Are We Just Wrong about Sex Today?

I like to compare today with 50 years ago. In 1962, I was fifteen. Although "the Pill" had recently been introduced, in 1960, the old strictures were still pretty much in place. You mustn't ever, ever have sex — except, of course, with your spouse. That was the essence of the strictures. It was, we were taught, the moral ideal.

Of course, there was a sizeable gap between that ideal and what actually went on. I call it the "hypocrisy gap." In 1947 the first Kinsey Report, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, came out, revealing that American men were having a surprising amount of illicit sex. In 1953, the second report was published: so were American women ... if to a lesser extent.

But read "Good news, bad news about teen sex behavior and HIV," an article from The Washington Post of July 24. Note that:

... 46 percent of U.S. high school students in 2011 reported ever having sex, compared to 54 percent in 1991. The percentage of students reporting having had four or more sex partners was 14 percent in 2011, down from 19 percent 20 years earlier.

That makes the Kinsey Reports seem prim. Think of it: almost one high-schooler in six having at least four sex partners by the time he or she dons the mortarboard and graduates.

These graphs accompanied the article:

The article tells us:

The data also showed that sexually active black students were [compared with whites and Hispanics] the most likely to use a condom in their most recent sexual encounter at 65 percent, but that is a drop from a high of 70 percent in 1999.

60 percent of black students were sexually active, and so 65 percent of that group — roughly 20 percent of all black high school students — were putting themselves at serious risk of HIV infection.

White and Hispanic kids were somewhat less likely to be having sex, but they were also slightly less likely to be using condoms, if they were sexually active, so their HIV risk factor was right up there, too.

This comes in a time when, as the article says:

Four of every 10 new HIV infections occur in people younger than 30, according to the [Centers for Disease Control]. So reducing risky sexual behavior during teenage years is key. The average age when teens begin to have sex is 16 ... .

And when :

The research suggests that black youth are benefiting from school-based education about HIV, but once they leave the school environment, gay and bisexual youth enter a high-risk environment where HIV prevalence is high. Having sex with partners who are also black, and older, poses risks and helps spread the virus.

And yet, over the past decade:

Overall, the number of U.S. high school students who have been taught about HIV and received sexual education in schools ... has declined steadily due to budget cutbacks.

So lots of kids are getting let down bigtime. Lots of them are having lots of sex. Lots of them either don't study HIV prevention in sex-ed class, or they ignore what they've been taught. Lots of them, whether black, brown, or white, or whether straight, gay, or bi, are in line for HIV infection ... and transmitting it to others.

I think the gap between the nominal ideal and what actually goes on today is far uglier than the "hypocrisy gap" of 50 years ago.

The nominal ideal is (a) if you are married, never to cheat on your spouse; ( b) if you aren't married, not to have really promiscuous sex, but to restrain yourself (at least somewhat) to "meaningful" sex; and (c) if you do have sex with other than a known-safe partner, always use a condom.

We all know what that ideal is today. We generally ignore it.

I call this gap the "rambunction gap." Its side effect: HIV/AIDS kills a whole lot of folks ... and that's major-league ugly.

The Hypocrisy Gap's Unlovely Side Effects

The hypocrisy gap of yore had some unlovely side effects, too. It was an outright sin against God to shirk the ideal, so everyone had to keep their sexual needs and feelings under wraps — women, especially, as men benefitted from the proverbial "double standard." The Bible said wives should be subordinate to their husbands, so their own sexual needs didn't count. Best if they just didn't have any sexual needs — openly, that is.

If a woman's secret sexual needs got loose at the wrong time and place, she might end up pregnant with no legal recourse to abortion. It was something she couldn't even admit to in public, being pregnant out of wedlock. In fact, the word "pregnant" wasn't allowed in polite conversation or on TV.

Teens couldn't be taught about sex in schools, in a society in which words like "penis" and "vagina" were occasions for fiery-red blushes.

Forbidden fruit such as teen sex and gay sex and oral sex and solo sexhad no place, at least nominally, in our lives.

