'Little Sisters of the Poor' Need an Education In Artificial Birth Control

It appears the Little Sisters of the Poor - who run nursing homes here in Colorado and elsewhere- have now taken their case to the Supreme Court. What is this case? Evidently the goodly nuns have trouble with providing birth control (under the Obamacare mandate), even to secular employees who are not part of the Vatican's dogma axis and disavow its archaic belief system. So these nuns believe the mandate covers these secular employees as well, and  "forces them to violate their beliefs" to even sign a simple paper that would empower the Sisters' insurer to provide it. Are you kidding me? Seriously?

It seems to me the Little Sisters sorely need an education on the birth control - magisterium based doctrine - for CATHOLICS. In particular, that NO one is violating their cherished beliefs or dogmas if artificial contraception is provided to secular employees not bound to Catholic dogma.. All we are asking is for them to allow these workers to have the same health care benefits of other workers in the public domain.  It's called equal treatment under the law.

Hence, the only thing being “taken away” here is the Church employer’s ability to take away secular employees’ rights to the same standard of health care as all other secular employees’ in the public or private sphere.  The Church, meanwhile, is quite free to morally legislate its own members’ do’s and don’ts to its heart’s content. NO one is taking away that right. 

If the Church sees fit to deny its own members’ as employees access to birth control or the morning after pill, or abortion, then fine. It is well within its purview. But it can’t extrapolate that to secular employees and retain tax-free status as a peculiarly religious institution.  Here's another reason this applies: Unknown to many Catholic purists, many secular hospitals have been taken over by Catholic ones. Their original secular workers (who had benefits under those private secular hospitals ) now see them threatened or removed  because of antiquated Church dogmas invoked after the corporate takeover.

Catholic employers – whether in schools or hospitals or whatever – are quite free to set whatever moral standards they wish for their OWN Church members who are employed in such venues. What they are not free to do is to set those standards for secular employees! Not if they wish to continue to receive  tax-free status from the federal state. As for violating the First and Fifth Amendments, that’s totally preposterous: there is no proscription against freedom of speech – they can spout whatever medieval nonsense that they desire. Nor is there proscription against being a witness against oneself.

One of the ignorant First Amendment arguments usually employed is that: "No one is denying the secular women access to contraception or abortion if they want it, they just don't wish to be forced to pay for drugs that violate their religious beliefs".   

The point is the "drugs" aren't doing that because they're not being used by the Catholic women who are free to follow their own mores.  They're being used by secular workers as part of the coverage promised under the ACA  health insurance plan!  And, moreover, those drugs - such as contraceptives - may well be needed for more than birth prevention (though that ought to be important enough - given too many mouths to feed can tilt a family over to food stamps, welfare).   But as Sandra Fluke noted in her testimony in March last year: e.g. 

Contraceptives can also be used to treat ovarian cysts. If this is not done, the contraceptives denied, then an ovary may need to be surgically removed- and health care costs explode beyond what they would have been.  In addition contraception is critical to limiting severe health problems such as miscarriage or stroke (which could ensue if a woman becomes pregnant).  Moreover, once one uses contraceptives then they must be taken regularly or else they cease to work.

Thus, female employees of the Little Sisters' nursing homes could be in really serious trouble if suddenly denied their contraceptive care.

Meanwhile, the Little Sisters insist they are  not imposing their faith on anyone only trying to do God's holy will and service to others (the infirm elderly in their nursing homes) but don't wish secular laws imposed which make them violate their precepts.

As for the claim of “not imposing their faith on anyone”, I am afraid the Little Sisters need to take a semantics or logic course, preferably both.  If indeed, they’re all about preventing SECULAR employees – say atheists like me – from accessing artificial  birth control- then they are indeed imposing their faith.  Besides - what if the tables were turned? How would Catholic purists and dogmatists react if a Hindu-run corporation took over a Catholic Hospital? Would such a happenstance be called a "forced conversion" or  "violation of religious liberty"? OR - would it be considered a business transaction only? Also, if the newly merged entity produced subsidiary corporations  what religious principles would rightly apply? Catholic blowhards and those like the Little Sisters of the Poor need to think such questions through before they get all sanctimonious on us.

Now, if instead they confined their faux natural law moralism to Catholic employees only, there’d be no objection. “Imposing one’s faith” means taking away rights of secular citizens– based on invoking one’s own imagined religious principles.  In other words, extrapolating their “principles” beyond their proper moral domain to take away the rights of citizens who aren’t part of that domain other than in an employee capacity.

