seventy percent of African American births are to unwed mothers, the consequence of teaching teens that human relations are merely “sex play”, as PP does on its web page directed at teens entitled ‘The Truth About Virginity Pledges.”

In this pernicious document, youth are cut off from their elders’ influence by appealing to their natural desire for autonomy: “Choosing to have sex is a very personal decision, and so is choosing to take a virginity pledge.”

As always, the lie is one of omission. True, choosing to have sex is a personal decision, but it is also one with profound consequences for family and community stability, which is why marriage is a legal contract and not a private arrangement.

Then there is the matter of African-American girls having twice the sexually transmitted disease rate of other girls their age. Full forty-eight percent of African-American girls will be diagnosed with at least one STD by age nineteen. Many of these will cause pelvic inflammatory disease and leave these young women sterile, which comports well with Sanger’s vision.

When Sanger began her “Negro Project”, Blacks might have been poor, but they had much more solid families and church communities. Seventy years later, the deplorable state of the Black inner-city is in no mall measure the result of Planned Parenthood’s machinations. The last word goes to these Black Pastors who want PP defunded. Nobody knows more than these good people what PP has done to their community.

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Of Cardinals, Cathedrals, Condoms, and Cretins (Part III)

John Cardinal O'Connor

WARNING: The subject matter in this post deals candidly with sexually transmitted infections and diseases and their modes of transmission. Minors and persons easily upset by the nature of such discussion are advised to skip over this post.

In Part II of this series (Part I here. Part II here. Part IV here.) we examined the disconnect between ACT-UP’s rhetoric on condoms and the published reports in The New York Times during the two years prior to ACT-UP’s desecration of Saint Patrick’s Cathedral. In this article, we’ll consider some epidemiological data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and see if perhaps the rhetoric is supported by the data.

The graphs below come from CDC’s Sexually Transmitted Diseases Surveillance, 2008, with the exception of the HIV data, which is also CDC data available here. For purposes of classification, I have divided these diseases into two groups: A & B. This division is entirely my own and not a CDC classification scheme.

GROUP A DISEASES

Number of AIDS cases, AIDS deaths, and people living with AIDS, 1985-2004, United States (CDC, n.d.a)

Chlamydia

Genital Warts (HPV) Initial Visits to Doctor's Office

Herpes Simplex Virus

Trichomoniasis and Other Vaginitis

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GROUP B DISEASES

Chancroid

Syphilis

Gonorrhea

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Explaining the Data

In making sense out of these data, they have been divided into two groups based upon some shared characteristics.

Group A data all show the incidence of disease trending steadily upward. These diseases also share another common characteristic. They all possess the capacity to remain ‘silent’, or asymptomatic in a large percentage of their victims.

HIV Less than half of infected people develop a conversion reaction with its flu-like symptoms.
Trichomonas Though curable with drugs, up to 1/3 of women are asymptomatic carriers.
Human Papilloma Virus (Genital Warts) 60% chance of infection with one contact. Up to 1/3 women remain asymptomatic.
Genital Herpes 80%-90% of people fail to recognize symptoms or have no symptoms at all. They may still shed the virus.
Chlamydia 70%-80% of women have no symptoms. 25%-50% of men have no symptoms.

HPV and Herpes are contact transmission infections. Any exposed skin on the penis not covered by the condom, or on the labia contacting exposed penile skin with condom use, can become infected with a single act of intercourse. These diseases are also spread by oral-genital transmission.

The prevalence line in the HIV graph indicates the number of people living with HIV. As is evident, the rate continues to soar.

The question needs to be asked, with the explosion in condom usage and sales over the past 25 years, why the steady rise in these STI’s? Chlamydia experts believe that the rise in the graph is the result of a combination of better testing methods and mandatory reporting that didn’t come about until the late 1990’s. While that’s understandable, the basal level of infection was not always this high in the population.

Indeed, the graphs all indicate that prior to 1968, the disease rates, even in diseases that had mandatory reporting were extremely low. The graphs tell the sad story of the sexual revolution that really got going with the widespread availability of the pill in the late 1960’s.

