New Scientific Findings Confirm Catholic Magisterial Teachings about Sex? Semen as "Better Gift Than Chocolate" for Women

This is one of the crazy corners of American scientific research about which I'll freely admit I know next to nothing.  I first became aware that this field of research--re: the male-female union-cementing properties of semen--existed, when a proponent of the theology of the body logged onto a Commonweal thread some months ago to argue that new research shows that women crave semen (as it were), since a good dose of semen in their vagina gives them an upper-type experience unparalleled anywhere else in nature.

Really.  I'm not joking.  As crude as this proposal sounds, that's essentially what I read the TOB proponent to say on the Commonweal thread.  (TOB = theology of the body, and is the acronym beloved by the Catholic right as it sagely discusses these inanities in the mystogogical, pseudo-theological language of John Paul the Great.)

And science proves what the Catholic church has been saying for some years now, don't you know, the TOB proponent also argued: contraception that thwarts the injection of the upper-inducing semen into a woman's vagina is not "natural" or real sex.  It doesn't give women the thrill they crave, which nature has designed for them to have when their man does his business with them.

And as soon as I read this load of malarkey on the Commonweal blog site, I knew that quite a few (male heterosexual) Catholics of the TOB school were certain to latch onto this new pseudo-scientific finding and would try to make much of it as "proof" of the validity of TOB.  And of the validity of the Catholic magisterial opposition to homosexuality.  And to artificial contraception.  And to the designs of women who want to escape from male control and male domination and the male injection of that relationship-cementing magical substance they so desperately need to be whole women.

And now that I'm reading about this controversy (first link above) involving Lazar Greenfield, Steven Platek, et al., I'm no more convinced than I was by the summary of this research at the Commonweal site that we're seeing some stunning new scientific breakthrough that has finally vindicated Catholic sexual ethics, via rigid scientific research.  Let me count the ways that I'm dubious--while freely admitting I have done no careful reading at all in this field, and am basing my doubts on the Commonweal thread I mention above, and this article about Greenfield:

1. Research by psychologists confirming a biological thesis that semen acts like an anti-depressant for women?  Really?  What biological mechanisms, pray tell, are being confirmed here?  And how do we define something so nebulous as depression?  And how do we know that it's the semen per se that gives the uplifting experience to college-aged women whose male partners don't use condoms, or some other factors that go beyond the biological--say, the sense of cachet provided by knowing they have a man, and that their man is a real man who eschews condoms?  There are too many uncontrolled variables in this research, as it's described here, for me to be overwhelmed by its conclusion that semen provides that natural lift women are looking for in life.

2. And when Platek et al. also grant that the vagina is also "a very hostile environment for sperm," I wonder why they'd conclude at the same time, on the basis of their observation of the anti-depressant properties (on women) of semen in unprotected sex, that the "numerous semen testimonials from other women who attest to the anti-depressant effects of semen exposure" point to a conclusion that semen is a natural anti-depressant.  Designed for women.  A natural anti-depressant when injected, mind you, into the vagina.  In the only kind of sexual activity the Catholic church endorses as natural.  If the vagina is "hostile" to semen, if it compromises the female immune system, should we be touting the natural anti-depressant virtues of semen in unprotected male-female sex--the "better gift for that day [i.e., St. Valentine's day] than chocolates," in Dr. Greenfield's formulation? 

3. And my inquiring mind also wants to know: have comparative studies been done to discover whether semen functions as a magical substance with similar uplifting effects for gay men?  Or have studies been done to find out whether men coming into contact with vaginal secretions find themselves curiously elated by a better gift than chocolate?  If not, why not?  Why is this study, and why is this field of research, framed from the outset as a discovery that semen is men's gift to women--the better gift than chocolate?  (And we all know who craves the uplift of chocolate, and who gives chocolate to whom.)

Count me an unbeliever.  I'm just not yet seeing anything in this slice of research--admittedly, a thin slice, since I haven't read more in the field--that convinces me that the Catholic magical-mystical approach to human sexuality promoted by John Paul the Great and beloved of the TOB crowd is anything other than scientific and theological nonsense wrapped up in high-flown rhetoric disguising its long-since outmoded scientific conclusions about gender, sexuality, and male-female roles.  Or that this crude male-skewed scientific "research" is a solid basis on which to build a theological system that justifies male domination, female subordination, and condemnation of those God makes gay and lesbian.