Neither, supposedly, did divorce.

The Comparative Death Tolls of the Two Gaps

But — and this is my first main point — few died because of the hypocrisy gap. Because extracurricular sex was rigidly circumscribed, even Kinsey didn't find all that much of it — by today's standards — going on. So a disease like HIV/AIDS didn't have a chance to establish itself ... and the old venereal diseases, gonorrhea and syphilis, were already pretty well under control thanks to penicillin.

Back-alley abortions did claim some lives, as did occasional suicides owing to shame and guilt, but between the first recognition of AIDS in 1981 and today, the disease has led to over 30 million deaths. Thus, the wages of the rambunction gap.

A "Post-Christian Sexual Ethic"?

My second main point is that the nominal ideal that we pay lip service to today looks on paper like just what the doctor ordered as a candidate for a post-Christian sexual ethic. Of course, it needs to be fleshed out quite a bit from the simple way I described it above ... and I'm reading an excellent book which does just that, Just Love: A Framework for Christian Sexual Ethics, by Margaret A. Farley.

But what Farley promulgates is just an albeit fairly liberal version of the nominal sexual ethic we find today, but mainly ignore:

• Avoiding doing unjust harm to anyone, especially by treating them as sex objects.
• Insisting that sex be consensual and mutually fulfilling in relationships set up voluntarily among equal and committed adult partners.
• Requiring that sex be fruitful in some way, either reproductive or abstract.
• Maintaining that sex must always serve rather than corrupt the "social justice" needs of the community.

But any thoughtful, modern, secular person would say the same — there's not much of a specifically Christian or even broadly religious outlook here. Meanwhile, many Christians would object to her tolerance for homosexuality, sex outside marriage, abortion, birth control, and masturbation.

Which brings me to my third main point, that there's no evidence that a sexual ethic that does not grow out of putatively God-given strictures can contain the rambunction gap. In fact, the evidence we do have says just the opposite, and the banishment of old-time religion from the public square has tracked closely with the boiling over of the rambunction gap.

The "Procreative Norm"

At the core of the dispute between liberal and conservative Catholics concerning sex today is the role of procreation. Catholic doctrine has long enshrined the "procreative norm," insisting that all non-celibates who marry put openness to procreation at the very heart of their connubial lives.

Sex is good, not evil, the Church maintains ... but only when constrained by the procreative norm.

Contrast that with this paragraph from Farley's book, in which she talks of other, non-Christian philosophical currents in the Greek world in which the early Christians were founding their churches:

Gnosticism was a recurrent religious movement that influenced formulations of Christian sexual ethics for the first three centuries C.E. Some Fathers of the church taught that there were two extreme positions among gnostics — one in opposition to all sexual intercourse and the other permitting any form of sexual intercourse so long as it was not procreative. The ascription of this kind of ascetic/libertine dichotomy seems not to be accurate, but in any case, Christian thinkers tried to avoid it.

Celibacy for those called to it and, for others, married sex governed by the procreative norm — that was what the Church Fathers settled on as good and true doctrine.

It rules out the use of artificial methods of contraception, the Church has long maintained. It also rules out the Gnostics' "any form of sexual intercourse so long as it is not procreative."

So ... what goes on today, in a world with such a bodacious "rambunction gap"? We seem intent on engaging in any and every form of non-procreative sex, including but not limited to the terms of sex between married heterosexual partners.

When marriage partners use pills or condoms to avoid pregnancy, it's just one more stab to the heart of the procreative norm, conservative Catholics insist.

Farley proposes that that existing sexual ethic based on the procreative norm be updated to promulgate a new set of norms (see above).

Yet I don't see how Farley's proposal at all changes the secular normative ideal that (supposedly) rules our sexual behavior today. Most enlightened liberals, religious or secular, who have set the procreative norm conspicuously aside are already on board with Farley's replacement norms. And yet we have an ugly "rambunction gap" that is ruining countless lives via rampant rape and sexual assault (see here and here and here) and killing countless people via unchecked HIV infection.

