Within a few hours of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling against the Defense of Marriage Act on June 26, I received an emailed fund appeal relating this to the abortion issue.  After all, if you think nothing of killing babies, why would you think that sodomy is sinful?  That’s not exactly the wording that was used, but it serves for brevity.   I replied as follows, slightly modified:

I appreciate your thoughts, but you are omitting the elephant in the living room–the societal acceptance of marital contraception.  Secular humanist Walter Lippmann called this the greatest revolution in the history of morals.  In the 1920s the self-styled progressives had decided that marital contraception opened the door to sexual liberty.  They advocated companionate marriage which involved the revolutionary idea of accepting as progressive a cycle of marriage, contraception, divorce and then remarriage, etc etc.  It hasn’t been the sodomites who are killing marriage; it’s been the contraceptionists.  The Church of England gave its formal acceptance to marital contraception in 1930 and the Catholic Church responded by reaffirming the Tradition on December 31 of that same year.  The conservative Anglican bishops predicted that the acceptance of marital contraception would lead to the acceptance of sodomy, and they were so horribly correct that now the Church of England accepts sodomy by their bishops as morally permissible.

The legal framework for the acceptance of abortion was developed in US Supreme Court cases in 1965 and 1972 that outlawed state laws against the sale of contraceptives to married couples and then to the unmarried as well.

In 1973 the liberal justices applied the logic of their 1965 and 1972 cases to abortion.  And let us not forget that since 1968 the Catholic Church as measured by its priests and laity was deeply divided and numerically in favor of contraception including the Pill with its abortifacient properties.

I hope that your organization can help students to realize that killing innocent babies is a horrible thing to do, but I think that the only real way to stop the abortion juggernaut is for there to be a societal re-acceptance of the idea that sexual union is strictly and exclusively a marriage act and that within marriage it should be a renewal of the marriage covenant, for better and for worse including the imagined worse of possible pregnancy.  So I hope your people are  living chastely and preaching both marital and pre-marital chastity as well.

I will continue to make periodic contributions but not with any hopes that your organization or any of the anti-abortion organizations are going to have much impact.

In His service,

John F. Kippley