Morally Bankrupt

That's the conclusion to which I arrive when I read some justifications of the Roman Catholic Church's position against contraception...

Father Landry also gives sermons on contraception, something very few priests do. He says he relies on Pope John Paul II’s argument against contraception, which he summarizes. “That God has made us fundamentally for love,” Father Landry said, “and that marriage is supposed to help us to love for real. In order for that to happen, we need to totally give ourselves over to someone else in love, and receive the other’s total self in love.

“What happens in the use of contraception, rather than embracing us totally as God made the other, with the masculine capacity to become a dad, or the feminine capacity to become a mom, we reject that paternal and maternal leaning.”

Father Landry argues that contraception can be the gateway to exploitation: “When that petition is made for contraception, it’s going to make pleasure the point of the act, and any time pleasure becomes the point rather than the fruit of the act, the other person becomes the means to that end. And we’re actually going to hurt the people we love.”

Many non-Catholics — and many Catholics — see the church’s teaching on contraception as cruel toward women. But Father Landry says it’s women who intuitively get how divorcing sex from procreation allows men to use them; in his experience, it is almost always the woman who moves a couple toward abandoning artificial contraception. 

 It may seem needless to point this out on a Buddhist blog, but the idea that human sexuality can be reduced to the arrangement of sexual organs is the ultimate in objectification of humans.  Even if you subscribed to the notion of a deity, "God made us" in such a way as to be able to reason and make judgements about when conception should be achieved, and if the good Father doesn't understand that pleasure is a point of the act then he has no business pronouncing on such matters, especially given the moral turpitude of his organization in response to its physical and sexual abuse of the young.

That, as they've recently done, they would try to legislate this morally deficient position into our policy is outrageous.