I think we need to start reconsidering the value of the "procreative norm" as a religious and ethical tenet.

"Can Liberal Christianity Be Saved?" ...

Ross Douthat

That was the title of a column by Ross Douthat in The New York Times of Sunday, July 14. A week later it was reprinted in the parish bulletin of St. Ignatius Church, Baltimore, with pastor Bill Watters, S.J., commenting that it offers food for thought.

And it truly does.

Douthat writes from the perspective of a conservative Catholic, while as a liberal one, I generally tend to disagree with him. But the points he raises are important, and they deserve to be considered by all.

Douthat has it that liberal Christianity, Protestant-style, has slid into an abyss of secularism and shrinking support. Churchgoers in mainstream denominations — Episcopalian, Presbyterian, Methodist, Lutheran — are way down in numbers since the scurrilous sixties, when these faiths began deemphasizing the transcendant in favor of the what's-happening-now.

"The defining idea of liberal Christianity — that faith should spur social reform as well as personal conversion — has been an immensely positive force in our national life," Douthat writes. But the liberals have lost track of what people are to be personally converted to:

As the liberal Protestant scholar Gary Dorrien has pointed out, the Christianity that animated causes such as the Social Gospel and the civil rights movement was much more dogmatic than present-day liberal faith. Its leaders had a “deep grounding in Bible study, family devotions, personal prayer and worship.” They argued for progressive reform in the context of “a personal transcendent God ... the divinity of Christ, the need of personal redemption and the importance of Christian missions.”

So true.

But I still think Douthat goes too far, by identifying that sentiment with a general, undifferentiated opposition to:

... the sexual revolution, but also consumerism and materialism, multiculturalism and relativism.

Whoa! It's as if all the "evils" inherent in the progressive cultural forces of the last half century or more can be exorcised only by means of a widespread return to a more "dogmatic" faith.

So the recent Vatican crackdown against American religious women and the recent Fortnight for Freedom campaign of the American bishops can be seen as much-needed efforts to take back the night, as it were:

Few of the outraged critiques of the Vatican’s investigation of progressive nuns mentioned the fact that Rome had intervened because otherwise the orders in question were likely to disappear in a generation. Fewer still noted the consequences of this eclipse: Because progressive Catholicism has failed to inspire a new generation of sisters, Catholic hospitals across the country are passing into the hands of more bottom-line-focused administrators, with inevitable consequences for how they serve the poor.

Catholic hospitals are, of course, among the institutions that under the new "contraception mandate" that Obamacare has brought about, will have to include free access to birth control in their employees' health insurance. Fortnight for Freedom opposed that on "religious freedom" grounds. At a deeper level, it's obvious that the more hospitals are run by administrators and the fewer by sisters, the more difficult it is to see them as "religious" in the first place ... and the more they would seem to qualify as institutions needing to be included in the contraception mandate.

All these things interlock with one another: the sexual revolution ... contraception ... women's health-care rights ... religious freedom ... Vatican crackdowns and bishops' campaigns .... a more dogmatic faith.

Truly food for thought!

Whither persuadability?

This is an election year, and in past elections there has been a veneer, at least, of the candidates engaging in real "debates" in an attempt to persuade picky voters to vote for them.

Richard Nixon, on left,
and John Kennedy

In 1960, we had the first televised presidential debate, Sen. John F. Kennedy (D) versus Vice President Richard M. Nixon (R). TV viewers decided they approved more of Kennedy than Nixon, and Kennedy went on to win the election by a razor-thin margin. The state of Illinois fell narrowly into his column, giving him a win in both the popular vote and the Electoral College.

I remember that debate. It was about the issues — many of which I, as a 13-year-old, was clueless about.

Now, when we have "debates," candidates are drilled to slide off the issues whenever they don't fit into their rhetorical playbooks. The issues morph into talking points about how fine a candidate "I" am and how lousy "the other guy" is. It's campaign ads brought to life in the utterances of the candidates themselves — and it's virtually idea- and policy-free.

