Review and Comment: The Unspoken
A politician’s gaffe is often defined as speaking the truth or saying what he or she really means, when that truth or honest opinion violates an official piety. Evasions are useful in enabling society to function without coming apart at the seams. What we don’t say often helps preserve relationships. Last week we saw how regard for an official piety was deferred to in order to salvage the main outlines of an important public policy.
In announcing a compromise on birth control benefits for employees of Catholic institutions, President Obama was at pains to assure the Catholic Church of his respect for religious freedom and freedom of conscience. He wouldn’t make the Catholic institutions pay directly for contraceptive coverage but he would have their employees covered through private insurance firms. For a moment it looked as if the Catholic bishops would accept this circumvention — it spared a kernel of their “principle” even as they recognized that the great majority of their own followers practice contraception — but then they dug their heels in and denounced the compromise. The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops called the compromise “unacceptable” and called on Congress to pass a “Respect for Rights of Conscience Act” that would prohibit even insurance companies from having to cover what goes against someone’s “religious beliefs or moral convictions.”
The bishops claim the higher ground of morality, and no official or political candidate dares say that in today’s world their position is deeply immoral. Against the unprecedented recent growth of human population, and the growing threat to the Earth of human activities harming its environment and depleting its resources, a religious policy that only encourages unrestricted birth is destructive of humanity’s long-term, general well-being. The church position grows out of the admonition in Genesis: “Be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth, and subdue it ….” This was good counsel at a time when all too many children died in childbirth or within a few years thereafter, and when Nature was a largely hostile force that challenged humanity to gain some control over it. But what was good counsel then is anything but today, when unwanted procreation mostly keeps poor families poor. Child mortality is mostly way down, and, with the exception of cataclysmic storms and earthquakes, we don’t fear Nature as we once did — although the recent signs point to our need to learn to cooperate more with Nature rather than to try to “subdue” it.