In light of Elon Musk throwing his highly influential weight into exposing the Underpopulation crisis, after decades of the Overpopulation propaganda, I thought, in early 2024, that I might republish here my article, “The War on Women and Population Control,” from my P. A. Ritzer blog of 10 January 2013. But this introduction to that re-publication has grown, over the ensuing months, into its own substantial article, “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It.” It is available here in full for those with paid subscriptions and will appear in several parts for all others. Please see all twelve parts of “The Big Lie of Overpopulation and the Fear that Drives It:” Part One: “One Big Family;” Part Two: “Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda;” Part Three: “Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder;” Part Four: “Nature, Control, and Sin;” Part Five: “Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order);” Part Six: “Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing;” Part Seven: “Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means;” Part Eight: “The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death;” Part Nine: “In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet;” Part Ten: “‘A Truly Human Civilization’ vs. the F-Word Culture;” Part Eleven: “Fear, Control, and Death;” and Part Twelve: “Making Room and the Courage to Love;” and please see also “The War on Women and Population Control.”
One Big Family
Overpopulation propaganda was essential to the social-political atmosphere in which I grew up in the 1960s and 70s. It was a given. And yet I grew up in a family of nine, mother and father and seven children. Large families were not unusual in the time and place in which I grew up, and so I felt a certain tension between the way in which I was being raised and the popular attitude among the elite, and all those who would control and those influenced by them, concerning population growth, large families, contraception, and the culture of death in general. A few memories illustrate that tension.
I remember my father showing us at the dinner table, around which our family gathered nightly, a picture of a postage stamp that was supposed to depict the ideal American family with a mother and a father and a daughter and a son. And my dad pointed out to us—in accordance with his well-informed prescience—that there were people who thought that families should only have two children, and that there were some people who wanted to make it against the law to have more than two children. Then he asked us to look around and imagine trying to choose which five of us should not be there. In less than a decade, the Chinese Communist Party would inflict the One-Child Policy—which included arresting pregnant women and forcibly aborting their babies and sterilizing the mothers—on the people of China. (Even Democrats today might object to such atrocities because these were “wanted” babies and therefore considered by them to be worthy to live.) And there were far too many people in the West who saw merit in that barbarity.
And my father impressed on us that we had a responsibility to represent the family well. Of course, as sinners we all failed in that regard to one degree or another. One time in particular we did so en masse. We were on vacation “up north” at a cabin at a resort and had gone into town for Mass. Afterward Mom and Dad had to run some errand. I do not remember if they took my youngest sister with them or not. But that would have left six or seven of us, the oldest of whom would have been ten or eleven or so, in the car. Well, pandemonium ensued. Of course there was no excuse, but I think someone got a nosebleed, which set off someone else, then some argued, and then a joker started to yell or sing over the commotion. Needless to say, there was no air conditioning in the car, so windows were open. The result was that, on our first day at the cabin, the younger kids had to sit on chairs for fifteen minutes, and we older kids had to sit on chairs for one hour. In our sentencing, Dad made it very clear that many people were opposed to large families and that we had a responsibility to represent large families well or it just fed and justified their bigotry.
“Yes, seven kids, and at least you won’t have to worry about one of our kids stabbing you in a dark alley.”
Another time, on another vacation in a distant state, we stopped at a restaurant (a rare occasion) for breakfast. On our way out of the restaurant, a woman was pointing at each of us in turn as she counted. My middle sister, thirteen years old or so, said to her without any attempt to hide her disgust at the woman’s blatant rudeness, “Seven, count them, seven.” I believe it was on an earlier trip east, when Dad was in the office of the campground where we were going to pitch camp, that the woman in the office was carrying on enough about the size of our family that my father finally said, “Yes, seven kids, and at least you won’t have to worry about one of our kids stabbing you in a dark alley.” As my older sister pointed out, Dad had driven all day and still had to set up a tent and camp. She concluded, “The man was a saint.”
Both my parents were saints through it all in a way that children cannot appreciate until they themselves don the mantle of parenthood. On what basis can such a claim be made? Well—with the caveat that in this life one cannot, except by “special revelation,” be certain of being in a state of grace—on no less than the words of Jesus throughout the gospels. In Matthew 25, in particular, Jesus explicitly states criteria by which people will enter into eternal life: those who feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, welcome the stranger, clothe the naked, visit the sick, and visit prisoners. Parents like mine fulfilled those requirements, in one way or another, regularly. Add the spiritual works of mercy of counseling the doubtful, instructing the ignorant, admonishing the sinner, comforting the sorrowful, forgiving injuries, bearing wrongs patiently, and praying for the living and the dead, and parenting emerges as one of the great opportunities to fulfill the Christian obligations of sainthood.
Those saints had determined that as a family we were going to take vacations and travel and see our country. We could not manage our first vacation until I was eight or nine years old. For a few years we took a week at a cabin up north. Then my folks decided that we would venture farther, and the one way we could do so was to camp. Thus did we take local trips here and there, and now and then a longer trip, like the time we traveled around Lake Superior from east to west. In the established routine, we would arrive at the campground, secure a campsite, buy firewood, unload the car, set up the screen tent over the picnic table so my mother could immediately begin cooking our supper (Dinty Moore beef stew being a favorite) over the gas stove, while the rest of us set up the tent and laid out the sleeping bags. After supper, we would sit around the campfire and roast marshmallows and visit.
And all of this travel was accomplished in a station wagon with a box on top that my father had masterfully designed and constructed, as was his custom, to hold the camping equipment and baggage. My own sons were made familiar with the travel conditions of those days when they complained to me on one of our trips, “Dad, he’s on my side.” You may have anticipated that my response failed to convey the sympathy they believed warranted. “Guys,” said I, “imagine a kid between you, three behind you, and one up here with Mom and me. That’s how we used to travel. So don’t tell me about sides.” And after a pause, I could add, “And your mother’s family had four more than we did. Imagine that.”
Meals are pregnant affairs for large families where and when all gather together to share in the sustenance provided by God and the work of human hands and then share themselves in conversation with each other.
On the most memorable camping trip in the early 1970s, we set out for Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, with each of us picking a place we would like to visit on the way. I was at that time maybe twelve years old or so and enamored of the Green Bay Packers, so the Pro Football Hall of Fame in Canton, Ohio was my choice. Still, I remember being most impressed by Washington, D. C. Besides these choices, there were Philadelphia, the Cumberland Gap, Cape Hatteras, and others now forgotten. For this trip we had splurged and reserved an above-ground, fold-out camper trailer that was supposed to sleep eight but would accommodate our nine. When the rental company rented our reserved camper to someone else and sent my dad home with a six-sleeper, my mother’s understandable indignation was not to be contained. In the telephone call to the camper rental she uttered words ever since cemented in family lore and passed down through family tradition to the present day, “I am just livid, livid with justifiable anger.” (Drawing on that lore a few years later, one of my sisters, in a rather warm exchange with my mother during the teenage years, rejoined, “Are you vivid, Mom? Are you vivid?”) And there lingers some vague memory of my dad recognizing providence, as was his wont, in the questionable substitution, pointing out some way in which the six-sleeper might have even had an advantage over the eight-sleeper, though he probably did so out of earshot of my mother. My mother, for her part, as mothers of large families inevitably do, ended up soldiering on and making the most of it.
Recalling above our breakfast in the restaurant and our camp suppers brings to mind how we kids just took food for granted. I marvel now, as a parent, how our parents provided so much food, good food, three times a day. And it was true for all large families I knew. We all ate, and ate well, even though none of our families was wealthy. My mother produced a seemingly endless variety of presentations of beef, pork, turkey, chicken, fish, potatoes, and vegetables. (It did not hurt that we grew up in the remarkably rich farm country of the upper Midwest.) And I remember how word would spread among families about newly discovered ways to make that large provision of food more economical including discount outlets, deals at the grocery store, day-old bread at the bakery, frozen pizzas in bulk, and boxes of frozen pasties that we could heat up at will. And peanut butter: what would we have done without peanut butter? And milk. At one point, with more of us reaching our teenage years, my father took out the rack in an old soda-pop vending machine (from the old family business) that he had stored in the basement, so that my mother could use the pop machine to keep cold the five gallons of milk that she bought every two days. Years later my mother reminisced about reaching the stage in the family’s development when all the kids were old enough to make it through a meal without someone spilling a glass of milk.
And, of course, so much of that food was consumed at meals. Meals are pregnant affairs for large families where and when all gather together to share in the sustenance provided by God and the work of human hands and then share themselves in conversation with each other. In our family we would not only begin meals with a prayer of blessing, but we would end meals with a prayer of thanks, so that when supper was ended we did not ask if we could be excused but if we could pray. Also in our family at the dinner table only one person was allowed to speak at a time, whether it was my mother or father or any one of us right down to my youngest sister. Whoever was talking had the floor. I have feasted with other large families where participants carry on several conversations at the same time, and though that is not the way I was brought up, I recognize the value in that approach too.
One meal in particular stands out. It was Thanksgiving, and we had sat down to table at perhaps two or o’clock or so, and my middle sister brought to the meal her new boyfriend. After a while they left, and when they came back that evening, we were still at the table to the great surprise of the boyfriend (who has been that sister’s husband for almost forty years). We did not bring an end to the meal until around nine o’clock. The conversation had flowed, along with the wine, and the food had been passed in cycles, and there had been no reason that anyone would want to leave. Christmas that year was much the same.
Still, what large families offer most of all, with all their good and bad, is fullness. They are just plain full. And that fullness is a wondrous thing.
Memorable Christmases centered around midnight Mass, after which we would walk home through the clear biting air, snowflakes floating down in the light of the street lamps on our way. At home we would indulge in my older sister’s cinnamon rolls (made from scratch) and coffee before drifting off to bed to let old St. Nick do his work. My parents would have got each of us a gift or two, and each would receive a thoughtful gift from the person who had drawn his or her name, and there would be smaller gifts in the stockings, but the gift giving was but a light seasoning to the feast of our being together—especially after we had gone off to college and other pursuits—and sharing our stories and partaking of food and drink in the meal. One year my sister made a movie of our Christmas gathering, and when her friend (who was an only child from a difficult family) saw it, she wept and said that she did not know people really had Christmases like that.
Nevertheless, as indicated above, eating out as a family was a rare and limited event. Trips home from visiting family in Minnesota included a stop at a drive-in restaurant so that, as the car rolled along, we could each partake of one hamburger, one order of French fries, and one shake that we relished until we could enjoy such fare on our next trip north a year in the future. My brother-in-law, one of five children, recounted something familiar to many from large families, his wonder at the way other children could buy food, drink, and ice cream with abandon at fairs or other family attractions, while his family tramped off to the car to partake of bologna sandwiches and Kool-Aid. And I can still recount clearly these many decades later, my uncle, a father of seven, in animated fashion that nonetheless betrayed his natural good humor, saying to my parents about those rare occasions when their family would go out to eat, “And the kids would order juice, and it would come in these little glasses and cost 95¢! So, whenever we would go out, I would tell the kids, whatever you do, don’t order juice!”
On another occasion that same uncle marveled to my parents about how a child growing up in a large family experienced all the emotions in a day: they would laugh, they would cry, they would hope, they would fear, they would fight, they would reconcile, they would hold a grudge, they would forgive. This should make it clear that large families are no more flawless than any other families. Large families like all families are full of sinners. Thus, in addition to the virtues, there are the vices, measured out in assorted portions to all members, which lead to the inevitable misunderstandings, bickerings, arguments, and fights.
And there is the messiness (which is not to be confused with dirtiness). Large families are just plain messy, messy enough to drive any delusions of control from the most committed control freaks, which can happen in families of any size provided they are open to life and the refining effects of love. Still, large families are messy in ways unique and common to them all. For years they have babies, in succession, which means there are years of diapers and bathroom trips for the little ones; there is the sloppiness of feeding; there are, especially among boys, the proclivities for dirt, mud, water, bugs, and reptiles. And there are the wide-ranging emotions in quantity that can result in laughing, crying, yelling, and fighting, but that can also result in countless acts of kindness and generosity, as sharing, in one way or another, is a given in a large family. Still, what large families offer most of all, with all their good and bad, is fullness. They are just plain full. And that fullness is a wondrous thing.
Truth Pierces the Veil of Propaganda
The uncle mentioned above was husband to my mother’s sister, her only sibling. By the hand of Providence, my mother and her sister each had seven children, four girls and three boys. And that aunt once told me about how the women she worked with, at a public school where she was a librarian, were disparaging Catholics, and talking about how they bred like rabbits. Then they said to her, “But we don’t mean you.” She replied, “Yes, you do mean me. I am Catholic, and I have seven children. So, you do mean me.” They also complained about Catholics using public schools, finally conceding, “Well, I guess they do pay taxes.” Left unmentioned was the fact that Catholic schools saved taxpayers millions of dollars every year by educating children, whether Catholic or not, at no expense to the taxpayers, even though the parents of those children paid the taxes that supported the public schools to which they did not send their children.
In one of those public schools, a high school, my mother was filling in as a substitute teacher one day when a girl approached her desk. She asked my mother if each of the charms on the bracelet she was wearing represented a child of hers. My mother answered that each did. The girl then told my mother that she thought it was wrong for any one to have that many children. And my mother tactfully responded to the misguided girl that she did not agree with her.
More recently, though still some years ago, in a short conversation with a pleasant-enough young woman with whom I had been working at a book signing, it came out that I had grown up in a family of seven children. The young woman in a spontaneous and perfectly natural reply said about my parents, “They never quite figured that one out, huh?” I was left speechless, completely taken aback as the meaning of her comment broke through the barrier of my orientation. Here this friendly woman was reflexively and blithely suggesting that my parents were too stupid to understand that sexual relations led to pregnancy, a truly ironic conclusion given that she apparently embraced the popular culture in which the argument was often made that a woman who conceived a child after engaging in consensual sexual relations should have the option to abort the child because her pregnancy was unintended.
Still, along the way I did experience a bit of light breaking through the pall of overpopulation propaganda, and it came from a fellow named Tom from, of all places, California.
