"Every Sperm Is Sacred," Said No Catholic Ever

In middle school a girl derided my Catholic faith because, she said, we thought that the death of sperm was tragic and that therefore masturbation is murder. Around the same time I recall seeing an Onion article that joked about nocturnal emissions being considered sinful by the Catholic Church. No doubt this prejudice goes all the way back to that inane skit in Monty Python’s Meaning of Life that has a comically large Catholic family belting out in song, “Every sperm is sacred!” Oh how much cultural damage that one silly song has done to the Catholic moral argument!

Moment’s ago I heard it repeated yet again. This time it was in the context of one of Steven Crowder’s “Change My Mind” segments on his pro-life position. I admire Crowder’s bravery, and his willingness to turn his rambunctious comedian’s grit to such a noble task. But even he allowed that insipid lie to be repeated without correction.

Crowder, in trying to demonstrate the humanity of the zygote by contrast with the mere potentiality of the sperm cell, said “I don’t see killing a sperm as the same as abortion.” The young woman who was his interlocutor replied flippantly, “That’s what Catholics believe.”

And Crowder agreed, saying “Yeah—I don’t.”

(See time coded clip here.)

Perhaps Crowder knows better and just didn’t want the distraction of having to defend a religion he doesn’t believe in, which is understandable in such chaotic situations. If he does not know better, I would recommend that he read up on the Catholic position.

After all, many of the philosophical and scientific arguments that he is making to defend the unborn come out of the Catholic intellectual tradition—even if he is unaware of their provenance. Neither could it hurt his heroic efforts in fighting for the unborn if he were to better familiarize himself with the moral views of his brothers-in-arms.

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Coda: If any one is tempted to repeat that tired canard that Catholics hold immoral such things as masturbation or artificial contraception because they think it wrong to kill the sperm, then let him hear from Pope Paul VI, who lay’s down the Catholic vision of human sexuality in Humanae Vitae:

[A]n act of mutual love which impairs the capacity to transmit life which God the Creator, through specific laws, has built into it, frustrates His design which constitutes the norm of marriage, and contradicts the will of the Author of life. Hence to use this divine gift while depriving it, even if only partially, of its meaning and purpose, is equally repugnant to the nature of man and of woman, and is consequently in opposition to the plan of God and His holy will. But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source. "Human life is sacred—all men must recognize that fact," Our predecessor Pope John XXIII recalled. "From its very inception it reveals the creating hand of God."

The Task Before Us

The task before conservatives, is not to conserve. Whatever we thought we were conserving, it has already been lost. Our task is to rebuild.

Observe, for instance, the Rule of Law. It may be obvious to conservatives that as far as the law is concerned, the task is to preserve the influence of the common law tradition, while holding the line on the only sensible method of interpreting constitutional and statutory law: to decipher, based on the text and the historical time in which the text was written, its original meaning, and to regard this meaning as the law’s only binding sense. But in fact, this understanding of the law was already lost 50 years ago when the court made abortion legal.

When the great Justice Antonin Scalia restored true interpretation to the court, he was not conserving anything. He was rebuilding.

We must do the same.

As we rebuild, we must remember that what was lost can never be recaptured as it was. We can never go back. A man cannot return to his mother’s womb to be born again, and at the entrance to paradise lost there stands and angel barring our return with a flaming sword.

What we rebuild, we build new. But if we build rightly, and well, we can perhaps breath into the nostrils of this new thing the life of the lost, so that it is animated by the same life-giving spirit.

His Terrible Swift Sword

This is a story that could be true. God help us!

New York has legalized the killing of the unborn up to birth. As all wicked things done by an erstwhile Christian people, its passing is couched in euphemisms, wreathed by comforting platitudes: they say it’s about protecting women’s rights and access to reproductive healthcare in the face of an uncertain political future. Already there are rumblings in other states for similar legislation. Given the propensity of progressives to always push onward, with no limiting principle, and no destination in mind, but addicted to that narcotic feeling of forward velocity, it is a certainty that many states will pass similar laws.

In the twinkling of an eye, the distant and comforting hope that someday we would overturn Roe v Wade, and allow the States to once again enact anti-abortion laws to protect the unborn from slaughter is rendered irrelevant. By the time we have a Supreme Court honest enough to interpret the Constitution and Laws as written, and courageous enough to strike down that most poorly decided case, the States will have already decided that it is legal to kill the unborn up to birth. Thus, devolving abortion laws to the States will accomplish nothing for the unborn but to subject their lives to the accident of their mother’s address.

But not all States will be so callous. Not all will light the sacrificial fires for Moloch.

So, supposing we do someday overturn Roe v Wade, as surely must happen, just as Dredd Scott eventually was overturned, we will have a world where some states are abortionist, and some are abolitionist. Thus will geographic lines be drawn in the already, perhaps irretrievably, fractured culture we are living in. As the culture in each State is amplified and clarified, we could, in a few decades, arrive again at the precipice of civil war. And the trumpeters will sound a new clarion call to rally for the protection of the unborn, and the new abolitionists will answer the call to eradicate from the earth a barbaric and bloody institution.

And then in this culture war we have all been drafted into we will all of us at least—and at last—know in which direction to shoot.