Pelvic Politics

In an astoundingly wrong-headed piece written for The Atlantic , Kathleen Kennedy Townsend has taken up the cause for the “98% of sexually active Catholic women.” Appealing to the example of the Virgin Mary’s parents, “Saint Joachim and Saint Anne, a reminder that women are people of conscience and can decide for themselves when it is best to conceive,” Townsend finds the Church’s position on the new healthcare mandate authored by the Institute of Medicine and promulgated by the U.S. Department of Health of Human Services to be one more reason to “marvel that faith can flourish despite the hierarchy’s not infrequent disdain for the faithful”:

“The most ideological of the U.S. bishops would do well to heed not only their more clear-sighted Vatican superiors but also the wisdom of so many women. That is, they could redirect the energy they waste obsessing about sex toward helping defeat the corrosive effects of tens of millions of Americans and their children of poverty, lack of health insurance, and unemployment. Funny how the right often calls us “cafeteria Catholics,” and yet here, rather than choosing to deal with the whole body of Catholic teaching, they are themselves obsessed with what we could call “pelvic politics”—and in the process shrinking the broad teaching of the Church to a few, narrow concerns.”

John Paul II forgetting that women can be priests, Aquinas misinterpreted , and an invocation of the 99%: it’s all here .