Father John Corapi and the Manly-Man Model of the Priesthood: Survey of Recent Discussion

As I follow the news that another of the manly man hero-priests beloved of the Catholic right, Father John Corapi of EWTN fame, has been put on leave due to allegations of sexual misconduct with adult women (and drug abuse), I’m fascinated by a spin-off conversation now developing on some Catholic websites in the wake of the news about Corapi.  This is a conversation about precisely how and in what specific ways the Catholic church is now benefiting (or not) from its fixation of late on recovering the manly-man model for its priests.

Before I point you to sites at which that important conversation is now taking place, a brief comment about the situation framing the discussion.  Corapi himself broke the news of his having been put on leave with a recent statement at his blog site noting that he’s been charged with “multiple sexual exploits” with several adult women and with “drug addiction.”  Corapi denies the charges, and maintains that Catholic officials are now putting priests against whom non-credible allegations have been made on probation.

I don’t intend to comment on Corapi’s guilt or innocence, or the basis by which any church official may have put him on leave.  It’s not even clear whether Corapi is under scrutiny by a bishop or bishops since, as his blog posting notes, the woman making allegations about him wrote to three bishops, or if it is his religious superiors who have chosen to act.   He belongs to the Society of Our Lady of the Most Holy Trinity.

It would be inappropriate of me to comment in any way about the guilt or innocence or procedural aspects of Corapi’s case, since I know nothing about the particulars—and he certainly deserves to be regarded as innocent until proven guilty (though I have seen no evidence at all to corroborate the claim that priests are being removed from ministry on the basis of tenuous, non-credible charges).  His case is somewhat different from that of Father Thomas Euteneuer, against whom charges of sexual misconduct with adult women have also been made, in that 1) Euteneuer admitted his guilt in at least one of the several cases about which there has been discussion of credible charges made, and 2) his admission was confirmed both by his former employer, Human Life International, and by the Diocese of Palm Beach, Florida, both of which revealed that they had already known of the charges against Euteneuer when he made them public.  And HLI’s statement about the matter indicated that there were charges in addition to the one to which his admission of guilt specifically responded.

I know little about Corapi except what I’ve seen when I occasionally flick through the offerings of EWTN, and then just as quickly click the television off.  I’ll freely admit I find him unappealing.  I can’t listen to him go on and on about his doctrinal certainties at the EWTN site without feeling queasy.  I had never specifically identified the queasiness as a reaction to the hyper-macho shtick about which there’s now discussion in the wake of the recent news about him.

I had thought of it more as a regional or perhaps even a class reaction: it’s the bullying tone, the shouting, the murdering of the king’s English, and the muddy, nasal, vowel-garbling accent that I find off-putting, as I listen to him.  And, yes, the anti-intellectual certitude with which he offers his reductionist, oh-so-certain understanding of the doctrines about which he preaches.

As I say, I had chalked my visceral reaction up to the fact that I just don’t seem to fit into the normative paradigms of American Catholicism, which emanate from urban centers of the Northeast and Midwest far from home for me.  And so when I read my way through comments about Corapi on some thread at one of the “In All Things” discussions at America in the past year (I'm sorry: I can't remember which thread this was), and read one glowing comment after another about Corapi by Catholic men logging in to praise Corapi’s scintillating theology and even the speaking style and rhetoric I find so repulsive, I just shrugged my shoulders and decided that, once again, the movers and shakers of American Catholicism don’t seem to have much room for me and my kind.

Now, though, I’m beginning to wonder: it may well have been the macho shtick to which I was reacting all along, without knowing it.  I’m wondering about this because, as I scan various Catholic blog sites recently for information about the Corapi case, I’ve happened on a fascinating discussion at several sites—a discussion of that manly-man fixation among some American Catholics who believe that the ills of the priesthood in the late 20th century had everything to do with the loss of machismo in the priesthood.  And who prescribe a return to clerical machismo as the way out of the deep crisis in which the church now finds itself.   And Corapi is at the center of this discussion because—I discover—he represents for a strong, mobilized group of followers precisely the kind of priestly machismo we need in order to cure the ills of American Catholicism.

