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Recently the Obama administration through executive order decreed that private insurance plans funded by religious entities must provide birth control pills to women who request them. Until this decision unlike all other private insurers, religious groups were able to deny women this specific type of contraception because they believe that contraception is a sin and will send a woman to hell where she will burn forever.

When the decision was announced, the Catholic Church run hospitals and universities threw a collective hissy fit.

There argument is that the Obama administration has struck a blow against religious liberty because it is forcing a catholic institution to go against its founding principles which are designed to keep as few people as possible from using contraception of any type.

The church’s objections aren’t just to the pill, but also to all other methods of birth control, including diaphragms, condoms, sponges, intrauterine injections and all other birth control devices. Of course the two methods they don’t object to are the rhythm method, where two people who are having sex guess about a woman’s fertility, and, of course, pull and pray.

The point everyone has lost sight of, however, is the most important point in the entire argument.

The Obama administration is not telling all catholic girls attending catholic colleges, hospitals, and universities that they must now get on the birth control pill, they have simply made it so that those who wish to use the birth control pill while attending a catholic college, hospital or university now cannot be refused when they ask for it.

Which brings us back to the issue of religious liberty.

In the last six hundred years, Christianity has been gelded.

The catholic church used to be able to drag you from your home and tie you to a stake and burn you if they thought you were a Witch or Wizard. There was a trial by ordeal, which translated into modern English means, “a trial you have no chance of ever ever winning”  This practice did not stop until the early seventeen hundreds.

The church used to have the power to make kings crawl to Rome and beg to be allowed continued membership in the church.

Now, however, in the twenty-first century, the problem the catholic church and other religious groups of all denominations face is that they are no longer taken very seriously by those who are members.

The church’s birth control policy is ignored by between ninety-eight and ninety-five  percent of catholic women. That is all but two to five percent, depending on the survey have confessed to using birth control methods the church claims one will go to hell for using.

If  all Catholics were “good Catholics,” this decision would not matter. The pope has told women that all contraception is hellish and a killer of the unborn, and if these women took there religion seriously, the decision would be as relevant to the catholic church as who wins the super bowl next week because its adherents wouldn’t act on it.

But they will act on it because in the twenty-first century, the popes words to American Catholics are not infallible. Otherwise none of the Catholics in this country would be using condoms, the pill, or all the rest of it.

In the deep south there are people who believe the bible is literally true, no ifs, ands or buts. They believe the world was created from nothing about six thousand years ago. Dinosaurs either lived concurrently with Adam  and eve, or are a hoxe perpetrated by secularists. These people don’t use condoms or birth control, which is why lots of them have many children, and also have higher rates of sexually transmitted disease than the rest of the American populous.

These people are stupid, but I respect them in the same way I respect a boxer whose getting his ass kicked and keeps getting up to take more punches to the face. The worlds  rapidly changing and through an insane effort of will they are not changing with it.

But liberal interpreters of scripture have been much more open to change. They have mostly forced there religions to change with them, and in the same way the Arab Spring was somewhat motivated by poor arabs able to see the lifestyle of the democratic west, Catholic peritioners watching the relitively stricture free life lived by mainline prodistants are ignoring Catholic teaching. And only Mother Church can be blamed for its own lack of clout.

The problem is that the pope and the religion he is supreme leader of has become feckless. It isn’t just this pope. The institution has lacked testicular fortitude for a long time now.

Your probably getting almost upset enough to stop reading at this paragraph, but give me one more to prove my point.

Picture this. Tomorrow the pope issues a papal bull, (a decree from on high, its all official,) which says everyone using birth control will be excommunicated. What would happen? Would condom use stop? Would birth control use stop? No. Neither would stop.

People would instead leave the church. The catholic hiarky is doing all it can do in 2012 begging its flock to stay. It might not look like its begging, but it is.

Ninety-eight percent of its current female flock will now burn in the fires of hell for ever and ever because they’ve used contraception. Sure, some will repent, but some will lie in confession and thus will burn. But does the church do anything to stop this? No! Because it knows that it lacks the power to stop anything.

