"The Catholic Church is not a democracy."

These were the words posted on the board in response to this poll, which indicates that 61% of Catholics in the US support the idea of mandatory coverage of contraception in insurance plans provided by religiously-affiliated employers. I'm sure you've heard about the controversy, since it's been rebounding from the walls of the newsosphere for the past couple weeks. The opinion proffered by the title comment was that it didn't matter that the majority of US Catholics supported the idea. The Church is against it and the Church is not a democracy, so people will just have to suck it up and live with medieval philosophy for a while longer. A quick response was that it was too bad for the Church, because the US is a democracy. In a democracy, we don't cotton to the idea of a bunch of old, rich, white men making decisions about what happens with women's bodies without even consulting the women.

Anti-abortion bill signing, because all of them are worried about being forced to have one.

Oh. Right.

What I always find amusing is the ability for the same people who regularly rant about "government control infringing upon our freedoms" to instantly accede to the idea that "the Church is against it, therefore we must obey." This isn't even a case of drawing some barely contextual example from the Bible to "prove" that "God said so!". This is following a dictate set down by a bunch of guys who are extrapolating from that presumed word of God and giving it their own shine (in the same way that a lot of people like to extrapolate from the Constitution... but let's get back to that later.) "Go forth and multiply" becomes "Thou shalt never not run the risk of having kids if thou art performing the evil, evil deed that God intended thou perform to have kids." And that's it. They said, therefore everyone must follow. This is the same institution that used to pressure scientists to not talk about things that contravened Church opinions, even though those discoveries soon were proved true and are accepted by everyone today. But most of those, of course, were about physical phenomena and this issue is about social engineering, which has always been more important to the proponents of organized religion.

Much of said engineering occurs on the strength of one idea: the Pope is the direct conduit to God. Everything the Pope says is what God says. Even the councils to choose the next Pope must be divinely inspired (omniscient and omnipotent, remember?) because that's how they got the right guy, of course. Believe what you'd like to believe, but it stretches credulity for intelligent humans in this day and age to completely subsume themselves in the concept that someone can be a regular, pious individual one moment and be speaking the Word of God in the next; especially in a day and age when the Church is losing members. It's as if they feel like they're in an arms race with other religions and everyone has to do their part. Repeatedly. And without end. The arms just happen to be human and most have two of them (the concern over the loss of "cherished cultures" as a consequence of low birth rates (in comparison to less cherished (i.e. non-white) cultures) has been prevalent for some time.)

In the end, it's hard to escape the idea that this is all really about sex, as opposed to the sanctity of human life and/or associated organisms.

Sin of Onan and all that. The funny thing about that skit is the line in the song where he says that "Catholics will take you as soon as you're warm", when most know that the anti-choice movement in the US is far more concerned about human life when its connected to an umbilical cord and for not one second after that cord is cut (especially if you're not, you know, white...)

There are two things that humans in general and men in specific like to do: screw and kill each other. Given the choice, most would prefer the former. Why that's always been a problem for organized religion is enough to fill a couple dozen more posts but let's let it rest with the idea that if people favor "earthly pleasures" over "serving God (and especially the Church!)", many think that religion kinda loses its verve. While humans have proved at times that they're fully capable of engaging in multiple pursuits with abandon, monotheism is monotheism for a reason. If you piss off the one God, you can't go running to another like Taygete (even though she didn't really anger Zeus; it was all about the sex (again!)) Therefore, sex should be about procreation and it's enjoyable because you should be multiplying. If you take away the threat of procreation, it's just enjoyable and you forget about serving God. See how easy? And you don't even have to get into that whole conflict of interest wherein a desire for sex may preclude you from killing each other or, preferably, those the Church would have you kill. That's too complicated. Deus vult!