William F Harrison, MD

There is no religious frenzy remotely comparable to that ecstasy experienced in mutually desired sexual contact with someone we love, and a simultaneous orgasm with that person is the nearest thing to heaven we humans will ever experience on this earth. All higher life forms, including human beings, are genetically programmed to seek this ecstasy again and again. It is the failure to recognize this basic life-driven imperative that has been the greatest crime against humanity fostered by institutional Christianity, and most especially by the institutional Catholic Church. The influence of the Catholic Church in setting governmental policies concerning birth control and safe, legal abortion in South and Central America and parts of Africa, constitutes a true Òcrime against humanityÓ given the resultant rapid increase in overpopulation and the deadly accumulation of toxic wastes along with the almost irreversible depletion of natural resources in these areas, including the loss of forests, clean water and arable land. And it is the attempt to block or alter this life-driven force that creates the most destructive sexual perversions, and crimes against children, in much of the industrialized world.

It is this true perversion of sexuality - adult celibacy imposed on the Catholic priesthood, and by extension on all unmarried sexually mature individuals, and Catholic and fundamentalist Christian teachings about the ÒsinfulnessÓ of artificial birth control and safe elective abortion - that causes great suffering, even criminal behavior, among those who try to follow this unnatural rule of the Catholic Church and fundamentalist Christian dogma. In the immortal words of St. Paul, Òit is better to marry than to burn.Ó I think we can all agree on this! But I also believe that St. PaulÕs options Ð celibate, marry or burn - do not represent the only morally legitimate choices. A prime cause of sexual perversion that is accepted dogma for many Christians, is the defining of sex as Òoriginal sin.Ó Sex, and the life-force behind the sexual impulse, is one of natureÕs - or GodÕs if you will - greatest gifts, and were it not for the pleasure and fulfillment that accompanies consensual mature sexual activity, most of animal life as we know it, including humanity, would never have evolved, much less have flourished to the point that the human race has reached the top of the evolutionary heap.

Original sin, even worse, sex as original sin, is a preposterous superstitious conceit that has no place in the value systems of normal, intelligent and informed human beings. And with a few exceptions, were it not for some of the mindless adherents of Christian fundamentalist sects and the Catholic ChurchÕs perverted hierarchy, it rarely would. Sex is a given. In a modern society, where sexual maturity, and intellectual and social maturity and marriage are arrived at and entered into at times separated by years, sometimes even decades, the idea that men and women are going to remain celibate for any significant number of years following sexual maturity is unrealistic and destructive to human happiness.

Not until a generation or so ago, in fact not until 1972 when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision called Baird v. Eisenstadt, were unmarried couples legally able to obtain and use effective birth control methods in all of these United States. (Unfortunately, outlawed birth control is still the rule in much of the Catholic dominated world.) When the U.S. Supreme Court made relatively effective birth control and then the next year with the Roe v. Wade decision made safe legal abortion accessible to the vast majority of Americans, the U. S. government effectively and legally separated sex from its most immediate and destructive ÒpunishmentÓ Ð an unwanted, possibly disastrous pregnancy. Obviously sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) were still one possible deterrent to officially unsanctioned sex, but antibiotics had made these less the ancient scourge that they once had been, and besides, STDÕs were not the punishment that kept on punishing, unlike the unloved child of an unwanted pregnancy. This consequence of an unwanted pregnancy, and the humiliation and pain that might potentially be visited on a girl or woman, couple or their families as a result, can reverberate through those families for generations, visiting the toxic legacy of the ÒsinÓ of the parents not only on the ÒsinnersÓ themselves, but also Òon their children and their childrenÕs children, even unto the fourth generation.Ó How very Deuteronomeic!

But to the dismay of those religious folks who would punish every act that they perceive to be sexual transgression, Americans are big with liberty. We are so accustomed to the concept of American Freedom that it might as well be encoded in the American DNA.

We Americans believe in Freedom of speech, in the Freedom to select our own friends, Freedom to associate and form liaisons with whom we chose, to live and work where and how we will; we emphatically assert our Freedom to marry or not to marry, to have children or not to have children, and to determine for ourselves the number and spacing of those children and the Freedom to chose where, when, how, and indeed, if and who or what, we will worship. And when we recognize that someone is attempting to abridge these basic American Freedoms, we resist mightily those who would do so, be they priests, parsons, Popes or Presidents.

Because our Freedom to control our own reproductive destinies was enshrined in our constitution by those Supreme Court decisions beginning almost two generations, many Americans are totally unaware of the very serious danger that the Republican party - in its present form as an almost wholly owned subsidiary of the fundamentalist Christian Right - represents. Since the first Reagan term as President of the United States, the openly stated goal of the national Republican platform has been to outlaw all abortions, replacing your Freedom to make your own reproductive decisions with state and federal mandates against all abortions. Abortion has been the birth control of last resort for thousands of years.

For much of that history, abortion carried very serious potential consequences for the overwhelming majority of girls and women, couples and families who sought to control their reproductive output in terms of number and spacing of children. Before the advent of modern medicine, for too many of those women and girls who obtained abortion, even when the law did not specifically address this issue, abortion carried its own penalty: all too frequently it resulted in terrible pain, disease, injury and death. Today, only illegal abortions routinely carry the seeds of such punishments. And it is exactly this punishment that todayÕs Republican Party would inflict on anyone so bold as to demand the Freedom to make their own reproductive decisions.

A majority of Americans believe that the decisions concerning if, when and how many children one should have are among the most sacred of personal Freedoms. Why in GodÕs name do we continue to elect presidents, governors, and state and congressional representatives who would deny us this Freedom?