Pence meets with Iraqi archbishop ahead of Middle East trip

Washington D.C., Apr 24, 2017 / 04:32 pm (CNA/EWTN News).- A California university came under fire for dispensing Plan B contraceptive pill in a vending machine, with one critic calling the move inadequate in meeting the real needs of women.

“Colleges and universities should be offering pregnant and parenting students options of housing, financial aid, diaper decks, and childcare instead of handing over abortion drugs,” said Kristan Hawkins, executive director of Students for Life.

“No woman should be forced to choose between the life of her child and her education,” she told CNA.

A study room at the University of California Davis recently installed a “Wellness To Go” vending machine that includes Plan B among other items such as condoms, tampons, pregnancy tests and Advil.

The move has been met with mixed reactions from students, with one calling it a “great thing for women,” according to CNN affiliate KTXL.

However, another student slammed the development as promoting recklessness and irresponsibility among UC Davis attendees.   

“It is promoting like ‘Oh hey, go and have unsafe sex because then you have a backup option and it’s gonna be cheaper than if you just wanna go to a drug store,’” Jordan Herrera told the affiliate.

Students for life coordinates a Pregnant on Campus Initiative, which provides resources for students who are pregnant and do not wish to undergo an abortion.   

Plan B has been the source of religious freedom troubles for pharmacists and drugstore owners who consciously object to dispensing the pills.

Greg Stormans and his family, who have been operating a small grocery store and pharmacy for the past four generations, had no idea they would be at the center of a firestorm in 2007, when the Washington Pharmacy Commission began to require pharmacies to dispense the abortion-inducing drugs Plan B and ella and make conscience-based referrals illegal.

In July 2007, the Stormans filed a lawsuit against Washington state to stop enforcement of the newly passed regulations. The legal battle continues to this day. In July 2015, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit reversed a district court’s decision to suspend the regulations.

Previously, Stormans would have been allowed to refer customers elsewhere if they requested Plan B or ella. However, the new Washington law requires Stormans to offer the drugs himself, becoming the first state in the country to prohibit customer referrals for religious reasons.

Since the lawsuit began, Stormans said that his family has received numerous threats. In addition, their business saw a drop in sales by 30 percent, and as a result, they were forced to take a pay cut and reduce staff by 10 percent.

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Denver, Colo., Jun 11, 2017 / 04:07 pm (CNA).- One of music artist John Mayer’s most signature songs is “Daughters,” a sweet and simple tribute to the importance of parents’ influence on their little girls. Here’s the refrain:

“So fathers, be good to your daughters, Daughters will love like you do. Girls become lovers who turn into mothers, So mothers, be good to your daughters too.”

But when John Mayer isn’t crooning about your beautiful daughters, he’s looking at naked pictures of them, sometimes hundreds at a time before he gets out of bed in the morning. In fact, he often prefers that to an actual human being, according to his wildly controversial 2010 interview with Playboy magazine.

“You wake up in the morning, open a thumbnail page, and it leads to a Pandora’s box of visuals. There have probably been days when I saw 300 (naked women) before I got out of bed,” he told the magazine.

Unfortunately, Mayer’s morning routine is not unique to him. Studies show that easy access to free internet pornography is having devastating effects on real-life relationships.

Preferring pixels to people

“For many individuals, the more porn they consume, the more likely it is that they can end up preferring the fantasy to reality, they can end up preferring the pixels to a person, and that’s really messing up relationships, as you can imagine,” said Clay Olsen, co-founder of the internet movement “Fight the New Drug” (FTND).

The FTND movement, so named because of porn’s addictive properties, aims to raise awareness of the harmful effects of pornography through creative mediums such as blogs, videos and infographics. The website includes personal stories as well as scientific studies to illustrate pornography’s effects on the brain, the heart (relationships), and ultimately on the world.

“Our goal is to change the conversation from ‘Dude, check this out,’ to ‘Dude, that’s messed up,’” Olsen told CNA.

The longstanding, pervasive cultural narrative surrounding pornography is that it is a healthy sexual outlet and can improve sex lives. However, science begs to differ. Several studies cited in FTND’s article, “Porn Ruins Your Sex Life,” found that pornography not only leads to dissatisfying sex, it can lead to less sex with actual human beings.   

In a series of studies examining pornography use, “The Social Costs of Pornography: A Collection of Papers” published by the Witherspoon Institute, researchers found that those who viewed pornography became less satisfied with their sex lives, and that viewing porn just once can lead to feelings of dissatisfaction towards a human partner.

