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."