Put Women's Rights Over Bishops' Wrongs

[doggie]

this is a great billboard. of course it has Catholics pissed but then again when are they not pissed. Sorry but the truth hurts and you might as well face it.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/2 ... 38099.html

[patsymae]

The bishops were well on their way to irrelevancy and it's really a shame that this issue has given them a platform to exercise political power again. Ick!

A friend of mine who still goes to Mass told me a few weeks ago that "Father gave this whole sermon about the evils of birth control" and it was just so bogus--looking around the church with families with two or maybe three children tops, it was obvious that everyone was using birth control: "the pope is a long way from Brooklyn."

As soon as the Church stops accepting any public money, including for its hospitals, schools and social programs, and starts paying taxes on its money like everyone else, I'm happy to see them do what they like.

[Coconut Flan]

A friend and I were discussing the catholic chuch and BC last night. She's a cradle catholic and still agrees that ship sailed decades ago. She only knows two people who ever tried NFP - her mother and a friend who conceived on her honeymoon despite NFP and who, of course, switched to regular BC after the birth. We're wondering how long the catholic church will survive with "leadership" so far out of tune with the majority of membership.

[Childless]

The Catholic church gets closer to irrelevancy with each passing day. Of course, I believe that of all organized religion, not just Catholicism.

[patsymae]

Interesting that Italy, right in the pope's back yard, has the second lowest birthrate in the Western world--the government even tried paying (a token sum of 1,000 euros) for women to have more than one child but not a whole lot took the bait. In Ireland, also under de facto church rule until relatively recently, when birth control pills finally became accessible Irish women started gobbling them like tictacs.

Wanton, socialist, godless Sweden has a 50 percent higher birthrate than nominally Catholic Italy.

While the church's stance on these kinds of issues are largely irrelevant to western catholics, unfortunately in this new climate they have the political power to force their will on other people in their role as an employer.

Aside from denying birth control, they are enforcing in other ways. A Catholic school teacher near us was recently fired because the church, as her employer (and provider of her health insurance) became aware that she was using IVF in an effort to "be fruitful and multiply."

I'm one of ten kids from a devout, but crazy, Catholic mother. My father was an abusive alcoholic, but of course divorce wasn't an option. After her third, which was medically dicey, doctors told her not to do any more but she of course did what the church dictated instead. Two of my siblings, the most normal, have three children. Two of us have had one. The rest are childless by choice. None of us go to Mass. One became born-again, although not sure that's still going on, and I raised my son Unitarian and just kind of dabble in New Thought churches now and then. The rest just ignore religion entirely. And marriages are all to lapsed Catholics or secular Jews.

I often wonder if maybe if my mother had had just a few kids she would have been able to cope and her many fewer children might have had a more decent life.

Just as I wonder if that lady in Texas who drowned her kids (name escapes me at the moment) might have been a decent mother of one or two children.