McGuire, 26, of Alexandria, is part of a movement of younger, religiously conservative Catholic women who are trying to rebrand what may be Catholicism’s most-ignored teaching: its ban on birth control methods such as the Pill. Arguing that church theology has been poorly explained and encouraged, they want to shift the image of a traditional Catholic woman from one at home with eight kids to one with a great, communicative sex life, a chemical-free body and babies only when the parents believe the time is right.
The movement sees an opportunity: President Obama’s decision this year to require most religious employers, like employers in general, to provide contraception coverage. The move angered Catholics so much that it cracked open a discussion about contraception that has been largely taboo for decades because there’s so much disagreement about it.
“More priests have given sermons on this in the past few weeks than in the last 50 years,” said Janet Smith, a conservative theologian who teaches at the Sacred Heart Major Seminary in Detroit.
The new movement’s goal is to make over the image of natural family planning, now used by a small minority of Catholic women. But natural family planning, which requires women to track their fertile periods through such natural signs such as temperature and cervical mucus, is seen by many fertility experts as unreliable and is viewed by most Catholics as out of step with contemporary women.
Meet the new phase in the War on Women, folks. The pill is slavery and if charting your fertility periods was good enough for women before the 1960's, well it's good enough for GCB's like Ashley here. They're "chemical-free" ladies, you see. That makes them better than you, and of course if women didn't use the pill, it would just go away, and then we can reframe the argument of whether married women having sex for pleasure is a sin or not (of course it's evil for unmarried women to have sex!)
We've gone from "Should society have to fund the pill as a women's health issue" to "Do REAL Christian women even need the pill?" One is a policy issue, where Democrats can win. The other is a morality issue, where Democrats can fight all they want to, but they'll lose to slut-shaming every damn time. How nice of the Washington Post to accept this reframing of the argument to the absolute benefit of the Austerity Party.
There's a lesson here, but I'm thinking most liberals will miss it. Just like they'll miss being able to have affordable birth control in a GOP world.
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