We're going to reap exactly what we sow

Bad news on the doorstep -- or in the Internet cache, as the case may be -- this morning.

Americans have lost their minds to their libidos and indifference, and their kids are going to be the ones to pay the price. According to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll, something like 67 percent of Americans are just fine with schools passing out condoms and The Pill to their children.

THIS, OF COURSE, means that 67 percent of Americans have incredibly low expectations of their children and others', and seemingly are OK enough with that lack of trust, lack of faith and lack of hope that they are resigned to . . . well, everyone rutting like it's 1977 and there's only a couple of easily treatable STDs to worry about. That, and no God to remind you that you're better than rabbits in heat.

Here's the depressing news from the AP:

People decisively favor letting their public schools provide birth control to students, but they also voice misgivings that divide them along generational, income and racial lines, a poll showed.

Sixty-seven percent support giving contraceptives to students, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll. About as many — 62 percent — said they believe providing birth control reduces the number of teenage pregnancies.

"Kids are kids," said Danielle Kessenger, 39, a mother of three young children from Jacksonville, Fla., who supports providing contraceptives to those who request them. "I was a teenager once and parents don't know everything, though we think we do."

Yet most who support schools distributing contraceptives prefer that they go to children whose parents have consented. People are also closely divided over whether sex education and birth control are more effective than stressing morality and abstinence, and whether giving contraceptives to teenagers encourages them to have sexual intercourse.

"It's not the school's place to be parents," said Robert Shaw, 53, a telecommunications company manager from Duncanville, Texas. "For a school to provide birth control, it's almost like the school saying, 'You should go out and have sex.'"

Those surveyed were not asked to distinguish between giving contraceptives to boys or girls.

The survey was conducted in late October after a school board in Portland, Maine, voted to let a middle school health center provide students with full contraceptive services. The school's students are sixth- through eighth-graders, when most children are 11 to 13 years old, and do not have to tell their parents about services they receive.

(snip)

The 67 percent in the AP poll who favor providing birth control to students include 37 percent who would limit it to those whose parents have consented, and 30 percent to all who ask.

Minorities, older and lower-earning people were likeliest to prefer requiring parental consent, while those favoring no restriction tended to be younger and from cities or suburbs. People who wanted schools to provide no birth control at all were likelier to be white and higher-income earners.

"Parents should be in on it," said Jennifer Johnson, 29, of Excel, Ala., a homemaker and mother of a school-age child. "Birth control is not saying you can have sex, it's protecting them if they decide to."

About 1,300 U.S. public schools with adolescent students — less than 2 percent of the total — have health centers staffed by a doctor or nurse practitioner who can write prescriptions, said spokeswoman Divya Mohan of the National Assembly of School-Based Health Care. About one in four of those provide condoms, other contraceptives, prescriptions or referrals, Mohan said.

Less than 1 percent of middle schools and nearly 5 percent of high schools make condoms available for students, said Nancy Brener, a health scientist with the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Underlining the schisms over the issue, those saying sex education and birth control were better for reducing teen pregnancies outnumber people preferring morality and abstinence by a slim 51 percent to 46 percent.

Younger people were likelier to consider sex education and birth control the better way to limit teenage pregnancies, as were 64 percent of minorities and 47 percent of whites. Nearly seven in 10 white evangelicals opted for abstinence, along with about half of Catholics and Protestants.

IT, FRANKLY, SPEAKS VOLUMES that Catholics, whose religion bans all forms of artificial birth control, poll no better than most groups -- and way worse than evangelicals -- on the issue. It speaks of a Church than has in practice surrendered to the Cult of the Eternal I Want, preferring to Be Nice than follow its murdered Savior's example of telling the truth and embracing the Cross.

It speaks of Catholics being no different from Protestants or pagans in turning their backs on all that is authentically divine -- as opposed to self-indulgently "divine" in the "I am my own deity" sense -- in themselves and their children. And in others and their children.

As Catholics -- at least those of us who still believe in all that stuff -- we embrace a faith that is both sacramental and incarnational. Let me define these terms, here, starting with "incarnation." According to the Merriam-Webster dictionary:

1 a (1): the embodiment of a deity or spirit in some earthly form (2)capitalized : the union of divinity with humanity in Jesus Christ.

Now, "sacrament" -- again from Merriam-Webster:

1 a: a Christian rite (as baptism or the Eucharist) that is believed to have been ordained by Christ and that is held to be a means of divine grace or to be a sign or symbol of a spiritual reality b: a religious rite or observance comparable to a Christian sacrament.

People who say they adhere to a sacramental and incarnational faith, yet insist upon society throwing monkey wrench upon monkey wrench into the gears of how all that stuff works have, quite simply, forgotten who they hell they are and why the hell they are.

Simply, the Church always has taught that sex is legitimate only within marriage, and that holy matrimony is a sacrament -- an outward sign or symbol of a divine truth, as well as a means of obtaining grace. Within marriage and open to creating new life, sex not only is fun and gratifying, it's holy.

WITHIN MARRIAGE and open to new life, sex is a profound act of giving. Outside of marriage -- outside the sacramental commitment of marriage -- and closed off to new life, sexual intercourse is a profound act of taking. Of using another -- of causing another to sin profoundly -- just so you can get your jollies.

The fact that you're using Ortho, Trojans or both to thwart disease and parenthood only compounds the wrong by subverting how nature's God intended the whole thing to work. In doing this -- and in empowering schools to empower their charges to engage in "safe sin" -- Americans think they're being intelligent, civilized and "enlightened."

Instead, they're just running headlong away from their humanity (not to mention their divinity) and seeking safe haven with the animals. Worse, they're taking their children, and others', with them.

If we still looked at life incarnationally and sacramentally, we'd see that marriage and the children born of marital love is the closest we can come to being as God. That the family is how we model the Holy Trinity -- three persons, forever united, with one proceeding from the pure love flowing from the other two.

But that's not good enough for 67 percent of the American people, bunches of them Catholic. No, we want better than the divine.

WE WANT to eat the fruit of the tree of Trojan. We want to be animals.

And we will . . . we will.