President Trump and Supreme Court nominee Amy Barrett

 If Amy Coney Barrett is confirmed there will be six Catholics, two Jews, and one former Catholic on the Supreme Court making monumental decisions how Americans are going to live out our lives. What centuries will they represent? The Roman Catholic Church, of which I was a member for 27 years, has been bedeviled by sex, politics, and power grabs for 2,000 years. It is suffering the death of a thousand cuts in Europe and North and Latin America while heavily recruiting members in Africa and a few Latin American countries. The proliferation of the sciences has eroded the Biblical prophecies, proverbs, and proclamations of ignorant prophets and power-hungry popes with large families.

Catholics have been arguing about sex since the first pope. The Apostle Paul in the First Century stated that people who could not control themselves sexually should marry: “For it is better to marry than to be aflame with passion.” After all, that old devil Satan tempts you with sex because of your lack of control. Doesn’t it say somewhere man should “be fruitful and multiply?” After 2,000 years of popes, cardinals, bishops, priests, and Catholics all fornicating with flaming passions and sexy fervor, the arguments about sex and all of its accouterments is still causing a heap of trouble in the river city of Tiber in Rome and almost every river on earth.

  Celibacy, as an example, became an issue in the First Century. Paul thought marriage was a bad choice, that remaining unmarried and choosing celibacy was a much higher ideal. Why should we admire someone who has such a nutty idea? Did he believe the great unwashed should just cohabitate without bonds of marriage? Do we know that Jesus Christ was a virgin when he was on the cross? The Vatican has been wasting the time and good sense of 1.3 billion in the 21st Century by arguing that only priests in the Amazon can be married because there is such a shortage of priests around the world! No wonder there’s a shortage. (In 1985 there were 57,000 priests in the U.S. Today, about 39,000.)

The sex drive is strong. Over 20 Catholic dioceses have had to file for bankruptcy to cover clergy sex abuse cases. The pope that approved celibacy in the 12th Century was rumored to have ten children! Look at the sexual abuse created by lusty priests. The sex drive has already cost the Catholic Church billions paying off victims! I thought Pope Francis put out an amazing statement from the sexy confines of the Vatican about two weeks ago: “The church has condemned inhuman, brutish, vulgar pleasure, but has on the other hand always accepted human, simple, moral pleasure. The pleasure of eating is there to keep you healthy, just like the sexual pleasure is there to make love more beautiful and guarantee the perpetuation of the species. The pleasure of eating and sexual pleasure comes from God.” He didn’t answer why the Roman Catholic Church has so many rules about contraception, abortion, homosexuality — and love ...

Were Abortions A Religious Problem Before The 20th Century?

 Whether legal or illegal, abortion has been around for thousands of years. We know from Middle East historians that passionate Egyptian women 5,000 years ago used cow dung as a contraceptive when fornicating with passionate Egyptian men. If they got pregnant by an powerful sperm spearing through the dung, they found exotic plants along the Nile and other watering holes — or other means – to provoke miscarriages. Sex between consenting creatures has always been a pleasant activity, even if Pope Francis finally got the idea from God rather late.

At last count we had about 6.7 billion people alive on earth and about 100 billion dead 0n earth. Homo Sapiens have been fruitful. Aldous Huxley in his novel "Brave New World" suggested that perhaps two billion people should be the limit of humans on earth because of  natural resources. As sex has been labeled a pleasurable activity by prominent religious leaders such as Jerry Falwell, Jr. and his wife, we have to have some means of limiting pregnancies. I know a few conservative evangelicals and Catholics who have just two children. I compliment them for controlling themselves to just two pleasurable sexual encounters in their fertile lifetime.

An Irreversible Premise About Abortion: It’s Impossible To Live Without It

Someone is immediately going to tell me: “LIFE BEGINS AT CONCEPTION!” Yes, I know that. I’m an old farm boy. Actually, death also begins at conception. Everyone knows that. No big deal. Someone will also remind me that 61 million fetuses have been aborted in the U.S. since 1970. Why 1970? Well, that’s when some conservative politicians realized abortion would be a terrific cultural wedge issue in elections. There have been 50 billion women on earth since the first Homo Sapiens discovered the pleasures of sex. I wonder how many of them had abortions or  miscarriages.

Our Center for Disease Control has statistics about live births, abortions, miscarriages, maternity deaths, and other facts on reproduction since—guess what—1970. As an example, in the year 2000 we had 4,058,814 live births. During that year women had 1,313,000 abortions and 1,029,000 miscarriages, bringing the pregnancy total to 6,400,814. So about 25% had abortions and 20% had miscarriages. In checking the research, the 50 years of figures did not vary much from the 2000 figures.

In 2018 we had 3,791,712 live births and a recorded 327,691 abortions. But in the two decades the RU-486 drugs had been approved and used but not recorded. The RU-486 drugs have a success rate of 99.6%.The experts estimate that 40% of U.S. abortions are now performed with drugs and that eventually practically all abortions will be by drugs instead of clinic operations—or back-alley clothes hangers or lye drinks. For some reason the CDC stopped counting miscarriages in 2001. A political decision, perhaps?

