A CREEPING THEOCRACY

The Rev. Dana Prom Smith, S.T.D., Ph.D. (3/23.2012)



The Republican Party is doing what all the Roman Catholic bishops and Pope Paul VI failed to do, enforce an edict upon the faithful. Pope Paul’s encyclical Humanae Vitae was largely disobeyed by most Roman Catholic women, some 98% of them. They used contraception after it was condemned. In the encyclical the pope argued somewhat speciously that the sole purpose of sexual intercourse was procreation, ignoring that it often used for love-making, too. However, since he was not into love-making, he discounted that reason. The upshot of his logical fallacy was that he coldly condemned one of the richest rewards of marriage, safe sex.

So, lots of Roman Catholic women didn’t take the pope seriously, disobeying his edict. Into the breech rushed Republican legislators from all over the country and in Washington who wanted to ensure that all these disobedient women knuckled under in obedience to the pope and the bishops, all of whom claim to be celibate. So we have the Republicans slipping in a bit of theocracy as well as practicing medicine on the side without licenses.

I’m sure it would come as a surprise to all the Mormons and Evangelical Republicans that they are doing the Roman Catholic bishop’s bidding, but there it is, a fledging theocracy. As they try to suppress the rights of women, they’re putting themselves at the behest of the bishops. Of course, these same Republicans who say they’re opposed to government intervention into the lives of the citizens go poking around in the nation’s vaginas and sexual intimacies.