I became aware of this discussion a day or so ago through something Elizabeth Scalia posted at her Anchoress site.   Scalia notes that Max Lindenmann had recently blogged about “types” of priests and why no one type is better than another.  Scalia excerpts a piece of Lindenmann’s commentary that, in fact, mentions a young priest in his (Phoenix) diocese for whom folks are predicting an illustrious future—a priest who sports what Lindenmann calls “the Fr. Corapi Starter Kit,”  an “aggressively shaven dome” and “a goatee fit for an outlaw biker or a king’s musketeer.”  And this young Corapi knock-off strides rather than walks, intones rather than speaks.

Scalia comments (bold-face in the original):  

Now I rather love priests with a bit of Spencer Tracy gruffness to them, but I love the soft-spoken sorts, too. 

Oddly enough, Fr. Mychal Judge was one of the first on the ground to die in the mess of 9/11.

I'm not quite sure why Scalia thinks it was odd that Mychal Judge was one of the first to die on the ground in the 9/11 events.  What she doesn’t say, of course, but what many readers will well know, is this: Mychal Judge was an openly gay priest.  He was, in short, precisely the kind of priest the prescribers of the Corapi manly-man fix are now insisting is at the root of the problem in American Catholicism.  He was the kind of priest they are working very hard to root out of all seminaries, in order to introduce a generation of priests who buy the Fr. Corapi Starter Kit.

Who will cure all that ails us.

And here’s Lindenmann himself on this prescription for the American Catholic church:

If instruction in the seminaries is taking a similar tone, conflating a call to holiness aimed at the soul with an appeal to the male ego (located guess where), then somebody's playing a very dangerous game. Masculine pride is a naturally volatile substance. In a system where masculinity and femininity are rigidly defined and polarized, it becomes machismo, the psychological equivalent of nitroglycerine. It can make men behave in ways that are ridiculous at best, atrocious at worst. Think Mike Dukakis in the tank. No, better, think Tom wedding Katie.

Lindenmann’s reference to “a similar tone” is a reference to the manly-man-as-cure analysis of Todd Aglioro in a Catholic Culture essay entitled “The New Catholic Manliness”—about which more in a moment.  For now, here’s where Lindenmann is going with the “similar tone” remark: he notes that Aglioro’s essay “blames femininity for everything he doesn't like about the Church, from bad catechesis to ‘the worst crimes of the Lavender Mafia.’” And: when Aglioro writes about “manly virtue,” one gets the sense, Lindenmann suggests, that for Aglioro, “manliness is virtue.”

And Lindenmann is skeptical of this analysis.  He’s skeptical for the reasons outlined above: creating rigid, polar-opposite definitions of masculinity and femininity (à la John Paul II's theology of the body)* and making one of these the solution to the problems of the church endows manly men with a dangerous, ego-charging sense of self-worth that easily translates into domination of others.  Of anyone “lower” than themselves.  And, specifically, of anyone feminine—whether women or feminized men—since masculinity is, per the foundational norms of this schema, superior to femininity.

Superiority so cheaply bought—with a shaved head, a bad tan, and a badly dyed goatee, a strut and a shout—doesn’t do anyone very much good, Lindenmann suggests.  Least of all the man who imagines he has reincarnated himself as a demi-god because he’s acquired a cheap starter kit to project the macho image.  Least of all a priest who imagines that a Fr. Corapi Starter Kit equips him for pastoral ministry better than, say, the gospels or the example of Jesus (who humbled himself to adopt a woman’s posture and wash his followers’ feet) does.

And Lindenmann goes further: he notes what a similar mindset—what the Fr. Corapi Starter Kit—has done for those working in the subprime mortgage industry, with which, I gather, he himself has work experience.  Just as Aglioro’s analysis of the new Catholic manliness does, Lindenmann thinks that the subprime industry exalts machismo and denigrates femininity.  It creates the same hard-soft polarity for which Aglioro argues as a prescription for the ills of contemporary American Catholicism.

And in Lindenmann’s experience, in doing so, it creates a model of being human that is not only unattractive, but dehumanizing and morally dangerous—hardly a model any community of followers of Jesus should be keen to adopt:

But subprime does, I think, have a lesson for the priesthood. It's this: once you polarize hard and soft, once you internalize those polarities as good and bad, then your whole value structure will become distorted, and your self will follow. Once you start conceiving missions that can only be accomplished with a stiff arm and a strut—that's when you run the risk of becoming someone you don't recognize, and couldn't possibly like.

