Once again, another compromise is coming down the pike on birth control. Under the guise of religious freedom, and despite the fact that hypocrisy runs rampant in that many religious institutions of the Catholic persuasion already cover birth control, religious institutions are still fighting to keep women pregnant and in the kitchen. The “God intended people to have as many children as can be conceived and born” male hierarchies of the more rigid denominations posit that contraception interferes with the natural process of conception, therefore, birth control is a no-no.
The religious purveyors of the notion that God intended conception to be a free-for-all with no interference using pharmaceutical products take just the opposite position when it comes to providing pharmaceutical assistance to the males in our society that will allow them to overcome the dreaded erectile dysfunction that goes with getting older. That is interference plain and simple, yet ED drugs are cheerfully covered by religious institutions.
Perhaps ED is God’s way of letting males know that their days of procreating are at an end. ED drugs supposedly help keep the hope of procreation alive – even if it has to be done with chemicals. After all, many still live in the dark days of seeing women as simply child-bearing vessels to be carriers of one child after another per God’s wishes. I don’t see anywhere in the Old Testament that God said how many children are acceptable or unacceptable. In fact, the Bible, in Genesis 1:22, says to “be fruitful and multiply.” That certainly is open to interpretation. Is multiplication one child? Two? Ten?
If the Catholic church and a few other churches see birth control as interfering with the natural process of procreation, they should also view ED drugs in the same way since these drugs interfere with the natural process. And that process includes slowing down as well as the inability to continue to procreate. And, let’s be honest here, the ED drugs are not really there to enable procreation by men who have reached the outer limits of that task; they are to enhance the sexual experience.
Watch the ED commercials and one understands that these couples are not looking to have more children. Instead we see youthful looking “older” couples lost in the bliss of each other’s company, happily running along beaches, sitting in bathtubs, lounging on porch swings – you get the picture. The message? One of them has a problem, and it isn’t the female partner. The panacea? Pop an ED pill, and intimacy can return to the relationship. Intimacy, not procreation.
But let the thought that women want to enjoy intimacy without the fear of pregnancy cross the minds of the religious institutions fighting coverage of birth control, and the patriarchs of the institutions shudder in horror and run for cover under the faux argument of “religious freedom.” Where better to take shelter than in the House of the Lord?
BERRY STREET BEACON 