(tFollowing upon her first instalment in this three part-series, here Paula Adamick charts the advance of the feminist movement through the mid-20th century by three of its most prominent avatars …)
On Christmas Day, an unidentified blond in St.Peter’s Square in Rome had her own Christmas message to deliver to the world. As a member of a feminist activist group, the woman was topless and had the words ‘God is Woman’ written on her bare chest as she attacked the nativity scene in the piazza.
Although the incident occurred well after Pope Francis delivered his Christmas message from the balcony of St Peter’s Basilica, thousands of pilgrims were still in the square when the woman grabbed the statue of the Infant Jesus, hoisted it over her head and screamed an inaudible message. Minutes later, she was apprehended by Vatican City police, cloaked and taken away. The infant statue was also returned to the manger.
The woman was a member of Femen, an organization of topless female protesters who oppose the political power of the clergy. The Paris-based movement, which began in Ukraine in 2008 to protest the former pro-Kremlin regime, opposes the Catholic Church’s opposition to abortion and gay marriage, often staging protests in places of worship.
Femen has staged other stunts in the Vatican piazza as well. In November 2014, three women representing the group protested Pope Francis’ scheduled visit to the European Parliament by simulating sex acts too disturbing to describe here. Then, the day before his visit to the EU, another topless activist mounted the altar of the Strasbourg cathedral.
As for the ‘sextremist’ of Christmas Day, the Femen website bragged that the woman was part of its ‘Massacres of the Innocents’ campaign. “The maniacal desire to control women’s fertility is a common trait of many religions, National Socialism, nationalism and other antediluvian, anti-humanist ideologies,” the group proclaims. “Abortion is sacred!”
All of which illustrates a central article of feminist faith – abortion as a quasi-sacramental right.
But abortion operates as a punishment as well, a punishment to be imposed on any woman who fails to separate procreation from sexual pleasure by failing to use a contraceptive and daring to become the unspeakable – pregnant. Nor does abortion as punishment stop there: It also functions as a punishment – penance, if you will – to be imposed on anyone else attempting to interfere with the pregnant woman’s ‘right’ to abort her child.
Too brutal? Facts often are … which is why they are so often disguised with lying phrases such as ‘the right to choose’.
Now a little history.
Margaret Sanger
Since the 19th century, feminism has been pushing its death dealing agenda relentlessly with the often lawless assistance of its avatars who prepared the soil for the next generation by directing their activism ever more sharply against the family and the traditional role of women within it.
Hidden in all the lofty rhetoric about ‘equality’ and ‘a woman’s right to vote’ in a democratic society was radical feminism’s real target – motherhood – which a century ago was blatantly revealed through the will and activism of one woman, Margaret Sanger.
One of eleven children, Margaret Sanger (1879-1966) was born into an Irish working class family. Early on, she came to view small families as the ideal, allowing parents free time and financial ease to provide better care for their children. And her mother’s early death at age 49, after eleven births and seven miscarriages, confirmed her view.
At age 23, while working as a nurse at a New Jersey hospital, she married William Sanger, a young architect with whom she had three children.
But it soon became apparent that Margaret was not going to be an average housewife as she began a lifelong pattern of sexual affairs – much to the distress of her husband and the neglect of her children. Indeed, in today’s parlance, Sanger might be diagnosed as a ‘sex addict’ whose behaviour became ever more voracious as she indulged it with ever more men, some famous, including science fiction writer H.G.Wells.
Indeed, as Sanger’s family took a back seat to her militant behaviour and association with anarchic personalities such as Emma Goldman (see part 1), she appears to have adopted a self-justifying creed that endorsed both the ‘morality’ and ‘need’ for all forms of contraception.
In 1914, Sanger coined the term ‘birth control’ and began to provide women with contraceptives and information.
Indicted in 1915 for sending diaphragms through the mail, she was arrested a year later for opening the first birth control clinic in the U.S. In 1921, she founded the American Birth Control League, the precursor to the Planned Parenthood Federation, and spent her next three decades campaigning to bring ‘safe’ and ‘effective’ birth control into the American mainstream.