That's because the candidates think — and they're quite right about this — that nobody out there in TV land is persuadable. There are no rational arguments that could be brought up that would convince the voters to adopt a different point of view than the one they had going into the debate.

So watching a "debate" today is more about catching candidates in gaffes than about revising one's thinking.

Barack Obama

If I'm Barack Obama, I might wish I could persuade the unpersuaded in the electorate to vote for me because the programs I espouse for bringing down health care costs, or dealing with taxes and the budget, or coping with global warming and America's energy future are the best ones for the country.

Mitt Romney

If I'm Mitt Romney, I might hope the unpersuaded could be brought by my sensible arguments to agree with me about the need to get rid of senseless federal regulations that hamper our economic recovery.

Problem is: nobody out there is persuadable.

Nobody out there is willing to grapple with the issues in a rational way that opens the door to possible conversions in voting behavior.

Everybody out there — with the possible exception of a thin sliver of independent voters — is dug into hardened ideological trenches and won't ever budge.

And that thin sliver of independent voters and of the otherwise unpersuaded don't really matter, except in the possibly 8 or 12 "swing states" in the nation. If I'm unpersuaded in Maryland, where Obama is going to win hands down, it matters not at all whether one candidate or the other "moves the needle" for me personally in a televised "debate."

One state to the north, in Pennsylvania, "moving the needle" is indeed important, since Pennsylvania is a swing state with a lot of electoral votes at stake. The candidates desperately want to capture the independents and undecideds in Pennsylvania. Yet they have to do so while not alienating their "base." If the base stays home on election day, any gains in the middle will be for naught.

What brings the base reliably out? Not rational consideration of policy alternatives, which after all might cut against liberal or conservative shibboleths. So an Obama or a Romney needs to stick to a rhetorical script that energizes the base, while tossing out ill-defined scraps that just might sway the undecideds in the middle.

Is that any way to run an election?

The Opportunity Society

A recent Washington Post op-ed piece by the well-known economist Lawrence Summers (left), "Changing focus to inequalities in opportunity," hits an important nail on the head. What's really of more importance, he asks, equality of outcomes or equality of opportunity? Summers says the latter ought to be the focus of attention today.

Liberals have long sought outcomes equality. If some groups of people have less income or wealth than other groups, then the government ought to step in and redistribute same.

Conservatives rue redistributive government programs because they impose a drag on the economy: successful entrepreneurs are penalized by the taxes and other measures that take money from the rich to give to the not-so-rich. There is less incentive to succeed.

Whatever the rights and wrongs of that ongoing dispute, Summers says disparities of wealth and income have been increasing, not decreasing ... and that's bad. It hurts American competitiveness, among other complaints.

"It is hard to see who could disagree with the aspiration to equalize opportunity," Summers writes, "or fail to recognize the manifest inequalities in opportunity today."

If "widening inequality jeopardizes the legitimacy of our political and economic system," as progressives claim, conservatives who insist there is nothing wrong with "success on a grand scale" should likewise be alarmed. America needs as many of its citizens as possible primed at a young age for success.

If only the children on the ever-narrower top rungs of the ladder get the best preparation for success in life, the whole country is worse off. There will be less innovation, less entrepreneurship, less economic dynamism.

What's the solution? "The global track record of populist policies motivated by inequality concerns is hardly encouraging," Summers points out, and "inequality is likely to continue to rise, even with all that can responsibly be done to increase tax burdens on those with high incomes and redistribute the proceeds. Fairness-oriented measures that are high on the usual liberal agendas today "are unlikely to even hold at bay the trend toward increasing inequality." So we need to focus a lot more than we do on equality of opportunity.

But how? "The number of children not born into the top 1 percent who move into it must equal the number of children born into the top 1 percent who move out of it over their lifetimes," Summers urges. "So a serious program to promote equal opportunity must seek to enhance opportunity for those not in wealthy families and to address some of the advantages currently enjoyed by the children of the fortunate."