Its become reactionary. It used to declare how the world would be, and people would listen. Now it harps because the world is ignoring it, and only a few listen.

Even Newt Gingrich lived for six years in sin with his third wife. I’m not knocking the guy, at least for this. He and his current wife had a getting to know you phase. Ignoring for now that this phase began while Gingrich was still married, what the couple was doing is what the huge majority of modern couples do. They were dating. Odds are they slept together before they were married. I have no problem with this, you probably have no problem with this, lets just assume his second mairage wasn’t going well. The church, however, views two consenting adults who are sleeping together without being married as some type of abomination, and, like everyone else, Gingrich and his wife flouted church doctrine.

This is technically an ex communicable offense. Keep in mind a hundred years ago Gingrich would not have been able to do this openly. He would have been ostracized by everybody that mattered, both within his church and within the larger Christian community. But the world has moved on so that now, not only was he not ostracized for sleeping with a woman he wasn’t married too, calling him on this point would not upset most of us.

When the Obama administration announced its decision, the Church did not quickly tell its congregation not to request contraception because most Catholics already use contraception of one form or another. They simply don’t go to catholic institutions to get there birth control.

The catholic church did not make this entreaty because they knew it would go largely unheeded by the so called faithful that fill its ranks.

The point everyone is ignoring is that the Obama administration hasn’t denied anyone religious liberty. The choice between taking birth control and not taking birth control exists unchanged. The catholic Church is upset because its followers, despite its wishes have already made there choice, which is counter to catholic doctrine.

On Sunday, catholic priests across the nation asked there flocks to complain to there local congressman in hopes of getting the ruling overturned through legislation. The alternative would have been to tell there followers to abandon contraception. But if they had asked this, and it was then ignored, the loss of credibility would have been crippling, so they did not.

In the coming weeks,  the Church will spend its time railing against Obama’s liberal secularist agenda. An agenda that its followers in small to medium degrees are already embracing. It can’t yell at its followers, because the vast majority will not care. They are catholic only as long as it is convenient to be catholic and most of them would drop there faith like a hot coal as soon as it asked too much of them. So it doesn’t. Instead it postures.

The catholic church is authoritarian. This authoritarianism is why you see so many people who used to be catholic but are now Episcopalian. The Episcopals let women be priests, let there priests marry, allow homosexual bishops and don’t bitch too much about abortion. The Catholics innocuously bitch about everything they see as a sin, are ignored, but still drive followers away because they don’t want to hear the constant bitching, even when its quiet.

A doctor at a catholic hospital is free to tell her patients that taking birth control is like popping the  Matrix’s blue pill, except instead of leaving the matrix its a one way trip to hell, and the patients are free to not care about this and take the pills anyway.

A person who is really catholic will not use condoms, will not take birth control, will not eat meat on Fridays, (a point the catholic church voluntarily conceded as not mattering much in the second Vatican counsel,) and do all the other things the church insists upon.

The Obama administration has expanded actual liberty, which makes it harder for any church to enforce religious liberty. But this issue should properly be between catholic leaders and catholic followers, not Catholic leaders and the Obama administration. Good catholic girls shouldn’t even be asking for the pill, and if they are its due to a failure of the catholic church to properly educate them. Let me do it. I think I can summarize this bullshit in a paragraph.

Life begins at conception. This means that if you have sex and have a miscarriage three days later even though the odds are you won’t ever know, you just had a kid. It was eight sells big and three days old and thought no thoughts, dreamed no dreams, took no breaths, had no limbs or head or bones even, but it had a little soul. Every time you tell your boyfriend to put a condom on, your preventing the unborn and enjoying sex for pleasure. This is bad because pleasure is a sin unless your married and even then pleasure is only a side affect of the sexual process because sex is about having children and pleasure is only a manifestation of humanaties sinful nature .

Have I convinced you of anything? Have they? Probably not.