njlauren
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ORIGINAL: searching4mysir
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Is the birth control pill the only contraception the Catholic Church is against?
No. They are against condoms, IUDs, and all forms of barrier/hormonal contraception. They are also against in vitro fertilization and artificial insemination.
They DO allow for Natural Family Planning that looks for physical signs of fertility (there are several forms, some are sympto-thermal, some are just thermal and some are just symptoms) that takes into account a woman's natural cycles both for avoiding and achieving pregnancy. They see sex as naturally procreative AND bonding and believe it immoral to intentionally separate them. Infertility is essentially a broken reproductive system and that is why age/menopause/natural infertility is not looked at as separating those two purposes of sex.
The Catholic Church sees NFP vs. Contraception as the difference between dieting and bulimia. Not having sex (or dieting) is refraining from a pleasurable good (sex/food) while contraception is like bulimia (taking part in the good (eating/sex) and then rejecting it (by interfering with fertility/throwing up) at the same time.
The church basically says that sex is tied to reproduction, period, and that any act of sex has to "open to life"....NFP is allowed, but NFP also is subject to a lot of error, to be able to do it effectively means charting the cycles of periods and so forth, and it has a high failure rate. Among other things, the Catholic Church is still preaching that the world is not overpopulated, there is no such thing as overpopulation, and that God means us to 'be fruitful and multiply'. For the church itself, that means it wants the faithful to reproduce in large numbers, in part, because more numbers=more power (did you ever notice that when they write about a religious group, the first thing they announce is how many people belong to it? The Bishops in the US, with 70 million Catholics, try to claim that the faithful follow them and far too many politicians are dumb enough to believe them.
It also means as a practicing catholic that oral sex, anal sex, and kind of manual release/pleasuring, is verboten as well. Despite all the blather they have put out in recent years, the Church still is basically saying that sex is only for procreation.
The whole issue of being mandated to provide contraception coverage is not about freedom of religion, it is about where freedom of religion crosses with employment law, which includes things like discrimination and health care coverage, both of which the federal government has the right to regulate. The institutions we are talking about are not Church run, they are church affiliated, and they hire a lot more then Roman Catholics. So a church secretary could not claim the right to birth control, but someone working for Notre Dame could. The distinction is that the groups we are talking about are employers and the organization is not run directly by the church, they have their own fundraising, own boards and so forth, so are like any other employer in that regards. The 1st amendment is not above all other rights, despite what the religious try to claim, and where the right of religious freedom conflicts with other rights, it can and does have to take a secondary role. For example, suppose you work for an employer who is a Jehova's witness, should he be able to not pay for blood transfusions? If you work for an employer who is a Christian Scientist, can they totally deny you health insurance? If a company is owned by a mormon, can he claim that he only can hire mormons, because in his belief, only mormons are good enough to work for him? Where does it end?
Then, too, a lot of these Catholic institutions receive federal funding, hospitals via medicare/medicaid, universities through federal grants and such, groups like Catholic Charities where they receive federal money in contracts to provide services, and when you take the federal dollar, you play by the governments rules, you cannot claim religious freedom once you have done that.
Once a group employs people not of their faith, or is a broad based employer, the religious exemption has limits on it, in other words, as all rights do.
As far as the GOP goes, the problem is they are running out of gas. Since the late 60's, the GOP has more and more become the party of attracting votes by catering to Anger. The GOP once was the party of fiscal conservatism and was socially moderate to libertarian, which is an almost extinct thing in the current national GOP. It started with the Southern Strategy, which brought in southern whites pissed off about the civil rights laws (Johnson, when he signed the voting rights act in 1964, said this would turn the south over to the democrats, and he was right). Then, came the reagan era, where they went after the blue collar, white voters, pissed off about job losses and economic hardship that started hitting the working class in the 1970's. The GOP got this vote, by blaming the economic stagnation on liberals, and claiming that the white blue collar voters had lost jobs because of affirmative action giving jobs to blacks and women and other minorities. To further divide and conquer, they also gave a bully pulpit to the religious right, the evangelical, anti evolution, anti science types, with their holy crusade against gays and abortion....and it worked, hate often does.