This soaring rate of STI’s and STD’s can be explained by the condom bible. Consider an excerpt from the following book available to be read online:

Case Against Condoms: Death by Latex
By Brian Clowes, PhD
Director of Research Worldwide
Human Life International

The book Contraceptive Technology is the most authoritative source of information on all methods of birth control in the world today. This two-inch thick book is often referred to as the “family planner’s bible,” and is revised every few years in order to include updated information. The latest edition was published in 2004, and it is considered by family planners to be the “last word” on all matters contraceptive…

According to Contraceptive Technology, the condom’s user effectiveness rate is 85 percent [9]. This means that, under real-world conditions, a woman whose sexual partners use condoms for every act of sexual intercourse has a 15 percent chance of becoming pregnant in a year.
Figure 2 shows the chances of pregnancy for a woman whose sexual partners faithfully use condoms for 83 average annual instances of sexual intercourse.[10]
Keep in mind that these are the lowest rates that can generally be expected, since they assume 100% condom usage.

Figure 2
Probability of Pregnancy Over Time for Women Whose Sexual Partners Always Use Condoms

1 year 15 percent
2 years 28 percent
3 years 39 percent
4 years 48 percent
5 years 56 percent
10 years 80 percent

It must be stressed that these are probabilities for pregnancy, which can only occur one week per month. Slippage and breakage happen the other three weeks out of the month as well.

How then do we explain the data in Group B? Why the decline?

These diseases manifest immediately, and in the case of gonorrhea and chancroid, painfully. People seek medical treatment immediately, as all three of these diseases are curable with antibiotics. Not so for the viral diseases in Group A. There are no silent infections in Group B to enable transmission between a series of unsuspecting partners. Note too that the infections in gonorrhea and chancroid declined precipitously only at the outset of the HIV pandemic in the mid-late 1980’s. That’s when public health officers required names of partners in order to go out into the community and dry up the reservoir of pathogens. The same for syphilis.

In Group A, because the infections remain asymptomatic in so many for so long, the diseases are able to be transmitted unchecked. Unlike the pathogens in Group B, it’s next to impossible to dry up the reservoir of Trichomonas and Chlamydia because they lurk silently for months to years. The viral diseases HIV and Herpes cannot be eliminated, only held in check. To a good extent, HPV resolves spontaneously in most people, but not before being transmitted.

If condoms were so effective and could be rightly credited for the declines seen in group B, then we would have seen declines in Group A pathogens, minimally Chlamydia and Trichomonas, as well.

Some might argue that there is simply an increase in the number of young people having sex without condoms. Certainly some of these increases in Group A can rightly be attributed to this. Even stipulating this point does not diminish the 15% condom failure rate detailed above, nor does it obviate the fact that condoms do not cover the entire penis, hence not protecting against the spread of HPV and Herpes. The false sense of security leads people to engage in more frequent sex, often with several partners either at once or serially, leading to a greater probability of disease transmission through skin contact, oral sex, or catastrophic condom failure.

Finally, there is CDC’s own Fact Sheet on the Male Latex Condom for Public Health Personnel.

“Latex condoms, when used consistently and correctly, are highly effective in preventing the sexual transmission of HIV, the virus that causes AIDS. In addition, consistent and correct use of latex condoms reduces the risk of other sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including diseases transmitted by genital secretions, and to a lesser degree, genital ulcer diseases. Condom use may reduce the risk for genital human papillomavirus (HPV) infection and HPV-associated diseases, e.g., genital warts and cervical cancer.”

Finally consider this statement from the fact sheet:

“The most reliable ways to avoid transmission of sexually transmitted diseases (STDs), including human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), are to abstain from sexual activity or to be in a long-term mutually monogamous relationship with an uninfected partner.”

That’s as close a vindication of Cardinal O’Connor and the Bishops are likely to get from CDC. It seems very much like a variant expression of traditional morality, which is abstinence before and fidelity in marriage.

CDC gives no guarantees beyond that, and very little encouragement in the way of condom safety.

Next Wednesday: The efficacy of abstinence programs.

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Sanger Targets the Lower Classes

Above is a photocopy of Margaret Sanger’s Magazine, The Birth Control Review. Note the stated purpose of birth control below the date;

Birth Control: To create a race of thoroughbreds.

Sanger’s disciples would later deny attribution of that statement to her, but there it is. In previous posts we have seen repeatedly, and in context, the disdain Sanger had for the lower classes, from whom idiots, imbeciles, and morons arose (bear in mind those were the medical diagnostic terms of her day). Sanger opened her first birth control clinic in Brownsville, Brooklyn. At the time, Brownsville was populated by Sanger’s favorite people: Slavs, Jews, southern Europeans, and those large Catholic families she had grown (through her own family experience) to disdain with a vengeance. Nine days after opening, her illegal clinic was raided and Sanger was sent to jail for 30 days.