According to an article in Psychology Today by clinical psychologist Tyger Latham, Psy.D, erectile dysfunction, while once considered an issue plaguing old men, is cropping up more in young men who rely heavily on pornography to become sexually aroused. A study by the Italian Society of Andrology and Sexual Medicine surveyed 28,000 men on their internet porn habits, and found that porn use over time led to a lower sex drive and an eventual inability to become aroused at all.

“As soon as they try to actually get close to someone and commit to somebody and have an intimate relationship with somebody, it’s in those moments that the harms of pornography show their full colors and truly manifest themselves,” Olsen said. “The unrealistic expectations are completely exposed…

And we now see people in their 20s having porn-induced erectile dysfunction because they cannot get excited or aroused without the presence of pornography.”

A decline in marriage rates

Not only is pornography use destroying the physical sexual life, it may be impacting the number of people pursuing marriage or committed sexual relationships.

In the fall of 2013, an article in The Guardian sounded the alarm that fewer people in Japan were having sex, citing as evidence numerous statistics on the country’s declining birth rate, marriage rate, and even rates of young people who are dating or who are interested in dating.

A follow-up article on Slate found that while the actual number of people having or not having sex might not be definitively pinpointed, the statistics on falling marriage and birth rates only mean Japan is leading a world-wide trend, rather than bucking one. While it’s not clear whether porn is directly influencing these numbers, many have speculated that it is.

Researchers with The Institute for the Study of Labor (IZA) in Germany found an increase in free Internet pornography is at least correlated with a significant decrease in the percentage of young married men, and it may even be contributing to the trend. A 2013 Pew study found that 71 percent of single Americans were not looking for a committed relationship. Another study found that nearly 40 percent of American women had never been married.  

“The results in this paper suggest that such an association exists, and that it is potentially quite large,” the study notes, as reported in the Washington Post.

The study used General Social Survey (GSS), a comprehensive, nationally representative survey which analyzed internet use of 1,500 men ages 18-to-35, between the years 2000 and 2004. The researchers studied the number of hours spent on the internet per week, how often internet pornography was used in the past 30 days, as well as other activities such as use of religious sites.

Even when adjusted for variables such as age, income, education, religion and employment, the study found that generally, the more a person used the internet, the less likely they were to be married. Additionally, it found that the more a person used internet pornography, the less likely they were to be married. On the other hand, the use of religious websites was positively correlated with marriage.  

Mark Regnerus, an associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and a Catholic who has studied religion and sexual behavior, cautioned against assuming that correlation equals causation in such studies – but said that pornography use is likely part of a more complex reason for dropping marriage rates.

“We know that both things are occurring, but it’s difficult to establish a causal connection,” he told CNA in an e-mail interview. “A variety of things are contributing to the declining marriage rate.”

“I don’t think porn use necessarily causes that, but contributes to it (together with diminished earnings power, diminished confidence, etc.),” he added. “To be sure, porn use doesn’t help build confidence in men, something that’s pretty necessary (but not sufficient) to be considered marriageable. So I’d say porn use is a suspect here, but connecting the dots is hardly straightforward.”

Increasing awareness

Only in the past few years and months has a conversation countering the “it’s healthy, it’s normal” narrative been emerging in mainstream media about pornography. Several celebrities are speaking up, and there are an increasing number of websites dedicated to helping people fight pornography addictions.

In 2015, the release of the controversial “50 Shades of Grey” movie sparked a conversation on social media about sexual violence against women in media, with the hashtag #50dollarsnot50shades encouraging people to forgo the movie and instead donate to places that help victimized women.

The movie sparked a response from an unlikely source – British comedian Russel Brand, whose short video about the problems with pornography went viral, generating over 500,000 views on his YouTube channel and over 2 million views on FTND’s website.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is another celebrity who has been outspoken about the negative impact of pornography, most notably in his 2013 movie “Don Jon,” which he wrote, directed and co-starred in along with Scarlett Johansson. The film explores the unrealistic expectations of love and relationships that come from pornography addictions and from the media at large.

“I think that there’s not a substantial difference between a lot of main-stream culture and pornography. They’re equally simplistic, reductionist,” Gordon-Levitt said in an interview with NPR about the film.

“Whether it’s rated X or ‘approved by the FCC for general viewing audiences,’ the message is the same. We have a tendency in our culture to take people and treat them like things.”

But the internet has been around for decades now – why has it taken society so long to catch on to the fact that pornography is harmful?