Watch “Unpregnant” And Travel With A Teenager A 1,000 Miles To Get An Abortion

We presently have 25 million women of reproductive age having lots of sex except for a few Roman Catholic “virgins” who have “married” Jesus Christ. If Roe v. Wade is overturned, Planned Parenthood estimates millions of poor white and colored women cannot afford to travel to states where abortion will be legal. In the last decade 33 states have enacted 479 restrictions on abortion, some of them imposing completely unnecessary equipment and “clinic” conditions. Nine states have enacted abortion laws which will adversely affect the health of women who have unwanted and dangerous pregnancies. Medical experts have concluded that abortions are less risky than tonsillectomies! No one wants abortion, but all abortions are medically, economically, and personally necessary.

The majority of women seeking abortions are not desperate teenagers. Nearly 60% are women with family responsibilities because they already have at least one child. Half of them live below the poverty level. They are too poor to travel distances and live in hotels while waiting for mandatory waiting periods in al least 26 states. There are no abortion clinics in 90% of the counties. Many fear they will be fired from their jobs if they take  time. Besides that, they cannot afford it.  They should be able to get RU-486 over the counter in any pharmacy—but can’t without an expensive doctor’s permission.

This statement by abortion law expert Joan Williams says it all: “This is the result of the highly successful death-by-a-thousand-cuts anti-abortion strategy which has piled on restriction after restriction to make abortion inaccessible to as many American women as possible.” Over 20 states have passed laws banning or limiting abortions in ways that are currently unconstitutional, but will immediately go into effect if Roe v. Wade is overturned.

The Most Catholic Country In The World Has Finally Decided Not To Be

To put it bluntly, the Irish have told the Vatican to go to hell. The campaign started about 2,000 years ago when 50% of the people on earth decided they would make laws and rules about sex for 100% of the people. This list covers some of the major mortal sins conjured up by “celibate” men who committed sexual abuse on young boys and girls and fathered many an “illegitimate” child over 2,000 years: masturbation, oral sex, anal sex, premarital sex, contraception, homosexuality, divorce, artificial insemination, abortion, stem cell research, vasectomy, tubal ligation, and Onan’s coitus interruptus. These are just some of the major sins.

Christians since the 5th Century and St. Patrick, the Irish finally got tired of seeing their “fallen” pregnant young women forced to go to the Magdalene Laundries to do the church’s dirty work as punishment. Catholic women got tired of having to go to England for abortions, The Irish were shocked to discover the bodies of 800 babies buried in a septic tank. They were shocked to learn that the bodies of 950 children had been sent to medical schools for anatomical research. The laundries proved to be chambers of horrors. The LBGTQ+ community got tired of being called “intrinsically and objectively disordered” while the bishops said “gender is determined solely by visible genitalia.” Oh, if life was so simple. But the Catholic Church finally went over the Irish cliffs when doctors could not perform an abortion on a dentist suffering from a dangerous infection during a miscarriage because her fetus still had a heartbeat. They let her die. After the Irish recalled their ambassador to the Vatican, 62% voted to make same-sex marriage legal, 66% voted to approve abortion, divorce was liberalized, many schools were removed from church control, and they elected Leo Varadkar prime minister, a gay married to his husband.

The Vatican’s Bizarre Bazaar Of Laws And Rules About Sex vs. Catholics

How many centuries of Catholic thought does the Vatican still follow compared to orthodox “Catholics?” Recent research by the Public Religion Research Institute indicates that 68% of Catholics believe they can still be “good Catholics” if they disagree with the Vatican’s positions on abortion and contraception. That is equal to the thinking of any other religious group in the U.S., although Pope John Paul II, the “saint” who neglected priest and bishop sexual abuse, said it was “a grave error.” Almost 60% of Catholic woman feel they do not have to follow the rules about abortion. Other studies show that 65% of Catholics are pro-choice while 67% approve of same-sex marriage. The use of the birth control pill by Catholic women exceeds that of all American women at large.

In 2006 Trump’s nominee for the Supreme Court signed a statement made by a South Bend pro-life group that would make abortion, in vitro fertilization, the destruction of embryos in that process, and the performance of abortions criminal offenses subject to fines and jail terms. At her hearing she should be asked what she would do if she discovered at the seventh month her fetus had the abnormality of having no brain. What century of Catholic thought would she use to solve that problem? Will it be based on 16th Century beliefs when Giordano Bruno was burned to death at a Roman stake for broadcasting that the earth orbited the sun instead of the opposite, or 21st Century genetic science and anatomical medicine research and process?

Voltaire, my 17th Century French cynic, has the answer: “In all the disputes which have excited Christians against each other, Rome has invariably decided in favor of that opinion which tended most towards the suppression of the human intellect and the annihilation of the reasoning power.”