Returning to Grant’s well-documented biography, Killer Angel, available in the link as a PDF:

“The Birth Control Review Margaret’s magazine and the immediate predecessor to the Planned Parenthood Review regularly and openly published the racist articles of Malthusian Eugenicists. In October of 1920, for instance, it published a favorable review of Lothrop Stoddard’s frightening book of Fascist diatribe, The Rising Tide of Color Against White World Supremacy. In September of 1923, the Review editorialized in favor of restricting immigration on a racial basis. In April of 1932, it outlined Margaret’s ‘Plan for peace,’ which called for coercive sterilization, mandatory segregation, and rehabilitative concentration camps for all ‘dysgenic stocks.’ In April of 1933, the Review published a shocking article entitled ‘Eugenic Sterilization: An Urgent Need.’ It was written by Margaret’s close friend and advisor, Ernst Rudin, who was then serving as Hitler’s director of genetic sterilization and had earlier taken a prominent role in the establishment of the Nazi Society for Racial Hygiene. Later, in June of that same year, it published an article by Leon Whitney entitled, ‘Selective Sterilization,‘ which adamantly praised and defended the Third Reich’s pre-holocaust ‘race purification’ programs.

“The bottom line is that Margaret self-consciously organized the Birth Control League–and its progeny, Planned Parenthood—in part, to promote and enforce the scientifically elitist notions of White Supremacy. Like the Ku Klux Klan, the Nazi Party, and the Mensheviks, Margaret’s enterprise was from its inception implicitly and explicitly racist. And this racist orientation was all too evident in its various programs and initiatives: government control over family decisions, non-medicinal health care experimentations, the rabid abortion crusade, and the coercive sterilization initiatives…

“As her organization grew in power and prestige, she began to target several other ‘ill-favored’ and ‘dysgenic races,’ including ‘Blacks, Hispnics, Amerinds, Fundamentalists, and Catholics.’

“In 1939, Margaret designed a ‘Negro Project’ in response to requests from ‘southern state public health officials’ not generally known for their racial equanimity. ‘The mass of Negroes,’ her project proposal asserted, ‘particularly in the South, still breed carelessly and disastrously, with the result that the increase among Negroes, even more than among Whites, is from that portion of the population least intelligent and fit.’ The proposal went on to say that ‘Public Health statistics merely hint at the primitive state of civilization in which most Negroes in the South live.’

In order to remedy this ‘dysgenic horror story,’ her project aimed to hire three or four ‘Colored Ministers, preferably with social service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities’ to travel to various Black enclaves and propagandize for birth control. Her intention was as insidious as it was obvious: ‘The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population and the Minister is the man who can straighten out that idea if it ever occurs to any of their more rebellious members.’

Of course, those Black ministers were to be carefully controlled—mere figureheads. ‘There is a great danger that we will fail,’ one of the project directors wrote, ‘because the Negroes think it a plan for extermination. Hence, let’s appear to let the colored run it.’

Another project director lamented: ‘I wonder if Southern Darkies can ever be entrusted with . . . a clinic. Our experience
causes us to doubt their ability to work except under White supervision.’ The entire operation then was a ruse-a manipulative attempt to get Blacks to cooperate in their own elimination.”

Of course, all of this invites the question, why did Sanger focus her efforts on the lower classes? Did the upper classes not have their share of developmentally disabled children? Sanger would go on to secure considerable grant money from such industrialists as Henry Ford, who was himself a rabid anti-Semite.

In Two Days, Sanger’s Ascendancy: The Political Leaders and Philanthropists Who Shared Her Views and Swallowed Her Lies.

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Of Bridal Veils and Little Girls

Several months ago, eight year old Elizabeth climbed into my lap and asked, “Daddy, why do brides wear veils?” I looked at Regina and smiled as my bride smiled back waiting to see how I managed this one. In an instant, the leading of the Holy Spirit to be sure, I decided to give Beth her first sex education talk.