She was furthermore suggesting that my mother (a librarian and teacher, who at seventeen years old had earned a full academic scholarship to a leading women’s college and, through it, her degree) and my father (a landscape architect, who had earned his college degree while helping run a family landscaping business and raising a young family) were too stupid to know that they were only supposed to have one or two children and too stupid to know how to prevent the others from happening along. Of course, the woman’s assumption about my parents’ stupidity included that they should not have wanted to have so many children and should have used contraception to make sure they did not.
Even had I been able to respond to the woman, how could I have ever conveyed to one so shallow the depth of my parents’ understanding of the nature of love and the Sacrament of Matrimony; the wisdom of the Christian understanding of love and marriage so faithfully presented in St. Paul VI’s encyclical Humanae Vitae; the theology of the body that St. John Paul II would later so ably annunciate; the openness to life called for in the words of God, “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it;” the richness of faith in believing that He meant it and would make sure that it would all work out if we would only do our work and trust and obey Him; and the beauty of life and the depth of love that could thereby result. Where would one even start?
Still, along the way I did experience a bit of light breaking through the pall of overpopulation propaganda, and it came from a fellow named Tom from, of all places, California. We were both studying in the same program in Italy in the early eighties, though we did not know each other very well. One day we were visiting, and it came out that he was one of ten children, if I remember right. That broke us into the natural affinity that exists to varying degrees among those from large families. And in that conversation, Tom, who was a bright and engaging fellow, said something about which I may have heard inklings before. He said that he did not believe the propaganda about overpopulation. He said without equivocation that there was plenty of room on the earth for plenty more people. And I asked him what he knew about it. I do not remember all that he said, but I remember that it made an impression, and I wanted to know more.
Well, I had the chance to learn more at a parish I belonged to in Texas in the 1990s, when I was asked to be a presenter for the Millennium Evangelization Project (MEP) from the University of Dallas, based on a program out of the Philippines. As soon as I saw the topics to present, I immediately chose “The Myths of Overpopulation,” and was immersed in research and facts that validated the case that Tom from California had made all those years before. In fact from what I learned, the title “The Lies of Overpopulation” may have been more accurate. Among those who famously got it very wrong was Paul Ehrlich who wrote, with his wife Anne, The Population Bomb, published in 1968. Among those who got it very right was Julian Simon as described in the article “Julian Simon Was Right: A Half-Century of Population Growth, Increasing Prosperity, and Falling Commodity Prices” by Marian L. Tupy in Economic Development Bulletin.
So those who would still value love and openness to life in their marriages were made personae non grata in villages in which their families had lived for generations, because they were seen to be keeping the rest of the village from receiving improvements to their standard of living.
And I learned about Steven W. Mosher, a brilliant, erudite, and dignified man who, as a doctoral student in anthropology at Stanford University and a pro-abortion atheist, was invited to China by the Chinese government to observe their one-child policy. What he witnessed there, including forced abortions and sterilizations, drove him out of atheism and support for abortion and eventually into Christianity and the Catholic Church and the fatherhood of nine children. He is now the president of Population Research Institute (PRI) where one can find all the information one wants to expose the lies of overpopulation propaganda, like this article of the pro-death stances of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz. Or one might start with this recent article: “East Asia’s Coming Population Collapse: And How It Will Reshape World Politics” by Nicholas Eberstadt in Foreign Affairs. Or one might watch Depopulation Bomb: Why Are Birth Rates Falling Across the Globe? on Epoch TV. Rest assured, we are not going to overpopulate the planet.
Among all the diabolical things I learned about the population-control movement was how developed nations, like the United States during the tenure of Democrat presidents, through the United Nations and other organizations, would coerce people from countries with a lower material standard of living to use contraception to have fewer children. Thus would representatives of Western population-control advocates and agencies and organizations gather villagers together like lab rats and have them all report on what form of contraception they were using. How evil is that! Talk about letting the government into the bedroom! And using our tax dollars to invade the profoundly private realm of the marital relations of poor people! Can you get much more creepy than that? So under Democratic administrations, unbeknownst to most Americans, our tax dollars are used to fund such evil practices of elitist leftists who assume that they have a right to probe and regulate the marital relations of fellow human beings due to the leftists’ selfish fears—based on hysterical, erroneous projections—that those people from distant lands and cultures who still value life and children will prove a threat to their exorbitant consumption of material goods. God help us.
But it was much worse than that. Not only would these elitists pry into and try to regulate our fellow human beings’ marital relations and how many children they would bring into the world, but then they would try to coerce and extort them into contraception use by conditioning upon it the availability of things like electricity and clean water for the village. Thus would they call out villagers in front of all their neighbors to expose what type of contraception they were using or if they were using none at all. Then the elitists would make it clear that electricity or a clean-water project or some other good would not be brought to the village until a certain percentage of the villagers was using contraception. So those who would still value love and openness to life in their marriages were made personae non grata in villages in which their families had lived for generations, because they were seen to be keeping the rest of the village from receiving improvements to their standard of living. Ponder the evil of that. Well did Dickens’ Ghost of Christmas Present rebuke Scrooge and all who reckon themselves so superior as to judge their fellow human beings to be surplus population:
“Man,” said the Ghost, “if man you be in heart, not adamant, forbear that wicked cant until you have discovered What the surplus is, and Where it is. Will you decide what men shall live, what men shall die? It may be, that in the sight of Heaven, you are more worthless and less fit to live than millions like this poor man’s child. Oh God! to hear the Insect on the leaf pronouncing on the too much life among his hungry brothers in the dust!”
Elon Musk, Bill Maher, Mark Steyn, Ronald Reagan, and Paul VI on Demography, Life, and Murder
Nevertheless overpopulation remained one of the “macro fears,” along with others like man-made global warming, that the elitists pushed into the dominant culture to help create the “free-floating anxiety” necessary for the “mass formation” that can lead to the totalitarianism they seek, as described by Professor Mattias Desmet in The Psychology of Totalitarianism. Still, I finally discovered one voice that broke into the media and intelligently challenged the overpopulation lie. It was many years ago now, maybe around 2005 or so, and I cannot find the exact article—though I have found others of the many he wrote on the subject—but as I remember it, Mark Steyn began the article in National Review by stating that a somber earth-shaking milestone had passed with no attention paid to it. That event was the moment that the population, not the fertility rate, but the actual population of Russia began to decline, a first for the developed nations.
Those of us who have spent any time reading about demographics know that once a population begins to fall, it is very difficult to reverse it. It would take a lot of women having a lot of babies to do so. In “It’s Still the Demography, Stupid,” Mr. Steyn offered, in 2016, a summary and update of his writing and concerns about the population declines in the West and what those declines portended. He pointed to his article “It’s the Demography, Stupid,” which appeared in The Wall Street Journal and The New Criterion, and also to his book America Alone. I strongly recommend that everyone read any or all of Mr. Steyn’s writing on the subject. Mr. Steyn so clearly and brilliantly cuts through the cultural miasma generated by the godless that I fear he is too often rewarded in the way that man tends to reward prophets, think Jeremiah in the cistern. May God bless and protect him.
On the other hand, one voice that pops up on the side of the overpopulation phobia is that of Bill Maher. I do not watch Mr. Maher’s programing, but I have seen clips of his interviews and statements, and I am struck by how—despite his vulgarity and blatant anti-human views and his sophomoric and twisted humor—he sometimes evaluates things with surprising accuracy and is honest with himself and others about what he thinks (however ignorant he may be of much of the truth about the topics on which he opines) even when it goes against the grain of his liberal following. Whether he is right or wrong, I believe he states what he really believes. And he has made it clear that he believes the overpopulation lies.
Contrast that with Bill Maher, who, in an almost endearing sincerity, defends the position of pro-lifers and then admits that he is OK with “kind of” murdering unborn children because there are eight billion people in the world, which he thinks are too many.
Judging from some of the clips I have seen, Mr. Maher appears to be genuinely anxious about overpopulation and with a vehemence that suggests that in his own life he has taken the common steps, advocated by the population-control zealots, that assail nature and thereby tend to cement one in his error. In one famous clip from an interview with Elon Musk, Maher, who appears to consider himself an intellectual, without managing to hide some degree of insecurity in the presence of the brilliant and remarkably collected Musk, calls into question Musk’s concern about “civilizational decline” and “plummeting birthrates.” But the better informed Musk assures Maher that though he is “not suggesting complacency. . . . we’re not in any danger of resource collapse.”
But in another rather jarring clip, Bill Maher honestly defends pro-lifers by saying that they are not anti-women and to say so is dishonest, but that they believe that abortion is murder: “I can respect the absolutist position. I really can. I . . . I . . . I . . . scold the left . . . on . . . when they say ‘Oh, you know what, they just hate women,’ . . . They don’t hate women. They just made that up. They think it's murder. And it kind of is. I'm just okay with that. I am. I mean, there's eight billion people in the world. I'm sorry, we won't miss you. That's my position on that." To the gasping response from the audience Maher questions: “What? Is that not your position if you’re pro-choice?” To Piers Morgan’s shocked reply and suggestion that Maher’s position is just because he does not like children, Maher replies, “You said you’re pro-choice; that’s your position too.”
Thus with brutal honesty does Bill Maher strip away all pretense and expose—and force his audience and guests to confront—the anti-human truth of the “pro-choice” position, to which his audience responds with gasps and shocked silence, which in turn draws from Maher incredulity that they have not accepted the reality that abortion is “murder. . . . kind of” of defenseless children in their most vulnerable and dependent state. That is the choice in the “pro-choice” position, which he believes is necessary to ward off the specter of overpopulation that apparently frightens him so. Well should they gasp.
Lives not worthy to be lived, some 60 million of them brutally aborted since 1973 in the United States alone, for what?
Ronald Reagan had come to the same conclusion about the nature of abortion and articulated it most eloquently in his last campaign for the presidency against Walter Mondale in 1984. The Republican Party today could take a lesson from Reagan’s clear, principled, and fundamental position. Remember, Reagan won forty-nine states, losing only Mondale’s Minnesota. In President Reagan and Vice President Mondale’s first debate in 1984, President Reagan said:
I have believed that in the appointment of judges that all that was specified in the party platform was that they respect the sanctity of human life. Now, that, I would want to see in any judge, and with regard to any issue having to do with human life. . . . With me abortion is not a problem of religion; it’s a problem with the Constitution. I believe that until and unless someone can establish that the unborn child is not a living human being, then that child is already protected by the Constitution, which guarantees life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness to all of us. . . . I know there was weeks and weeks of testimony before a Senate committee . . . and at the end of all of that, not one shred of evidence was introduced that the unborn child was not alive. . . . All the evidence so far comes down on the side of the unborn child being a living human being. . . .
The laws regarding that always were state laws. It was only when the Supreme Court handed down a decision that the federal government intervened in what had always been a state policy. Our laws against murder are state laws; so I would think that this would be the point of enforcement. . . .
Now, it is a sin if you’re taking a human life. At the same time in our Judeo-Christian tradition, we recognize the right of taking a human life in self defense. And therefore, I’ve always believed that a mother, if medically it is determined that her life is at risk if she goes through with the pregnancy, she has a right then to take the life of even her own unborn child in defense of her own. . . .
Well, with regard to this being a personal choice, isn’t that what a murderer is insisting on, his or her right to kill someone because of whatever fault they think justifies that? Now, I’m not capable, and I don't think you are, any of us, to make this determination that must be made with regard to human life. I am simply saying that I believe that that’s where the effort should be directed to make that determination. I don’t think that any of us should be called upon here to stand and make a decision as to what other things might come under the self-defense tradition. That too would have to be worked out then, when you once recognize that we’re talking about a life, but in this great society of ours, wouldn’t it make a lot more sense, in this gentle and kind society, if we had a program that made it possible, for when incidents come along in which someone feels they must do away with that unborn child, that instead we make it available for the adoption? There area a million-and-a-half people out there standing in line waiting to adopt children who can’t have them any other way.
Contrast that with Bill Maher, who, in an almost endearing sincerity, defends the position of pro-lifers and then admits that he is OK with “kind of” murdering unborn children because there are eight billion people in the world, which he thinks are too many. He would rather we savagely “murder” millions of innocent children in utero now to avoid imagined problems that may arise if the population increases. Does Mr. Maher, who is obviously an intelligent man, not realize the profound evil in this position and the company this position puts him among. There have been others who believed that murdering millions would make life better for those deemed worthy enough, according to varying subjective criteria, to live: Mao Zedong, Joseph Stalin, Adolph Hitler, Pol Pot, just to name a few. Mr Maher, and other supporters of abortion, might well heed the words of Dr. Leo Alexander, a Boston psychiatrist who was consultant to the Secretary of War working with the office of Chief American Counsel for Nazi war crimes in Nuremberg. He said of the Nazi’s slaughter of at least eleven million people: “It started with the acceptance of the attitude, basic in the euthanasia movement, that there is such a thing as a life not worthy to be lived.”
Lives not worthy to be lived, some 60 million of them “terminated” since 1973 in the United States alone, for what? What is Bill Maher, and those who think like him, so afraid of that he would support this? So afraid of that he prefers mass murder “kind of”? It is apparent that Mr. Maher makes a high income, has no children, and can afford all the comfort he would need and a great deal of luxury. So it would make little sense for him to fear that he will not have enough. Does he fear that others may not have enough? If so, why would he place the well-being of strangers who may not have enough over strangers whom he is just OK with being kind of murdered in the womb so that other strangers have enough? That makes no sense. So what is it that he and those who think like him fear?
One’s opinions or feelings about contraception must run pretty deep to cut oneself off from what one used to believe, and had some degree of commitment to, is the community through which is ordinarily made available the graces by which one can attain eternal life.
What may make sense is that, according to Wikipedia: “Owing to his disagreement with the Catholic Church’s doctrine about birth control, Maher's father stopped taking Maher and his sister to Catholic Mass when Maher was thirteen.[17]” Bill Maher stated the same in an interview with Harry Smith on The Early Show on CBS some fifteen years ago. If it is true that Maher was born on January 20, 1956, Maher would have turned 13 in 1969. That would be less than one year after Pope Paul VI published the encyclical Humanae Vitae on July 25, 1968, reasserting the Church’s teaching that contraception (artificial birth control) is unlawful. The pope began the encyclical: “The transmission of human life is a most serious role in which married people collaborate freely and responsibly with God the Creator. It has always been a source of great joy to them, even though it sometimes entails many difficulties and hardships.” And then after recognizing that the modern world raised new concerns, he wrote that: “This new state of things gives rise to new questions.” And he further stated that these new questions require “from the teaching authority of the Church a new and deeper reflection on the principles of the moral teaching on marriage—a teaching which is based on the natural law as illuminated and enriched by divine Revelation.”
