Sunday, July 27, 2008

Famous Quotes On Contraception


See if you can guess who said the following:

1. The abandonment of the reproductive function is the common feature of all sexual perversions. We actually describe a sexual activity as perverse if it has given up the aim of reproduction and pursues the attainment of pleasure as an aim independent of it.

2. Contraceptive methods are like putting a premium on vice. They make men and women reckless. Nature is relentless and will have full revenge for any such violation of her laws…If contraceptive methods become the order of the day nothing but moral degradation can be the result. As it is, man has sufficiently degraded woman for his lust, and contraception, no matter how well-meaning the advocates many be, will still further degrade her.

3. Onan must have been a malicious and incorrigible scoundrel. [Genesis 38:9, 10].This is a most disgraceful sin. It is far more atrocious than incest and adultery. We call it unchastity, Yes a Sodomitic sin. For Onan goes in to her; that is, he lies with her and copulates; and, when it comes to the point of insemination, spills the semen, lest the woman conceive. Surely at such a time the order of nature established by God in procreation should be followed. Accordingly, it was a most disgraceful crime to produce semen and excite the woman, and to frustrate her at that very moment ... He committed an evil deed. Therefore, God punished him...

4. Besides [Onan] ... preferred his semen to putrify on the ground, rather than to beget a son in his brother's name....It is a horrible thing to pour out seed besides the intercourse of man and woman. Deliberately avoiding the intercourse, so that the seed drops on the ground, is double horrible. For this means that one quenches the hope of his family, and kills the son, which could be expected, before he is born. ...Moreover he thus has, as much as was in his power, tried to destroy a part of the human race. When a woman in some way drives away the seed out the womb, through aids, (contraception) then this is rightly seen as an unforgivable crime. Onan was guilty of a similar crime, by defiling the earth with his seed, ....

5. Onan, though he consented to marry the widow, yet to the great abuse of his own body, of the wife he had married, ... he refused to raise up seed unto his brother. Those sins that dishonour the body are very displeasing to God, and the evidence of vile actions. Observe, the thing which he did displeased the Lord--And it is to be feared, thousands, especially of single persons, by this very thing, still displease the Lord, and destroy their own souls.

See, what most folks don't know is that every Christian on the planet agreed that contraception was sinful for the first 1900 years or so after Christ. No heresy or schism was sufficient to break this unified belief until 1930 at the Seventh Lambeth Conference. Yep, leave it to the Anglicans. Even then, it was approved of in limited circumstances only. Of course, once it got its foot in the door, there was no stopping the race to the moral bottom here.

Give up on those quotes above? Here are the answers.

1. Sigmund Freud

2. Gandhi (thanks to Amanda from my sophomore core class at Notre Dame for these quotes, even though I've lost the primary references)

3. Martin Luther

4. John Calvin

5. John Wesley

Thanks to David McDonald for those last three.

And for those of you who laughed at Paul VI's concerns about the government taking over contraceptive decisions, guess who said this:

It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind...Three generations of imbeciles are enough.

Why that's none other than Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, heralded by many as one of the greatest jurists ever to sit on the Supreme Court. Think about that and the legacy of Margaret Sanger, a well-known eugenicist who promoted "racial hygiene" and "racial regeneration" by specifically targeting black citizens for birth control and abortion. Think about such views when modern politicians bask in 100% ratings from her spawn at Planned Parenthood. Yep, it's a brave, new world folks, and we really don't seem to care.

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