I started by asking Beth what we place around the Tabernacle in church. “A veil,” was the correct response, though Beth looked a bit puzzled by the non sequitur. “And what does the Priest place over the chalice and ciborium, which also hold the Blessed Sacrament?” “A veil,” was the correct response. Beth was beaming; she was on a roll. “And what sign do we use to indicate that Jesus dwells within the Tabernacle?” “The sanctuary lamp,” came the response. Correct, but secondary. The veil, going back to the Tent of the Meeting in the desert and later the Temple in Jerusalem has always been the sign that God dwells within. Beth soaked up the new material like a sponge.

I could hear Dr. Scott Hahn of Franciscan University giving a lecture where he made this connection, “That which is veiled is that which is Holy”.

“Every one of our bodies is not only the tabernacle of our souls, but also of the Holy Spirit who dwells within us. So every person’s body is sacred Beth. But women’s bodies have an added dimension of the sacred. When you grow up, God will use your body to make your babies, just as He used Mamma’s to make you, Joseph and little Regina. So when you get married and I walk you down the aisle, that veil will tell your husband that your body is sacred to God and he is to treat you and your body with reverence. Don’t forget, Jesus could have hopped off of a cloud. He chose to be born of a woman, and that makes every woman so much more sacred.”

“Oh, I get it,” was the reply. We could see the light bulb go on. Beth really did get it. She’s told a great number of people all about it too.

From the gleam in Regina’s eyes, it was obvious that she loved this first step down the road of Beth’s sexual maturation.

I think we go wrong when discussing contraceptives and their ill-effects as the substance of sex education. It misses the mark by a mile. We’re Holy, fearfully and wonderfully made by God; which is why St. Paul tells us to glorify God in our bodies. Sex isn’t dirty. Our human sexuality is one of the greatest goods of all creation. At only eight years old, I couldn’t tell Beth the other half of that good, that she and her husband will use their bodies to forge inseparable bonds of passionate love and selfless devotion. I’ll tell her in due course. There’s simply no room for premarital sex in that equation. Forgetting sexually transmitted diseases, which afflict 1/4 of all girls by their nineteenth birthday, 80% of all adults during their lifetimes according to CDC, premarital sex corrodes that sense of the sacred and the dual, inseparable purposes for which sex was made: Unitive and Procreative.

All sex education MUST begin here: teaching a reverential love for what God has made. Little girls dream of being beautiful brides. Passionate daddies look beyond the wedding day to their daughters being good and faithful wives and mothers, to them marrying men who will honor and cherish them. Therefore, we fathers need to look in the mirror each morning when we shave and make sure that the guy looking back at us is a sound role model for our sons and duaghters.

That’s the best sex education of all.

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Margaret Sanger’s Malthusian Roots

The most of Thomas Malthus that many of us ever hear is in connection with Charles Darwin’s formulation of his Evolutionary Theory. Malthus believed that populations double over time, while food and materials increase only arithmetically. This in turn creates shortages in food and goods, leading to famine and war, so the thinking went. Darwin picked up on this and postulated that a Malthusian system created competition between members of the species, and that only those with unique traits, or differences, would be able to best compete for those resources if the environment favored those traits; what would come to be known as Survival of the Fittest.

Less well known is what Malthus postulated, using his calculus.

In An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus writes:

“All children born, beyond what would be required to keep up the population to a desired level, must necessarily perish, unless room be made for them by the deaths of grown persons. . . . Therefore . . . we should facilitate, instead of foolishly and vainly endeavoring to impede, the operations of nature in producing this mortality; and if we
dread the too frequent visitation of the horrid form of famine, we should sedulously encourage the other forms of destruction, which we compel nature to use. Instead of recommending cleanliness to the poor, we should encourage contrary habits. In our towns we should make the streets narrower,
crowd more people into the houses, and court the return of the plague, In the country, we should build our villages near stagnant pools, and particularly encourage settlements in all marshy and unwholesome situations. But above all, we should reprobate specific remedies for ravaging diseases; and restrain those benevolent, but much
mistaken men, who have thought they were doing a service to mankind by projecting schemes for the total extirpation of particular disorders.”

