Bring It On or Let It Go?

Obviously I have some differing opinions than many people I know. Yes, hello, I am Catholic, and many people I know are not.

So a cousin of mine posted a "news article" about a topic upon which we disagree. She noted that it was an "excellent article written by a conservative lawyer" supporting her point of view. I read through the article, to the end, and did my best to stay objective. I failed. I will never get those five minutes of my life back. I don't miss them terribly, but I still can't decide if I should say something or not and lose another five or ten minutes. I guess pointing out that the lawyer was "conservative" (whatever that means) was supposed to say something like, "Look a liberal (whatever that means too) likes this article!" The problem was, the article had nothing in it that actually addressed the concerns of the opposing viewpoint.

I have learned that the way to show objectivity is to actually present the opposing argument in a way that a person who holds that point of view would actually recognize as his or her own. In the film, "Listen to Me" about a group of debaters, there is a wonderful scene where their coach makes a young woman switch sides of a debate after making her opening statement. The subject? Abortion. It was an excellent movie. A really well informed debater can do it without anyone knowing where he or she stands.

This wasn't that kind of article. This was the kind of article known as a "strawman argument." It means that you build a false picture of your opponent's point of view and then proceed to knock it down. Then for the kicker, you claim victory.

I try to keep away from strawmen. I think one of the ways to do so is to actually view your opponent as an intelligent person who came to their beliefs through careful study, faith beliefs, or legitimate experience. I have often said to an opponent, "I get where you are coming from. If I had your same experiences, I would probably hold the same point of view." So my job, I believe, in getting the word out on authentic marriage and authentic sexuality is to present the side they haven't considered and then Let. It. Go. Walk away, and take my soap-box with me. I fail at it far more often than I care to mention, but that is still my job.

We all want victory. If what we hold as important really is The Truth, then victory would really mean no one actually lost. But, we are all fallible humans. We will make mistakes. We will misrepresent the Truth eventually, accidentally of course. But we still have an obligation to interact even when we are slightly misguided. We aren't on this big chunk of dirt and water alone. We have to live together. We have to communicate and not just talk around each other. We have to know when to remain silent and be thought the fool instead of opening one's mouth and removing all doubt. A huge piece of of this is knowing when to bring it on and when to let it go. As of right now, I still don't know. Please pray for me.

That Old Feelin'

Through much prayer and waiting we have discerned that God has called us to a small family. We are still leaving the door open if God has another plan for us, but everything has pointed to being called to be done having children. The reasons are many, and all are valid, some even extremely important, but it doesn't take away the hurt.

It is that old feelin'. Am I just falling back into a contraceptive mentality? I hope not. Do I just want more children on principle to prove a point? Very possible. Or am I just really having all of my maternal instincts in high gear? Most likely. It is so natural for a woman to want to have babies. But in recent decades it seems that our culture has tried to condition us out of our instincts.

Women want marriage and family and all of the trappings that come with it. For years there was a faction of people trying to convince society that women really wanted "freedom." They were right on one point. Women were enslaved in one way or another. But it wasn't our precious babies who enslaved us. It wasn't even really men, although they were the ones bore the responsibility for the outcome. No, it was and has always been we women who have kept ourselves enslaved.

I deep look at human history shows that every time women sought "sameness" with men is when men made their bad decisions. We have always been equal, since the dawn of time. What we have never been is the same. And this isn't the struggle of the civil rights movement to have to overcome "separate but equal." No. That was a certainly a battle that needed to happen, because they most certainly were not treated equally, and you cannot live anywhere on this earth and be "separate" from anyone.

No, this battle was a dog digging in his heels at the vet. This is the battle against neutering. Now I am all for neutering pets when needed. They have no self-control. But we humans do. So why don't we show it more often? Of that I have no real answer.

But this attempt at sameness was and is a battle of neutering. If women are less like women and more like men, then where does that leave men? Neutered, unless they dig in their heels and fight back. Every time in history when women stayed women, men did not fight back and our rights were maintained. We are equal simply because we are not the same. We are complementary. It is the universal yin and yang, push and pull, positive and negative. To be neutral has no power. It is through our complementarity that we have balance AND power.

Contracepting Lawnmowers

I wrote at an earlier date about a movie (unnamed here so I don't have to worry about legal issues) where the trailer begins with a young girl saying these words, "Most babies are accidents..." I was shocked down to the tip of my toes to hear that, but now it gets worse.

