Yes, Hillary Clinton among others says that there’s a War on Contraception.

“There’s a quiet war going on in America against the most basic rights of Americans to make their own personal decisions about family planning,” Clinton wrote in a mass e-mail.

“This war against contraception endangers basic American values.”

A basic American value now is deciding to prevent pregnancy using artificial means.

At a June 13 meeting of the National Family Planning and Reproductive Health Association, Clinton declared: “We know it’s not just ‘choice’ that is under attack, it’s contraception which is under attack.”

Hmm, with contraception so readily available, how does this even make sense? Per the article, because the Bush administration’s promoting “abstinence education,” the FDA won’t permit the open sale (read o-t-c sale) of the morning after pill, and some states have ruled that a pharmacist whose religion prohibits him from selling contraception has the right to refuse to sell it.

One really encouraging quote, in my opinion, comes from a NARAL nut:

“They’ve by and large won the abortion law. They are just waiting for an 86-year-old justice to step down,”

I say, good news. If they think we’ve by and large won on abortion, maybe they’ll give up fighting on it…or, even better, maybe they’ll keep fighting and keep proving how absurd their positions are.

“We are truly blessed that the Catholic Church in California is vibrant and growing, but our future should not happen by accident,” said Bishop Stephen Blaire of Stockton, the president of the California Catholic Conference, in a press release Monday.

In other words, a side effect of the inflow of illegals aliens into the United States is the growth of the Catholic Church in the United States. Great. Now we’re celebrating the growth of our church as a result of people choosing to break United States and international law. Our churches are filling with criminals. I just can’t agree with the Church’s stance on illegally entering our country. Great that it pads out the parishes, but guess what…our little parish in Rome, GA, is bursting at the seams, and I’ve heard at least one person speculate that it’s because the illegals that are filling up the parish aren’t putting their names on the roll…therefore we don’t get an additional priest to give Fr. Jim some relief. The man says 5 masses each weekend, which is, of course an exceptional circumstance. Come on into the country, but come here legally.

This is a great story because it’s about people who have various medical problems that could potentially be treated with methods derived from the use of stem cells…and these folks are proponents of methods using adult stem cells and umbilical cord stem cells, rather than embryonic stem cells. They understand that not only does the use of embryonic stem cells necessitate killing of babies, but that the scientific community knows about the usefulness of adult stem cells and cord blood stem cells, and does not have anything clear on the usefulness of embryonic stem cells.

How to wreck a celebration of the anniversary of the local planned parenthood? Bring in an abortion survivor to sing the national anthem…and introduce all that she’s been through as a sufferer of cerebral palsey, but how she has worked hard to make something of herself. Invite the crowd to applaud her. Then break the news…she has cerebral policy because she was the victim of a failed abortion…and watch that zealous applause by the democrats in the room disappear. They’re mad because she survived an abortion! Please read this. Spread it around to as many folks as you can.

Remember the post a couple of weeks ago on how the Vatican warned that consecrating a female as a bishop would be the final breaking point in strained relations with the Episcopal church? Well, apparently, it’s happened…there’s a new leader of the Episcopal church in the US…and it’s a she. Fine, they can do what they want…but the new leader has stated homosexuality is not a sin and that some people are created to love members of the same gender.

Interesting, because I posted a little while ago on how the Catholic Church also says that homosexuality is not a sin…that an orientation is not a sin, but that rather choosing not to follow the Church’s and God’s call to chastity is where the sin is – regardless of orientation. But somehow I don’t think that’s what this hypenated lady meant. Check out this quote:

“The Bible has a great deal to teach us about how to live as human beings. The Bible does not have so much to teach us about what sorts of food to eat, what sorts of clothes to wear — there are rules in the Bible about those that we don’t observe today,” she said.

So choosing to dismantle and bastardize the procreative act created by God specifically to build unity in a marriage and to bring new Christians into the world is on par with choosing not to be Kosher (which is in the Old Testament and therefore doesn’t apply to those of us living in the New Covenant) or to wear and not wear specific clothes. Wow.

Good news…in Kentucky, the state Board of Education has decided that they’re going to continue to refer to years as B.C. and A.D. rather than the new, politically correct B.C.E. and C.E. For those of you unaware, there is a concerted effort among the ivory-tower liberal elite to strip away yet another reference to religion from our calendar system. B.C. of course means Before Christ, and A.D. means Anno Domini, or in the year of our Lord. Well, this is just unacceptable. To use the birth of someone, especially someone claiming to be supernatural, as the middle point of our entire calendar system just won’t do. So now we have “before the common era” and “common era.” In other words, “before nothing important happened” and “after nothing important happened.” But, at least in KY, they’ll be staying with the time-tested BC and AD.

The Catholics I know tend to pick and choose their beliefs, rather than strictly adhere to church doctrine. After all, how many Catholic families today have 10 or 12 children? With so many western families opting for just one or two kids, it seems clear that most Catholics (at least in Canada) refuse to abide by the church’s ban on birth control.