While we’re at it, let’s take a closer look at some consequences of these principles which they profess to hold so dear. Biologist Elizabeth A. Daugherty  has asked ('The Lessons of Zoology'. in Contraception and Holiness, p. 110):

"Why do we call secondary the ends of the sexual act which have been accorded in fullness to us, and why do we call primary the end which we share with the lower animals?"

She's referring to the fact that the core of Pius XI's  original encyclical Casti Connubii was that the "sin" of artificial contraception inhered in making primary a sexual aspect that in reality is only "secondary". According to that esteemed pontiff:

"Since therefore the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature."

 
Which is irredeemable codswallop. As Daugherty notes in her chapter (op. cit.)  what the pontiff and his ilk really sought to do is reduce humans to the state of lower animals, at the behest of their "natural" reproductive cycles. In this sense, unlike the lower animals, humans have the intellectual capacity and sense of novelty to introduce a vast variety of pleasure-play into their sex relations. They aren't yoked to  primitive instincts to simply mount and hump at specific times. As Daugherty notes (pp. 96- 97):

"After ovulation, all mammalian females are under the influence of progesterone from the corpus luteum. This is a period of rapidly declining estrogenic activity which ends the sexual receptivity of the lower mammalian female, whether or not fertilization occurs.

But (in humans) marital relations continue during this progesterone -dominated period before the abrupt onset of menstruation. It is the period of lowest estrogenic activity and the progesterone-dominated period after ovulation which are known as the 'safe period' for marital relations."

This then, is what the Catholics'  “rhythm method” (of  Ogino-Kaus)  seeks to do: establish the "safe period" for a particular woman and then ordain that this is the time to safely have sexual relations if one wishes to not have any kids. The trouble is, it requires meticulous temperature taking at various times during a cycle to establish where that safe period begins and ends, and often this will be for no more than 10 days or so in a given month. Presumably, the couple is quite happy to do without sex the other two thirds of the time!

Thus, the moralizers of the Vatican and their moral accomplices (such as these Little Sisters)  are actually demanding that married couples act UNNATURALLY, since as Daugherty observes (ibid.):

"Humans are free from physiologically determined sexual desires so we possess a more or less permanent sexuality from adolescence to old age."

Indeed! But the Church and its robed minions (and now evidently younger acolytes in colleges)  seek to dictate that despite being sexual or having sexual desires from adolescence until old age, her members are only free to discharge those desires under certain limited times and limited conditions. For example, teens who have such exploding desires on account of their hormones are warned they cannot even masturbate to relieve themselves because those organs are only allowed to morally function in the state of marriage. Then....once married, the couple is informed they may gratify their mutual sexual desires only if they are open to conception....that is, unless they use the rhythm method.  Anyone not see a pattern here?

But once more, my gripe is not so much the Vatican roping  in its own flock’s gonads, but seeking to rope in the gonads of secular employees working at their schools, hospitals etc. (And please don’t anyone tell me “They can get another job!” – NO, not in this low aggregate demand, high unemployment environment. That’s like telling a guy who’s been denied food stamps (and on his last legs)  to go jump off a roof, then he won’t need them!) Besides, would Catholics tell Catholic employees to just "get another job" if their hospital was taken over by Hindu owners? I doubt it!

Julian Pleasants has observed (op. cit., p. 88) the Vatican has always been hostage to:

"Aristotelian modes of thought which tend to fix behaviors within very limited and fixed definitions and categories."

Thus, the Church once believed it "natural" that some men be enslaved because they were “unable to manage their own affairs”  (ibid.)So why be surprised when the same Church seeks to ordain all her members abide by a sexuality more fitting of lower primates?   However, be that as it may, we MUST express surprise (and outrage ) when the Church and its enablers like the Little Sisters seek to impose that same sexuality on secularists. That is simply unacceptable.

The abiding question for me is:  Why have these nuns not been properly educated on the matter of artificial birth control? And while we’re at it, one ought to remind them that the birth control proscription has never been stated ex Cathedra so it’s not infallible. It is proposed under the Magisterium or Teaching Office. As one honest padre once confided to me: "You are free to use your own conscience in this regard, since the teaching isn't binding."

