Feature
The Hundred Years' War
The Culture of Death's Campaign Against the Catholic Church
When it comes to advancing the culture of death in the West, the strategy most often used by its leaders has three parts, all centered on the Catholic Church.
First, isolate the Catholic Church from the rest of society. Frame any debate as the Catholic Church versus some other group or cause (women, Protestants, science, progress, and so on, or any combination of such). Sometimes the isolation will be somewhat rhetorical; at other times the Catholic Church will in fact be largely alone on the issue, in which case the goal is to emphasize that isolation.
Second, isolate the Catholic hierarchy from the laity. Attack the hierarchy specifically, not all Catholics. Point out that many Catholics don't follow church teaching. Give dissenting Catholics cover by framing the debate within the church as being between liberalism and conservatism (non-theological categories) rather than between orthodoxy and heterodoxy. Highlight prominent dissenting Catholic theologians, scientists, and politicians.
Third, actively court dissenting Catholics and give them a prominent voice. Assert that the church will, of course, eventually embrace the liberal view anyway, making the dissenters the courageous pioneers who led the way.
One may recognize these as the tactics employed by the Obama administration and its secular liberal allies with regard to the so-called HHS contraception mandate. The mandate's supporters have, for example: pinpointed the Catholic Church as the primary obstacle to universal coverage of contraception and sterilization in employer-provided insurance plans; highlighted statements of support from lay Catholic organizations that have openly contradicted the Catholic bishops on this issue; cited on the White House blog a faulty statistic that 98 percent of Catholic women have used contraception; and given prominence to the dissenting Catholic government officials who have promulgated and supported the mandate, including Kathleen Sebelius, Joe Biden, Nancy Pelosi, and others.
These tactics were not new with the Obama administration, however; they are elements of a strategy that was used successfully in several other cultural debates that have taken place over the last hundred years. Three related movements from the last century will serve to illustrate this: the movement for the legalization and cultural acceptance of contraception; the population control movement; and the movement to legalize abortion. I will examine each of these in turn.
Margaret Sanger & the Birth Control Movement
When Margaret Sanger opened the first birth control clinic in the United States in 1916, she was deliberately engaging in an act of civil disobedience, since the anti-contraception "Comstock Law" had been enacted by Congress decades earlier, in 1873. Sanger was soon arrested, tried, and sentenced to 30 days in jail, but her mini-martyrdom garnered publicity for the contraception cause and for her as one of its most important leaders.
The contraception movement was situated within the broader eugenics movement of her day, and she was spurred on in her efforts both because she thought contraception would liberate women and because she hoped access to contraception would limit the increase of racial minorities and others she and her fellow eugenicists believed to be genetically inferior. The procreating limits were needed, they thought, not only to improve the gene pool, but also to combat overpopulation and its negative impact on the environment. In blunt terms, eugenicists were worried that blacks were having too many kids and that they would ruin the natural environment for whites.
In the 1910s and 1920s, Sanger developed what ended up being her winning strategy: framing contraception as a Catholic issue and exploiting deep-seated suspicion of Catholicism among Protestants. Lutheran scholar Allan Carlson explains:
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