Before Johnny Carson took over NBC television’s Tonight Show, the show was hosted for several years by a man named Jack Paar, who would frequently ask his guests if they thought the United States was overly puritanical about sex.
Paar believed that, compared to much of the rest of the world, Americans were somewhat prudish, much less liberated, “puritanical” to quote Paar. Certainly, compared to what this country has become since then, we were very “puritanical.”
I’m old enough to remember that era. It was an era when foul language was rarely used in public (and never in front of a lady), when “dating” didn’t mean sleeping together, when divorce and teenage pregnancy were rare, when pedophilia was a term virtually unknown, and abortion was a word rarely used. Back in the “puritanical” era that so annoyed Jack Paar and other forward-thinking types, children were safer, outside the womb and in.
I have often pondered upon how a country once considered so straight-laced could morally and culturally decline so rapidly. What brought about the cultural revolution that has changed our society so much? Was it the media? The courts? Or something else?
A book that was given to me last fall suggests that it was something else, a revolutionary. Revolutions, even cultural revolutions, don’t just happen. They are the end product of individuals with a vision, individuals who set out to change the society in which they live until it conforms to their vision. The book that was given to me was Blessed are the Barren (Ignatius Press, 1991), written by Bob Marshall and Charles Donovan. And the revolutionary was a woman oft hailed as a pioneer for women’s rights, the Carrie Nation of contraception, Margaret Sanger.
Her vision was, to say the least, warped. Sanger was both a libertine and an ardent supporter of the much discredited eugenics movement of the early 20th century. As a libertine she lived what would be considered, even by today’s standards, a wanton lifestyle that involved many lovers, and among her several marriages, an “open” marriage. She had little, if any, regard for the traditional institutions of marriage and family, and preached that “the marriage bed is the most degenerating influence of the social order…a decadent institution, a reactionary development of the sex instinct.”
As a eugenicist she wrote that “the unbalance between the birth rate of the ‘unfit’ and the ‘fit’ [is] admittedly the greatest menace to civilization…. The most urgent problem today is how to limit and discourage the over-fertility of the mentally and physically defective.” She viewed contraception and abortion, along with mandatory sterilization and government-managed camps for the feebleminded, as antidotes for the overpopulating unfit.
Her twin philosophies of sexual amorality and eugenic population control became the underlying themes of the industry she spawned and the organization that claims her as its founder, Planned Parenthood. The industry she created was the family planning/abortion industry, the largest retailer of which is Planned Parenthood. What Planned Parenthood and its network of political action organizations have been selling for the past 60 years is a redefinition of traditional national attitudes toward sexual conduct, the role of the family and the value of human life. Blessed are the Barren documents how the family planning/abortion industry has been lobbying the federal government and manipulating our legal system to affect these profound changes.
As I write this the effort continues — and the latest targets of the Sanger revolution are our children. According to a story in LifeNews.com, a couple of months ago the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institute (CFAM) announced that an anonymous source had sent it a copy of a 60-page document summarizing the conclusions of strategic planning meetings held by the Center for Reproductive Rights (CRR) in late October. The CRR, which describes itself as an international advocacy group, is part of the legal apparatus of the abortion industry.
Describing the CRR document as a “smoking gun,” LifeNews.com says that it refers to an ongoing “project to secure the fundamental right of minors to access all reproductive health services confidentially,” including abortion, and talks about the need to “confront the politically difficult issue of whether minors have a right to have sex (and more generally, whether minors should be treated as adults)…[while] undoing child abuse reporting requirements with respect to non-abusive sexual relations,” which would include statutory rape.
Apparently these strategies are something the abortion industry doesn’t want the general public to know about. CRR sent a “cease and desist” letter to LifeNews.com insisting that it pull the story. LifeNews.com has refused to do so.
Concannon is a freelance writer from All Saints Parish in Manassas.
(This article courtesy of the Arlington Catholic Herald.)
