The basic gist of the premise is that getting laid is the essence of womanhood and anything that links getting laid to having children is de facto slavery. After all, screwing is all women want to do all the time. That’s just the way women are. If you don’t believe it, just ask that nasty, flea-bitten skank Amanda Marcotte.

It amazes me that feminists have elevated to a sacrament a policy that has proven to be a dream-come-true for womanizing cads since time immemorial.

“…letting nature take its course in matters of reproduction or — as Christians would say — recognizing God’s sovereignty as the Author of Life.”

“….at some level we must acknowledge that contraception involves a rejection of God. ”

I found K-Lo’s article to be very persuasive, but I guess I’m too Protestant to understand the statements above.

Sexuality blossoms pretty early in life these days. Am I thwarting the will of God if I don’t marry off my daughter at puberty so that she can let nature take its course?

I’m not sure how one can fully “recognize God’s sovereignty” and avoid “a rejection of God” without marrying extremely early…so as to capture every moment of sexuality within the context of holy matrimony.

If two fertile high school kids “fall in love” and decide to remain perfectly chaste outside of marriage and decide that they will delay marriage until they can afford to have sex without contraception, haven’t they chosen to prevent nature from taking its course?

Isn’t abstinence a form of contraception? As the only form of contraception that is 100% effective, is post-pubertal sexual abstinence the most complete rejection of God’s sovereignty?

As a Protestant married to a Catholic, I’ve asked these same questions; I’ll tell you what she told me.

The purpose of sex is two-fold, but intertwined: to cement the love between husband and wife, and to bring new life into the world, out of that love. (John Paul’s Theology of the Body equates it like this: as the Spirit is the love by which the Father and the Son give themselves to one another, so a child is the love by which a husband and wife give themselves to one another.) So, sex is only being used in a godly manner if it’s being used for both of those purposes.

Abstinence (more correctly chastity, I think, as you’re using it here) is definitely a virtue; if you can’t participate in sex the way God intended, abstaining is definitely virtuous. The difference is, if you’re abstaining, you’re still open to the possibility of procreation when you do have sex; if you use artificial contraception, you’re not. (Natural “contraception”, like natural family planning, is still moral, because you’re still open to the possibility, just trying to minimize the odds. You’re still fulfilling God’s purpose; you’re just adding in a little human ingenuity.)

That’s how I understand it, at least — so take it for what it’s worth. Hope that helps, though.

What’s interesting is that the entire sexual revolution was sold as a means to “freeing” women from the confines of biological imperative. In reality, it merely freed men to behave like shits.

It’s an interesting argument, but the distinction between “natural family planning” and other forms of contraception is moot.

A couple using oral contraceptives, for example, should still be “open to the possibility of procreation” because that possibility is very real one.

I can not imagine a discussion more destructive to our ends than this one.

I don’t agree. This is a cultural issue that can be used as a supplement to fiscal arguments at the federal level, and in its own right at the state level. It deserves to be kept in mind by all social conservatives – and, to a certain extent, by libertarians. Why should the Federal government be in the business of subsidizing contraceptives?

Using the logic that the NY Times employs, my Second Amendment rights are worthless unless the government hands out free or heavily discounted .44 magnums. It’s stupidity on steroids.

Not one comment above makes an argument as to whether or not gummint should pay for contraception.

I’ll bet gg could come up with an argument in favor, but the rest of us are in agreement the government shouldn’t.

Actually, gg would more likely claim that all this disagreement on other aspects of the question only proves this site is an echo chamber.

“This is a cultural issue that can be used as a supplement to fiscal arguments at the federal level,”

I couldn’t disagree more. It’s a cultural issue that will be a fatal distraction FROM fiscal arguments relegating them to the relative obscurity they’ve wallowed in for most of the last decade. It deliberately gives the Bolshevik media control over our message. Worse than that it gives cover to those like anyone named Bush to masquerade as a conservative.

…

a fatal distraction FROM fiscal arguments relegating them to the relative obscurity they’ve wallowed in for most of the last decade.

Dude. Seriously?

The national debt exceeds the GDP. Inflation numbers leave out food and energy prices which are getting nosebleeds.

Anyone capable of being distracted from that should have been deprived of his vote long ago under the “lunatics and idiots” clause.