Yes ... but, again, how?

"By far the most important step that can be taken to enhance opportunity is strengthening public education. For the past decade we have focused on ensuring that no child is left behind. This effort must continue, but if everyone is to have a real chance for great success we must also ensure that every child in public school can learn as much and go as far as his or her talent permits."

That means, Summers says, "judging schools on measures beyond the fraction of students who exceed some minimum." We need to supplement — or rethink — No Child Left Behind.

And the nation's leading colleges and universities — Summers teaches at Harvard and is its past president — should "make the kind of focused commitment to economic diversity that they have long mounted toward racial diversity. It is unrealistic to expect that schools [like Harvard] that depend on charitable contributions will not be attentive to offspring of their supporters. Perhaps though, the custom could be established that for each 'legacy slot' room would be made for one 'opportunity slot'."

Those are good, solid, specific recommendations, but what seems most important to me is that here is a goal that liberals and conservatives ought to be able to join hands over. It is also something Catholics who want to promote social justice should be foursquare behind. If either President Obama or Mitt Romney would make it the centerpiece of his election campaign, the entire country would cheer.

Bring Us Together!

I believe the main problem we face in America in this election year is not the economy, as important as that is. It is not Obamacare, as hot-button as that issue remains. It is not the budget, or taxes, or the federal debt, though all those are important. It is, rather, that Americans stand farther apart from one another than I can ever remember. We are a deeply divided nation. We need someone or something to bring us together.

Red vs. blue. Left vs. right. Rich vs. middle class. Citizens vs. immigrants, especially illegals. Social liberals vs. traditionalists. Straights vs. gays. Big government vs. small. The prerogatives of whites vs. the aspirations of nonwhites. These are political divides that have long existed — and there is nothing inherently wrong with them, until they become so fixed and hardened in place that no one is willing to compromise for the common good.

I think the principal reason the bishops in the Catholic Church are wrong to dig in their heels over the contraception mandate portion of Obamacare is that doing so divides rather than heals. If the bishops got their way, the employees of Catholic-run institutions would not be given contraception coverage in their health plans ... though other, similar, non-sectarian workers would. It would create yet another division in America, a nation in which vast majorities of women, Catholic and non-Catholic, use some form of contraception, at some point in their lives.

The bishops' stance is emblematic of all the inflexible stances being taken today. Republicans take a pledge never to raise taxes, no matter what. Democrats in control of the Senate won't advance any bill passed by the Republican House, no matter what.

When the Supreme Court upheld Obamacare, at first liberals cheered, but the cheering died down when they realized that the deciding vote cast by Chief Justice Roberts did not uphold the rationale they favored: that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution should be interpreted broadly enough to justify the individual mandate, all by itself. Roberts instead called the penalty that those lacking health coverage must pay a "tax," which he said was within Congress's legitimate power to levy. Conservatives were unhappy at Roberts's side-switching to the extent that they are now even more earnestly pledging to do the impossible: repeal Obamacare.

Both sides are being ridiculous.

The individual mandate, which applies to anyone who lacks health insurance, is a prod to those who are in good health and have few doctor bills, who would otherwise be just as happy not to buy insurance, and who don't get insurance from their employer. They must now buy it on a state-run exchange or pay ... a tax. The upshot will be that their premiums will pour into the insurance fund that pays the medical bills of the ill and formerly uninsurable. It's an idea that was originally put forth by conservatives who wished to block liberals' efforts to enact a single-payer healthcare system, sometimes called "Medicare for everybody."

When Mitt Romney was governor of Massachusetts, he enacted an individual mandate at the state level. It was at that time acceptable in conservative circles to do that.

That was then. This is now.

When true believers hold so fast to principle that we all end up being driven further apart, rather than brought together, I say that principle has to yield. But that's not what's happening today.