I saw an ad for a reality show where a couple has decided to try to conceive. So far they have been unsuccessful and are apparently seeking infertility treatment now. This woman is in her mid-30s and says a line that saddens me deeply. She says, "We spend all of our lives trying not to get pregnant and when we go to get pregnant we can't."

How upside down have we really become? Is it really so shocking to society that if you break something that it doesn't magically fix itself? Here's my thought: Let's say I have a riding lawnmower. I decide that it is fun to drive around. I can do fun little quick turns and make fancy maneuvers. But it has that pesky blade on the bottom. I can't go everywhere I want to go because I risk mowing down the daisies. I think the daisies look nice so I would like to save them for now. Maybe when they are not looking so hot I will go ahead and mow them down. But for now I want to drive right where those daisies are, and my blade is just stuck in the engaged position. I can't disengage it. Wherever I go, scattered daisies lie in my wake.

So I flip my mower over and smash the heck out of my blade with a sledgehammer. I keep bending it and smashing it until it will not mow daisies no matter where I drive it. The blade can spin and spin but will never reach the daisies. Now I can drive it wherever I want, on whomever's lawn I want and it will do nothing but make fancy maneuvers.

Then one random day I decide I want to mow. my. lawn. I want the blade to do what a blade was designed to do. I have decided that it is best to stay on my own lawn and stop driving over the daisies. I have decided this because I finally cultivated a good healthy relationship with my very own lawn. I would finally like to have a beautiful, manicured lawn of my very own. But it is too late. The blade is mangled. It will take professional intervention at great cost to straighten out the problem. I have to use precious time to fix what should have never been broken, (by me I might add,) in the first place. Can it be repaired? Well of course. It is just a silly lawnmower blade! Just rip it out and put in a new one! I can just do that so easily so I will.

So why would anyone mangle a perfectly good lawnmower blade just to be able to drive over the daisies? "What a silly analogy!" some might say. No one would do that to a perfectly good lawnmower just to go for a joyride! We see the idea of mangling a lawnmower blade as such a silly idea. So why do we treat our bodies with less respect than a lawnmower? What value have we placed on our human sexuality that we see corrupting a lawnmower as completely ridiculous, but corrupting our own bodies as perfectly reasonable? Word to the wise: Cultivate your own lawn and stop mowing over the daisies! You will be happier in the end. No mangled blade to fix.

Pro-life Surroundings

The good news is that lately, I have been surrounded by pro-life people. Even people who normally aren't pro-life have been behaving in a pro-life way. It is nearly amazing. It would be unbelievable without hope. I live every day in hope that more people will see that life matters. I look to influence everyone around me to know that without the right to life, no other rights matter, because they do not exist. The right to life trumps all other rights, for all of us.

Marriage Under Fire Yet Again

I have spent so much time trying to defend marriage that I don't have time to write about defending marriage. There are so many marriages going down in flames right now that it is hard to keep up. Most of the ones that I know of, I am not close enough to the couple to really say anything directly. It is often a mutual friend who contacts me asking, "What do I do?" It is frequently the same problems over and over: Boredom, infidelity, pornography, and just plain selfishness. Those problems have always existed, yet before contraception they didn't lead to divorce like they do now. What I find more than anything is people who constantly argue, "It isn't because of contraception!"

This statement makes me more nuts than any other. They are so sure it isn't contraception, yet they really don't know what it is otherwise. They are just sure it isn't contraception. The numbers prove otherwise, yet they don't want to hear it. They just want to continue to believe the lies. It is so frustrating.

Yet, I can see where they are coming from. Contraception masks so many things that it is hard to reveal. They complain about communication, yet they communicate a contraceptive lie with their bodies. But they never know that. They complain that their sex life is non-existent or boring, the very things they were told that contraception would cure. They have no idea that it made their problems worse not better. There is nothing more exciting than discovering that today is THE day, either because you are fertile and want to be, or infertile and want to be. As one NFP teacher says, "I never knew I could become sexually aroused looking at my wife's thermometer."

The problem with contraception is it is a silent killer. It sneaks up and destroys the marriage without ever being identified. It is a murder and the survivors never learn the weapon or date of death. All they know is that a marriage they hoped would last forever, is now cold and dead. Contraception was the unnamed killer. We have to stop it.

Abstinence: Putting Your Money Where Your, er, Mouth Is.

Post-op surgically, by 12 days now. Still healing up. Incisions seem to be healthy, but they do bother me a bit.