This is partly my point if we lead with cultural issues we lose the whole game.
Yeah Seriously, if we give the Winston Smith media the chance, the fiscal issues fade to black. You sir have touched the subject with a needle. Much to my dismay I couldn’t find that “”lunatics and idiots” clause”. Even more to my dismay we need their votes no matter how much they lack in righteousness.

Can someone pass this information on to my wife? I’d appreciate it.

I don’t think that’s the automatic assumption, but imho there aren’t a lot of socially liberal Republicans left who aren’t libertarians.

Who’s socially liberal? Or a republican for that matter?

Not to argue, AW (it’s a bit of an echoless chamber for me in here), but fact is Socons/Theocons are both wrong and tactically stupid. And frankly, amigo, you may not have said they’re wrong, but I’m pretty sure you think it, at least with respect to this thread, if not others.

Not always easy when Govt gets involved with social mores
http://www.theagedp.com/?p=2106

I guess I’m too Protestant to understand the statements above.

I’m Protestant, too. Abstinence obviously doesn’t violate God’s plan. Artificial contraception does, because it separates sex from its natural corollary and, in doing so, opens the way to many other perversions of the natural order.

As to your concerns about the age-at-marriage issue: The biggest problem is that the modern culture of child-rearing tends to retard maturation. Among other things, the public-school system has oriented itself toward maximizing its clientele, keeping kids in school as long as possible. This is what prompted Newt Gingrich once to describe high school as “subsidized dating.”

We ought to accelerate the education process — to get kids fully educated as soon as possible. Instead, the rent-seeking incentives of the public-education system have led to the age/grade K-12 process: Every child must endure 13 years of school, regardless of their aptitude or interests, and students are grouped into classes according to age, rather than ability. So you have 13-year-olds who are reading at a collegiate level and you have 13-year-olds who are scarcely reading at a third-grade level and yet, according to the school system, both of these students are “eighth-graders.” The transparent illogic of such a system ought to be the flashing red emergency light that tells us something is fundamentally wrong with the system.

We need not contemplate whether, because many young people are physically mature at age 13 or 14, we should sanction marriage at such young ages when, as matters now stand, so few couples choose to marry at age 18. Rather, we ought to address the defects of an educational system that retards the emotional and intellectual maturation of young people so that they are unready for marriage when they do reach the legal age. And we ought to resist the attitude of moral passivity that tacitly endorses pre-marital fornication on the grounds that “everybody is doing” or “kids will be kids.” Because (a) not everybody is doing it, and (b) sin is still sin.

It’s a good thing pregnancy is never a life-threatening experience and is never traumatic for women in ways that are both physical and deeply emotional.

Otherwise you’d all look pretty silly arguing that women should be forced to go through by punishment of law so that some invisible man who lives in the sky is happy.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

For reasons beyond me, childbirth–in the popular American mind–is swaddled in gossamer, gift-wrap, and icing. Beneath the pastel Hallmark cards and baby showers, behind the flowers, lies a truth encoded, still, in our wording, but given only minimal respect–the charge of shepherding life is labor. It’s work. And you need only look to the immediate past, or you need only look around the world, or you need only come close to losing the love of your small, young life to understand a correlating truth–pregnancy is potentially lethal work.

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been studying the seminary movement in the South during the mid-19th century. In these all-female boarding schools, women found a security and friendship that would elude them for the rest of their lives. Their parting notes to each other are filled with foreboding hints of early death. It’s not very hard to imagine why. As recently as the 1930s, the maternal death rate in this country was 900 per 100,000 births.

It’s been some time since I read “What Hath God Wrought,” but my recollection is that in the mid-19th century men actually lived longer than women. As a society, the Western world has obviously made significant strides in reducing maternal deaths. (In Afghanistan some 1,400 women die per 100,000 births.) This is excellent news. But it can not obscure perhaps the most specific and nameable species of male privilege–of all the things that may one day kill me, pregnancy is not among them.
[...]
My embrace of a pro-choice stance is not built on analogizing Rick Santorum with Hitler. It is not built on what the pro-life movement is “like.” It’s built on set of disturbing and inelidable truths: My son is the joy of my life. But the work of ushering him into this world nearly killed his mother. The literalism of that last point can not be escaped.

Every day women choose to do the hard labor of a difficult pregnancy. Its courageous work, which inspires in me a degree of admiration exceeded only by my horror at the notion of the state turning that courage, that hard labor, into a mandate. Women die performing that labor in smaller numbers as we advance, but they die all the same. Men do not. That is a privilege.