In my opinion, President Obama has been notably flexible during his presidency. He has not been the "socialist" his opponents claim ... far from it. For example, he changed the original contraception mandate to allow the cost of that coverage to be borne by insurers themselves, rather than by the Church. Though he has temporarily blocked the Keystone XL pipeline, he has allowed oil exploration in Alaska's Chukchi and Beaufort seas. At times, it is true, he has moved in a decidedly progressive direction, rather than a conservative one, as when he came out in favor of gay marriage. But all in all, he has tried to strike a balance.

What does he get for it? Increased intransigence on the right.

We need to get the federal deficit under control, no? But Republicans won't raise income tax rates. So trimming the deficit would have to be done by expenditure cuts ... possibly in addition to vague suggestions about "tax reform" that would (if they could be enacted) eliminate certain tax deductions. Forced expenditure cuts across the board are due to happen this coming January 1, as is the end of the "Bush tax cuts." No one wants us to go over that fiscal "cliff" — it would boost taxes on the middle class, which Democrats hate, while cutting military outlays, which Republicans hate — but no one is putting forth credible alternatives.

Again, both sides are being ridiculous.

The Right Wing

But I believe the right wing, both religious and secular, is being more ridiculous than the left.

When Obama won in 2008 by a large margin over Senator John McCain, as a liberal I began licking my chops. My party controlled not only the White House but also both the Senate and the House — the Senate by virtue of a 60-vote supermajority. In his first year as president, Obama sent to Capitol Hill his Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) ... and in town meetings all over, people came out of the woodwork to call it "socialist medicine." The Tea Party was born. Obama likewise supported, if tepidly, a House-passed measure to set up a "cap and trade" system for carbon emissions, the prime mover in global warming.

Then Senator Edward Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, died, and a special election saw Scott Brown, a moderate Republican, take his seat. The insuperable 60 votes the Democrats could muster to overcome a filibuster had become 59. It became impossible to get "cap and trade" — another regulatory mechanism, once favored by conservatives, that they have now disavowed — through the Senate. PPACA was passed, without a single GOP vote, only by some fancy legislative footwork in the Senate — and Republicans immediately starting working to get it declared unconstitutional.

I'd be wrong about the GOP being the more intransigent of the two parties if it weren't the case that both the individual mandate and cap and trade weren't originally conservatives' own policy suggestions.

But never mind. The overarching point is that everyone has dug ideological trenches and is doing nothing but lobbing mortars back and forth. This has got to stop. And it won't stop until some real grownups step forth and say it must. How about you, President Obama? How about you, Mitt Romney? How about you, Catholic bishops?

Please ... bring us together!

Fidelity Oaths for Catholic Sunday School Teachers?

"Arlington Diocese parishioners question need for fidelity oath," says the headline of a story on the front page of a recent Washington Post.

Arlington, Virginia, sits opposite Washington, DC, across the Potomac River. The Catholic Diocese of Arlington is headed by Bishop Paul S. Loverde. According to the news story, the diocese has begun a policy of requiring

... all teachers in the Arlington Catholic Diocese to submit “of will and intellect” to all of the teachings of church leaders.

Specifically, all teachers in Catholic Sunday and parochial schools in the diocese must now take a "fidelity oath," in front of a priest, in which they

... commit to “believe everything” the bishops characterize as divinely revealed, and Arlington’s top doctrine official said it would include things like the bishops’ recent campaign against a White House mandate that most employers offer contraception coverage. Critics consider the mandate a violation of religious freedom. 

I question the need for fidelity oaths. So do Kathleen Riley, left, and Alison Carroll ...

... who have resigned as teachers at St. Ann's Parish Sunday School.

"As a fifth-generation Catholic who went to a Catholic school and grew up to teach in one," the article says, "Riley feels the faith deeply woven through her." She felt called by the Holy Spirit to become a Sunday School teacher. But when she recently received a letter from the diocese saying she had to take a fidelity oath, the Holy Spirit then moved her to refuse.