Nevertheless, the church is so strongly opposed to the use of birth control that officials are actually divided on whether to allow married couples to use condoms when one partner is infected with HIV or AIDS.

It’s precisely this line of thinking that has us at odds with the Catholic church.

Call us liberal extremists, but we don’t believe it’s immoral for a married couple struggling to have a baby to undergo in-vitro fertilization (providing neither spouse qualifies as a senior citizen).

Call us radicals, but we don’t see the harm in same-sex marriage. And if priests want to get married, what’s the big deal?

The biggest blight on the Catholic church, however, has to be the sex abuse scandals that have plagued the dioceses in recent years.

Okay, I know this is a longer quote than usual, but I wanted to illustrate the randomness and more importantly the ignorance of the editorialist. This person claims both she and her husband were both raised in Catholic schools as well as in the Church. Yet they somehow managed to completely miss all the REASONS that the Church teaches what she teaches. Instead, the editorialist focuses on all the stuff she disagrees with. The answers to the questions are out there, but all she includes is a salvo of objections to Church teaching. Ultimately, I think the child of these people is better off than if there were raised in a setting where they go to Mass and then rip Catholic theology to shreds on the way home.

The principle theme of the assembly, the message says, “is the dignity of human beings and the absolute value of human life from conception to natural end.” On this subject, the cardinal recalls how the American continent “has a long tradition of respecting life, now threatened by the pressure of opinions contrary to its nature.”

I’m pleased. Once again, Mother Church has asserted a consistent position She has held for centuries. It is society that has departed from normality, and the Church calls us back to it.

VATICAN CITY (CNS) — Couples who use natural family planning to have only one or two children allow “brief parentheses” in a marriage “willingly made sterile,” said a new document from the Pontifical Council for the Family.

The document, “Family and Human Procreation,” was released in Italian June 6 and was issued to mark the 25th anniversary of the council’s establishment.

Read the whole article for the full effect. I agree with the majority of it, but this appears to be self-contradictory:

When for the good of the entire family it is best to avoid having another child, couples can abstain from sexual intercourse during fertile periods to avoid a pregnancy, it said.

However, using natural family planning to have only one or a maximum of two children “is nothing other than a kind of series of brief parentheses within an entire conjugal life willingly made sterile,” it said.

So what does this say to the couple who find that for the good of the entire family, they must limit their family’s size to 2 kids total? The Art of Natural Family Planning talks about how we are called to procreate, but we’re also called to prudence. If the addition of another child would place the rest of the family into a position jeopardizing the welfare of the rest of the family, then that is a serious reason to avoid an additional child.

At my current station in life, making my whopping $33k a year, I am unsure my wife and I can sustain a family of more than 2 kids. Okay, yeah, we could afford more, but we would literally be unable to save a penny. That means no saving for retirement, which would place an undue burden on the kids. It also means no savings for college for the kids…and that means essentially we’d either be condemning them to a life without enough education to even subsist in their adult lives, or a life of paying off high-interest student loans, and I argue that neither of these things are in the best interest of the family.

But then immediately, the document says that if I only have 1 or 2 kids, my wife and I have lived our lives “willingly sterile.” And this is apparently a criticism. Now, granted that this is not an official English translation, so there’s the possibility that CNS is not being 100% faithful to the real meaning an context in their reporting. I look forward to reading the real English translation.

In the context presented here, I have a hard time accepting this. Yeah, I could make $50k-60k a year as a corporate IT guy, but I have been convicted that I need to be reliable and active in my kid’s life, and in order to do that, I have chosen the position handed to me on a silver platter, which pays less but is much lower stress and allows me to maintain a relationship with my kid. I think my number one call is to be a present figure in the life of my children, a positive male role model, and a provider for the material needs of my family. My wife and I are called to be prudent and realistic as we consider how many members our family can support.

LONDON (CNS) — A Vatican cardinal has warned the Church of England that a move to ordain women as bishops would destroy any chance of full unity with the Catholic and Orthodox churches.

Cardinal Walter Kasper, president of the Pontifical Council for Promoting Christian Unity, said that if the Church of England adopted such a resolution the “shared partaking of the one Lord’s table, which we long for so earnestly, would disappear into the far and ultimately unreachable distance.”

Well, no offense to the Cardinal, but why is the “breaking point” the consecration of women as bishops? Let’s think for a minute about this. Isn’t the consecration of an practicing gay male bishop a unity-destroyer? For that matter, how about a praticing gay male priest (which this guy was before he was a bishop?) How about the ordination of women at all? How about the ambiguity in the the Anglican church about whether Christ is really present in the Eucharist? How about being the church that began the tidal wave leading to acceptance of abortion, homosexuality, and all sorts of other sexual dysfunctions in our world today, via the ruling that Christians could contracept at the Lambuth Conference back in the 20’s?

My point is, what’s so special about the consecration of women as bishops? Seems to me that the Anglican church has been destroying unity with the RCC for the last 100 years at least…why would the consecration of women be the point of no return? Any ideas?