Abstinence Only Until Marriage and Faithfulness in Marriage

[HockeyMom]

That is the Bush Administration Sex Eduction Policy. Forget ABORTION. Just think about it. WHERE do you hear ANY mention of Birth Control in that - even for married couples? How do they intend to strike down Roe without striking down Griswold? If you visit any of these so called "christian" sites, they all say even Griswold is an "abomination."

To put this in perspective regarding his nomination of Alito for SCOTUS, this very closely mirrors the Catholic Church's stance on birth control which is that it is EVIL. If you are unmarried, you "cross you legs" and don't have sex AT ALL, no matter your age.

If you ARE married, if you don't screw around then you don't NEED BC. You will use Natural Family Planning, i.e, Rhythm, to SPACE your children, not to PREVENT their conception. When you are married, you WELCOME all children that "God may give you." This is precisely why the Fundies and the Catholics are now so aligned. Plus, now there is an ACTIVIST Pope in mix, who has promoted the Catholic Church LEGISLATING their religion into government policy. This is why nominating somebody like an Alito is so dangerous to our secular society. Yes, one can argue that we still have states rights, BUT they can always pass FEDERAL laws which will supersede state laws.

Just to tell you where I am coming from, I was raised a Catholic and spent 12 years in Catholic School, so I KNOW where they are coming from. I also had the misfortune to have an ectopic pg in a Catholic Hospital and nearly lost my life because the good "christian" doctors and nurses couldn't "kill a 5 week old baby" in my Fallopian tube.

Call, write to you Congresspeople to vote NO to Alito.

[Agnomen]

1. Would someone please explain to me

why are right wingers so obsessed with other people's sex lives?

[stillcool]

2. Sexual repression begets...

sexual obsession....and sexual deviation. Sick shit.

[melody]

3. Because RWs are so deviant and they don't want anyone to know

...so they try to cloud the issue by pointing at others.

[Shallah Kali]

16. they laws to make illegal that which they themselves do or want to do

Not all but many fit give evidence of fitting this catagory.

[napi21]

4. You're right about what the Catholic Church teaches, but...

MOS%T Catholics do NOT follow that teaching!

I also attended 12 years in a Catholic School, with religion class every day. I can also tell you, I don't know ONE Catholic that didn't practice some kind of BC. Most use the pill, a few used an IUD, and a few used the implant. Each of them have a different way of excusing their behavior and they all don't think they're sinning.

The ones you hear about in the daily news and in the attack ads are the very vocal ones, but I suspect a very small segment of the population.

[ShockediSay]

5. Where in God's Word (the Bible) do they get this

birth control is a sin man made false gospel?

Is it because the Papacy all of a sudden declared itself God's infallible spokesman back in the 1800's?

[napi21]

6. Believe it or not, we were taught that ANY interference with the

natural conception process was a mortal sin! The only thing that Catholics were allowed to do was abstain. They were allowed to use rythem method to prevent bearing too many children, but that's it!

Heck, we weren't even allowed to wear a boy's class ring to school if we were going steady.

I think about all this now, and I can understand why some of the vocal RW nuts believe what they do. That's what they were taught and they never questioned it.

[Agnomen]

7. The ones who never questioned it

were too dumb to question. In my Catholic high school, we questioned - and we argued. And most of us wound up disregarding the Church's stances we found lunatic. Don't notice Catholic families being larger than non-Catholic, so most of them are practicing some form of birth control, and it's probably not rhythm method, a.k.a. Vatican Roulette.

[ShockediSay]

8. Me too, I was born and raised RC but

at somewhere along the line in "released time" (religion classes for Catholic kids) I started questioning.

These days I guess I'm a Fallen Catholic, and welcome that result as I am committed to the Bible as being the Word. However, there's a lot more to the Bible than its literal wording; the deeper spiritual truths lie in the Bible's metaphors, and so I believe in faith. Anyone can argue for any result based on some literal passages of the Bible, so-called "proof texting."

Therefore I believe the Pope is no more infallible, and no less a sinner, than the rest of us mortals. God speaks not except in parables. Matthew 13:13; Mark 4:34.

And no "Pope" speaks for God.

PS: Peter, the first "Pope" according to the Roman Catholic church, was married according to the Bible. And Mary was no virgin after the birth of Christ, according to the Bible.

[Nobody]

9. I too was raised Catholic

and went the Catholic school route.

I had the best science and religion class ever, we learned about all of the existing birth control methods, how to use them, how often then\y fail, how to combine methods so you get a better effectiveness, and all of this was followed by the teacher saying in a dull, over-rehearsed voice that the church disapproved.

We learned that Rhythm Method was different from Natural Family Planning and that RM was acceptable because the effectiveness was as bad as than no protection at all and that NFP was allowed only so you could use it to become pregnant, but most people use it to prevent pregnancies. We learned how both worked (or didn't work).

NFP requires a cycle as regular as clockwork, and a lot of work. Women whose cycles aren't that regular might be successful, but shouldn't rely solely on NFP.

RM requires counting the days past the end of your period. RM just plain doesn't work.

