Janet E. Smith's Articles
The Catholic Church has a wisdom about sexuality derived from Scripture and natural law (good common sense) that too few Catholics know and live. Sexual Common Sense features publised articles by Janet E. Smith, an author and expert on Catholic Ethics, that make clear the common sense teachings of the Chuch on sexuality. Addressing issues from abortion to contraception and bioethics Sexual Common Sense will arm you with information and insights that will help you both live out and spread the Churchs' teachings.
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Janet E. Smith's Articles
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Written by Dr. Janet E. Smith
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Part I
It is one of the most ardently held and relentlessly repeated dogmas of feminism that women have been oppressed and exploited throughout history. Young women today tend to think that before the nineteen sixties, women were totally subservient to men, their lives completely occupied in trivial and humiliating tasks. They believe it is thanks to feminism that women have finally escaped the ghetto of the home and found that they need not have as their highest aspiration, being Mrs. Cleaver, wife of Ward, mother of Beaver and Wally.
The myth of the historical subjugation of women has been dominant in American culture since the mid portion of last century. A female historian at the turn of this century, in speaking of winning the vote for women, stated:
The true objection to women suffrage lies far deeper than any argument. Giving women the ballot is the visible sign and symbol of a stupendous social revolution and before it we are afraid. Women are one-half of the world but until a century ago the world of music and painting and sculpture and literature and scholarship and science was a man's world. The world of trades and professions and of work of all kinds was a man's world. Women lived a twilight life, a half-life apart, and looked out and saw men as shadows walking. It was a man's world. The laws were man's laws, the government a man's government, the country a man's country . . . " [1]
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Janet E. Smith's Articles
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Written by Dr. Janet E. Smith
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To Children
The sociologists and psychologists who are addressing this distinguished assembly will have laid out the dimensions of the sociological and psychological dysfunctionality of the family; which includes, for example, the incidence of divorce, the amount of sexual and psychological abuse, the alienation and isolation of children, the easy slide that such alienation and isolation facilitates into drug abuse, sexual license and other modern forms of escapism.
What I wish to explore here is how the modern age has a philosophical and theological dysfunctionality in respect to its understanding of children and their intrinsic importance, and of the importance of children to their parents and society. At the risk of sounding unduly alarmist, I must observe that our society has nearly reached a state of philosophical insanity in respect to the value of human life, the value of babies and the meaning of sexuality. A state of philosophical insanity means that we are fundamentally and basically denying the reality of fundamental and basic truths to the point that our behavior is dangerously self-destructive.
Babies are gifts, wonderful gifts from God that should rightly be the focal point of any marriage. But in our society babies are rarely considered as gifts from God. Certainly parents still naturally want to have children (if only a few well-planned and genetically well-designed ones) and they still delight in their children but even so children are more often considered a possession that couples -- or single individuals, homosexual or heterosexual -- may opt to have or even opt to have made for them; they are an option, not the reason for marriage. It is even considered a luxury and often an irresponsible luxury for couples to have more than two children; those who have many are considered ignorant or self-indulgent. They are not understood to be doing a generous service for God and man; they are adding to the problem of overpopulation; they are producing enemies of the environment who will consume too many of the world's resources. Any mother of three or more children has horror stories to tell of the rude comments about her child-bearing practices, made to her by perfect strangers. Many of those who are infertile, on the other hand, think they have a right to a baby and think that there are no ethical limits to the reproductive technologies.
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Janet E. Smith's Articles
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Written by Dr. Janet E. Smith
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Q: Do you see any connection between the rejection of the Church's teaching on contraception and the push for homosexual marriages?
Smith: Not so many years ago at a conference on homosexuality, Russell Hittinger argued that there is not much ground for opposing homosexual marriages in a culture where most unions are contraceptive. He said we were already blessing unions whose primary reason for existence was sexual pleasure.
In fact, many years ago, when dissent first started concerning the Church's teaching on contraception, some of those defending the teaching said, if we were to approve of contraception, soon people would be arguing that masturbation, fornication and homosexuality were morally permissible. Some people thought those claims were absurd and likely most now would as well, but in both the Church and in the culture it is clear that widespread acceptance of contraception has radically changed our understanding of sexuality.
Rather than holding to the Christian and common sense view that sex belongs within marriage between a male and a female committed to each other for life and open to children, our culture thinks that sex is quite simply for pleasure -- and that almost any combination of consenting individuals may morally seek that pleasure without any commitment, without an openness to children.
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Janet E. Smith's Articles
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Written by Dr. Janet E. Smith
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It is good news that Catholic textbooks and Catholic marriage preparation manuals are beginning to do more than formulaically state that the Church condemns contraception – and then state that couples are permitted to do what their consciences dictate. In doing so, these books did more to deter Catholics from following Church teaching than winning them over to Church teaching. Space is now given to explaining, rather than just reciting, the Church’s teaching and the "conscience clause" has disappeared. (There is now a more honest understanding that "following one’s conscience means a conscience formed by Church teaching.")
It is encouraging that some of the texts are very clear in the presentation that the all the chemical forms of contraception and the IUD work on occasion as abortifacients – that is, they sometimes work by preventing the implantation of the fertilized ovum (the new little human being). The distressing and frustrating bad news is that these texts give a false explanation of the reasons for condemning contraceptives as contraceptives. They state that the Church teaches that contraception is wrong because it is artificial. These texts also teach that natural family planning is morally acceptable because it is not artificial. But the fact is that the artificiality of contraception figures not at all in the Church’s condemnation of contraception. Certainly, the Church teachings that contraceptives commonly known as "artificial birth control" are morally impermissible, but it is not because of their artificiality that they are condemned.
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