As I’ve noted, Lindenmann is commenting here on an essay Todd Aglioro published two years ago at the Catholic Culture website, entitled “The New Catholic Manliness.”  Aglioro’s essay is . . . an interesting  (and I'll be honest: often downright hilarious). . . read for all kinds of reasons.  As Lindenmann notes, it develops a neat analysis of diametrically opposed male-female characteristics, and then implicitly ranks these in a hierarchical schema.  And guess which come out on top?  And which set is the solution and which the problem in the contemporary Catholic church?

And it quite specifically prescribes this model for—it calls for its imposition on—seminaries, as a solution to what’s wrong with American Catholicism today.  This is the subtext of Aglioro’s analysis I find particularly fascinating because, when I’ve written about this topic in the past, some readers have suggested that I’m over-stating or even making up my case about how the manly-man paradigm is now driving both the thinking of many Catholics about the priesthood today, and the direction now being taken in seminary formation.

As Aglioro states outright, “Good seminaries are not simply enjoying a serendipitous influx of manlier applicants; they're expressly targeting them.”  Aglioro quotes for corroboration Msgr. Stewart Swetland and Msgr. Steven Rohlfs of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland:

For one, they [seminarians] are carrying themselves differently: "They take pride in their masculine attributes," says Monsignor Swetland. "The last couple generations of priests generally weren't too concerned about taking care of themselves physically," but these days "they work out, they play sports, they want to look and dress and act like men." Also in contrast to their predecessors, they're interested in pursuing "a distinctly masculine spirituality," says Monsignor Rohlfs — in part, he adds with a laugh, because "there's a sense of relief that it's now acceptable to talk that way."  

In contrast to their predecessors: this is analysis—this is a prescription—deliberately pitched against what Aglioro and others in his camp imagine seminarians of the immediate post-Vatican period were like.  Seminarians that those promoting the return to a manly-man priesthood want us to imagine are at the root of the abuse problem in the Catholic church in the U.S.  Gay seminarians, you understand.  The Mychal Judges.  Not the John Corapis or Tom Euteneuers.

And so rooting out those “feminine traits and roles” that used to “plague” seminaries is also rooting out the same-sex relationships that have also plagued seminaries (and—subtext—have led to the abuse crisis during the period in which the Lavender Mafia dominated American church life):

The change [to a macho understanding of priesthood] has begun to bear evident fruits in the interactions among younger clergy and seminarians, thanks to a reemphasis on the classical sense of friendship, which helps guard against same-sex attraction while building a lifelong foundation for priestly fellowship and mutual help. Among such men there is virtually no evidence of the affectation of feminine traits and roles that has plagued many seminaries.

The priests now being churned out by our seminaries are not merely bona fide men free of feminine affectation: they’re orthodox men ready to do battle for the church to whom they’re wed, priests eager to teach “hard or ‘crunchy’ doctrine” in season or out of season.  Lump it or like it, people of God.  Father knows best.  Real men don’t waver or yield.  The new generation of manly-men priests who will save our tottering, unbalanced, hyper-feminized church are priests in the image of John Paul II, a manly-man priest “who by all accounts was the inspiration, motivation, and architect of the whole project.”

For some reason, Aglioro’s article never mentions Benedict.

And so the path is bright before us: if we want to renew the American Catholic church, to lift it out of its current (feminine-produced) malaise, we need to keep cleaning out our seminaries—cleaning them out of “effeminate” candidates and the “ideologues” who preferred such candidates over manly men:

In many seminaries, even those that have cleared their staffs of ideologues, who before would give unabashed preference to effeminate candidates while straining out the masculine ones, there are still future priests with a seriously deficient — or skewed — sense of what it means to be a man. Some of these will become deadbeat spiritual fathers; others will have to battle — or will succumb to — homosexual urges.

And, as I read Scalia and Lindenmann, I'm delighted to discover that even Catholics far more inclined than I am to buy into the restorationist model of John Paul II and Benedict are finally waking up to the downright noxious silliness of all of this gay-baiting analysis.  And to the proposal that a church dominated by priests of the ilk of John Corapi or Tom Euteneuer or Ryan Erickson would be preferable to a church dominated by priests of the ilk of Mychal Judge.

Or even—God help us—that we'd have a church free of the gays because more and more seminarians are choosing to work out, play sports, and dress like real men!  No, sir, don't know a single gay to whom that description might apply.  I find this thesis just about as convincing and reassuring as I found that silly little baseball cap Benedict was sporting last summer to be a convincing sign that he belongs solidly in the crowd of of manly-men priests.