The encyclical then went on to state:
Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. (14) Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary. (15)
Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means. (16)
Apparently the reaction of Bill Maher’s father to the conclusions reached from that “new and deeper reflection” “from the teaching authority of the Church” drove him to remove Bill and his sister, and presumably himself, from the Catholic Church founded by Jesus Christ on St. Peter and the Apostles, which for believers is the community through which the salvation won by Christ is ordinarily made available to the world and the entire human race. As Humanae Vitae states:
It is in fact indisputable, as Our predecessors have many times declared, (1) that Jesus Christ, when He communicated His divine power to Peter and the other Apostles and sent them to teach all nations His commandments, (2) constituted them as the authentic guardians and interpreters of the whole moral law, not only, that is, of the law of the Gospel but also of the natural law. For the natural law, too, declares the will of God, and its faithful observance is necessary for men's eternal salvation. (3)
One’s opinions or feelings about contraception must run pretty deep to cut oneself off from what one used to believe, and had some degree of commitment to, is the community through which is ordinarily made available the graces by which one can attain eternal life.
What exactly might it be about the Church’s teaching that would lead one to reject the Church? Did the Church say that it was wrong to engage in sexual relations? No, the Church held, as it has from the beginning, that “the sexual activity, in which husband and wife are intimately and chastely united with one another, through which human life is transmitted, is, as the recent Council recalled, ‘noble and worthy.’ (11)” Did the Church say that couples must have many children? No, Humanae Vitae clearly states:
If therefore there are well-grounded reasons for spacing births, arising from the physical or psychological condition of husband or wife, or from external circumstances, the Church teaches that married people may then take advantage of the natural cycles immanent in the reproductive system and engage in marital intercourse only during those times that are infertile, thus controlling birth in a way which does not in the least offend the moral principles which We have just explained. (20)
Nature, Control, and Sin
The Church affirmed that sexual intercourse is right and ordered and good between a man and a woman united in the Sacrament of Matrimony for the unity of the couple and the procreation and education of children.
Married love particularly reveals its true nature and nobility when we realize that it takes its origin from God, who “is love,” (6) the Father “from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named.” (7)
Marriage, then, is far from being the effect of chance or the result of the blind evolution of natural forces. It is in reality the wise and provident institution of God the Creator, whose purpose was to effect in man His loving design. As a consequence, husband and wife, through that mutual gift of themselves, which is specific and exclusive to them alone, develop that union of two persons in which they perfect one another, cooperating with God in the generation and rearing of new lives. . . .
And if each of these essential qualities, the unitive and the procreative, is preserved, the use of marriage fully retains its sense of true mutual love and its ordination to the supreme responsibility of parenthood to which man is called.
Contracepted sexual intercourse offends the nature of the act by closing it to its natural and supernatural ends of union and procreation. So, the elder Maher apparently objected to the Church’s affirmation that deliberatively contracepted sexual intercourse is wrong, and he left the Church for that. And this rebellion seems to have left a profound mark on his son, who has exhibited real hostility to religion—whether he considers himself atheist, agnostic, or “apathist”—in his rebellious-teenager way that insists on pitting science against religion rather than recognizing their natural harmony.
Sexual intercourse is designed to create other humans beings with supernatural destinies to live with God for all eternity and not to be the plaything that our culture has groomed us to believe it is.
The use of terms is interesting: contraception and birth control. Contraception, that is against conception, is used to control birth. Control. I have been long struck by the pride of humanity that one should be able to engage in sexual intercourse that is designed by nature and nature’s God for the purpose of reproduction and then expect to control birth by artificial means, playing with the natural order in human sexuality, let alone the spiritual. Humanae Vitae speaks to this:
But the most remarkable development of all is to be seen in man's stupendous progress in the domination and rational organization of the forces of nature to the point that he is endeavoring to extend this control over every aspect of his own life—over his body, over his mind and emotions, over his social life, and even over the laws that regulate the transmission of life.
How prescient does that sound when we reflect on our present culture?
Control. It makes me think of a neighbor asking after we had our second child, if we were now “stopping.” Stopping? I knew what he meant, but I was so overwhelmed by the impropriety of his question—the very idea that we could just shut off, as with a switch, the divinely established procreative power of our marital union; that anything to do with the divinely established procreative power of our marital union was any of his business; that anyone would speak of such profound and private matters so casually; and thus that he would even ask such a question let alone expect an answer—that I almost answered, “Stopping? Do you mean sexual intercourse?” Do people have any idea what they are dealing with, what they are playing with, what they are trivializing, with ramifications cosmic and eternal? Sexual intercourse is designed to create other humans beings with supernatural destinies to live with God for all eternity and not to be the plaything that our culture has groomed us to believe it is.
It brings to mind another memorable conversation I had during my year in Italy with a young woman in the program who, like Tom mentioned above, was from California. Let’s call her Sheila. In my imperfect recollection, I believe Sheila was from San Francisco and apparently amiably excused from the cool group of that city, not only because she was of average appearance and means and did not dress in the latest fashions, but because she was an introvert and was considered by the cools to be a thinker. We were not very long into our conversation before it became clear to me that Sheila identified as an intellectual. Nor did it take me long to realize that, given my appearance and Midwest affability, she did not identify me as one. Therefore, when Sheila tried to make her case to me that prostitution should be legal, she did so with a measured though not unkind condescension, that seemed natural to her, coupled with a low expectation of my ability to comprehend her lofty position. When I would question her position, or point out ways in which I believed she was wrong, she would patronizingly restate her position to me in a way consistent with her apparent assessment of my inability to understand her.
Of course sexual desire and pleasure—just like the childbirth they are designed to result in—are natural, and therefore, it is no surprise that people want to indulge the one to experience the other.
After she had done this several times, I finally said to her, “I understand what you are saying; I just don’t agree with you.” To this she responded with wide-eyed wonder and apprehension that I had apprehended her and, having done so, rejected what she had theretofore assumed to be her superior reasoning. (This made a considerable impression on me that has long lasted, the running headfirst into the hubris of one who assumes that anyone who disagrees with him or her does so not because he or she has reasoned to a different, and perhaps more sound, conclusion but because he or she has just not understood. One may recognize shades of it in the contemporary patronization of asking, after offering an explanation, “Does that make sense?”) That appeared to shake her. She was further shaken when, after she had explained to me that prostitution—and by extension most if not all sexual activity outside the Sacrament of Matrimony as well as abortion—must be acceptable because sex was natural, I responded, “So is childbirth.” To that she really had no response and I repeated, “So is childbirth natural.” And I added that if she was going to argue a natural cause, she must then logically argue for the natural result, and thus her position on abortion was insupportable as was her position on the naturalness of contracepted sexual relations.
And so, with a nod to the self-professed lovers of nature and protectors of nature, let us treat of nature. Of course sexual desire and pleasure—just like the childbirth they are designed to result in—are natural, and therefore, it is no surprise that people want to indulge the one to experience the other. It is also no surprise that it is a profound challenge, under the influence of concupiscence in our present culture, to relegate and direct the sexual drive with its procreative potential through our minds and wills into its harmonious place in our persons and our lives. The profound power of the sexual drive, and its sensual pleasure, corresponds to the significance of its purpose, to cooperate with God and his grace in bringing into the world other human beings endowed with the supernatural destiny of joining in the very life of God for all eternity: pretty consequential stuff.
Sexual drive and pleasure run to the very roots of biological reproduction, to the roots of our mammalian nature. Anyone who has watched the elk rut or any other such activity cannot but marvel at the power the sexual reproductive drive, and its attendant sensual pleasure, has over the animals. I remember watching on television years ago an experiment (which I do not endorse) in which mice would starve to death rather than cross a shocking electrical grid to get food, but they would without hesitation cross that same shocking grid to have their brains stimulated as they would be in a sexual experience. Accordingly, it was no surprise to me that a spiritual director once succinctly said, “Everyone has sexual sins.” Good point. He (or she) who thinks he does not have sexual sins is not being honest with himself and might consider that the standard is: “But I say to you that every one who looks at a woman lustfully has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
Sexual sins would indicate that some sexual activity is wrong, contrary to what Sheila would maintain. What would make some sexual activity wrong and what would that sexual activity be? Well, in a nod to Sheila, I think we must go to the nature and purpose of sex. As we learned in science classes, at least in our day, sex exists for the purpose of reproduction, to create new creatures from parent creatures. And the sexual drive is a natural power that directs creatures to reproduce according to the “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God,” the most fundamental laws even recognized in the Declaration of Independence, the very founding document of the United States of America. Nature takes care of itself in this regard; populations ebb and flow according to nature and natural law. But concerning man, the human creature, it is not that simple. Why?
“Everyone has sexual sins.”
Because man, though part of nature, has a supernatural destiny, to join in the very life of God. As is described in Genesis 1 and 2 in figurative language, wherein lie depths of truths that man can never exhaust, God created man, male and female, in the very image of God. (Note the one fundamental distinction God includes in his creation of the human creatures in order to reflect his image is “male and female.”) Consequently, humans have a natural body like other mammals but that body is endowed with an immortal soul in which exist a mind (the power to think) and a will (the power to choose). And the male and female humans so endowed were blessed by God who commanded them to “Be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth and subdue it; and have dominion” over the creatures of the earth. And a man “cleaves to his wife, and they become one flesh.”
Thus the procreative act is also unitive in that it joins the complementary bodies of man and woman into one flesh. It is also right and good and fundamental according to the laws of nature and of nature’s God. And man, male and female, abided in original justice and original holiness. In that state their sexual actions would have been ordered and good and would not have offended God’s law:
“The intimate community of life and love which constitutes the married state has been established by the Creator and endowed by him with its own proper laws. . . . God himself is the author of marriage.”(87) The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator.
But as is portrayed in the figurative language of Genesis 3, God gave man, male and female, an opportunity to love him more by giving them a commandment. They broke that commandment, as depicted by their eating of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, and lost original justice and original holiness in their original sin, which abides in the human race in a mysterious way to the present. Ever since then, human desires are disordered (in concupiscence) due to sin to varying degrees in various ways according to each individual.
Every man experiences evil around him and within himself. This experience makes itself felt in the relationships between man and woman. Their union has always been threatened by discord, a spirit of domination, infidelity, jealousy, and conflicts that can escalate into hatred and separation. . . .
According to faith the disorder we notice so painfully does not stem from the nature of man and woman, nor from the nature of their relations, but from sin. As a break with God, the first sin had for its first consequence the rupture of the original communion between man and woman. Their relations were distorted by mutual recriminations;(96) their mutual attraction, the Creator’s own gift, changed into a relationship of domination and lust;(97) and the beautiful vocation of man and woman to be fruitful, multiply, and subdue the earth was burdened by the pain of childbirth and the toil of work.(98)
Psychology, Communication, Love, Communion, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order)
I cannot help but make an interesting digression here into what I perceive is a psychological witness to this “rupture of the original communion between man and woman,” which, of course, extends to all human relationships, as all descend from that one. In The Psychology of Totalitarianism, Professor Mattias Desmet does not explicitly treat of original sin or its consequences, but he does describe an aspect of the human condition in which believers can recognize effects of the fall of man. Professor Desmet identifies “the primal desire for blending with the Other.” Sounds a bit like communion. However, human beings cannot fully accomplish this blending due to an inherent deficiency in communication and understanding:
Human communication is full of ambiguities, misunderstandings, and doubts. . . . The signs—or more correctly, the symbols—of human language can refer to an infinite number of things, depending on context. . . . For this reason, language as a rational system—as a system in which words acquire meaning axiomatically—has an intrinsic, irreparable lack. . . .
We, as human beings, can never convey our message unambiguously, and the other can never determine its definitive meaning. It goes even further: We don’t even really know our own message. We never know exactly what we want to say, simply because our thoughts also work with words and so there is always a word lacking on that level, too.
This deficiency in communication is integral to deficiency in communion.
Professor Desmet points out that, from the very beginning, due to an “indefiniteness of the human world of symbols,” and a corresponding “lack of knowledge,” a child’s relationship with its mother is one of “uncertainty,” “insecurity,” and a search for meaning about how to be the “it for the Other,” beginning with the mother but extending to others, which leads to narcissism. If that narcissism goes to “the extreme,” it is isolating, and it is destructive of the Other and the self, and it dehumanizes the individual and leaves him bereft of empathy. “Excessive narcissism comes at the expense of empathy. To the extent that it diminishes a person’s ability to resonate with others and with the world, it renders that person lonely and isolated.”
Lonely and isolated. There is primordial precedent as expressed in the figurative language of Genesis: “Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves aprons. . . . and the man and his wife hid themselves from the presence of the Lord God.” The naked intimacy between man and woman; among humanity; between humanity and creation; and fundamentally, between humanity and God, upon which all other relationships depend, was broken. Denying responsibility and blaming would follow as would the consequences of their actions.
There is hope for perfect knowledge, clarity, understanding, communication, and thus, communion.
Sacred Scripture provides more specific witness to the role of communication in the rupture of communion after the fall of man in the story of the tower of Babel. “Now the whole earth had one language and few words.” That does not sound like the ambiguous, indefinite, complex, and confusing language that Professor Desmet describes as the basis of relational pathology in human beings. But it does not stay that way. As a consequence of man further raising himself up in an act of pride, God goes down to earth to “there confuse their language, that they may not understand one another’s speech” and further raise themselves up according to their own plans without deference to the plan of God.
Nevertheless, fallen man is not abandoned in his isolation, narcissism, and destructiveness. There is hope for perfect knowledge, clarity, understanding, communication, and thus, communion. In St. Paul’s celebrated elucidation of love in 1 Corinthians 13, he writes:
Love never ends; as for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For our knowledge is imperfect and our prophecy is imperfect; but when the perfect comes, the imperfect will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall understand fully, even as I have been fully understood. So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love. (italics added)
And once fully understanding and fully understood, the Object of faith and hope will be attained, so they too will pass away leaving only abiding love. Toward that end, in order to release fallen man from the bondage of sin, God sent his only Son, who entered into humanity in the Incarnation in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary, with her consent by the power of the Holy Spirit, and became man with natures both human and divine. He lived out his human life in perfect obedience and laid down his life so that humanity could be reconciled to God through his sacrificial death:
Have this in mind among yourselves, which was in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form he humbled himself and became obedient unto death, even death on a cross. Therefore God has highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name which is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.
