The Logic Of “Liberation” Marches On

By CHRISTOPHER MANION

“Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” — John Adams, Letter to Officers of the Massachusetts Militia, October 11, 1798. 

• + + This month we will celebrate the 55th anniversary of Humanae Vitae. In this courageous and prophetic encyclical, Pope Paul VI both defended the truths of the Faith and predicted how their rejection would lead to moral and cultural chaos.
  As we make our way through the wreckage wrought by the emphatic and prideful denial that followed, it’s worth noting a few steps along the road that got us here.
  In 1960, most adult Americans were married. Divorce and illegitimacy were rare, while abortion and sodomy were crimes in every state. Pornography and drugs were illegal, their marketing controlled by the Mafia and other organized crime syndicates right down to the peddler in the gutter.
  But seeds of destruction planted long before had begun to sprout. And the first to cast a shadow over the flourishing American family was a lie as bold as it was cynical: “family planning.”
  Margaret Sanger couldn’t call it “child elimination.” That would have been too honest, which was not her mien. Instead, in the fashion of Vladimir Lenin just a few years before and a few time zones away, she hijacked the revered symbol of the target she longed to destroy, emptied it of its innate goodness, and twisted it upside down to represent a hateful campaign to eliminate “blacks and browns,” as well as, in the memorable words of Scrooge, to “decrease the surplus population.”
  Thus was “family planning” born, and, with it, one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant brand marketing campaigns. Sanger’s “planners” would prosper for a century and more. Under their banner untold millions have died and billions have not been born.
  All in the name of “family.”
  But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
  A hundred years ago, contraception was universally considered an objective evil. In 1920, the Church of England’s Lambeth Conference issued an “emphatic warning” against it. Ten years later, however, that same body reversed that decision, prompting Pope Pius XI to issue Casti Connubii, his valiant defense of marriage.
  While Lambeth 1930 forgave contraception if a “clearly felt moral obligation” demanded it, Pope Pius XI warned the faithful to “be on their guard against the overrated independence of private judgment and that false autonomy of human reason.” He called on the faithful to reject the “pride and presumption of men,” and choose instead to humbly embrace the “whole and unadulterated” doctrine of the Church.
  Pride versus humility. Feelings versus doctrine. Therein lies the battle that began with Satan’s rebellion against God and continues in our own day.

Behold The Poison Pill

“There can be nothing more dangerous than those heretics who admit nearly the whole cycle of doctrine, and yet by one word, as with a drop of poison, infect the real and simple faith taught by our Lord and handed down by Apostolic tradition” — Tract. de Fide Orthodoxa contra Arianos (cited by Pope Leo XIII in Satis Cognitum [9]).
Marriage and the family constitute so vital a foundation for civil society that Lambeth’s “drop of poison” met fierce resistance — at first. In the United States, for instance, the medical profession took years to shift its ground. Finally, in 1937, the American Medical Association reversed its longstanding opposition and gave contraception the green light.
In the meantime, Sanger had acquired new allies, including elite superstars John Dewey and Eleanor Roosevelt.
In 1932, Dewey wrote that “the opposition to the birth control movement is not a unique or isolated fact. It is an expression of an ever-recurring struggle between darkness and knowledge. I can think of no change that would be more beneficial than one that would make us prize quality more and quantity less,” he purred.
Oh, really?
If you’re troubled by the disastrous moral collapse in American public education today, consider: Dewey, widely admired as the “Father of Progressive Education,” founded the AFT School Union, whose million-plus members have destroyed public schools in Chicago and dozens of other blue cities, abandoning millions of children to a coven of prideful and venomous hacks.
So much for Dewey’s “prizing quality.”
Sanger had other champions as well. First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt was an early supporter of the “family planning” movement — and this sly vixen wielded significant influence among the glitterati. In one of her more curious initiatives, she arranged for the War Department to make contraceptives available to women working in factories that played a critical role in the production of war materiel during the Second World War.
The alleged purpose of the initiative was to preserve “unit cohesion,” but one wonders, which unit’s “cohesion” is being preserved?
After all, most of the female factory workers were wives of men in the military. Was Roosevelt’s policy designed to preserve the family, when it so obviously dangled an invitation to promiscuity before women whose husbands were on active duty far from home?
After World War II ended, the weariness of war brought a bipartisan sigh of “never again!”
“Family planning” advocates argued that the war had been caused by countries looking for “Lebensraum” for their growing populations. By the mid-1950s, leaders in both parties endorsed the concept — for everyone else, of course.
But they finally called it by its proper name: “Population Control.”
And that how the groundwork was laid for a profound cultural shift in American attitudes about sex.

“Thou Shalt Not Kill”?
Says Who?

What had begun at a crawl one hundred years ago took off at light speed forty years later. Every dimension of culture, religion, and politics became a battlefield for liberation.
But liberation from what?
First of all, from Thomas Jefferson’s “Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God.”
Sixty years ago, the U.S. Supreme Court, led by Chief Justice Earl Warren, pulled the moral rug out from under the public educational system relied upon by the vast majority of American families. In 1962, the U.S Supreme Court forbade prayer (Engel v. Vitale), and, a year later, Bible reading (School District of Abington Township v. Schempp) in public schools.
It didn’t take long for the rest of the culture to fall into line — just in time to welcome the introduction of “The Pill” as the ammunition that fueled the weapons of the Sexual Revolution.
Once the Court exiled the fundamentals of civic virtue from public life, the dead hand of logic pointed the way to Roe v. Wade a decade later. In 1980, realizing that a few irritating truths remained in the public realm, took a final step.
It was as awkward as it was blunt. Even though the “Ten Commandments [are] clearly seen in its adoption as the fundamental legal code of Western Civilization and the Common Law of the United States,” their posting on public property “is plainly religious in nature, and the posting serves no constitutional educational function” (Stone v. Graham, 1980).
There you go. “Thou shalt not kill” has no “secular purpose.”
We can see where that got us.
And we can see where it’s taking us.
Juan Donoso Cortes (+1853) once observed that Satan isn’t satisfied to see you merely limping down the road to Hell. He doesn’t want you to coast, his appetite for evil is insatiable.
So, he cracks his burning whip — “Faster! Faster!”
In coming weeks we’ll be looking more closely at the Catholic response to the warnings of Popes Leo XIII, Pius XI, and Paul VI. And what we can do about them.