In his biography of Sanger, Killer Angel, (available as a PDF) George Grant describes Margaret’s year in England and her falling in with the Malthusians and neo-Malthusians:

“Not surprisingly, Margaret immediately got on the Malthusian bandwagon. She was not philosophically inclined, nor was she particularly adept at political, social, or economic theory, but she did recognize in the Malthusians a kindred spirit and a tremendous opportunity. She was also shrewd enough to realize that her notions of radical socialism and sexual liberation would never have the popular support necessary to usher in the revolution without some appeal to
altruism and intellectualism. She needed somehow to capture the moral and academic “high ground.”

“Malthusianism, she thought, just might be the key to that ethical and intellectual posture. If she could argue for birth control using the scientifically verified threat of poverty, sickness, racial tension, and overpopulation as its backdrop, then she would have a much better chance of making her case. So she began to absorb as much of the Malthusian dogma as she could.

“Margaret also immersed herself in the teachings of each of the Malthusian offshoots. If a little bit of something is a good thing, then a lot is even better. There was phrenology, Binetism, and Craniometri-
cism. There was Oneidianism, Polygenesis, Recapitulationism, Lambrosianism, Hereditarianism, Freudianism, and Neotenism. From each group she picked Up a few popular slogans and concepts that would permanently shape her crusade.

“But Eugenics left the most lasting impression on the malleable mold of her nascent worldview of radicalism. Eugenics was perhaps the most revolutionary of the pseudo-sciences spawned by Malthusianism. Having convinced an entire generation of scientists, intellectuals, and social reformers that the world was facing an imminent economic crisis caused by unchecked human fertility, Malthusian thought quickly turned to practical programs and social policies.

“Some of these managerial Malthusians believed that the solution to the imminent crisis was political: restrict immigration, reform social welfare, and tighten citizenship requirements. Others thought the solution was technological: increase agricultural production, improve medical proficiency, and promote industrial efficiency. But many of the rest felt that the solution was genetic: restrict or eliminate “bad racial stocks” and gradually “help to engineer the evolutionary ascent of man.”

“This last group became the adherents of a malevoent new voodoo-science called Eugenics. They quickly became the most influential and powerful of all the insurgent ideologists striving to rule the affairs of men and nations. In fact, for the rest of the twentieth century they would unleash one plague after another+ whole plethora of designer disasters—upon the unsuspecting human race.

“The Eugenicists unashamedly espoused an elitist white Supremacy. Or to be more precise, they espoused an elitist Northern and Western European white Supremacy. It was not a supremacy based on the crass ethnic racism of the past but upon a new kind of “scientific” elitism deemed necessary to preserve “the best of the human race” in the face of impending doom. It was a very refined sort of supremacy that prided itself on rationalism, intellectualism, and progressivism.”

Ideas have origins. Ideas also have consequences. It is impossible to consider Sanger’s life’s work absent the inspiration for, and philosophical context of that life’s work.

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Margaret Sanger on Charity and Philanthropy

This week continues with a series of posts examining the anthropological assumptions and philosophical underpinnings of Margaret Sanger’s world view. It is every bit as unrelenting and unsparing as her Planned Parenthood.

One of the commenters in the comboxes challenged Sanger’s treatment here, suggesting that the scholarship being done at NYU ought to merit serious consideration. The reader went on to challenge another reader for not being an ‘expert’ in matters pertaining to Sanger.

One need not be expert in order to see Sanger for the wretched creature that she was. One need only consider her words in context. Her famous book, The Pivot of Civilization is available as a PDF online.

Margaret Sanger in her own words:

Page 28

Even if we accept organized charity at its own valuation, and grant that it does the best it can, it is exposed to a more profound criticism. It reveals a fundamental and irremediable defect. Its very success, its very efficiency, its very necessity to the social order, are themselves the most unanswerable indictment. Organized charity itself is the symptom of a malignant social disease.

Those vast, complex, interrelated organizations aiming to control and to diminish the spread of misery and destitution and all the menacing evils that spring out of this sinisterly fertile soil, are the surest sign that our civilization has bred, is breeding and is perpetuating constantly increasing numbers of defectives, delinquents and dependents. My criticism, therefore, is not directed at the «failure» of philanthropy, but rather at its success.