“Science has caught up with the fact that pornography’s harmful,” Olsen said, “but society is still catching up.”

It often takes years for something that was once culturally accepted as true to be flipped on its head as science proves otherwise, Olsen said, so Fight the New Drug knows they still have a lot of work ahead of them.

“We’re very excited to see some of this progress and some of these mainstream media outlets kind of following suit and starting to talk about the negative impacts, we couldn’t be more excited about it, but we still have a long way ahead of us.”

Some other websites that are also trying to raise awareness and give help to those struggling with pornography include The Porn Effect and Covenant Eyes, and internet filtering and accountability system.

The best way to kick a porn habit? Keep fighting it and lean on the sacraments, Regnerus said.

“(My) advice: don’t give up hope; pursue confession regularly; recognize and avoid the contexts which give rise to temptation. That’s a start.”

 

This article was originally published on CNA April 16, 2015.

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Baltimore, Md., Jun 11, 2019 / 10:54 am (CNA).- The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops 2019 Spring General Assembly kicked off in Baltimore Tuesday with a brief address from USCCB President Cardinal Daniel DiNardo and a message from Archbishop Christophe Pierre, Apostolic Nuncio to the United States, explaining the rationale for the Vatican’s cancelation of votes last November.

Pierre was unable to attend the meeting in Baltimore as he was in Rome with a meeting with his fellow Apostolic Nuncios, and his remarks were delivered June 11 by Msgr. Walter Erbi, chargé d’affaires of the Vatican nunciature in Washington.

Both Pierre and DiNardo spoke on the progress that has been made in tackling the sexual abuse crisis in the Church in America since last November’s general assembly, particularly the importance of careful discernment. In November, the Vatican intervened and canceled planned votes on various measures designed to increase accountability among bishops, much to the displeasure and confusion of nearly every bishop present.

“Through the mercy of Christ, we will make progress, and may our discernment lead us to God’s will,” said DiNardo.

According to Pierre, this delay was meant to ensure that careful prudence was taken in response to the crisis.

“I would say that among the reasons the Holy Father asked for a delay was his belief that the whole Church needed to walk together – to act in a synodal way, and that this ‘walking together’ of the whole Church, following the guidance of the Holy Spirit, would make the path forward clearer,” he said.

Since that time, the U.S. bishops have gone on a weeklong retreat, and the world’s bishops’ conference presidents met in Rome for the Meeting on the Protection of Minors in the Church. After that meeting Pope Francis issued the motu proprio Vos estis lux mundi, which outlined new strategies to for the Church hold sexual abusers accountable for their actions.

“It seems to me that Pope Francis’ emphasis on synodality and walking together is a manifestation of the four principles articulated in Evangelii gaudium,” said Pierre, referring to Pope Francis’ 2013 apostolic exhortation on the proclamation of the gospel in today’s world. These principles are: “time is greater than space,” “unity prevails over conflict,” “realities are more important than ideas,” and “the whole is greater than the part.”

It was this first principle, Pierre explained, that resulted in November’s delayed votes. Pierre wrote that Pope Francis believed that additional prayer and time were needed in order to address the abuse crisis as a worldwide Church.

“Technology and social media condition us to desire an immediate response to practically everything,” he said, particularly in the United States. “The idea that time is greater than space is a useful remedy. In an ecclesial context, faster responses do not always produce the best results.”

Pierre’s speech also emphasized the importance of Church unity and “walking together” to combat the abuse crisis, particularly at the meeting in Rome. The contributions of the episcopal heads from around the country proved valuable, he said.

Guided by the Holy Spirit and each other, “together, the whole Church was able to take steps – to walk together – to address the problem and concrete actions could begin – without one group running ahead of the others and another lagging too far behind,” he said.

This, plus the “concrete ideas” offered by Pope Francis at the summit and in his motu proprio, could only be accomplished with the additional time gained by delaying the vote, Pierre wrote.

“The Holy Father calls the whole Church to walk together in this moment of crisis,” he said, and there can be “no hesitation in responding vigorously as a matter of justice.”

“We must meet our people in their concrete situations, proposing the life-giving Word to them as a sure guide for understanding their experiences and for guiding their moral and spiritual lives,” added Pierre. If this is not done, the bishops run the risk of being disconnected and ineffective in dealing with their flock.

“In the process of walking together, we also have the opportunity to hear from different members of the group,” wrote Pierre, emphasizing the need to include the laity in these discussions.

“With Christ, together we can walk and face the realities of the Church today, and together discern the path forward.”

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