carnivaloftherandom:

amaditalks:

“During his lecture, Archbishop Dolan criticized people who postponed conception with “chemicals and latex,” calling them part of the “culture of death.”

Culture of Death.

This Roman Catholic archbishop has suggested that those who use contraceptives are a part of a culture of death even though we know, as noted elsewhere in this article that when people don’t use contraceptives and have to deal with an unintended pregnancy they are:

“more likely to be depressed and to smoke, drink and delay or skip prenatal care, potentially harming fetuses and putting babies at increased risk of being born prematurely and having low birth weight.”

Controlling our fertility and planning our pregnancies improves our health and that of the children we do have. Controlling our fertility and planning our pregnancies saves lives.

Yesterday, I was chatting with @hegemommy about the difficulty we face when we let anti-choicers set the terms, and when the media presents their dogma — and make no mistake, it’s dogma, believed as religiously as their belief in Jesus — as unvarnished fact, talking about “aborted babies” and whatnot.

Here, we have another stunning example of that. The Catholic Church is griping because they have employees whose work is entirely secular, but they think that they should be exempt from federal law regarding secular employees. There’s an easy way to do that: don’t have secular employees. Period. So long as you do, you follow the law. Period. You don’t like that, we get it.

But where the hell is the New York Times, the alleged “paper of record” getting off printing this religious claptrap in this article? We get that Catholic teaching is anti-contraceptives. What is the value in repeating this archbishop’s hateful, intolerant and blatantly and demonstrably false religious opinion? This isn’t a religious issue (nobody is telling the church what dogma to hold), this is a medical issue. This isn’t a religious article, this is an article about new federal regulations.

Why is this being spun as a “women and faith” article? Women of faith have spoken. They use contraceptives. 98% of Catholics use contraceptives that their church bans. This is no longer a controversy of faith. By giving these religious objections the weight of national news and spreading the fact-deficient screeding of religious leaders who can’t even command their own flock to follow their arcane and punitive rules no one is served. All this does is create false controversy over a matter that by the numbers and by the law is settled.

Maybe that sells papers, but I doubt it. What it absolutely does do is attempt to muddy waters that for most of America are actually crystal clear, as are our consciences. If the men in dresses who run the Catholic church can’t figure that out, that’s their lookout, not ours, and there’s no reason why the media should be trying to foist all of the bishops’ and archbishops’ angst off on the rest of us.

NYT, I see you’re continuing w/ blatantly anti-woman/uteri bias. Just like giving space to people making excuses for gang-raping a child.

These issues are important and deserve to be passed along. Religion should not be at the helm of this debate.