Girls less likely to use protection = Boy still to blame

Remove all ads!

I'm wondering why we should focus on Catholics at all? I think we've verged away from the original topic. I admire your attempts to reign that verging in, but you seem to be trying to pull us back to another point of not-the-topic.

 

Why? Most Catholics aren't activists. They belong to the rank and file that you seem willing to ignore. Of course the activists agree with Catholic doctrine down to the last letter ... that's why they're activists.

 

Because my original point -- which I was trying to defend in the prior exchange -- was that a majority of US Catholic activists and and Catholic pro-life organizations not only oppose abortion under any and all circumstances but also oppose the legalization of any form of contraception that could even possibly block implantation. I was making that point because it had been asserted that there really aren't any pro-life activists out there who oppose contraception, which is why I brought up Catholic activists and the anti-contraception views held by a substantial majority of them [or at least their organizations*] -- at least in the US. That original point was taken out of context, shifting away from my relatively narrow statement and into the realm of "what all [most] Catholics believe." What the majority of American Catholics believe, while an interesting case study on the fading influence of the Church over its first-world flock, has nothing to do with my initial point and holds no bearing whatsoever regarding it's validity.

* While it gets harder to track the opinions held by rank and file activists, the stances of the Catholic pro-life organizations which these activists support with their time and money are well documented. Given the plethora of pro-life organizations out there that do not oppose contraception, it stands to reason that at least most of the supporters of organizations that do oppose it share that view -- or at the very least aren't hostile to the idea of banning contraception.

 

One, you made a mistake when you went to the 'blocking implantation' standard. That's neither what was being argued, nor what the Catholics actually teach. Sure, they do ban everything that could possibly do that, but not because of that. It just added confusion. Two, I don't think anyone has actually argued that there aren't any anti-contraceptive activists. Shoshino said he hadn't found any, but I don't think he meant that as a universal claim that they don't exist.

Your arguement was that anto-abortion activists often are also anti-contraceptive activists. To that, I disagree. I've only even heard of anti-contraceptive activists in the Catholic Church, and their activists aren't running the pro-live movement any more, and haven't been for a while.

 

Guilty, as charged. I've read the exchanges in this post over several days, I don't go back and re-read every post, and I had not realized (or had least forgotten), that you were limiting your response to only the activists, and not Catholics as a whole.

On that point though, even the Pope seems to have softened his stance on this lately. Just last week he stated that using condoms was a "lesser sin" than risking spreading AIDS through unprotected sex. Granted, that's not the same as saying that contraception is OK, but it is a departure from the RCC's prior stance on such.