And yet, we experience sexual desire disordered by sin and feel inclined to enjoy the sensual pleasure of the act without accepting the responsibility of its life-giving result. Nevertheless, the procreative and unitive powers of sexuality are so essential to man that Jesus through His Church affords them their own sacrament.
Jesus Christ later rose from the dead and ascended into heaven taking his humanity and all that went with it into the Godhead. God then sent the Holy Spirit at Pentecost and founded his Church upon St. Peter (as promised in Matthew 16:17-19) and the apostles and endowed the Church with the seven sacraments, one of which, Baptism, washes away original sin. Still, concupiscence, “an inclination to sin,” remains, and redeemed man still commits sins venial and mortal. Thus does the Church also offer man (male and female) the Sacrament of Reconciliation, when he sins after Baptism, to restore man to friendship with God through the graces won for man by the incarnate Second Person of the Holy Trinity, Jesus Christ.
So sinful man is disordered, and even after he is redeemed, he still must contend with the inclination to sin, the inclination to act contrary to his nature. And, of course, the drive and pleasure of human sexuality offer a potent arena in which man can act contrary to natural law and God’s revelation in ways small and gross. Human beings dealing with sexuality in the state of original sin or mortal sin or just under the influence of concupiscence are like children playing with fireworks.
Nevertheless, the order of creation persists, though seriously disturbed. To heal the wounds of sin, man and woman need the help of the grace that God in his infinite mercy never refuses them. Without his help man and woman cannot achieve the union of their lives for which God created them “in the beginning.”
Humanae Vitae warns, “With regard to man’s innate drives and emotions, responsible parenthood means that man’s reason and will must exert control over them.” And yet, we experience sexual desire disordered by sin and feel inclined to enjoy the sensual pleasure of the act without accepting the responsibility of its life-giving result. Nevertheless, the procreative and unitive powers of sexuality are so essential to man that Jesus through His Church affords them their own sacrament. Thus does God offer through the Church the Sacrament of Matrimony to give humanity the grace to engage in the complementary unitive and procreative relationship between man and woman in a way that is pleasing to God and his creation and that serves as a sign of the relationship of God and the Church:
By coming to restore the original order of creation disturbed by sin, [Jesus] himself gives the strength and grace to live marriage in the new dimension of the Reign of God. It is by following Christ, renouncing themselves, and taking up their crosses that spouses will be able to “receive” the original meaning of marriage and live it with the help of Christ.(109) This grace of Christian marriage is a fruit of Christ’s cross, the source of all Christian life.
“The marriage of those who have been baptized is, in addition, invested with the dignity of a sacramental sign of grace, for it represents the union of Christ and His Church.” The sacrament also protects the union from attacks from the devil and his minions. Therefore man and woman have the grace in the Sacrament of Matrimony to live in a life-long union of self-giving love within a fallen world. This comports with the virtue of chastity.
Thus does God offer through the Church the Sacrament of Matrimony to give humanity the grace to engage in the complementary unitive and procreative relationship between man and woman in a way that is pleasing to God and his creation and that serves as a sign of the relationship of God and the Church.
Humanae Vitae further reflects upon the beautiful nature of love in the Sacrament of Matrimony that is too often obscured by the vulgarity of our present culture:
This love is above all fully human, a compound of sense and spirit. It is not, then, merely a question of natural instinct or emotional drive. It is also, and above all, an act of the free will, whose trust is such that it is meant not only to survive the joys and sorrows of daily life, but also to grow, so that husband and wife become in a way one heart and one soul, and together attain their human fulfillment.
It is a love which is total—that very special form of personal friendship in which husband and wife generously share everything, allowing no unreasonable exceptions and not thinking solely of their own convenience. Whoever really loves his partner loves not only for what he receives, but loves that partner for the partner’s own sake, content to be able to enrich the other with the gift of himself.
Married love is also faithful and exclusive of all other, and this until death. . . .
Finally, this love is fecund. It is not confined wholly to the loving interchange of husband and wife; it also contrives to go beyond this to bring new life into being. “Marriage and conjugal love are by their nature ordained toward the procreation and education of children. Children are really the supreme gift of marriage and contribute in the highest degree to their parents’ welfare.” (8)
Therefore, since by its nature before sin and now in its sacramental form the sexual union of man and woman in the Sacrament of Matrimony is both unitive and procreative, any sexual activity that would occur outside the sacrament and/or pervert the complementary, unitive, and procreative qualities of the act would be sinful. Thus, it is sinful for human beings to engage in the sexual act outside of the Sacrament of Matrimony of one man and one woman that is open to accepting any child that may be conceived in that act. Though a married couple may for serious reasons purposely take advantage of nonfertile times of the reproductive cycle to engage in the marital act, artificial birth control not only closes the act to its procreative nature but also to its unitive nature in that the act of self-giving is perverted into a profound act of selfishness and rejection of the other: the spouse; the child that might have been conceived; and the God that gave man and woman the gift of each other, their fertility, their sexual complementarity, the act itself, and the marital union. Furthermore, any time a person engages in a sexual act that is contracepted and/or outside of the Sacrament of Matrimony, the desire that drives one into the act is not satiated but rather frustrated and perverted, and the act leads the persons and the union into evil. Contraception strangles a marriage; the marriage may survive it, but if contracepted, it will never be what it was intended to be. On the other hand:
But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source.
Now, especially in our current culture, it is a high bar to “save sex for marriage” and to not give in to the temptation of contraception, and hence people will fail to always live up to that high bar, but the more we support and encourage each other in a culture of life to live according to that ideal, the more likely we are to succeed in it and the better the world we will help to make in which to live. And if and when we fail in it, we can seek forgiveness from God, ordinarily in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and with renewed grace seek to live rightly again.
Sexual Morality, Hope, and Healing
I guess somewhere along here I have to make the obligatory statement, especially in a culture that puts so much effort into suppressing rather than confessing sexual guilt, that this is not about judging anyone. Judgment of a person belongs to God. Nevertheless, we are all called to judge behavior. If a person breaks into my house and makes toward my wife with a knife, I had better judge his behavior and act accordingly. We all need to judge ours and others’ behavior and act accordingly. “The unexamined life is not worth living,” as Socrates put it. And this is not about advocating for new law. The laws regarding these things have already been promulgated by God. Instead, this is about advocating for conversion, which is an ongoing process for all of us, who have a real need for it until the day we enter into the very life of God.
And this is not to make the case that large families are better than small. Families come in all different sizes for different reasons. As I mentioned above, my mother had only one sibling, and she and her sister each had seven children. I remember meeting a very impressive man years ago in West Texas. He was a tall, strapping farmer in his forties or fifties who was obviously very intelligent and yet conveyed the humility of a man of deep faith. In the course of our conversation, when I asked a question about his children, he lowered his head and said that he and his wife had not been blessed with children. It was obviously a sensitive point for him, and I regretted that I had mentioned it. People open to life may have many children or may have few or none at all. It is not so much a matter of how many children people have, it is a matter of being open to the children God would bring into the world through the love of a couple and of God within the Sacrament of Matrimony.
For those whose sexual morality has not yet arrived at the point of reserving the sexual act for one man and one woman within the Sacrament of Matrimony open to accepting the children that would naturally result from it, you might ask yourself where your line is drawn. It seems most people recognize that there is something perverse in much of the way sexuality is presented and practiced in the present culture. Perhaps the blasphemous opening of the Olympics, the drag shows for children, the pornography in schools, the human sacrifice of abortion “to a false god of expedient mercy,” or the horrible sexual mutilation of children as a sacrifice to the lie that we can change our sex are bridges too far. Understood. Why are those too far; why are those immoral? Once you determine that, work your way back to what sexuality is for, as we did above, and see where you land as far as what is right or wrong. And please do not fall into the idea that everyone has the right to act out sexuality however he or she wishes. We cannot keep playing this game of anything goes. We may be free to do so, but we do not have a right to do what is wrong.
It seems most people recognize that there is something perverse in much of the way sexuality is presented and practiced in the present culture.
Therefore we cannot ignore the necessary morality for the powerful gift of human sexuality and must seek the truth about what that is, regardless of our own failings. To do what is wrong is evil, even if it is legal, and that is between the person and God (instead of the person and the state.) And also, please do not limit your sexual morality by your own sexual failings. Again, everyone has sexual sins. Do not let yourself be prisoner to your past sins. If you have not repented of your past sins, do so. If you have not confessed them, do so. And especially do not refrain from teaching morality to your children out of a feeling of hypocrisy. Parents cannot sit idly by, due to the sins of their past, and allow their children to ignorantly navigate the minefield of illicit sexuality. I remember schools bringing in drug addicts to teach us not to do drugs. Similarly, if you have sinned sexually, all the more reason to instruct your children not to do so. Teach your children the truth about chastity for their sakes. Your sins are none of their business.
If you are not sure what chastity really is, do your research. Not forming young people in the virtue of chastity is a grave failing on the part of their parents and culture. Consider that when the devil unleashed the “sexual revolution” upon the world, many representing the Catholic Church in the United States in positions of leadership, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, all but abandoned the Baltimore Catechism and much sound catechesis for such things as the Becoming a Person series. Those of that era might well have known that one was not supposed to engage in sexual intercourse outside of marriage but—with a drastic shift in cultural morality, confusing teaching (even in the confessional) from those representing the Church, and without a solid grounding in practical chastity—were left to determine for themselves where they should stop short of intercourse, which left the door a bit too open to the possibility of not stopping short after all, especially in the heat of passion.
And all this evil of the contraceptive culture rests in despair of the future. Sexuality should not be about despair but about hope that celebrates the union of man and woman, in the sacrament, and the children that are introduced into the world with the supernatural destiny of joining God and all the hosts of heaven. What could be more hopeful. Instead, we have the present despair of a culture mired in sexual perversion. Ultimately, despair is considered to be one species of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, which Jesus said would not be forgiven. Would it not be better to forge ahead choosing life and doing the best we can to develop the resources we have to make sure everyone has what he needs, rather than to brutally slaughter millions of innocents in utero now in the unfounded belief that that will make the world better for those whom they fear may not have enough. Morality aside, is it not better to protect the life of all we can now in hope, rather than slaughter innocents for a possibility of scarcity that we have no reason to expect?
Sexuality should not be about despair but about hope that celebrates the union of man and woman, in the sacrament, and the children that are introduced into the world with the supernatural destiny of joining God and all the hosts of heaven.
One can see why people recognize abortion to be a form of age-old human sacrifice. And as God taught Abraham to whom he gave the Promise of blessing for “all the families of the earth,” after a pre-history of man’s failure to live up to his part in God’s covenants with man, God does not want human beings to sacrifice their children. There is but one sacrifice that atones for man’s sins, and that is the sacrifice of God’s only-begotten Son. Thus, the child sacrifice of abortion is offered not to God but to Satan, who just revels in the profound evil of it.
Apply that knowledge to all we know about abortion, and see if it does not ring true. It makes me think of something I heard once about Charles Manson and his cult. He would ask his followers to cross a moral barrier, like to have sexual relations with someone he chose within the cult. He did not force it but made it known that he would like them to do it. Once the person then crossed that line, he would ask them to cross another, like to have relations with someone of the same sex. With each moral line they would cross, he would have a deeper hold upon them. If you have had an abortion, do not let it have that kind of hold on you. I once heard that, on average, it takes a woman well over ten years to come to terms with her abortion. To come to terms with it is to have to admit what would seem to be unforgivable, one’s participation in the killing of one’s own child. But a meditation on a crucifix or the passion narratives of the gospels reveals the depth of humiliation and suffering Jesus Christ went to to make available the very forgiveness needed, and he loved you personally enough to do that. If you have had an abortion, there is healing in the Church through the Sacrament of Reconciliation, and there is support through various individuals or groups. Come out from the denial and darkness and admit, confess, and come back to the light.
Compelling Observations about Human Procreation from Roseanne Barr, Tucker Carlson, and Calley and Casey Means
I am reminded of a conversation I had recently with an Anglican bishop who had long-ago discovered Saint John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. He expressed, in quite an animated fashion, how reading it opened up his mind and his ministry; how, as a Protestant, he had never heard terms like unitive and procreative before he had read the work and that how ever after it had guided his ministry. Consequently, as a young priest, when he would have couples meet with him prior to marriage, he would ask the young men if they were ready to be fathers, and when they would say that no, they were not planning to be fathers yet but just planning to get married, he would correct each of them to understand that if he was getting married he was choosing to be a father. He concurred with me when I said that I believed 95% of so much of what is wrong with our culture today is that we have separated human sexuality from reproduction.
But such truths are not only self-evident to those of such lofty station as the Magisterium of the Catholic Church or an Anglican Bishop, but even to one no less earthy than Roseanne Barr, who has recently said she wants to start the Make America Moral Again (MAMA) movement. In an interview earlier this year with Tucker Carlson, Roseanne Barr said, “You know, people should not have sex. That’s one way that we can fix the world right now. . . . unless you’re married and you can take care of the kids that are going to be a result of it. Right? Isn’t that common sense?” Mr. Carlson replied, “I strongly agree.” God bless Ms. Barr for speaking common sense about human sexuality into our culture, a culture so toxic that Mike Cernovich, in another Tucker Carlson interview, claims that it grooms people for fornication, pornography, and worse and worse sexual sins. Paul Harvey famously exposed it as far back as 1965 in his broadcast “If I Were the Devil.”
In reference to Mr. Carlson’s agreement with Roseanne Barr, I have noticed another evolution in Tucker Carlson’s thinking that may be leading him to the truths articulated in Humanae Vitae. He exposed a bit of this evolution in his interviews of Calley and Casey Means and Vince Coglianese.