*Readers interested in tracking what I've written on this theme can click on the tag "theology of the body" at the bottom of this Corapi posting, and follow postings with that tag back in time.

A Gloss on Catholic Theology of the Body as Bogus Science Propping Up Bad Theology

A gloss on what I've just posted about the ludicrous science now being used to prop up bad theology, as proponents of the theology of the body now assert that the superiority of male-female sex is proven by the response of the vagina to semen: 

I want to make the theological point crystal clear.  That is, I want to make crystal clear my point that this particular rendition of the theology of the body is bad theology clothed in preposterous science.  Here's why: it actually moves Catholic ethical thinking backwards in the area of sexual teaching, while claiming it is doing so in response to good science.  It retrieves ethical conclusions long since discarded by the Catholic tradition itself, at its best, while it also claims to be offering an entirely new, scientifically astute reading of sexual ethics:

To wit:

1. The claim that science demonstrates that the vagina is simply waiting around eager to receive male ejaculate continues the now-rejected understanding of male-female complementarity in the scholastic theology of the manual tradition, in which women are simply passive receptacles of what really counts in sexual intercourse--that is, the semen.

2. The theory that Gregory Popcak is promoting on the Commonweal thread to which I linked previously steps back in time to Aquinas, with Aquinas's conclusion (following Aristotle) that males provide the essential stuff of life in intercourse, and all that women provide is the incubator, the waiting receptacle.

3. And so, as should be apparent, this backwards-looking and scientifically unsound understanding of human sexuality also reinforces male domination.  Men carry life itself (the "little man," the homunculus that resides in the semen), and women incubate life for their men.  (But we now know from sound science that it's quite the opposite, and that the role women play in procreation surpasses that of males in importance).

4. On the basis of his Aristotelian reading of nature (which was necessarily limited by lack of scientific knowledge at the time he wrote, as was Aristotle's), Aquinas concluded that it is less morally serious for a man to rape a woman than to masturbate or engage in homosexual activity.  The former act at least puts the all-important semen where it belongs . . . .  This is precisely where Popcak's theory of the semen as the glue that cements marriage by landing in the vagina also heads.

5. This is bad theology propped up by defective science because it does not really intend to pay serious attention to scientific findings at all.  It has its mind made up before it cracks a science textbook.  It merely looks for any scientific research it can latch onto to prove its preconceived notion that only male-female sex is natural, and that male domination of females is natural.

6. At its best, traditional Catholic theology does more than pay lip-service to science, because it believes that faith and reason must function in tandem, and that the two are not antithetical to each other.

7.  The reading of nature that contemporary theology-of-the-body natural law thinkers are promoting is highly selective and deliberately blind to many of the most salient facts available to us from the side of dispassionate scientific observation of nature, as we formulate a sexual ethic.  For instance, its attempt to dismiss same-sex activity as unnatural flies in the face of abundant evidence for homosexual behavior as precisely natural throughout the animal kingdom.

8. There is another level of disingenuousness in the "scientific" arguments now being used by theology-of-the-body thinkers to defend traditional positions, as well.  The resistance to same-sex marriage has been fueled for a long time by the argument that marriage is all about procreation, and same-sex marriage is impermissible and unnatural because it thwarts the procreative purpose of marriage.

The proposal that semen is a glue cementing male-female unions inside the receptive vagina seeks to keep alive the conclusions of the procreative argument vs. same-sex marriage, while also claiming that the unitive function of marriage is rooted in nature--in a biology of male-female complementarity that excludes same-sex intimacy from authentic unitive behavior. 

9. And so this argument kicks male-dominant heterosexism up a notch in Catholic moral thinking, by denying all evidence for the solidity, depth, and fruitfulness of any and all gay unions, and elevating any and all heterosexual unions, no matter how shallow they may be, to the level of the ideal--the ideal in which the eager and waiting vagina receives the donation of the male semen that cements the heterosexual union.

10. This way of thinking about human sexuality is crudely biologistic, reductionistic, and even--it has to be said--crudely adolescent, in a male adolescent fantasizing sort of way.  This crude, heterosexist adolescent male way of thinking about human sexuality is entirely tone-deaf to what is most important of all in evaluating human sexual behavior--the relational dimension, the relationships within which sexual activity occurs.