 Perhaps the best solution to the Little Sisters'  moral dilemma is one proposed last week by a Denver Post writer: Hire only physically fit elders for the nursing homes, who no longer have need for birth control. It would solve two problems: provide jobs for seniors who are money tight and may need more, and obviate the need to continue with these court cases.

It's "win - win"!

'Fellowship of Catholic University Students' (FOCUS) Is Out to Lunch on ACA

Would one of the FOCUS women rather be emulating this secular teacher at a Catholic HS, or accepting an unplanned pregnancy because of a rat bastard doing a "roofie-rape"? Inquiring minds want to know!

According to the news in yesterday’s  Denver Post (‘Suit Filed Over Birth Control’ p. 2A), a Catholic college group (FOCUS – or the Fellowship of Catholic University Students)  plans to challenge  the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act health coverage mandate on the basis of its “forcing religious employers to offer sterilization and contraceptive services, and abortion-inducing drugs for employees.”

 

Mouthpiece Mike Norton of the “Alliance Defending Freedom” (a fulsome name if ever there was one) bloviated yesterday that:

 

“Faith-based organizations should be free to live and operate according to the faith they teach and espouse.”

 

Adding:

“If the government can fine Christian ministries out of existence for keeping their faith there is no limit to what freedom they can take away.”

Of course, this is absolute nonsense. There is no attempt whatsoever to “fine Christian ministries out of existence” – only to have them adhere to the standards of all other employers in the public sphere. If then the Catholic Church operates as an employer in the public sphere – never mind it’s a religious institution – then it’s bound to adhere to public standards pertaining to the Affordable Care Act, which all other public employers at other institutions, corporations are also bound to accept.

Hence, the only thing being “taken away” here is the Church employer’s ability to take away secular employees’ rights to the same standard of health care as all other secular employees’ in the public or private sphere.  The Church, meanwhile, is quite free to morally legislate its own members’ do’s and don’ts to its heart’s content. NO one is taking away that right. 


If the Church sees fit to deny its own members’ as employees access to birth control or the morning after pill, or abortion, then fine. It is well within its purview. But it can’t extrapolate that to secular employees and retain tax-free status as a peculiarly religious institution.  Here's another reason this applies: Unknown to many Catholic purists, many secular hospitals have been taken over by Catholic ones. Their original secular workers who had benefits under those private secular hospitals now see them threatened because of antiquated Church dogmas invoked after the corporate takeover.

According to the Post (ibid.):

“The legal group filed a lawsuit in Denver district court on behalf of the Fellowship of Catholic University Students- a non-profit organization founded in 1998.”

Here's some more of the folderol in their statement(ibid.):

“The (ACA) mandate violates the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, as well as the First and Fifth Amendments to the Constitution.”

Which, again, is total bollocks. There is no such violation because Catholic employers – whether in schools or hospitals or whatever – are quite free to set whatever moral standards they wish for their OWN Church members who are employed in such venues. What they are not free to do is to set those standards for secular employees! Not if they wish to continue to receive  tax-free status from the federal state. As for violating the First and Fifth Amendments, that’s totally preposterous: there is no proscription against freedom of speech – they can spout whatever medieval nonsense that they desire. Nor is there proscription against being a witness against oneself.

 

One of the ignorant First Amendment arguments usually employed is that: "No one is denying the secular women access to contraception or abortion if they want it, they just don't wish to be forced to pay for drugs that violate their religious beliefs".   The point is the "drugs" aren't doing that because they're not being used by the Catholic women who are free to follow their own mores.  They're being used by secular workers as part of the coverage promised under the ACA  health insurance plan!  And, moreover, those drugs - such as contraceptives - may well be needed for more than birth prevention (though that ought to be important enough - given too many mouths to feed can tilt a family over to food stamps, welfare).   But as Sandra Fluke noted in her testimony in March last year: e.g. 

Contraceptives can be used to treat ovarian cysts. If this is not done, the contraceptives denied, then an ovary may need to be surgically removed- and health care costs explode beyond what they would have been.

Contraceptives are also key in limiting severe health problems - such as miscarriage or stroke - which could ensue if a woman becomes pregnant. Moreover, once one commences use of  contraceptives then they need to be taken regularly or they don't work - an educational point that had to be reinforced on dimwit Repukes during their 2012 'war against women'.

