Esolen's take

Maybe it's because I am an English major that I love the writings of Anthony Esolen. He is at it again in Crisis Magazine:

For the same government that is, in effect, commanding Jews to eat pork, as did Antiochus in the days of the Maccabees, or commanding a man to show his intellectual capitulation by spitting upon a crucifix, as does Professor Frost in C. S. Lewis’ That Hideous Strength, is now commanding Catholics and other Christians to purchase the means and the guarantor of sexual vice – the falsely named “birth control,” pills or chemical-leaching devices designed to trick a woman’s body into a kind of childless pregnancy.  It does so, moreover, against the mounting evidence to show the destruction of lower-class and now lower-middle-class communities occasioned by the devices and by the sexual profligacy they both encourage and entrench.

If it be argued that my analogies are inadequate, I agree.  Unlike what the Pill has done, the eating of pork does not, in itself, bring harm.  Nor does spitting upon a piece of carved wood.  Catholics should boldly resist the toxin as such.  But more is at stake here.  If the Jews had capitulated to Antiochus, they would have ceased to be Jews, and we would hear little more of them now than we hear of Medes and Parthians.  If Mark Studdock, the agnostic sociologist, had capitulated to his professorial enticer, he would have lost what little remained of his human integrity and his soul.  And if Catholics capitulate to breaking the law of God as they see it, spitting upon the crucifix, they too will lose their soul; there will no longer be a Catholic Church worth troubling about, just as the State does not trouble itself about those innocuous denominations that have surrendered to the sexual revolution and to statist ambition.

The horrible secret is that the American people may well no longer wish to be free, because the practice of the virtues is too difficult.  The teachings of the Catholic Church threaten them; they are openly gleeful when they can point to priests and laymen who violate those teachings.  They prefer the servility of sexual license, made comfortable by levies from their neighbors.  They are thus at the point of cheerfully giving away their most precious liberty, just so that they may do as they please with the zipper.  Words cannot describe the baseness of it all.

The whole article is worth a read.