For 8 hours on Saturday, Forth and I were subjected to a marriage-preperation class called “God’s Plan For a Joy-Filled Marriage” per requirement of the Catholic church. I grew up Catholic, and though I’m what Forth calls “lapsed” and I prefer to call “spiritual in my own right,” I was determined to just grit my teeth and be a responsible adult through the day. And—I failed. Miserably.
Thankfully, we missed the only couple-to-couple interaction there was since we were 15 minutes late due to construction (at 7:30 in the morning….). Couples were paired up and talked to each other, then had to introduce the other couple they were paired with. We simply introduced ourselves, and sat and watched a video on marriage prep by nutcase Christopher West.
The first half was okay. It was basically about understanding the fundamentals of marriage and what it means to God and whatnot, and Forth and I had to split up a few times to answer “personal reflection” questions, then meet back up to discuss the questions together. For us, this consisted of doodling or short-story writing, then getting together to peruse the internets via Forth’s iTouch, on the church wi-fi, which I had located the password to. The second half, however, caused some major issues.
In a nutshell, we were all told that having sex should only be done to “be closer to God” and create children. If a married couple partakes in sex that is “contracepted” in any way, it is a direct violation of the marriage vows, because it is going against the “openness to being fruitful” part. Of course they also found a way to slip in the “fact” that since genital-to-genital intercourse cannot be had by members of the same sex, gay marriage is of course impossible and immoral. They then proceeded to push NFP, or Natural Family Planning. This, if you are unaware, is abstaining from sex during a woman’s fertile period, which the couple has calculated by creating a chart, taking the woman’s temperature, and monitoring her cervical mucus (conveniently pictured above in the highlighted Wiki-preview link!), urinal hormone levels, and other fun, yummy things like that.
Now, this is not all. Two couples were administering the seminar, and here is the story behind the couple pushing for NFP: They started dating their freshman year of college. At the time, she was against marriage, favoring a great job, nice house, and hot car instead. She and her now-husband got knocked up three months after they started dating, because something they were on or used failed (the only people I ever hear of this happening to are uber-religious people, I swear). They got married when their kid was 15 months old, she converted to Catholicism soon after, and their second screaming, pooping, money-sucking bundle of joy arrived before they graduated college. She is currently pregnant with their fifth “miracle,” and here is how her husband described each birth: “Well the first one showed up and we definitely weren’t ready. When the second one was coming it was like okay, cool, then we found out about the third one and thought ‘crap, it’s going to be hard to afford this,’ and then with the fourth one it was like, ‘whatever.’” Yeah. I shit you not. The wife pretty much forced a smile and concluded, “I thought I knew what I wanted, but God had a different plan. Contraception is a cancer to any marriage.”
But they swear up and down, with all their five unplanned brats (who are homeschooled nonetheless!!), that NFP is the way to go. Because it’s so freeing, scouring your body for signs of fertility and then avoiding sex even if you’re both really in the mood and up for it. It feels so great to get it on and then wonder in the back of your mind the whole time if the possibility of pregnancy is really void or not. God, how wonderfully liberating!
They also managed to twist the statistics. We were told that Natural Family Planning has a 1-2% failure rate. I thought to myself right then that if condoms and the Pill have a 98-99% success rate, as they do, that’s essentially the same statistic, backwards. How…tricky, of them. Upon further research, I discovered the failure rate they provided us is actually the rate for couples who use the method “perfectly.” The couples who use the method “commonly” have a 25% failure rate. A 1 in 4 chance of getting up the spout as opposed to a 1/100 chance? I think not. I also noted that the percentage of Catholic couples in the world is something like 24%. Out of that percentage, only 1.5% use the NFP method. The idea hasn’t exactly caught on like wildfire or anything, and rightly so.
Another idea that was forced upon us was the notion that contraception “objectifies” a woman. Because if the possibility of pregnancy is removed from the situation, a woman becomes a vehicle for pleasure. Apparently the church has removed all consideration of a woman’s right to think for herself, and she must obviously be getting nothing back from the event–though we were taught earlier in the day that it specifically states in Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, that a woman should be brought to orgasm just as a man. If this is truly what objectification is…I’d like to choose my make, model, and mileage.
Just for a moment, let’s also consider two recent cases of very public teenage (ie. unwanted) pregnancies. Both Jamie Lynn Spears and Bristol Palin were raised conservatively–the Spears’ being fairly devout Southern Christians, and the Palins being uh, you know…Republican. What I had gathered from news reports and interviews was that both girls were strongly steered from sex and shuffled towards the abstinence-only method. So what do the kids do? Rebel and screw. That holds true in my personal experience: I’ve got an ex-best friend (a conservative evangelical) married at 18, with a 2 or 3 year old. Other friends, and myself included, were taught to be smart about who we jumped on, but if we felt the need, the proper precautions would be available to us. They knew they could trust us and lo and behold, we are smart and not knocked up (and all college-educated, heading towards nice jobs, cars, AND houses…hmm) In short, the Catholic argument we heard so much about, that showering kids with condoms feeds sexual promiscuity, raises abortion rates, and increases the amount of absent baby daddies is ridiculous.
In other news, apparently the availability of condoms has “increased homosexuality rates.” At this point, I was ready to kick the presenter in his fertile little nut sack: Homosexuality rates have always, ALWAYS been the same. Now that society is slightly more accepting of homosexuals, more are letting themselves be known–in other words, the rate of outted homosexuals is up. To me this was obvious, but apparently all the VILE, objectifying pornography (obviously another Catholic no-no) the jackass on the video tainted his mind with earlier in his “wicked” life had killed some brain cells or something. By the way, apparently all prOn the guy had watched featured women on the Pill and condom-clad men, because he found it TERRIBLY objectifying.
What the Catholic Church also neglects to grasp is, *gasp*….MODERNITY. There are too many humans on this planet and they want us all to keep pumping them out. We’re in the midst of a recession but sure, go ahead and pop out some more beings that need to be fed, clothed, entertained, and educated. It’s simply not practical. Hell, I HATE humans and the thought of creating more is fairly nauseating, but I selfishly want to experience motherhood–strictly two times only. While I thank God for giving somebody the intelligence and ingenuity to invent condoms and the Pill, the Catholic Church frowns upon the un-naturalness of contraception, as well as IVF and other artificial infertility. So in theory, if one member of a couple is infertile, it must be God’s will, though that man or woman still provides technical grounds for divorce, and sex between them cannot be “real.”
Obviously things get muddled now as I talk about things I know less and less about. I expressed my concerns of this organized bullshit to my mother, but she merely told me to calm down. She and my dad certainly don’t run their marriage specifically by the Catholic rulebook, nor do my aunts and uncles, so just relax, and let God acknowledge the marriage while also realizing we aren’t going to subject ourselves dozens of ridiculous babies.
Thusly, I shall leave with a visual message regarding why CONDOMS rock and THE PILL is fantastic:
**Back.