 

Meanwhile, we also behold this drivel from John Zimmer – FOCUS VP -  that:

“FOCUS sincere religious beliefs forbid it from providing insurance coverage that includes birth control for its employees, it says: ‘ As Catholics we do not impose our faith on anyone but propose to others the life-changing power of God’s love.”

 

But as I noted in my recent book (‘Beyond Atheism, Beyond God’), humans with their limited neural capacity aren’t in any remote position to define or know “God” since the noun (G-o-d) isn’t the same as the entity. Since the entity is supposedly “infinite” then no finite brain can comprehend it. The best it can do is forge approximate god-concepts which are relative, limited and subjective.  Hence the term “God’s love” is totally meaningless other than on a subjective level. It’s vacuous verbiage because if one can’t comprehend “God” one surely can’t comprehend any “love” derived therefrom.  And by extension one is proposing to others nothing more than one’s own ideations as internally subjective lingo.  As Philosopher Joseph Campbell put it (The Power of Myth, p. 56):

 

“ 'God’ is an ambiguous word in our language because it appears to refer to something that is known..”

 

All of which reinforces the point that when people use the word G-o-d they’re not talking or writing about an actual entity but a limited construct or ideation configured as a noun, which we call a God concept. People BELIEVE they are referencing the real entity by use of the noun but they are deluding themselves. It would be analogous to me going to a restaurant – seeing a ‘steak’ picture on the menu – then tearing the image out, consuming it and asserting I’d eaten a ‘steak’.  Any such pretense would ordinarily earn one a fast trip to the loony bin.

 

As for the claim of “not imposing their faith on anyone”, I am afraid FOCUS’ collegians need to take a semantics or logic course, preferably both.  If indeed, they’re all about preventing SECULAR employees – say atheists like me – from accessing artificial  birth control- then they are indeed imposing their faith.  Besides - what if the tables were turned? How would Catholic purists and dogmatists react if a Hindu-run corporation took over a Catholic Hospital? Would such a happenstance be called a "forced conversion" or  "violation of religious liberty"? OR - would it be considered a business transaction only? Also, if the newly merged entity produced subsidiary corporations - what religious principles would rightly apply? Catholic blowhards and tools like FOCUS need to think such questions through before they get all sanctimonious on us.

 

Now, if instead they confined their natural law moralism to Catholic employees only, there’d be no objection. “Imposing one’s faith” means taking away rights of secular citizens– based on invoking one’s own imagined religious principles.  In other words, extrapolating their “principles” beyond their proper moral domain to take away the rights of citizens who aren’t part of that domain other than in an employee capacity.

 

While we’re at it, let’s take a closer look at these principles which they profess to hold so dear. Biologist Elizabeth A. Daugherty  has asked ('The Lessons of Zoology'. in Contraception and Holiness, p. 110):

"Why do we call secondary the ends of the sexual act which have been accorded in fullness to us, and why do we call primary the end which we share with the lower animals?"

She's referring to the fact that the core of Pius XI's  original encyclical Casti Connubii was that the "sin" of artificial contraception inhered in making primary a sexual aspect that in reality is only "secondary". According to that pontiff:

"Since therefore the conjugal act is destined primarily by nature for the begetting of children, those who in exercising it deliberately frustrate its natural power and purpose sin against nature."

Which is irredeemable codswallop. As Daugherty notes in her chapter (op. cit.)  what the pontiff and his ilk really sought to do is reduce humans to the state of lower animals, at the behest of their "natural" reproductive cycles. In this sense, unlike the lower animals, humans have the intellectual capacity and sense of novelty to introduce a vast variety of pleasure-play into their sex relations. They aren't yoked to  primitive instincts to simply mount and hump at specific times. As Daugherty notes (pp. 96- 97):

"After ovulation, all mammalian females are under the influence of progesterone from the corpus luteum. This is a period of rapidly declining estrogenic activity which ends the sexual receptivity of the lower mammalian female, whether or not fertilization occurs.
 

But (in humans) marital relations continue during this progesterone -dominated period before the abrupt onset of menstruation. It is the period of lowest estrogenic activity and the progesterone-dominated period after ovulation which are known as the 'safe period' for marital relations."

This then, is what the Catholics'  “rhythm method” (of  Ogino-Kaus)  seeks to do: establish the "safe period" for a particular woman and then ordain that this is the time to safely have sexual relations if one wishes to not have any kids. The trouble is, it requires meticulous temperature taking at various times during a cycle to establish where that safe period begins and ends, and often this will be for no more than 10 days or so in a given month. Presumably, the couple is quite happy to do without sex the other two thirds of the time!

