There are very good reasons to advise young people to put off sexual relationships until they are more mature. Those reasons are both physical and emotional in nature and are significant in terms of present and future well-being. But the issue has nothing to do with "sin" and it is confounded by ignorance rather than information.
However, as the saying goes, "if you are a hammer, you see everything as a nail." Religious institutions and organizations, notably the Catholic, are in the business of "forgiving" sin, and so they define sex in that framework. It follows in their thinking that essentially shameful and sinful acts are only permissible under certain circumstances, that is, between married heterosexuals. That is not the way the world works, for one thing, and for another, such arrangements have not been particularly successful in terms of human self-fulfillment, women's well-being and autonomy, and often, just plain decency.
It has been assumed that because women bear children, it follows that they should bear as many as possible or, avoid sex, even in marriage. Therefore the use of contraceptives or other methods is verboten. This is very basic to Catholic morality, and a tenet derived from its prime theologian, St. Augustine of Hippo. No matter how you spin this concept, children are not, in many cases, a "blessing," but a punishment for having sex.
The untenability of this situation is made exponentially more obvious by the fact of the LGBTQ and trans-gendered community – once forced to hide out and deny their reality – is now demanding hard-won rights. They have persistently and bravely fought the real political correctness of the establishment who persecuted them. This is a reality the church does not want to recognize even in modern times.
Hundreds of thousands of women die in childbirth that is not natural or healthy under their circumstances, directly because of the political influence of religion against the availability of abortion and, bewilderingly, even the use of contraceptives.
Parents have more rights than religion to teach their own values but even they don't have the right to subject much of the world to these Neolithic ideas. Trudeau is not perfect but he has bravely stood up for the rights of women everywhere in refusing to fund backward misogynistic enterprises. And if there is one thing I am absolutely sure of it is that God, if such exists, is not fixated on the sexual proclivities of consenting adults.
Doris Wrench Eisler, St. Albert