“You know, people should not have sex. That’s one way that we can fix the world right now. . . . unless you’re married and you can take care of the kids that are going to be a result of it. Right? Isn’t that common sense?” —Roseanne Barr
In Mr. Carlson’s interview with Calley and Casey Means, Calley stated, “Chronic disease medications didn't exist before 1960. The first one was the birth-control pill, the first pill that you took for more than a couple of weeks, that didn't cure the issue right away, ever. So in 1960, 0% of the medical attention was on chronic conditions. . . . Today, 95% of spending is on chronic conditions.” Please, read what he said again. So, there were no medications for chronic disease before 1960. And when we did start on this questionable road of chronic-disease medication, and all that that entails, we did so by treating God’s gift of human fertility, and its ability to create more human beings for God and us to love, as a disease. Ponder that.
Mr. Carlson did not want to pass over the subject of the birth-control pill, so he said:
Can we just go to the pill really quick. I just want to say upfront that, you know, I’m Protestant, never had a problem with birth control. I never thought about it, but, um, at all. So that's my position or has been my position, which is actually radically changing as we speak. But, um, I've always felt that way, so I never really thought about it, but I always noticed that you were not allowed to criticize the pill, period. Like that was not allowed in the world I grew up in. You can have all kinds of kooky opinions. You cannot criticize the birth-control pill. And now I feel like maybe we were played a little bit.
Casey Means responded:
Yeah, I mean, I . . . I . . . I can speak as a physician, but I can also just speak as a woman who has taken all these different medications because it's liberation. It's liberation. We can do whatever we want, you know, and I can . . . who needs to get a period when you can, you know, work in the hospital 100 hours a week and put off having, and then I freeze my eggs at 37 and have kids, you know. . . . So you've got these medications that are literally shutting down the hormones in the female body that create this cyclical, life-giving nature of women. We basically told women, these hormones don't matter. Your ability to create the most miracle of any miracles, which is create life, just shut it down. There's no impact. That's crazy to me. And as I've woken up from this, I'm realized, like your cycle and having these hormonal cycles is, is part and parcel with our health in every possible way, and also with the miracle of creating life. And so for years, you just lose the biofeedback of what's happening with your cycle. It is the, it is one of the key barometers of female health. How is your cycle doing? Is it regular or is it heavy? And we're just, we just shut it down and say there's no repercussions for that, which I think gets to a larger issue, which is a disrespect of life. Right? It's a disrespect of things that create life. . . . We have lost respect for life, which again gets to the spiritual crisis.
Yes! “We have lost respect for life, which again gets to the spiritual crisis.”
Tucker responded, “Keep going. Keep going. I love this. You are speaking truth right now.”
And when we did start on this questionable road of chronic-disease medication, and all that that entails, we did so by treating God’s gift of human fertility, and its ability to create more human beings for God and us to love, as a disease.
In his interview with Vince Coglianese, after they discussed how the Biden administration is trafficking illegal aliens into the United States, Mr. Carlson said, “And then convincing Americans that having children is like the worst thing that they could ever do.” They moved on to how at the Democratic National Convention there was a mobile clinic that offered abortions and vasectomies. Carlson said, “Who would get a vasectomy at the DNC?” He continued: “It’s just so interesting. I mean, I’m re, I’ve been pro-life, you know, since my 20s, anyway, um, when I had kids and really thought about it, . . . um, even before then. But I did, never really connected that to birth control. I mean I’m Protestant. I never had any problem with birth control, practiced birth control, but in that, I’m not really sure what I think of it now, but I know what I think of people who are obsessed with preventing conception and childbirth. . . . Like, what is that? Why the obsession?” Mr. Carlson touches on the subject again in his interview with medical ethicist Charles Camosy.
It makes me think of a married couple who lived next door to me in an apartment complex in San Antonio decades ago. I had been sharing with them information about the Church including the Catechism of the Catholic Church. At a time when so many people were condemning the Catholic Church for its opposition to artificial birth control, the wife of the couple, who were not Catholic, told me that she really respected the Catholic Church’s condemnation of artificial birth control because the pill was so obviously detrimental to women. I told her that I thought it so strange that some women would go out of their way to eat healthy food, get their exercise, and then ingest a substance that completely devastates the intricate natural hormonal balance and interplay in their bodies.
It is interesting that, in light of his conversations above, Tucker Carlson makes clear in questions to his many and varied guests that he wonders how we in the United States, and the western world, got to our present state of depravity and degeneration. In his speech in Wichita, Kansas on 13 September 2024, he said:
How could Tony Blinken at the State Department, and Joe Biden at the White House . . . how could every one of their policies be anti-human? Is that an accident? I don’t think it is, actually. I think what we’re seeing here is a manifestation of the spiritual battle that’s been described by every civilization since the beginning of time. And again I just want to say that I’m not saying that as someone, you know, who is so pious and faithful as a Christian that you should follow my example. Please don’t. I’m saying that as someone who is searching for another explanation, and I can’t find one because there is no rational explanation for what we’re seeing now. There is none. You’re encouraging people not to reproduce? No human being would ever encourage other human beings not to reproduce. . . . So, what we’re looking at is evil.
Just so! What Mr. Carlson exposes here, in his search for truth, is the culture of death of which Saint John Paul II wrote in Evangelium Vitae. The culture of death encompasses abortion, warfare, disregard of the danger of nuclear war, transgenderism, same-sex marriage, human trafficking, and various other manifestations. It is evil. And left unrepented, it festers and sickens the soul of a nation. The culture of death tries to pretend that abortion is little more than having a mole removed with commensurate effects. That lie leaves us with a society in denial, full of all the physical, psychological, and spiritual effects of the violent slaughter of the most defenseless human beings and the deep wounding of their parents and the rest of us who are all affected by it. It leaves us with deeply damaged mothers—physically, psychologically, and spiritually—who do not seek the healing in all those areas so necessary for their health and the health of society. And fathers of the aborted need the healing too. And the loss of the children needs mourning. Thus, the culture of death infects our nation, and everyone in it, in every way until we face the evil, repent of it, and seek the necessary healing.
The Deep, Broad Root of the Culture of Death
And if Tucker Carlson does not yet recognize perhaps the deepest and broadest root of the culture of death grown from a seed of diabolical origin, I think he is getting closer to it. That root is pervasive and subtle and oh so easy and something that far too many people will skirt around or go over, because they will not choose to accept the implications it has for the way they live their lives. But if we are going to free ourselves from the culture of death, we have got to face it. The root is contraception. Once a culture accepts contraception, artificial birth control, the seeds of so much of the horror of the culture of death are sown.
Saint Paul VI warned of the consequences of contraception like infidelity, lowering of moral standards, reducing women to “a mere instrument for the satisfaction” of men’s desires. He wrote in Humanae Vitae:
Responsible men can become more deeply convinced of the truth of the doctrine laid down by the Church on this issue if they reflect on the consequences of methods and plans for artificial birth control. Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. Not much experience is needed to be fully aware of human weakness and to understand that human beings—and especially the young, who are so exposed to temptation—need incentives to keep the moral law, and it is an evil thing to make it easy for them to break that law. Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection.
Do we not have enough evidence of that final point in our present culture? It makes me think of a friend who told me that in her mother’s bridge club, in the 1950s or 60s, a woman admitted to taking the pill, and when the other women questioned why she would do so, she said of her husband, “When he wants it, he gets it.” The friend’s mother observed that, right before their eyes, their friend had been reduced to a sexual object. As a priest said to me over forty years ago, “Too many men treat women as masturbatory tools.” How well does the condom fit into that description. And how willingly do women desperate for love allow themselves to be so used, which does not sate but rather increases their desperation for love. How much mental illness can be attributed to the abuse of God’s profound gifts of sexuality and fertility? And how much damage is done to our culture, how toxic do we make it, by our refusal to accept the responsibility of sexuality, fertility, and the Sacrament of Matrimony?
And you know, on television, film, and internet—whether in dramas, real-life interviews, or other fare a husband is subjected to—I have seen many times where women, in twos or threes or larger groups, sit around and sip their wine and gripe about men. And it dawned on me that my mother and the other mothers of large families that we knew did not gather and complain about their husbands as clueless Neanderthals. These women spoke of their husbands as committed lifelong partners in the challenge of life in the world, which involved marriage, children, home, church, work, and whatever leisure activities they might squeeze in with husbands and kids. That is also true of family women of our generation. And it is true of the men of the relationships.
Contraception invites Big Pharma and manufacturing companies and a host of other soulless actors into the intimacy of the sexual act, placing commercial artificial barriers between the man and woman and in the way of what God intended for the act.
It would never have occurred to them that the goal of life was a succession of candlelit wine-drenched gourmet dinners—with some washed and coiffed metrosexual as fashionably dressed in the latest male attire as the washed, coiffed, and painted female in her short tight dress and spike heels—mere preludes to the endless vacations on sunlit exotic beaches, all of it laced with sterile desperate fornication that in reality communicates to the man and woman a profound rejection of each other, children, family, and God, and sexuality itself, (not to mention commitment and future), and is so satisfying that the women afterward sit around with their friends and complain about the men, while the men move on to other easy marks who will sleep with them without the grace and responsibility of marriage. How special can they feel in such relationships, men and women, to know that they are just the next in line to engage in the most physically intimate human act stripped of its deepest purpose and meaning? Apparently, given their grousing, not very. Sue Ellen Browder’s Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Women’s Movement is instructive in this area.
I remember in the 1990s, at the parish where I was involved in the Millennium Evangelization Project, I was talking after Mass to a woman who was quite active in the pro-life movement, serving as a sidewalk counselor in front of an abortion clinic. We were talking of the evil of abortion when I said that I was ever more convinced that the root of the evil was contraception. She responded, “You don’t have to tell me.” Then she proceeded to tell me that her husband had got a vasectomy without consulting her, and thereafter one evil after another was visited upon their family. It began with his infidelity and culminated in her own pro-life daughter getting an abortion, from which she had still not recovered. The husband eventually repented and joined her in her pro-life work. That is not the only time I have heard of a vasectomy leading to infidelity and, often enough, the destruction of a family.
And let’s just consider that for a moment. This is not to point fingers, or to seek to know about any personal behavior, but just to take an objective look at the practice. Step out of what we have got used to accepting and really consider it. Men have their bodies mutilated in an attempt to prevent the sexual act from doing what nature and nature’s God intended it to do. And women do it too. How unnatural is that? How does that fit into God’s plan? And think of any kind of contraceptive. They all relegate sexuality to the mechanistic thinking that begets the mass formation and totalitarianism that Mattias Desmet warns about in The Psychology of Totalitarianism.
Contraception invites Big Pharma and manufacturing companies and a host of other soulless actors into the intimacy of the sexual act, placing commercial artificial barriers between the man and woman and in the way of what God intended for the act. How does it fit into God’s plan, or just into nature, that people visit a public store and purchase an unnatural product in front of the whole world to take home and shove between oneself and one’s partner, literally into the woman’s body, to pervert the intimacy and dignity and fecundity of the most intimate act? Think of all the money these soulless actors are making off dehumanizing your intimacy and off your decision to prevent or abort your children. Yes, some forms of artificial birth control act as abortifacients. And how easily is abortion justified in a culture that has repudiated chastity and reduced sexual responsibility to taking a pill or using a device to prevent the natural result of sexual relations. How much easier does that make it to then dispatch the “unintended” baby.
Why would human beings, endowed with a supernatural destiny, allow the barren, elitist, globalist purveyors of the Culture of Death to impose their Malthusian belts on them to strip their sexuality from its deepest meaning and reduce it to mindless sterile pleasure devoid of the children with which God may have graced husband and wife and the whole world.
Why would human beings, endowed with a supernatural destiny, allow the barren, elitist, globalist purveyors of the culture of death to impose their Malthusian belts on them to strip their sexuality from its deepest meaning and reduce it to mindless sterile pleasure devoid of the children with which God may have graced husband and wife and the whole world. Why would they allow the elite to sucker them out of their greatest legacy: children formed from their own bodies, man and wife, and animated with eternal souls, and then grandchildren, and on and on. Bigger houses, nicer cars or trucks, or vacation cruises will never fill the void left by the children they did not bring into the world and raise. Family is not meant to be something one adds on for personal enhancement to one’s career. As Phillip Sloan put it: “Should the careerist choose love, he would cease to be a careerist.” Work supports the family and is subservient to it. Professor Desmet observes:
The rise of meaningless professions shows us that the real problem of humanity lies in human relationships, more so than in the struggle with natural forces or in the physical demands of work. Simply put, in a society in which human relationships are satisfying, life will be bearable even if it has only primitive means of production. Whereas in a society where human relationships are impoverished and toxic, life will be difficult and unbearable, however “advanced” such society may be in terms of mechanical-technical evolutions.
And without going into detail, considering all the various forms of artificial birth control, how do they in any way reflect the dignity of man and woman and the gift of sexuality and its purpose to create trinitarian communions of man, woman, and God; and man, woman, and child? How bad would it really be to welcome an “unplanned” child and to offer all involved the sacrificial love that is exemplified on the Cross? I remember one story in particular of a couple who, when a crisis hit their family and they were tempted to despair, they took solace in each other’s arms only to conceive their tenth child, who was thereafter a living reminder of their love in times of difficulty.
That is an example of true love, unitive and procreatvie. As Christ himself taught, “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” Love in the Sacrament of Matrimony is: I give myself to you because I am laying down my life for you and those our love will bring into the world. Yes, those our love will bring into the world. After the example of Jesus, who better exemplifies laying down her life for a friend than the pregnant mother, epitomized in the example of Mary, the mother of Jesus? And in authentic matrimony the husband and wife are true friends, not adversaries who resent each other and their desire for each other and their rejection of each other.
And without going into detail, considering all the various forms of artificial birth control, how do they in any way reflect the dignity of man and woman and the gift of sexuality and its purpose to create trinitarian communions of man, woman, and God; and man, woman, and child?
On the other hand, if we go back to the Bill Maher statement that, with eight billion people on the earth, he will not miss the aborted, contraception, of course, fits right in with that. One of the lies of contraception is that we will not miss the unconceived. Contraception allows one to engage in the act that is supposed to be a giving of self in a profound union with God, spouse, and child thus conceived and turns it into a sterile, selfish taking that does not fulfill but rather depletes and leaves the barren man and woman desperately wanting.