My reaction is: Why is this happening? Why did this diocese, like several others around the country, decide to make their teachers take fidelity oaths? The diocese has presented no evidence that these oaths are necessary. Kathleen Riley says, according to the story, that "her beliefs on the male-only priesthood and contraception put her at odds with leaders of her church," but there is no tangible suggestion that her personal beliefs interfere in any way with what she teaches in Sunday School. Unless and until there is credible evidence to that effect, I think the fidelity oaths are a step too far on the part of the diocese.

Fortnight for Freedom, Day 14

Lady Liberty

At last! This is the final installment in my marathon 14-day challenge to the spirit and letter of Fortnight for Freedom, the current U.S. bishops' campaign — set to end tomorrow on the Fourth of July — against the "contraception mandate" being imposed by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as part of Obamacare.

The prelates claim that Catholics' "religious freedom" is under attack, since requiring Catholic-run hospitals and other institutions to offer employee health-benefit plans that cover contraceptives violates the Catholic Church's teaching that the use of condoms, birth-control pills, etc. is immoral.

I have proposed, contrariwise, that the Church re-examine its teaching, and indeed ought to develop a new framework for Christian sexual ethics that takes into account the fact that 98 percent of sexually active Catholic women not desiring pregnancy have used artificial means of birth control, as a Guttmacher Institute study I cited in an earlier post shows.

Many Catholics will say the bishops' cry for religious freedom makes sense to them regardless. Yes, many folks will say, by all means let us as a Church update our views on sexual morality. Meanwhile, though, the contraception mandate is an insult to our freedom to practice our Catholic religion as presently defined by the Church and its hierarchy.

I tried to show in my last post, however, that F4F by its very nature introduces a contradiction. Since Vatican II, the Church hierarchy has officially adhered to the Constitution on Religious Freedom, from 1965, which insists the "private consciences" of non-Catholics must always be honored, even where Catholics are in the majority — as they typically are in the ranks of employees of Catholic-run hospitals, charities, and universities. My claim is that the bishops' expectation that the health plans of (minority) non-Catholics in the employ of such organizations not be mandated to cover contraceptives violates those employees' "private conscience" rights to make up their own minds about using birth control or not.

For that matter, I'd say it violates the "private conscience" rights of Catholic employees, too. Do the bishops really want us to go back to the days when the supposed "objective truth" of their teaching could be imposed on lay Catholics whose private consciences might in fact dictate otherwise?

I sincerely hope not.

I believe that including contraception (and sterilization and abortion) coverage in an employee health plan does not itself compromise the Church. It simply creates a "money tap." That money tap is turned on, though, only when, as, and if a person's "private conscience" so dictates. And that's entirely fine. In a pluralistic democracy, under the rule of secular law, it's exactly what our Church's Constitution on Religious Freedom envisions.

Happy Fourth of July!

Fortnight for Freedom, Day 13

The opening Mass for the U. S. bishops Fortnight
for Freedom at the Basilica of the
National Shrine of the Assumption
of the Blessed Virgin Mary in Baltimore.

OK, I'm definitely finding out how hard it is to write something of interest every day for 14 days, which is the span of Fortnight for Freedom, a campaign to preserve "religious freedom" for Catholics in America. Our bishops say that's a thing which is entirely right and good. I say the whole campaign's a ploy to keep Catholic-run institutions' women employees from getting Obamacare-mandated insurance coverage for contraceptives — and that's bad.

Desperate for a topic for today, Day 13 of the campaign, I turned to The National Catholic Reporter, a Catholic news outlet that sits, as conservative pundit George Weigel puts it, "on the port side of the Barque of Peter." I'm on the port side, too, in case you can't tell.

I immediately found, at NCR, "Fortnight for Freedom based on outdated theology," a commentary by Father Edward J. Ruetz. The Second Vatican Council's 1965 Constitution on Religious Freedom, says Ruetz, established a conception of religious freedom that put paid to an earlier "double standard," under which there had been one approach to religious freedom taken by the Church when Catholics were in the minority and a different, more autocratic one in situations where Catholics outnumbered non-Catholics. Post-Vatican II, a "new straightforwardness" made Catholic concepts of religious freedom uniform, whatever the relative numbers of Catholics and non-Catholics in a country or an organization.