Thus, the moralizers of the Vatican are actually demanding that married couples act UNNATURALLY, since as Daugherty observes (ibid.):

"Humans are free from physiologically determined sexual desires so we possess a more or less permanent sexuality from adolescence to old age."

Indeed! But the Church and its robed minions (and now evidently younger acolytes in colleges)  seek to dictate that despite being sexual or having sexual desires from adolescence until old age, her members are only free to discharge those desires under certain limited times and limited conditions. For example, teens who have such exploding desires on account of their hormones are warned they cannot even masturbate to relieve themselves because those organs are only allowed to morally function in the state of marriage. Then....once married, the couple is informed they may gratify their mutual sexual desires only if they are open to conception....that is, unless they use the rhythm method.  Anyone not see a pattern here?

 

But once more, my gripe is not so much the Vatican roping  in its own flock’s gonads, but seeking to rope in the gonads of secular employees working at their schools, hospitals etc. (And please don’t anyone tell me “They can get another job!” – NO, not in this low aggregate demand, high unemployment environment. That’s like telling a guy who’s been denied food stamps (and on his last legs)  to go jump off a roof, then he won’t need them!) Besides, would Catholics tell Catholic employees to just "get another job" if their hospital was taken over by Hindu owners? I doubt it!
 

Julian Pleasants has observed (op. cit., p. 88) the Vatican has always been hostage to:

 

"Aristotelian modes of thought which tend to fix behaviors within very limited and fixed definitions and categories."

Thus, the Church once believed it "natural" that some men be enslaved because they were “unable to manage their own affairs”  (ibid.)So why be surprised when the same Church seeks to ordain all her members abide by a sexuality more fitting of lower primates?   However, be that as it may, we MUST express surprise (and outrage ) when the Church and its enablers like FOCUS seek to impose that same sexuality on secularists. That is simply unacceptable.

 

The abiding question for me is: Why would 21^st century college students, embedded in a bunch like FOCUS,  be yoked  to Aristotelian modes of thought they seek to impose on their more enlightened peers or secularists? Maybe they are jealous they themselves never broke free of their mental chains to see just how limited they are by the Vatican’s nonsense. And while we’re at it, let me remind them that the birth control proscription has never been stated ex Cathedra so it’s not infallible. It is proposed under the Magisterium or Teaching Office. As one honest padre once confided to me: "You are free to use your own conscience in this regard, since the teaching isn't binding."

 

As for abortion, the FOCUS groupies ought to bear in mind that John Connery, S.J,  a leading Catholic historian,  showed that up to 1869 the Church’s Canon Law had historically held abortion to be murder only subsequent to the end of the first trimester.[1]  The interesting thing is that for the bulk of Church history the practice of abortion was allowed, at least up to the first three months of pregnancy. More interesting is that the doctrine of papal infallibility was pronounced in 1870. Could it be that the latter doctrine was introduced to back up the Church’s change in its moral position on abortion? If so, one wonders who really controls the Church, the Holy Spirit-  as is so often claimed-  or zealous prelates in positions of high power who fear relinquishing vise-like grips on their congregations[2]?

Oh, one also wonders if they still teach critical thinking at Catholic universities, as Loyola did in the 1960s - even encouraging atheists such as Jean -Paul Sarte to lecture us on existentialism! To see FOCUS' antics is to wonder if critical thinking went the way of the Dodo - at least in the universities that harbor FOCUS outlets!

---

[1] Sagan and Druyan: PARADE, (April 22, 1990), 6.

[2] And  (most recently), nuns, mainly belonging to The Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which was issued a reprimand by the Vatican for straying outside the purview of Church teachings – especially after they defended the inclusion of contraceptive services in Obama’s Affordable Care Act. The Vatican has also censured Sr. Margaret Farley (of Yale Divinity School) after publication of her book, ‘Just Love’. Farley evidently stepped on Vatican toes when she justified artificial contraception as well as masturbation within marriage as an aid to preserving fidelity.

 

Is The Catholic Church Certifiably Insane....or Simply Immoral?

