Faithfulness to God's Design- Paragraph 13
This doctrine states that having sex in a non-sensual matter is not ok. It also says that those who have sex with not intention to have a child is going against what God intended. This also states that life from inception (the beginning, the start, the commencement) is sacred and was designed by god. Overall this doctrine would definitely come into conflict with a few modern scientific practices including birth control, abortion. Plan b, gays (having sex with no intent to procreate), the list goes on and on. The argument that the pope is making here has an endless list of consequences.
First off birth control, including the pill, condoms, the nuva ring, depo shot, etc. All of these are used with the intent of preventing the conception of a child during intercourse, and blatantly go against what the pope is saying. This is very problematic because it has socially constructed into a bad sinful thing. This construction has caused people to feel shameful who use birth control and attempt to hide it or avoid using it. This has negative consequences on society because there would be people having kids who don’t want them or possibly can’t take care of them.
Secondly, this doctrine goes against abortion by saying that not staying faithful to what good created at inception is wrong. This also has social implications such as religious protestors in front of Planned Parenthood. This causes the construction of abortion to be that you are killing a human being rather than killing an embryo or a group of cells. Unfortunately this has caused those who get abortions to believe and buy into the thought that they are killing a human being and can cause them to have “post-abortion stress” disorder interestingly enough this term was coined by somebody who is pro-life. “Post-abortion stress” is only a term realized by the pro-life community and is used for political matters.
Thirdly the pope is clearly going against any sexual relationships that are not heterosexual. This is because sexual relationships that are not heterosexual have no chance of procreation. This has implications in the religious society (Catholics especially) being against those that are not homosexual. This question of religion is always pulled into the debate of gay rights and gay marriage. Religious beliefs have allowed people to say that being gay is not ok as evident by religion. This also has implications in identity, people that are gay and religious may go through hard times (as evident by family members of mine) trying to determine what there true identity is and whether they can be both gay and religious.
Overall the popes statement of sex should lead to procreation and that procreation begins at inception causes cultural issues. It makes the heterosexual body an intelligible body. It also causes forms of birth control and abortion to take negative heat. This can cause the choices people make for them life to be altered drastically and could have bad consequences. The popes stance is controlling a large audience of people by imposing his views on them. The pope can use his place in society as upperclass, powerful, egos messenger, etc to dominate the values of so many others in society. The pope also pins science and religion against each other in many cases because of the science being the main push behind contraceptive methods.
Great post, but I would have to argue that the heterosexual body is a docile body in that it willingly and eagerly goes along with what society says. Unless our culture ceases to recognize heterosexuality as the "norm", than people will continue to be represented by their sexuality as a good thing or a bad thing. Foucault argues that "gay" is a social construction that didn't exist before the 19th century, just as ADD didn't exist before 1995.
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