"Yet this year," Fr. Ruetz says, "when the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops decided to reject the Health and Human Services mandate-compromise to have insurance companies pay for free contraceptives and sterilizations for all women under the health insurance policies of Catholic hospitals, universities and social agencies, they bypassed the 'new straightforwardness' of the 1965 Constitution to return to the old 'double standard' of the 500 years of the Inquisition and the 300 years of the Holy Office theology (1123-1965)."

We Catholics are a minority here in America. We don't set the rules. The contraception mandate has been painted with a broad, all-inclusive brush. Yet the bishops reject that, Fr. Ruetz says, and are insisting that all employees, non-Catholic and Catholic alike, who work for Catholic-run institutions must cede their rights to make yes-or-no contraception choices according to their own "private consciences." Instead, all must bow before the supposed "objective truth" of Catholic teaching about the immorality of contraception.

Fr. Ruetz says that this represents a return to the old double standard, given that Catholic employees are in the majority at the institutions in question. The "private conscience" rights of the minority non-Catholics at these workplaces would be trampled upon, if the bishops got their way — violating the letter and spirit of Vatican II's Constitution on Religious Freedom. (And, I would add, the "private conscience" rights of employees who are in fact Catholics would likewise be trampled on, since up to 98 percent of Catholic women use or have used birth control.)

Here is yet another reason why we Catholics who are truly concerned about religious freedom, and also about the rights of "private conscience," ought to object mightily to Fortnight for Freedom.

Fortnight for Freedom, Day 12

In this Sunday's Washington Post there's an opinion piece, "Breaking the cycle of sexual assault in the military," by Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip “Doonesbury,” and Loree Sutton, a psychiatrist and retired Army brigadier general, that says an estimated 19,000 rapes and sexual assaults take place in the armed services each year. They are often preceded by incidents of harassment, bullying, and scapegoating by the rapist or assaulter. Then, many rapes and assaults go unreported because the victims don't trust that they can get justice. Sometimes the rapist is a buddy of the victim's ranking superior; sometimes he in fact is the victim's superior.

The opinion piece goes on to call for a new Special Victims Unit system for handling these cases, which I'm sure is a good idea. But my thought is: why in the world are all these rapes and assaults happening in the first place?

Women in the
armed services
are under grave threat of
rape or sexual assault.

Some say that sex crimes are inevitable in these numbers when young men and women are thrown together in the same military units. Allowing women into the armed services is what's putatively to blame.

To an extent, I actually agree. Empowering women, whether in the uniformed services or in society in general, has had huge ripple effects, some of them beautiful and some ugly. This effect is one of the ugly ones.

In this series in which I am questioning the validity of the U.S. bishops' present Fortnight for Freedom campaign, I've tried to underscore the idea that F4F is a not-so-stealthy campaign against women's health-care rights.

The bishops say no, of course it isn't. It is a cry for religious freedom. But Obamacare's "contraception mandate" is the principal bone they've picked, and were they somehow to get the government to roll back the mandate, the losers would be women who work for Catholic-run institutions, wish to avoid becoming pregnant, and can't afford to pay for contraceptives on their own.

I think the bishops have their heads in the sand on the status of women today. I believe they see stuff like the 19,000 rapes/assaults and think the solution is to turn back the clock — not necessarily to an all-male armed forces, but to a world in which the sexual strictures of a century ago are back in force.

I think that can never happen. One, you can never turn back the clock. And two, even if you could, it couldn't be done without disempowering women and returning them to the status of (say) 1912.

Women today are not interested in turning back the clock. That means, I think, that we need a new sexual ethics, a new framework for sexual morality. Catholic. Protestant. Jewish. Secular. Whatever. For men. For women. For everybody.

That new sexual ethos can't happen, I believe, until reactionaries such as most of today's crop of Catholic bishops begin to see that they're throwing their weight in exactly the wrong direction.