What this then morphed into was, instead of wanting to really run the country, to win at any cost, as done by people like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. They had some success with it, they scared people with Willie Horton, and then with the incredible right wing money machine, created the whole angry white people/talk radio phenomenon.
The problem is, demographics are working against them and their message is turning a lot more people off then it attracts. They are beholden to the hard right, who vote in primaries, but these same people turn everyone else off, they turn off hispanics tired of the openly racist crap of 'take back our country', they turn off independent voters, who are generally more educated and upscale, with their catering to the anti intellectual/education stance (Sarah Palin, anyone) and the backwards social vision, and they immensely turn off young people, who are tired of the Jesus freaks and the catering to the very well off that has been a GOP hallmark (only about 30% of young people id as GOP these days_.
The only reason the GOP has been able to hold on is to a large extent the way the government is structured and the way elections happen. The electoral college favors the GOP, by gerrymandering how electoral votes are given, they can manage to get electoral victories for the GOP and in many cases, it doesn't reflect the popular vote. Likewise, by drawing electoral maps that create white majority districts, they can disenfranchise minority voters and create in effect 'rotten boroughs'. Add that up to the fact that all states get 2 electoral votes, and there are a lot more small states then big ones, and it keeps the GOP in the game.
Worse, the GOP for the last 5 years has been simply trying to stop Obama from doing anything, they have offered nothing constructive (the Tea Party are a bunch of morons, their 'ideas' are based in myth and crackpot economics. Not that the budget deficits aren't real or a problem, but that simply cutting spending like they think isn't going to do much, especially since they, not surprisingly, don't want to cut what they use (medicare, SS, farm subsidies, block grants to states)...their vision was you get rid of welfare and suddenly the budget is balanced, and that isn't true.....just saying no isn't an answer, and I think a lot of people have realized this. You saw this with the fiscal cliff, when Boehner basically was powerless to negotiate a compromise because of the extremists.
People in the US don't like extremists (Obama is no flaming liberal, most of his stuff is pretty centrist), and that is what the GOP is, it is associated with Rush Limbaugh, Fox News and basically a party full of hate and intolerance whose only concern seems to be the uber rich. And if you want to see the real problem? If you looked at Romney's campaign headquarters, it could have been I like Ike in 1954, it was almost lily white, the average age of the people there was getting close to retirement, and it didn't represent the US of today. A party that bases its idea on rural, older, angry white people isn't going to last long, but they don't seem to have any ideas.
Buckley and Goldwater were right, they said that the conservatives would be in deep trouble when the loony right took on the mantle of conservatism, when ideology replaced thought, where things like compromise and discussion were replaced by a bunch of morons digging their heels in, and they were right.
Think about this one, as of the mid 1980's, the GOP actually had a chance of taking states like NJ, NY, Connecticut and California, these days they don't even bother campaigning there. In fact, the GOP actively campaigns in presidential elections in roughly I believe 35 states, and their whole strategy is gaming the electoral college, rather then trying to build a broader based party. Gaming works only so long, eventually demographics catch up to you.
BTW, their socially conservative message is falling on deaf ears. Prop 8 passed in california because the Mormons and other religious right groups dropped about 40 million dollars in scare campaigns to get it passed. Among other things, majorities of both black and hispanics support same sex marriage and gay rights, social conservatism is mostly found in the older blacks and in recent immigrants from south America, when the next generations come along, that message is going to fail, too. Even religious voters are turning their back on the GOP, s lot of evangelicals have woken up to the fact that supporting the GOP, with its ayn rand, cut taxes on the rich while gutting programs for the poor, is not exactly what Jesus would do.
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RE: Did the GOP really understand the last election? - 
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). This is why the Catholic Church is against covering contraceptives. 
You did not just call me a Gingrich, did you?!?!? 
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