From a Catholic News Agency piece about a recent online debate between Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics, and Slate magazine author William Saletan:
Douthat also urged Saletan, and others who dismiss the Church’s teachings on sexuality, to take an honest look at the consequences of contraception.
“The world that contraception has made is a world that de-emphasizes the moral weight of the sexual act, while insisting on the centrality of a perpetually-fulfilled libido to human contentment,” he observed.
Contraception, he said, has created a world “characterized by steadily declining marriage rates, steadily rising numbers of children born out of wedlock, birthrates that have fallen well below replacement levels across the developed West … and millions upon millions upon millions of abortions.”
“In general, the sexual culture that contraception has created is a culture that treats the stuff of human life and even life itself as a commodity to be bought, sold, mass produced, experimented upon and kept on ice when necessary.”
In his final installment, Douthat thanked the religiously-skeptical Saletan for his respectful tone. But he critiqued the Slate author’s liberal viewpoint, for its unconscious reliance on principles drawn from the faith it rejects.
“When I look at your secular liberalism, I see a system of thought that looks rather like a Christian heresy, and not necessarily a particularly coherent one at that,” Douthat remarked.
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