So until I am healed, we are abstaining. I know, I know. We NFP Catholics give too much information when it comes to our sex lives. But I wonder. How else do you get the word out that not "everybody is doing it?"

One of my points for NFP is pointing out that a couple who refuses to abstain has less secure ground to stand on when telling a teenager to abstain. After all, many teens really are pretty mature. Many have been emancipated and have raised babies quite well. Before higher education, people married shortly after entering puberty.

But now, we have teens who have been able to reproduce for years being told, "Wait! You can't handle a baby yet!" But they look to the so-called role models in their own lives and the teens say, "Whoop de do, neither can you. What's the difference?"

Well we know, as adults, that teens don't have it nearly as together as they think they do. We currently have an extended adolescence that extends into the mid-20s. They are the age of parents from generations past, but have the maturity level of middle school. Why? Because their own parents grew up with them. Their own parents were so young (mentally and physically) that they raised their children as they finished raising themselves.

If you never have to say 'no,' and never have to sacrifice, then what is there to learn? What have you earned? Nothing. The only thing these younger parents feel they sacrificed was, in fact, their youth! They don't have the tools to teach their children to abstain. They never had to, so why should their kids? They never had to put their money where their mouths were.

I propose: We go back to educating our young people as if puberty actually means something. I propose that we tell them exactly what is going on their bodies. Forget the mystery. Teach them the science! But then in the same breath, let's teach them their inherent value as human beings. Let's teach them that abstaining is difficult, but worth it. Let's teach them that they will have a lot more ahead of them if they don't get tied to an unhealthy relationship.

Let's live our lives with more transparency. If they are going to learn anything from us, we have to put our money where our mouth is. If they have to abstain, we have to prove it is possible. And not only that it is just possible, but that there are rewards for it. Stability, self-esteem, commitment, and communication all have deep roots in abstinence. Let's show them how it is done!

The Definition of Procreative

Here is another post that I wanted to save. Again, it says what I want to say. The indented quote is from someone else. The rest is my response.

We are using science to determine if we are fertile and having sex only when we are not. That, in and of itself, is messing with the way God meant it to be, according to what Catholics say about contraception. We are separating the procreative and the unitive properties of sex.

Please allow me to give a different perspective than the ones already presented here. I speak with the voice of those suffering from infertility.

Let me begin by asking you a question. Would you be willing to look an infertile couple in the eye and say, "You are not being procreative. You are separating the procreative from the unitive?" I would hope not. I would hope that you have more sense than to tell a couple who desperately wants a child that they are not being procreative.

You see objectively, that is what they are doing, by your definition. According to what you have defined as "procreation," they have used science to determine that their act is not going to result in a conception, yet they are still having sex. If your definition of procreation is accurate, then they are doing the same thing as an NFP couple who is making exclusive use of the infertile phase. And by that further logic, you cannot see a difference between what an NFP couple does and what a contracepting couple does. So if I take those points to their logical conconclusion, then the infertile couple is contracepting. Because we know that if A=B, and B=C, then A=C. Correct?

But I would guess then that your answer would be, "No the infertile couple wants to have a baby." True. But that is intent, not means. So that merely changes the why they are having sex, not the when and how. What we are discussing is the objective means of having infertile sex.

But what if instead the definition of procreation is not just a reproductive act? What if being procreative is instead a measurable, act that is defined, (as it is correctly listed in your second post) as an act ordered towards life? Wouldn't that change the above illogical conclusion that an infertile couple is doing basically the same act as a contracepting couple? Wouldn't that say, that no, a contracepting couple has done an act of some kind, deliberately, to disorder the act away from life?

Having suffered through both previous infertility and now having to limit the size of my family through the use of the infertile phases, I can really see both sides of the coin. My health is so bad that there are days that I cannot get out of bed to tend my two children. I have to have people come over and help. I hate that. I would love to be healthy. I desperately wanted to have another child, but it looks like God has a different plan for us. I want more children. Right now. My intent is the desire for children, yet we only make use of the infertile phase. Are you willing to tell me that I have separated the procreative from the unitive?

If you are really interested in the topic I have a list of sources as long as my husband's arm that I can give you. (He's six feet tall. Long wing-span.) Contraception is most certainly discussed, by name, in Scripture. Many, many of the early Church Fathers wrote on the intrinsic evil of contraception. I am more than happy to discuss with you the massive differences between natural infertility and intentional sterility.

Contraception was the topic that brought me fully back home to living a devout Catholic life. My blog is entitled, "Confessions of a Former Contracepter."