Not sure what our brand new Pontiff’s views on the subject, but here’s a spectacular 19th century view from Patt Fagan of the Family Research Council. From Right Wing Watch, he says that unmarried people should be punished for having sex, and denied the use of Contraception. Here’s the direct quote, and audio can be found from the RWW article (linked above)…
The court decided that single people have the right to contraceptives. What’s that got to do with marriage? Everything, because what the Supreme Court essentially said is single people have the right to engage in sexual intercourse. Well, societies have always forbidden that, there were laws against it. Now sure, single people are inclined to push the fences and jump over them, particularly if they are in love with each other and going onto marriage, but they always knew they were doing wrong. In this case the Supreme Court said, take those fences away they can do whatever they like, and they didn’t address at all what status children had, what status the commons had, by commons I mean the rest of the United States, have they got any standing in this case? They just said no, singles have the right to contraceptives we mean singles have the right to have sex outside of marriage. Brushing aside millennia, thousands and thousands of years of wisdom, tradition, culture and setting in motion what we have…
It’s not the contraception, everybody thinks it’s about contraception, but what this court case said was young people have the right to engage in sex outside of marriage. Society never gave young people that right, functioning societies don’t do that, they stop it, they punish it, they corral people, they shame people, they do whatever. The institution for the expression of sexuality is marriage and all societies always shepherded young people there, what the Supreme Court said was forget that shepherding, you can’t block that, that’s not to be done.
So the question begs to mind… which societies is he talking about? Last I checked, there have always been people having children out of wedlock, and there have DEFINITELY always been people having sex out of wedlock. Sex of course is OLDER than the limited practice of Judeo-Christian marriage.
Sure, the comments may seem harmless enough. Who cares about the Family Reasearch Council anyway? Well if you don’t care, you really should. After all, it’s their donors who are pulling the puppet strings to many in the Republican Party… from Todd “legitimate rape” Akin, all the way up to ex-Presidential candidate Mitt Romney. This group invests millions and millions of dollars to have their far-flung opinions take center stage in our political debate. If Progressives and Moderates ever want that to change, they need to stand up to people like Patt Fagan, and call out their backward opinions.