Where contraception, due to ignorance, is not a complete failure to love, it is at least a contraction of love. That failure or contraction results in using the other for one’s pleasure and refusing the child that ought to result from the act. It says, “I want you because you make me feel good” not “I give myself to you, in the Sacrament of Matrimony, because I am laying down my life for you and our children.” It is profoundly selfish and stingy, the ultimate in taking and not sharing. And that failure to love or contraction of love, that selfishness, is contagious. It is passed on to the children that live within the relationship. And it is passed on to others within the culture.
A memory stirs of a visit to a doctor for a check-up at an ivy-league school decades ago. I remember him to be older, maybe in his fifties if not sixties, and he seemed uncomfortable and furtive from the very beginning. He asked me about my family based on the form I had filled out that listed my six siblings. It seemed that something was bothering him and that he was being devious about it. Finally, without looking at me, and in a sneaky way that felt like he was trying to elicit a certain answer or maybe some kind of justification, he said that growing up in a family that large I must not have got much attention. The guile all but dripped from his question, and I would not be manipulated; so I told him truthfully that in a family that large, all you got was attention; from waking up to going to sleep, all you got was attention. His discomfort was palpable, and I just could not help feeling that there was something deeply unsettled in his soul regarding the matter of life.
In that light, I would sometimes hear people ask how we or others could have so many children in our family. How did we afford it? That is funny because I never heard my parents mention anything to do with the monetary cost of having children. They were just open to whatever children were given them and committed to providing for them however they could. Nor do I remember anyone from large families in those days ever mentioning the monetary cost of having and raising children. On the other hand, I have heard people with smaller families raise the matter of the monetary cost of having and raising children: “How can they afford to have that many kids?” “They must be rich to have so many kids.” Rich, all right, but not necessarily in money.
In Vitro Fertilization and Transhumanism as Illuminated by Nicole Shanahan and Mattias Desmet
Another extension of the culture of death into human sexuality and fertility is in vitro fertilization (IVF), which has taken its place in the news lately, in a most disappointing way, with President Trump’s support of it. In vitro means in glass. In glass. Fertilization, conception of human beings, in glass. How does that comport with the Christian understanding that every child has the right to be conceived in a loving act between a man and woman in the Sacrament of Matrimony? Instead we have scientists harvesting ova and sperm from two people; brewing up a batch of embryos (each of which upon fertilization has an immortal human soul); evaluating the embryos for suitability in their little project; choosing the most suitable; then implanting, freezing, or discarding their siblings. And if too many of them “take” upon implanting, they can always be clinically murdered by “selective reduction.” These are all human beings being treated like the products of a science experiment if not a baking class. No one has the right to play the false god and devalue human life like that.
And there are a whole host of other contingencies involved in IVF that are beyond the scope of this article. It is diabolical. There are humane alternatives for the infertile, like treatments developed at the St. Paul VI Institute and adoption. In yet another Tucker Carlson interview in Rosenberg, Texas on 18 September 2024, Nicole Shanahan, running mate of Robert Kennedy, Jr., said of IVF:
Being a mother turned out to be a very convoluted experience, it turns out in this country right now. And, if you’re a liberal woman, you’re told, “Go harvest your eggs and freeze them.” They tell you that now really early on. . . . I walked away with an understanding that science is also not what they’re telling us today. That there’s this corporate world that, in the case of IVF, runs the IVF clinics. And the science of IVF is actually not based in well-researched, well-documented foundational science. Um, it works—it was discovered out of cancer-research dollars—but if you actually look at the investment in women’s health, it’s, it’s not there. And ovarian function, it’s the least studied organ in the body, arguably the most important. . . .
And so I started to fund the science, and, and that’s when I, I first came across transhumanism. And transhumanism is very real. It’s this idea that technology can replace human function. Um, and so I put $100 million into understand how to make and keep healthy women healthy, but all these transhumanists, all these transhumanists—right, what a novel idea, let’s keep women healthy so that we can have healthy babies, the most important thing in the world. Um, but the transhumanists wanted to build artificial wombs with these grants. They wanted to study IVG, um, which is creating gametes, eggs, out of the human stem cells just from your skin. And there’s a company, uh, called Conception, that actually just had mice give birth to five pups, um, with two male, uh, donors. And, and so, you know, I, it’s very real, transhuman. I’m, I’m in Silicon Valley, I’m in tech, I, I see all this stuff daily. Um, and it made me question, you know, if we are at a time in human history where we have to pause to really think about where this is all going. And I was slowly being labeled anti-science as a result of that.
The world view that is continually pushed on us as science-based by every aspect—not just scientific and medical, but political, social, educational, broadcast—of our culture is “outdated.”
Instead, Ms. Shanahan’s concern about transhumanism—which is in effect de-humanism—and “where this is all going” and her questioning if “we have to pause,” far from being “anti-science,” may in reality be an awakening from the mechanistic, technical “science,” that has held sway since the Enlightenment, to the real, authentic science into which quantum mechanics, complex and dynamic systems theory, and chaos theory give us a glimpse. According to Mattias Desmet in The Psychology of Totalitarianism, transhumanism “is a contemporary iteration of the mechanistic ideology that considers it desirable, even necessary, that future humans merge physically and mentally with machines.” He further writes: “The fourth industrial revolution, in which man is expected to physically merge with technology—the tranhumanist ideal—is increasingly seen as an unavoidable necessity. . . . Anyone who refuses to go along with the technological solution is naive and ‘unscientific.’”
Professor Desmet elaborates:
The greater the impact of mechanistic science on the world, the more it becomes clear that we’re creating problems for which we can hardly find a solution. . . .
It is here that we, together with Hannah Arendt, situate the undercurrent of totalitarianism: a naive belief that a flawless, humanoid being and a utopian society can be produced from scientific knowledge.(26) The Nazi idea of creating a purebred superman based on eugenics and social Darwinism, and the Stalinist ideal of a proletarian society based on historical-materialism are prototypical examples, as is the current rise of transhumanism. . . .
As Hannah Arendt states, totalitarianism is ultimately the logical extension of a generalized obsession with science, the belief in an artificially created paradise: “Science [has become] an idol that will magically cure the evils of existence and transform the nature of man.(28)”
And Desmet exposes not only what the mechanistic ideology has done to people and culture but how it is, in fact, obsolete:
The mechanistic ideology has put more and more individuals into a state of social isolation, unsettled by a lack of meaning, free-floating anxiety and uneasiness, as well as latent frustration and aggression. These conditions led to large-scale and long-lasting mass formation, and this mass formation in turn led to the emergence of totalitarian state systems.
Therefore, mass formation and totalitarianism are in fact symptoms of the mechanistic ideology. . . .
This ideology sees the universe as a logically knowable, predictable, controllable, and undirected mechanical process. And above all, it sees the universe as a dead and meaningless given, as the blind, mechanistic interaction between dead, elementary particles. While such a view of the world and matter imposes itself as the only scientifically valid view, a thorough examination teaches us that, from a scientific point of view, this world view is actually outdated.
Under the influence of mechanistic ideology, the step from progressivism to the Animal Farm is a short one.
Outdated! The world view that is continually pushed on us as science-based by every aspect—not just scientific and medical, but political, social, educational, broadcast—of our culture is “outdated.” Outdated. Reflect on that. And the totalitarianism that results from it is ubiquitous and insidious:
However, it would be a capital mistake to identify the phenomenon of totalitarianism only in totalitarian regimes. There is an ever-present, totalitarian undercurrent that consists of a fanatical attempt to steer and control life in far-reaching ways on the basis of technical, scientific knowledge. Technocratic thinking always walks on two legs. On the one hand, it appeals to people by intimating a positive image of an artificial paradise with which it claims we can be delivered from all adversity and suffering. On the other hand, it imposes itself based on anxiety, as a necessity to solve problems. With every “object of anxiety” that has emerged in our society in recent decades—terrorism, the climate problem, the coronavirus—this process has leapt forward.
But Professor Desmet makes it clear that we need no longer fall under this totalitarianism. He asks the question: “Do we view man as a biochemical machine that has to be technologically monitored and pharmaceutically adjusted, or as a being that finds its destination in mystical resonance with the Other and with the eternal language of nature?” He writes that, within the complex and dynamic systems theory and the chaos theory, “perhaps a person’s greatest task” is:
To discover the timeless principles of life, in and through all the complexity of existence. The better we can sense those principles, the more we feel that we start to understand some of the essence of life and that we are connected with the majestic, ordering principle that speaks to us from across the universe. And the more we stick to our principles, . . . the more real these principles become and the more we develop, as human beings, a real sense of existence and fortitude.
“Do we view man as a biochemical machine that has to be technologically monitored and pharmaceutically adjusted, or as a being that finds its destination in mystical resonance with the Other and with the eternal language of nature?” —Mattias Desmet
The discovery and commitment to principles is not limited to individuals alone but also to societies:
A society primarily has to stay connected with a number of principles and fundamental rights, such as the right to freedom of speech, the right to self-determination, and the right to freedom of religion or belief. If a society fails to respect these fundamental rights of the individual, if it allows fear to escalate to such an extent that every form of individuality, intimacy, privacy, and personal initiative is regarded as an intolerable threat to “the collective well-being,” it will decay into chaos and absurdity. The belief in the mechanistic nature of the universe and the associated overestimation of the powers of human intellect, typical of the Enlightenment, were accompanied by a tendency to lead society in a less and less principled manner. . . . In the final analysis, it was no longer a question for Enlightenment people to adhere to commandments or prohibitions or ethical and moral principles, but to move through this struggle for survival in the most efficient way possible based on “objective knowledge” of the world. This culminated in totalitarian and technocratic forms of government, where decisions are not made on the basis of generally applicable laws and principles but on the basis of the analysis of “experts.” For this reason, totalitarianism always chooses to abolish laws, or fails to implement them, and prefers to rule “by decree.” This means that, each new situation will require the formulation of new rules on the basis of a (pseudo)rational assessment of such situation. History abundantly illustrates that this leads to erratic, absurd, and ever-changing rules, which ultimately destroy all humanity in society.
Under the influence of mechanistic ideology, the step from progressivism to Animal Farm is a short one.
But quantum mechanics, complex and dynamic systems theory, and chaos theory liberate us from the mechanistic ideology of the Enlightenment to again seek an authentic humanism in light of “consciousness” and “the Other.” Professor Desmet articulates a hopeful future: “Chaos theory heralds, maybe even more than quantum mechanics, the era that historically and logically follows the Enlightenment; an era when the universe is once again pregnant with meaning.”
A universe “pregnant with meaning.” How much does that intuitively resonate with each one of us? True science has moved beyond the barren atheism of mechanistic ideology. Professor Desmet quotes Max Planck, the theoretical physicist who originated the quantum theory, “Both religion and science require a belief in God. For believers, God is in the beginning, and for physicists He is at the end of all considerations. To the former He is the foundation, to the latter, the crown of the edifice of every generalized world view.” And Desmet makes clear that, “Great scientists have left the logical-factual discourse of science behind and returned in an enlightened way to the type of discourse that during the Enlightenment was initially deemed subordinate: a poetic or mystical discourse, a discourse that shows an original respect and a genuine awe for the unnameable, for that which time and again eludes the human mind.” Please do not gloss over that. Consider it again and what it could mean for the culture and world in which we live: “a poetic or mystical discourse, a discourse that shows an original respect and a genuine awe for the unnameable, for that which time and again eludes the human mind.”
"A Truly Human Civilization" vs. the F-Word Culture
Nevertheless, mechanistic ideology persists among those who benefit from mass formation and totalitarianism. And it is not just Big Pharma, Big Insurance, and Big Pharmacy Benefit Managers that practice mechanistic thinking and want to intrude into your sexual intimacy. Humanae Vitae further presaged the evil that godless government could, with contraception, visit upon its population not that many years before the Chinese Communist Party’s One-Child Policy and all the population-control programs pushed upon developing nations:
Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife.
Again, this was written just years before the CCP’s One-Child Policy. Humanae Vitae also points out the limits imposed upon mankind by the laws of nature and of nature’s God to safeguard the reverence due to “the whole human organism and its natural functions:”
Consequently, unless we are willing that the responsibility of procreating life should be left to the arbitrary decision of men, we must accept that there are certain limits, beyond which it is wrong to go, to the power of man over his own body and its natural functions—limits, let it be said, which no one, whether as a private individual or as a public authority, can lawfully exceed. These limits are expressly imposed because of the reverence due to the whole human organism and its natural functions, in the light of the principles We stated earlier, and in accordance with a correct understanding of the "principle of totality" enunciated by Our predecessor Pope Pius XII. (21)
What a piece of work. Imagine Satan rubbing his hands and chortling at such an accomplishment: the profoundly beautiful act in which man and woman give themselves to each other within a sacrament of the Church to join with God in the ecstasy of creating another human being with the supernatural destiny of living forever in the very life of God pulled down to the filthy, perverse, destructive depths of a profound act of aggressive destruction.
Humanae Vitae recognizes the Church’s responsibility to proclaim “the entire moral law” toward “contributing to the creation of a truly human civilization:”
It is to be anticipated that perhaps not everyone will easily accept this particular teaching. There is too much clamorous outcry against the voice of the Church, and this is intensified by modern means of communication. But it comes as no surprise to the Church that she, no less than her divine Founder, is destined to be a “sign of contradiction.” (22) She does not, because of this, evade the duty imposed on her of proclaiming humbly but firmly the entire moral law, both natural and evangelical.
Since the Church did not make either of these laws, she cannot be their arbiter—only their guardian and interpreter. It could never be right for her to declare lawful what is in fact unlawful, since that, by its very nature, is always opposed to the true good of man.
In preserving intact the whole moral law of marriage, the Church is convinced that she is contributing to the creation of a truly human civilization. She urges man not to betray his personal responsibilities by putting all his faith in technical expedients. In this way she defends the dignity of husband and wife. This course of action shows that the Church, loyal to the example and teaching of the divine Savior, is sincere and unselfish in her regard for men whom she strives to help even now during this earthly pilgrimage “to share God's life as sons of the living God, the Father of all men.” (23)
Given all of the above, I would encourage Ms. Barr, Mr. Cernovich, Mr. Carlson, and all of us for that matter, to eschew use of the f-word as a common-sense contribution to thwarting the culture of death. About the f-word I wrote in “The Devil’s Bargain Behind ‘Let’s Go Brandon:’”
The f-bomb prohibition fell within this same realm of respect. As Fr. Ganshert told my sister’s class when he went in to address wanton profanity, the word referred to the act by which their parents had brought them into the world. Pause on that. The act by which their parents had brought into the world those human beings endowed with the supernatural destiny of entering into God’s very self. That act was supposed to be beautiful, self-giving, life-giving, holy, sacramental, and private. The f-bomb pulled that act from sublimity to plunge it into filth.