This is an apt question after RC Cardinal Timothy Dolan recently got on his pseudo-moral high horse and insinuated that if his Church were coerced into abiding by the contraceptive provisions under Obama's Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, his Church might have to resort to pulling back on assisting the poor via their assorted charities. Okay, so let me see if I've got this straight, and paraphrase Dolan: "If the government forces the Church to provide lawful benefits to NON-Catholic employees, we may have to respond by cutting all services to the poor including meals and housing to the homeless, health care to impoverished kids and meals, assistance for the elderly and disabled."

Sorry, Timmy, but that's the response I'd expect from a psychopath. All this over the provision of a law that says nothing on how the Church must deal with its own members, only the Protestants, Jews, agnostics or atheists that may be working at its institutions, e.g. schools, universities, hospitals etc. What is it that these ideologues don't grasp?

Maybe a better take entails examining the claims of the Church's archaic apologists. This also includes why artificial contraception is such a big deal to this Church.

Perhaps we need to begin with a bit of history. The ancient Manicheans (founder Mani, b. 219 BCE) absolutely were against ANY form of birth. They believed that the human was essentially a spark of deistic light locked within a body fashioned by 'Satan'.   Hence, enabling birth, was in effect tantamount to multiplying the total of diabolically imprisoned 'sparks' in the world. Since there was never any assurance these sparks could be liberated, it was paramount that the diabolical flesh be prevented from reproducing itself.  Thus, contraception became a regular practice and most often via coitus interruptus. (Those diabolical sparks that were conceived had to be carefully trained and disciplined lest the Satanic flesh break out).
Females figured into this, and came to be regarded as 'vessels of the Devil' - since it was within their wombs that the devilish flesh sprouted.

St. Augustine, the early Church Father, was originally a Manichean, and like his peers, practiced contraception. While he converted to Christianity in 387 CE, however, the only Manichean tenet he ditched was contraception. He retained all the other flesh/pleasure =demonic connotations and interjected them into his various teaching including his 'letters'. (For more on this, see the excellent monograph 'Eunuchs For the Kingdom of Heaven' by Ute Ranke-Heinemann, Doubleday, 1990).  Most scholars, like Ranke-Heinemann (and also Elaine Pagels, the Harvard-based author of 'Adam, Eve and The Serpent') believe Augustine's stance altered owing to a passage in the bible to do with Onan "spilling his seed".

As Augustine himself writes:

"It is impermissible and shameful to practice intercourse with one's wife while preventing the conception of children. This is what Onan did, the son of Judah, and that is why God killed him". ('The Adulterous Relations', II, 12).

In fact, this false interpetation of the Onan passage is also what is probably responsible for engendering the masturbation bogey- which has also incepted vast frothings at the mouth from Catholic clerics (who seemed to have no froth left when the priest pederasty was disclosed some years ago) . Anyway, from then, "spilling seed" was equated to "onanism" and onanism to masturbation as well as artificial contraception (which is still called "mutual masturbation" by many RC ethicists today).

In reality, Onan's sin was neither a form of contraception (coitus interruptus) or masturbation but rather an offense against the Hebrew law of succession, wherein the nearest male relative of the deceased husband is obligated to fertilize the wife. He refused, spilled his seed, and was therefore guilty.  But it evidently turned out to be a convenient peg on which the Church could hang its anti-sexual crusades (unless its own priests were engaged in child molestations.)

Fast forward now to the early 20th century and the arrival of a meme that insinuated itself not only into western society and nations, but the Catholic Church. This was spelled out by author Leslie Dewart in his chapter Casti Connubii and the Development of Dogma (pp. 178-79) in Contraception and Holiness: The Catholic Predicament  (1965, Fontana Books, UK). This referred to a "social morality in which a social premium was put upon the repression of genital activity".

In many ways, western society at the time deemed it critical that they control their citizens' gonads, since as those gonads were chained down, so also were the owners' minds. How truly genuine a free thinker could one be, after all, if his or her most private parts were put under lock and key by either the state or the Church?

In the U.S. the seed of sexual-genital repression was probably sown as early as 1873 via the infamous Comstock laws, e.g.

http://womenshistory.about.com/od/laws/a/comstock_law.htm

and

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comstock_laws

But little known, or seldom mentioned today, is that these laws not only targeted "obscene" literature but also all contraceptive devices and any and all educational material explaining their use. It was exactly these archaic Comstock laws that Margaret Sanger confronted when trying to widen the availability of contraception for the poor women she beheld being ground under.