[iverglas]

11. heh; the real question that I'd like the answer to

is where the RCers, or any other Christians, get the "gospel" that RCers, or any other Christians, are called upon to make anybody else do what their god tells them to do and punish them if they don't do it.

That's the real $64,000 question, and I have yet to see an answer.

All those rules laid down in their scriptures -- those are rules for THEM to follow, so that they save their eternal souls. They've got nothing to do with the rest of us.

Obviously, we all get to advocate whatever public policies (laws) we like, for whatever reasons we like.

But "because god says so" is NOT a reason for advocating a particular policy -- even by their own rules.

"Because I think it's wrong" is a glimmer of a beginning of a reason. But it has to be followed with a "because" -- an explanation of why it's not only "wrong" but deserving of prohibition and punishment -- that matches up with some consensus about what we all get to tell other people they may/may not do, and what we are entitled to do about it (like, put them in prison) if they do/don't do it. Not "I think it's wrong because god says so", nope.

I don't give a crap if RCers think birth control is a sin, or if fundamentalist Christians or anybody else thinks anything else is a sin. (Well, I do ... because they tend to brainwash other people into thinking it, and thus into doing things that are plainly contrary to their own interests; but that's life, sad as it may be at times.)

I just want the whole lot of them to acknowledge that they live in liberal democracies, and not in theocracies, and behave the way people who embrace democracy behave: to advocate sincerely and honestly and in good faith, to listen to what other people say with equal sincerity and honesty and good faith and respond to it in the same way, and to keep their damned noses out of things that are not their business.

My eternal soul may be their business, in the "religion" forum of life, if I decide to enter that forum and choose to listen to them; it ain't their business in the politics forum or the law forum, and if they choose to enter those forums, they can damned well behave civilly, which means dropping their foul and dishonest pretence that their god's injunctions were ever intended to be applied to me against my will.

That way lie inquisitions.

[MountainLaurel]

12. Amen

And that is one of the central reasons why I will never go to a Catholic hospital if I can help it (which becomes more difficult as they buy up more and more health care systems, and as you get outside of urban areas): I can't trust that my health will come before their dogma. In fact, I'm pretty sure that in most cases the dogma received precedence.

[musical_soul]

20. Your quote.

"I just want the whole lot of them to acknowledge that they live in liberal democracies"

I wouldn't call ourselves a liberal democracy. What is true is that the US forefathers insisted upon a separation of church and state for a reason. It's what our constitution says. No pro-theocratic person can change that.

[BoneDaddy]

18. LOL

Tell me about my friend. After attending catechism, catholic hs and a jesuit college, I have had some interesting experiences.

First of all, there was more sex happening, more drunken binges and drug use going on at my school than at most public universtities. I was even fortunate to have has several threesomes with some very intelligent, Catholic lasses. A good majority of these people came from Catholic HS and once out of view of their parents went entirely hedonistic. That is what happens. As mentioned sexual repression gives way to many self and other destructiveness.

Secondly, every catholic I know used birth control and/or still does. Totally hypocritical.

Most Catholics I know are pro-death penalty and supported GW in the war, even though the Papal office has had very strong statements about both.

A very good number of Catholic women I know who have had abortions and used birth control are, now that they are married and have children, against both.

[Scurmudgeon]

10. Kinder, gentler Catholic Church

I am a Catholic and also attended Catholic schools. We were always taught the church's position on a matter but never lectured. Believe it or not, religion class was the best course I've ever had. We learned things about sex that would never be taught in a public school, it was great.

The church has a position but it also has confession and forgiveness. They obviously expect human beings to make mistakes.

My wife and use birth control and we've never felt that guilty about it.

Also, one could argue that after abstinence after marriage is a form of birth control. Some sects of the Jewish faith believe that abstinence in a marriage is a "waste of sperm".

[Nobody]

13. Welcome to DU

Now you can say Nobody welcomed you. :)

(on edit: fixed an oops)

[newyawker99]

17. Hi Scurmudgeon!!

Welcome to DU!! :toast:

[Jamastiene]

14. Yep, they expect the impossible.

One the one hand, they talk about homosexuality being "against nature" and on the other hand they totally slap nature in the face by telling people to ignore what nature is telling their bodies to do. That just doesn't make any sense. They never make any sense. Anytime I try to understand them, I end up :banghead:. I just cannot accept their bullshit views. They are bogus.

[Donald Ian Rankin]

15. They've missed the point.

Abstaining from sex is a very good way of avoiding catching STDs and getting pregnant.

Promoting abstinence from sex is not a good way of reducing the number of people who catch STDs and get pregant unintentionally.

An awful lot of people don't seem to get the distinction.

All the evidence shows that if you tell people to abstain, they won't, but if you tell them to use condoms, they will. This is why promoting condoms is more use than promoting abstinence, not because condoms are better than abstinence if you're going to use one or the other.

[musical_soul]

19. The purpose of being against BC.

I think with the RCC, it was to make their church grow. Family growth has been needed in the past to add workers to the community and to add caregivers to the family. Today, what they are needed for is to add workers to a Capitalistic country and to expand the military. Sad. Has to be stopped.