And how well the f-bomb’s degradation fits our society today. Life-giving has been long stripped away by contraception to transform the act from one of self-gift to one of selfishness and rejection. Once so transformed there is justification for hooking up, cohabiting, adultery, pornography, untold perversities, and the vicious silent slaughter of any human beings conceived by the act so profaned. It continually descends from matrimony to the f-bomb.
But it is far worse than that. It is not enough that we have so degraded this act of life and beauty. The f-word weaponizes it, transforms it into an act of aggression with intent to do the receiver of it profound harm if not destruction. Is it any wonder that sexual abuse and assault in all their horrific forms infect our culture, from film studios to churches? That is not to say use of the word has done all this, though there may be a chicken-and-egg aspect to the whole thing, but that use of the word reflects the practice in the current culture of death.
What a piece of work. Imagine Satan rubbing his hands and chortling at such an accomplishment: the profoundly beautiful act in which man and woman give themselves to each other within a sacrament of the Church to join with God in the ecstasy of creating another human being with the supernatural destiny of living forever in the very life of God pulled down to the filthy, perverse, destructive depths of a profound act of aggressive destruction.
Nice trick. He gets conservatives to twist authentic justifiable outrage over the atrocities of the left—like abortion, impeachment hoaxes, violent destructive riots, rigged elections, the Afghanistan withdrawal catastrophe, and dangerous vaccine mandates—into an obscene perversion of the beautifully cosmic, unitive, procreative, sacramental act to pronounce their nullification of the demented man who is the face of the dehumanizing leftist Democrat machine. (And by the way, what kind of people would take a cognitively impaired elderly man, even one as corrupt as Joe Biden, and use him this way?) Why would conservatives cooperate with that?
Ah, well, they have been long prepared through manipulation by the very totalitarians by whom, you would think, they would be loath to be manipulated. Hollywood, to sum it up in one word, though it extends well beyond. Hollywood let the f-bomb drop in movies in 1967, and at around the same time, brought forth the first R rating. And then the culture was bombarded with the f-bomb and perversities that the average American had not been exposed to, at least not in anything like the quantity presented on the screen big and small. Previously, The Andy Griffith Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Leave it to Beaver, and several other television programs of that era entertained and touched on subjects that mattered without the obscenity that has become so prevalent in our culture today. And they did so with real humor, not the joke-and-insult volleys of later shows.
On the big screen, John Wayne, Jean Arthur, Jimmy Stewart, Maureen O’Hara, Gary Cooper and their peers could fight wars, fall in love, engage in conflicts, evoke everything from tears to laughter and manage to do so creatively, brilliantly, even provocatively in films that would easily fit the requirements for what would eventually be a PG rating. Even then, people might object to some of their productions on a moral basis, but they could do so without having first been subjected to the graphic assault on decency launched by so many films of the last several decades.
Long ago I recognized that entertainment held a far more insidious potential to tear down virtue than the news. I saw the effect it had on our generation. The manly and womanly virtue of chastity would not have withered so detrimentally had it not been so commonly run down in films featuring the handsome and gorgeous discarding it without the consequences—pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, damaged psyches—suffered by those average Americans who emulated their “sophistication.” And then there was the whole genre of the anti-hero, outlaws and criminals pitched in high-end visually alluring productions that made us sympathetic to them and their crimes: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, anyone?
Why would the entertainment industry glamorize unchastity and seduce their consumers into such destructive behavior with all its consequences like the fall from grace, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, mental illness, and the general degrading of our culture?
It is interesting that our generation, raised in the 1960s and 70s, started out with television shows like Leave It to Beaver, The Andy Griffith Show, My Three Sons, The Dick Van Dyke Show, and the like, all of which depicted the goodness of the attraction between boys and girls, and men and women, and people dating. And all of those programs took for granted the virtue of chastity in relationships and how it resulted in respect between boys and girls, and men and women. But by the mid-1970s the popular “family show” Happy Days had reduced dating to “making out” with no clear boundaries indicated. Happy Days occupied the more “wholesome” end of the spectrum. Other offerings in the television and film media wreaked far greater havoc on chastity.
Humanae Vitae addressed this as well:
We take this opportunity to address those who are engaged in education and all those whose right and duty it is to provide for the common good of human society. We would call their attention to the need to create an atmosphere favorable to the growth of chastity so that true liberty may prevail over license and the norms of the moral law may be fully safeguarded.
Everything therefore in the modern means of social communication which arouses men’s baser passions and encourages low moral standards, as well as every obscenity in the written word and every form of indecency on the stage and screen, should be condemned publicly and unanimously by all those who have at heart the advance of civilization and the safeguarding of the outstanding values of the human spirit. It is quite absurd to defend this kind of depravity in the name of art or culture (25) or by pleading the liberty which may be allowed in this field by the public authorities.
Of course, a very different atmosphere was created. One may ask why. Why would the entertainment industry glamorize unchastity and seduce their consumers into such destructive behavior with all its consequences like the fall from grace, out-of-wedlock pregnancy, abortion, sexually transmitted diseases, mental illness, and the general degrading of our culture? There are plenty of reasons, not least of which are hedonism and greed, but one truism that cannot be overlooked is: Misery loves company. If it is somewhat common for people in the entertainment industry—apparently often enough under duress—to have the beauty and wholesomeness of sexuality and childbirth and family stripped away for the momentary pleasure of sexual gratification, would it not also be common for them to justify their lifestyles by portraying them as normal and good. And would it not be common for them to, whether overtly or subconsciously, intend those portrayals to lure others into the deprivation of the truth, beauty, and goodness of the wholesome lifestyle they have forfeited or been deprived of? Would that not comport with our fallen human nature? “Ay, madam, it is common.”
Fear, Control, and Death
And so for decades now we have been groomed by our culture to want to be able to play like children with the cosmically powerful—both physically and spiritually—gift of sexuality without consequence, leaving mass wreckage in the wake. “Everyone has sexual sins.”
This brings us back to artificial birth control. Control again. Is that what the overpopulationist fears so much so as to support the slaughter of innocents, loss of control? That would not make sense because they do not have control. But they may well fear the loss of the illusion that they have control or are capable of having control or just the desire to have control. Is that it? The loss of control that they do not have but want to have? That seems to make sense. They may fear the loss of the control that they want and perhaps believe they should have but do not have. That would explain their deep emotion. It would fit with the hubris displayed. It would fit the mechanistic ideology. As quoted above, Mattias Desmet writes of the “ever-present, totalitarian undercurrent that consists of a fanatical attempt to steer and control life in far-reaching ways on the basis of technical, scientific knowledge” (italics added). And like the narcissism treated of above it emerges as a result of the “societal increase of fear and insecurity” and manifests itself in what Desmet calls “regulation mania,” and “regulitis.” Desmet further observes:
Whenever a new object of fear arises in society, there is only one response and one defense in our current way of thinking: increased control. The fact that the human being can tolerate only a certain amount of control is completely overlooked. Coercive control leads to fear and fear leads to more coercive control. Just like that, society falls victim to a vicious circle that inevitably leads to totalitarianism, which means to extreme government control, eventually resulting in the radical destruction of both the psychology and physical integrity of human beings.
Wow: “The radical destruction of both the psychology and physical integrity of human beings.” No small thing. In fact, in order to overcome the uncertainty and insecurity and consequential anxiety of the human condition due to the ambiguity resulting from the complexity of human communication through symbols, totalitarians would, and have tried to—whether as Maoists, Stalinists, Nazis, or present-day globalists—reduce human communication to that of animals, which consists of “unambiguous and self-evident signs.” As Mattias Desmet observes, “Totalitarianism is the ultimate attempt to rid ourselves of this uncertainty by withdrawing into a (pseudo)scientific certainty and merciless logic, by trying to reduce symbols to signs, and by trying to annihilate all variety in cultural expression.” And therefore Professor Desmet can conclude: “At this point, we are able to pinpoint the psychological essence of totalitarianism: an attempt to reduce the polysemy of human language to the monosemy of a sign system.”3 From that of man to that of animals. Totalitarians would, and have tried to, reduce human beings to beasts. And all in an attempt to gain more and more control in response to fear after fear after fear.
There is the leveler, there is the delusion buster, there is where gods die before the immortal God.
Fear and control: that brings me back to how we questioned above why Bill Maher was afraid of overpopulation, given that he apparently was very well off and comfortable. The same could be said for others who want to control population like Bill Gates, Klaus Schwab, Al Gore, Barack Hussein Obama, the Democratic Party, the Chinese Communist Party, or any others of the megalomaniacal class. For those individuals who are concerned about overpopulation—even if it were going to happen, which it will not—they would be dead by then anyways. In that same vein, perhaps the main reason people need not fear overpopulation is just that people die. And therefore as the developing nations catch up to the life expectancy of the developed nations, the population will level off. Makes sense.
But what if that is the problem? Death? What if they cannot accept death? Well then, they would have a very different perspective on the world’s population. If they want to live forever in this life, it would only be fair that everyone else be able to do the same. Then there would be cause to worry that the earth could overpopulate. And then, the world really would overpopulate, if nobody ever died. Then there would be cause to see other people’s lives as a threat to their own. I think there is something to that.
Still, though a nagging sense of fairness may contribute to their fear of overpopulation, we well know that the elitist globalist types have no problem causing or concurring with the deaths of others, whether through abortion, forced famines, extermination camps, or wars to bring about their utopias. It is not that they do not accept death; they are fine with it when it works for them, when they think they can control it.
Ah, control again. It would fit their professed world views and activities that they want to control death, to be in control of death. These control freaks can even deceive themselves about the control they believe they have or wish they had when it comes to life and death. And the life, not just the lives, of others are a threat to that deception. If your perspective is warped from a delusion that you will be able to control death, you could well see other people on the earth as a threat to your well-being. Abortion, forced famines, extermination camps, war—and add euthanasia, contraception, IVF, transgenderism, and mass trafficking of humans beings as if they were animals—all allow them to delude themselves that they have control over life and death.
It may well be that the sense of the immortality of the human soul that we all share to varying degrees may in these godless controllers be mistaken for a sense that they can extend their lives in the earthly world indefinitely.
But then comes their own deaths. What if they do not want to consider their own deaths? What if they do not want to accept their own deaths? The one thing that is inescapable, death. There is the leveler, there is the delusion buster, there is where gods die before the immortal God. “Death comes for us all, my lords. Yes even for kings he comes,” said Thomas More. Nicole Shanahan added about the tranhumanists, in the interview with Tucker Carlson cited above: “The people who are afraid to die; they don’t want to meet Lady Justice. And that’s what I think this transhumanism is all about. I think it is a deep fear of death.”
I think Ms. Shanahan is profoundly correct. I believe these folks are afraid of death, and are afraid that there is a reckoning at death, and so they seek to defy death when it comes to them. It may well be that the sense of the immortality of the human soul that we all share to varying degrees may in these godless controllers be mistaken for a sense that they can extend their lives in the earthly world indefinitely. And it appears that one way they seek to extend their earthly lives—so fitting for the gods they deem themselves to be—is to convey their mortal lives into their inanimate machines rather than reckon with the immortal life granted by their Creator in which their delusions of control must disperse as the fogs of hubris that they are, and in which they will be held accountable for all the sins they have wrought in their pride.
There seems to be a twisted irony in the notion that these folks seek the control, the power that is impossible for them to realize, that believers ascribe to the God that the fearful reject or do not believe exists. Thus there seems to be a subconscious acknowledgment of the God they reject in their own longing for the power and control essential to the Deity. Is this not a desire for self-deification, and does not this desire for self-deification point to the need for the Deity that they so obviously are not? Hence, they are in rebellion, and their fear includes that of being relegated to the proper order, of facing reality which would require: the ruination of their imagined self-idolatry, the exposition of their true relationship with and rightful subordination to God, and the recognition they are not God and that God does not need them but that they need God. Like their ancient fallen master they proclaim: “I will not serve.” Instead they stand before God and his laws and defiantly proclaim: you are not going to tell me what to do, I will have control, I will make my own petty rules, I will make sure we limit the number of children people bring into the world so that it corresponds to my vision of creation. By what colossal act of pride could they in all their ignorance possibly know how many people are the right number on the earth for everyone to have enough? How could they even consider that they could know?
All the more pathetic is this eternally disappointing longing when considered against the belief that God invites us all to “become partakers of the divine nature.” The Catechism of the Catholic Church elaborates on this true divinization through quotations from fathers of the Church: “For this is why the Word became man, and the Son of God became the Son of man: so that man, by entering into communion with the Word and thus receiving divine sonship, might become a son of God” (St. Irenaeus). “The only-begotten Son of God, wanting to make us sharers in his divinity, assumed our nature, so that he, made man, might make men gods” (St. Thomas Aquinas). “For the Son of God became man so that we might become God” (St. Athanasius). One might pause and consider how consequential it is that Bill Maher’s father abandoned that promise precisely in rejecting the Church’s teaching on contraception.
All the more pathetic is this eternally disappointing longing when considered against the belief that God invites us all to “become partakers of the divine nature.”
St. Irenaeus’ witness to the Word provides an occasion for us to once again ponder in a larger context Mattias Desmet’s contention that the human condition is profoundly influenced by “an intrinsic, irreparable lack” in human language. Here we might consider that contention in light of creation: “In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. He was in the beginning with God; all things were made through him, and without him was not anything made that was made.” Appropriately then, God spoke forth creation: “And God said, ‘Let there be light’; and there was light. . . .’” The Word is one of the three persons of the Holy Trinity and spoken forth begets creation and, after the fall of man, incarnation: “And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth.” The Word, communication, language are integral to the communion of the Triune God; there is every reason to recognize that they would have no small place in man created in the divine image. That provides the context for our consideration of Desmet’s contention in light of Eden, Babel, and Redemption in Part Five of this series: “Psychology, Communication, Love, and Sacrament (Not Necessarily in that Order).”