The RC Church's role emerged coincidental with Sanger's editorial oversight of The Birth Control Review (1917- 1938) and in the encylical Casti Connubii issued by Pope Pius XI on December 30,  1930, viz.

http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/pius_xi/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-xi_enc_31121930_casti-connubii_en.html

More specifically, this was a pre-meditated response to the Lambeth Conference of the Anglican Church which had approved birth control in limited circumstances.

In so many words, what Pius XI sought to do was issue a comprehensive definition of "Holy Christian Marriage" that amounted to a pseudo-rational reinforcement of atavistic attitudes of fear, hatred and contempt for human sexuality that had long lay smoldering in the Manichean recesses of the Church's primitive collective mind. As Ute Ranke -Heinemann notes, these were foursquare mounted for control of the body in any and all its sexual expressions since it was believed this was the most straightforward way to control minds. (As indeed it is because, again, if one is prevented or inhibited from manipulating his or her own sexual organs then the ultimate test for individual autonomy has failed. One may believe himself to be an "individualist" but in fact he's merely a eunuch or appendage for his church's or society's dictates, and he's certainly no free thinker. Sexologist Betty Dodson has correctly insisted the first litmus test of a true free thinker- whether male or female-  is the ability to masturbate.)

So, the original declaration for refusing to be "part of the mainstream" was issued in 1930. According to Catholic Theologian Janet Smith, of Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit "the Church has long been pressured to change its position but has never accepted it".

She goes on to claim ('Faithful in Birth Control', The Denver Post, May 20, p. 1B)  that there is no shortage of statistics showing that contemporary views and modern contraceptives have created a messy society in which sex has been cheapened and family devalued. She also has the nerve to add:

"We are drenched in contraceptives in this country yet 42% of babies are born out of wedlock. More than half of American women will experience an unintended pregnancy by 45 and 3 in 10 women at current rates will have an abortion:"

So what is she trying to insinuate here? That contraceptives or the acceptability of them created the out of wedlock babies? If this is so, then why don't the Dutch,  for example, have an even greater out of wedlock teen birth problem than the U.S. - since Dutch teens in their Sex ed classes are actually issued condoms from the age of 12-13?  In fact, it must be something else! Because yes, while there is the widespread psychological acceptance of contraceptive use there is not the accompanying educational mastery of their use.

Why not? Because most U.S. Sex ed classes have fallen prey to the knuckle-dragger 'just say no' - teach abstinence only idiocy instead of adopting the practical Dutch methods of Sex Ed which really do work in reducing teen births, as well as preventing STD transmission.  So, one wonders why Smith avoids citing those stats, as opposed to only the sex-ignorant American ones. Well, because like most apologists she has an agenda!

This also addresses Smith's other complaints (ibid) that "Six out of 10 teens are sexually active and we have an epidemic of sexually transmitted disease."

OF COURSE WE DO! Because these kids are not being taught how to use condoms etc. in their Sex ed classes like the Dutch kids are!!! What the hell does she expect?

In the same way, of course more than half of American women are likely to have unintended births, because again, they aren't properly taught contraceptive use! Indeed, assorted polls have shown numerous cases where women have actually skipped pills - either because of money issues or because they thought they didn't need to take them every day if they only have sex once a month (they do!). Then, despite having an economic situation which can ill afford another mouth to feed, their only recourse is ex post facto birth prevention, as in abortion. Hence, again explaining how it is that 1 in 3 women will have an abortion by age 45.

Yet, fewer than 1 in 20 Dutch women do. Why? Because they're taught from early what to do and how to truly ensure control over their bodies to the extent of preventing accidental births. The antediluvian RC Church on the other hand would be quite happy to have as many accidental births as possible - because they erroneously believe higher numbers confer power in the world.

In fact, all they're doing - in a world of receding resources- is engendering more destitution. To me, this is both immoral and insane! (One reason the late Arthur C. Clarke included Paul VI's later encyclical - Veritatis Splendor - supporting earlier anti-contraceptive stands, as a "crime against humanity"). As many sober minds have asked: WHY are we even having such a regressive debate in the year 2012? Why do we allow a band of temporally misplaced robed misfits to dictate their temporally backward mores to people that don't even belong to their Church? And why do we allow them to do so in the name of a god that has to be totally whacked if it's main concern is the sexual proclivities of a mammalian biped inhabiting one dust speck planet two thirds of the way out to one ordinary galaxy among billions?

Next: The Chuch's Non-method of Contraception.