Page 29
Statistics now available also inform us that more than a million dollars are spent annually to support the public and private institutions in the state of New York for the segregation of the feeble−minded and the epileptic. A million and a half is spent for the up−keep of state prisons, those homes of the «defective delinquent.» Insanity, which, we should remember, is to a great extent hereditary, annually drains from the state treasury no less than $11,985,695.55, and from private sources and endowments another twenty millions. When we learn further that the total number of inmates in public and private institutions in the State of New York−− in alms−houses, reformatories, schools for the blind, deaf and mute, in insane asylums, in homes for the feeble−minded and epileptic−− amounts practically to less than sixty−five thousand, an insignificant number compared to the total population, our eyes should be opened to the terrific cost to the community of this dead weight of human waste.

Organized charity is thus confronted with the problem of feeble− mindedness and mental defect. But just as the State has so far neglected the problem of mental defect until this takes the form of criminal delinquency, so the tendency of our philanthropic and charitable agencies has been to pay no attention to the problem until it has expressed itself in terms of pauperism and delinquency. Such «benevolence» is not merely ineffectual; it is positively injurious to the community and the future of the race.

Page 31
This rapid survey is enough, I hope, to indicate the manifold inadequacies inherent in present policies of philanthropy and charity. The most serious charge that can be brought against modern «benevolence» is that it encourages the perpetuation of defectives, delinquents and dependents. These are the most dangerous elements in the world community, the most devastating curse on human progress and expression. Philanthropy is a gesture characteristic of modern business lavishing upon the unfit the profits extorted from the community at large.

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Mary’s “Yes” and Margaret’s “No”

Today is the Solemnity of Mary the Mother of God.

Many non-Catholic brothers and sisters object to the title and don’t understand whence it comes. An excellent, brief essay here tells the story.

In light of our focus here these past few days, today’s Solemnity throws two very different women into stark relief: Mary, Mother of God and Margaret Sanger. A study in contrast if ever there were one.

Both women looked out upon a broken and wounded humanity. Both heard the call to action. One embraced life as the answer to healing humanity. The other embraced death as the solution.

Through her acceptance of the Archangel Gabriel’s message, Mary invited God Himself in the person of Jesus to take on human nature through her womb. Thus, the dignity of women was forever elevated in God choosing to cloak Himself with our humanity through woman. Mary chose a lifetime of scorn by others. Having her son referred to as a bastard child was an implicit condemnation of Mary as a less than virtuous woman, to put it politely. The indignity of a feeding trough as a cradle, a barn as lodging. They were chased out of their homeland. Jews going back to Egypt, setting up the second Exodus, this one for all humanity. The gifts of the Magi, God’s providence manifest through the faith of strangers, no doubt secured safe passage and sustenance in the land of their former slavery.

Mary’s acceptance of being Mother of the Messiah didn’t make her the Jewish Doris Day of the first century. Life for Mary was hard. And then she saw her son die the most excruciating death.

The lesson for us, suffering is redemptive. Jesus’ suffering redeemed us all. Mary’s suffering is a model for us. She could have had a much easier life-a home, social acceptance, economic security-all of the things Sanger would later cite as the justification for her war on life.

Mary’s reward for being the Mother of God, not merely His incubator, but fully His Mother, was not to be here on earth. She enjoys pride of place in paradise with her son.

Margaret Sanger’s approach was the converse of Mary’s. To be fair, the widespread grinding poverty that Sanger lived with and witnessed exists in small pockets in America today. Most Americans cannot imagine the poverty of which she spoke. None should begrudge her the genuine revulsion she felt staring into the face of that poverty. Such revulsion is very healthy indeed.

Then came her response. Death and nonexistence. Sex divorced from responsibility and consequence. The lie that pleasurable sex could only be had by deliberate and artificial means of thwarting the transmission of new life. The lie that suffering is meaningless, that pleasure and ease are to be sought after to the exclusion of any suffering along the way.

Suffering is not easy, but it helps us to grow. We learn from suffering, if we are open to her lessons.

Sanger’s was a life of narcissistic self-indulgence that poisoned everything it touched, the very operational definition of neurosis, which is the attempt to avoid suffering. Unrestricted pleasure slowly twists and distorts us. It removes us from human suffering by inducing us to disengage from those who suffer, ultimately causing us to objectify them. Sanger chose to scorn charity as a means of relieving the suffering of others, of healing them, of lifting them up and ameliorating poverty. She objectified not poverty, but the poor themselves. She loathed them. The result of such objectification when we do so, is that they lose their humanity in our eyes, as they did for Sanger.

Then we are free to contraceive and abort them into oblivion, all in the name of relieving their suffering, which is really to say, our own.

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