Be that as it may, beyond the perceived threat of others, the yearning for control, and the deification of self, could it be that population-control extremists are afraid of having others threaten the possibility, the desire, the appetite, even just the idea, to have whatever they want whenever they want it? Are they afraid that more people on the earth might threaten that inclination? Whatever their fears, there is no way around recognizing the raw selfishness from which those fears flow. We are all prone to selfishness since the fall of man. And behind the population-control mantra can be heard the age-old child’s cry, Gimme! “Gimme this, Gimme that!” as the toddler pulls everything he can get his hands on unto himself.
And ultimately, selfishness at its extreme is: “I am all that matters, and others are here for me to use, and if they get in the way of what I want, they should not exist or be removed and therefore can be justifiable eliminated (“murdered. . . .kind of”).” Most of us fall somewhere short of that extreme, but how far from the extreme is the position that it is better that others be aborted than that I consider the possibility, the very idea, that I may not be able to have all that I want, that I may not be able to experience the world in the way I want, that someone else may make my life uncomfortable? “Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him.” Thus, it would be better for me if we murder babies in the womb now rather than consider that I, me, mine may not have all that we want later. And thereby is displayed the ugly stinginess of imposed population control to fit the plan of the elite and how they think the world should work with its brutal slaughter of innocents in the womb and forced sterilizations.
And how much more evil is the pro-abortion, sterilization, and population-control position when those who hold it implicate the rest of us in it by using tax dollars, that citizens are forced to pay by law, to pay for abortion and global population-control programs? How evil is the need to implicate the whole human race in their own deadly selfishness? Diabolical. But we can follow that stinginess and opposition to religion far deeper into the overpopulation lie, the height of barbarity into which the controllers want to incriminate us all.
There is that need to control, that self deification again: “Not only will I do it my way but I will implicate you in it by forcing you to support it with your tax dollars.” Incorporated in that need to pull others into their crimes through tax-and-spend coercion is that ugly stinginess of Communism (and the preliminary stages to it). In Who Really Cares: The Surprising Truth about Compassionate Conservatism: America’s Charity Divide–Who Gives, Who Doesn’t, and Why it Matters, Arthur C. Brooks through deep and thorough research arrives at the unmistakable conclusion that conservatives and Republicans are far more charitable than liberals and Democrats, largely because conservatives and Republicans are more religious, with all that that entails. In general with exceptions, conservatives give where they see need. In general with exceptions, liberals tax—even the givers—and spend where they will, even if it is anathema to many of those from whom they taxed the money.
Again, we are all given to selfishness and covetousness due to original sin. That being the case, it should be no surprise that it is religion that encourages us sinners to whatever generosity we muster. And out of that qualified generosity comes the perspective that tax-and-spend liberalism betrays that sinister stinginess in which others must contribute to and be implicated in what the liberal wants done however evil, including slaughtering helpless and innocent unborn babies. And in their tax-and-spend coercion the liberals also expose the greed and covetousness in their stinginess. Raise taxes to make other people pay to take care of the poor so that I may not be made uncomfortable by their poverty, their existence. And the poor naturally make those who have more than enough uncomfortable because, perhaps if they were to give, there need not be the poor, though that is by far an oversimplification that gives credence to Jesus’ words: “For you always have the poor with you.”
Thus is the selfish mentality: “I will not willingly give. I will allow it to be taken from me as long as it is being taken from everyone else, and better, if it is taken more from the others, the rich—who are everyone other than I—whose wealth and privilege I covet. In fact we should raise taxes on those who I believe have more than I do, or who do not have the opinions I have, and make them pay for what I believe should be done, however evil.” Accordingly do the Democrats give our tax dollars to Planned Parenthood to “kind of” murder unborn children, and to other population-control organizations.
Making Room and the Courage to Love
Those who so covet, who would rather have people killed than be inconvenienced, who demand that those who oppose their evil be implicated in it, those are the people who are bitter about large families, who resent them, who do not hide their judgment of and disdain for them. Large families have their stories of their experiences with such people. There are examples above.
Why do they resent large families? What does it matter to them how many children others bring into the world as long as the families take care of themselves and do not infringe on them? Could that resentment stem from a mixture of stinginess and regret? Mattias Desmet points out that people with meaningless jobs harbor “feelings of resentment and revenge toward those who have meaningful work.” Could that not be true of people who have contracepted—who have taken the meaning out of their relationships and closed them to life—toward those whose relationships are open to life and thus have profound meaning?
And that, right there, might be the great genius of large families: making room.
Could it be that large families put the lie to all the reasons they fornicated, contracepted, did not marry, constrained their love to minimize the number of their children, had abortions, demanded fewer people in the world and implicated others in all that evil? Could it be that they envy and resent the fullness of life that they see in large families that is lacking in their lives? Who are you to have all those kids when I had aborted my child or children, or had my tubes tied or had my vasectomy so that we did not have so many kids, so that we could afford all the things we wanted in life. Who are you to love into existence and raise all those kids, when I was afraid to do the same, afraid of what it would take from me, of what I would be required to give. Who are you to prove my stinginess wrong with your generous love? I remember my dad saying years ago with deep sympathy that he wondered if women thought about the children they aborted when they lay all alone in nursing homes. May God grant them repentance and peace. On the other hand, I recently visited my nintey-five-year-old mother in her beautiful care facility, and her nurse from Ethiopia told me how wonderful it is that my mother gets so much attention from her children and grandchildren. The nurse is a mother of five.
The consideration of selfishness above brings to mind a recent experience we had at a hotel. It was a modest hotel in a small town with a commensurate breakfast accommodation in the lobby. My wife went down to get us coffee and tea and returned much later than expected. She complained that a woman took her time at the automatic coffee machine (hardly Starbucks) mixing various automatic coffees, blocking all other people from the machine, to achieve her ideal blend, as the line of frustrated guests behind her grew. My wife expressed to me her exasperation with the woman blocking all others and said that, had she allowed others to get in around her, they could have got their drinks as she concocted her composite brew. I observed that I doubted that the coffee-mixing lady was from a large family, as images emerged in my mind of my wife and her ten siblings and their family members merging supplely and happily in and out of food and drink offerings at family events. Of a different race and culture from my wife’s, the large family from which I hail is geared more toward the line-up-and-take-your-turn persuasion but all with the sense that one needs to move along and not take too much out of consideration for those with whom one is sharing the feast (and then go back later and load up again of whatever is left). I was perhaps in my teens when I first wondered at people who could walk four abreast in a hall or on a sidewalk, or stand in the way of everyone else in a narrow passage and not give way to others. It struck me then that they could not have grown up in a large family to be so oblivious to the needs of others, to the need to make room for others.
As one makes more room in one’s heart, one expands his capacity to love.
And that, right there, might be the great genius of large families: making room. Large families are blessed with an essential disposition, intuition, and capacity for making room. People in large families continually make room for others. They make room for the new baby who comes home with their mother from the hospital, for each other at the dinner table, for each other in the car, for each other in the pew. They know how to make room as well for the guest. This making room is a choice on the part of the parents. Out of that rolling, loving choice emerges a living reality for the parents and for the children, for whom it becomes a living norm exercised in a myriad of daily choices. Unlike Bill Maher, they are not afraid of running out of resources.
In all those choices, members of a family are not just making room for others in their physical surroundings. They are making room for them in their minds. And they are making room for them in their hearts. As one makes more room in one’s heart, one expands his capacity to love. If family members can make room and watch their house, table, car, and their minds and their hearts accommodate more people whom they love, they are not threatened by the idea of making room for more people to share this vast planet. They are not afraid that there are not enough resources because they have lived a life of sharing and doing with less when necessary.
It does not look like the metrosexual and the mini-dress babe on the endless fornication vacation but more like two red-eyed young parents tag teaming it through the night to care for a sick child their sacramental love brought into the world.
And as a family member makes room for others, he is continually conditioned to think about how whatever he is doing right now affects others within the space he shares with them in the house, at the table, in the car, in his head, and in his heart. And he settles into his place among the others in his family, in the world, in the universe. He finds his place with others and the Other. Mattias Desmet puts that in a special perspective: “In a sense, all of life consists of an attempt to find space for oneself in the relationship with Others. . . . The more man advances in this process, the more energy and creative power he will have. . . . It is on this track that the future of humanity lies and not on the mechanistic-transhumanistic track.”
And there, in considering the capacity of making room within a family, of finding one’s place in relationship to others, we touch upon the great fear that drives the overpopulation lie and the contraception lie and the abortion lie and the big lie of the entire culture of death. The great irony is that the very thing that people who peddle and buy those lies are seeking is the very thing that they are so afraid of. What else could scare people so much that they would murder their own children rather than accept it? Love. They fear love, the very thing that they are erroneously seeking.
So, the fear that drives the lies is the fear to love. Not the make-me-feel-good, get-all-I-can infatuation, but the real die-to-yourself, fully committed love. It is not about controlling or becoming the it for the other by whatever desperate means necessary, but about laying down one’s life for the other. It does not look like the metrosexual and the mini-dress babe on the endless fornication vacation but more like two red-eyed young parents tag teaming it through the night to care for a sick child their sacramental love brought into the world. And because of that true selfless, sacrificial nature of real love, the fear of it is not uncommon, whatever we may think. In fact, it is a fear that we must each face, acknowledge, and work to overcome. The culture of death is the result of our refusal to do so.
And yet, by courageously choosing love, one lovingly chooses courage: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.”
And so, to love requires courage. Everyone on earth seeks the benefits of love, but far too few of us have the courage to make room for love, to abandon ourselves to love. And yet, by courageously choosing love, one lovingly chooses courage: “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear.” Ah, there is the antidote to the fear that drives the big lie of overpopulation and the culture of death of which it is a part. And thus that stepping-off-a-cliff kind of courage that can launch one into love is itself properly grounded in the love out of which all other love flows, the love of God. As I wrote in Love and the Art of Bookstore Book Signing:
Love is relational, requiring a lover, a beloved, and the love between them. ‘God is love’ (1 Jn 4:16). Thus God is relational, trinitarian: the Father giving himself to the Son, the Son giving Himself to the Father, the Holy Spirit being this exchange between the Father and the Son. Love is giving of the self. It is desiring the best for the other. It is especially manifested among humans in the Sacrament of Matrimony, the spouses giving themselves to each other in a way that brings forth new life, most dramatically in conception of children: trinitarian in the husband, the wife, and God present in the sacramental union; trinitarian in the husband, the wife, and the child conceived, brought forth, and educated. Human marriage is thus a type of the trinitarian life of God, as is the marriage of God and the Church. And marriage is fruitful, because love is ultimately fruitful in every good way.
That true love, God’s love, has plenty of room; it knows no bounds; it is ever expansive, ever giving, never exhausted. It knows not the pernicious stinginess of the little false gods of control.
That true love, God’s love, has plenty of room; it knows no bounds; it is ever expansive, ever giving, never exhausted. It knows not the pernicious stinginess of the little false gods of control. It will go to the Cross and suffer ignominious subjection, torture, humiliation, and abandonment for its beloved. Most of us are not called to that extreme but are called to lesser acts of love in communion with that ultimate act. Mattias Desmet touches upon it whether knowingly or not:
To the degree that we can connect with what is outside ourselves, we are able to transcend our own boundaries and our own world of experience gets expanded to an existence that extends endlessly in time and space. Through resonance with the greater plain, we participate in the timelessness of the universe, like a reed rustling in the eternal air of life.
And that professor of psychology asserts that it is when a child recognizes that his parents are not omniscient and omnipotent that the child is faced with a choice between “fear or creativity.” If the child chooses creativity it develops a “fledgling sensitivity” to “fiction and poetry,” and “a basis for its identity and principles about how to behave” and “the child finds, in stories and poetry, echoes and scents of the lost maternal paradise of its earliest months of life.” This “creation of individuality. . . . connects man with the Other and leads to resonance with (love) objects instead of psychological isolation and (self-) destructiveness.” Connecting with the Other looks like a good thing, psychologically. It looks a lot like love of God and love of neighbor, the greatest commandments that sum up all of God’s law.
The thing about us believers in the God of love is that we pray for, and invite, and are ever eager for others to join us in that love, even and especially our enemies.
With the love of God comes faith and hope. Without the courage to love, and the faith, hope, and love it enables, desperate love-seeking degenerates into extramarital sexual relations, contraception, abortion, demanding there be fewer people on the earth, all of which leads to deeper and deeper selfishness, loneliness, disappointment, frustration, and despair that cannot imagine the freedom and fullness of love that meets the criterion that Jesus pronounced. The greatest love involves one laying down one’s life for his friends, one dying to oneself so as to live.
The good news is that it is not too late to love if you are still alive on earth. We all fail at love in various ways and to varying degrees; thus sin. But until we die, we can do something about it. We can repent and give ourselves over to love. If you do not believe that God can love you due to your sins, read the passion narratives in the gospels, or meditate on a crucifix, and ask yourself if the God who would do that for you does not love you enough to forgive whatever you bring to Him in repentance. For those who have given themselves over to the culture of death in contraception, abortion, extramarital sex, population control, etc., conversion can propel you out of the culture of death to life. Liberate yourself from the side of fear, despair, hate, murder, destruction, selfishness, and control and join the side of faith, hope, and above all, love. All of us must continually repent of our failures to love. Christianity offers a profound opportunity for that conversion, especially in the Sacrament of Reconciliation in the Catholic Church where forgiveness is sacramentalized.
And in that vein, this sinner has hope for conversion in so many people throughout the earth. Take an example like Russell Brand who famously speaks of his former life of hedonism and who now very publicly shares his ongoing conversion to Christianity. I see conversion in so many of the folks mentioned above: Tucker Carlson, Roseanne Barr, Calley and Casey Means, Nicole Shanahan, Robert Kennedy, Jr. I suspect that Elon Musk may be heading into it. And I have hope for Bill Maher. In fact, I do not see how much longer Maher’s intelligence and honesty can accommodate atheistic liberalism, though I do hope that he does not wait until it is too late. The thing about us believers in the God of love is that we pray for, and invite, and are ever eager for others to join us in that love, even and especially our enemies. It will not yet be perfect love because we are all still sinners in this fallen world, but it will be true love with the promise of perfection in eternal life when we all hope to live in the very life of God. No matter who you are or what you have done, we would love to have you join us. God bless.
Thank you.
P. A. Ritzer
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