The Catholic church can and should do far better, if it wants to keep thinking and morally sensitive people on board at this point in history, and if it wants to avoid re-branding itself as a club for immature heterosexual males and immature women who enjoy being dominated by men.

Catholic Theology of the Body: Bogus Science Propping Up Bad Theology

And dear God again: I noted yesterday the extremely shaky "scientific" foundation that the newly elected president of the U.S. Catholic bishops' conference, Timothy Dolan, wants to cite for Catholic officials' opposition to same-sex marriage: a one man, one woman model of marriage is hardwired in human DNA, doncha know.

And now this: this analysis pops up in an interesting Commonweal blog thread in which Lisa Fullam argues that a church really committed to preserving and strengthening marriage should, in a society in which a growing number of folks reject marriage altogether, honor and protect loving, faithful, same-sex marriages.

In response, a member of the John Paul II theology-of-the-body crowd, with its magical-mystical theory of male-female complementarity (and perennial male domination of females), and its pretense to decipher the codes of nature for the rest of us while ignoring scads of evidence for the naturalness of same-sex behavior in the animal kingdom, Gregory Popcak, informs us it's all about the semen.

Really.  That old Catholic male-clerical preoccupation with penises, what they do, where they go, but above all, when and where they ejaculate, is now being dressed up in new scientific clothing.  "Science" informs us that it's all about semen and where it lands, since--I'm not making this up--semen ejaculated into a vagina cements a bond between a man and a woman that semen ejaculated anyplace else just can't cement.

It's all about a penis, what it does, where it ends up, where it ejaculates, and a receptive female container designed to receive that penis and its ejaculate.  So the church naturally (I use that word with full intent) marries infertile male-female couples, but not same-sex couples, since the unitive function of marriage is still served in the former case through the union-cementing function of semen ejaculated in the eager and waiting female apparatus.  But that union-cementing function is lacking when two women have sex (no semen, no union), and when two men have sex (semen aplenty, but no eager and waiting female apparatus to log in the donation and increase the bank account of marital unity).

Really.  This is where the Catholic church is willing to go today, in its defense of the "sanctity" of "traditional" marriage.  This is where the Catholic church is willing to go today with its claims to have discovered even deeper dimensions of the DNA-encoded one man, one woman model of marriage.  Bogus natural law propped up by ludicrous science posturing as religious conviction and profound, serious moral insight . . . .

Is it any wonder that increasing numbers of morally sensitive, thinking people are walking away from a church that promotes such toxic nonsense about semen and vaginas and the superiority of heterosexual anything, when people have eyes to see that gay human beings also love and bond deeply, and that their marriages work as well as if not better than those cemented by semen in eager and receptive vaginas?

Fresh Sperm: Bishop Eddie Long and John Paul II's Theology of the Body

One of the supposedly earth-shaking insights of the Catholic theology of the body developed by the late pope John Paul II is its insistence that male-female complementarity is the central thread on which Judaeo-Christian beliefs hold together.  The theology of the body insists that everything in scripture and tradition should be read through the optic of the crude biological facticity of gender, of maleness and femaleness.

And because it employs a literalistic framework for reading scripture and tradition, the theology of the body tortures the central symbols of religious traditions to make them fit its mindless literalism. And so we end up with arguments that priests must be male because the church is female, and priests are married to the bride of Christ through ordination.

And here's where these arguments are headed; here's where the mindless literalism, with its fixation on biological gender as the most significant fact about Judaeo-Christian faith ends up, when taken to its logical, absurd extremes.

This is Bishop Eddie Long of Atlanta preaching about the "fresh sperm" that he and other (male) preachers inject into the church's "womb" through their preaching:

"The word of God is potent. The word of God is His sperm," Long thunders. "The job of the preacher is to bring fresh sperm and when he speaks it, the womb -- the church -- is to take it in and say, 'Sho' you're right.'"

And this is absolutely no different at all from what John Paul II teaches in his theology of the body, and what those (like Maggie Gallagher and Robert P. George) now trying to impose the theology of the body on our entire culture through the political process, are arguing.

It all comes down to fresh sperm.  And male preachers and priests supplying it.  And the supple, receptive--but above all, passive--womb of women to receive it.  And the womb of the female church, with its its passive, receptive stance to the mighty men supplying it with fresh sperm.