She also embraced eugenics which, in Sanger’s terms, meant the elimination of all unwanted life, particularly inconvenient preborn babies and physically and/or mentally imperfect persons, regardless of age.
In her view, it was wrong to keep the sick and the weak alive, or to allow them to propagate, thereby producing what she viewed as a ‘race of degenerates.’ This, she thought, gave rise to the perpetuation of delinquents, dependents and defectives who, if born, ought to be sterilized.
Central to her thinking was the belief that sexual activity should be kept completely separate from procreation. The natural, lifegiving act of sexual congress must be thwarted; its pleasures must be indulged.
Which is why Sanger advocated the rejection of the Christian view of sexual morality and its virtues of purity and chastity, continence and abstinence, which she regarded as the cause of prostitution, venereal diseases and countless other social evils.
Sanger married three times and one of her children died young. Yet throughout her life, she moved in a cloud of manic energy, becoming increasingly booze-addled and chasing men for sex right up until her death in 1966 at age 87.
Today she is best known as the founder of Planned Parenthood, the abortion death toll of which has mounted into the tens of millions.
“We’ve come a long way since Margaret Sanger was jailed in 1916 for opening America’s very first birth control clinic,” crowed Planned Parenthood chair Alexis McGill Johnson and president Cecile Richards as they released the organization’s annual report on the Eve of 2015. “Today, 99 percent of sexually active American women at some point in their lives use birth control – and, thanks to Planned Parenthood and the Affordable Care Act, more than 48 million women are now eligible to receive it with no co-pay. Until 1973, young healthy American women were dying because of illegal and unsafe abortions. Today, abortion is one of the safest medical procedures in this country.”
Safest for whom?
According to its latest report, the abortion giant performed 327,653 abortions in 2013 and nearly one million abortions over the past three years. It also made more than $127 million in excess revenue for 2013-2014 and has over $1.4 billion in net assets.
Bottom line? Abortion remains very lucrative.
Margaret Mead
Back in the day, however, Sanger’s ideas required bogus science to confer ‘legitimacy’ and ‘gravitas’ in the public square.
Enter Margaret Mead (1901-1978), the American anthropologist once called ‘the grandmother of the world.’
Sporting a permanent smile and a thoroughly non-traditional upbringing, it was Mead, the social scientist who visited Samoa in the South Pacific in the 1920s in search of the needed data to support her unnatural beliefs.
Her goal was to confirm her fantasy that a cultural absence of Christianity would spontaneously produce guiltless ‘free love’. And voila! After spending nine months studying 68 Samoan girls, aged 8 to 20, to prove that social behaviour, including gender roles, were determined by cultural rather than spiritual forces, Mead reached her desired conclusions and published a landmark book in 1928 titled Coming of Age in Samoa, a bestseller which catapulted her to worldwide fame.
In it, Mead depicted Samoa as an epicurean paradise of free and easy sexuality unhindered by the burdens of Christianity.
But there was a problem: it wasn`t true. Instead, her Utopian vision of life in Samoa operated as a justification for her own libertine sexual beliefs and her underlying goal, which was the cultural release of Christian moral strictures.
It wasn’t until 1983, however, that her mythification of Samoan sexual ethics was exposed as bunk by Derek Freeman, a seasoned anthropologist who’d known and studied the area for half a century. Unlike Mead who’d spent less than a year there.
In Margaret Mead and Samoa: The Making and Unmaking of an Anthropological Myth, Freeman ripped apart Mead’s facile contentions point by point, and refuted her characterizations of Samoan society as irreligious and relaxed about adolescence and sexual behaviour.
Not only were Samoans more restrictive and severe than westerners about child-bearing and premarital sex, Freeman wrote, their culture had been this way since long before the advent of Christianity, putting the lie to Mead’s theories which had been widely accepted throughout her life – a life marked by multiple-marriages, divorces and rumours of bisexual affairs.
Yet Freeman`s exposure came too late to discredit Mead during her celebrated lifetime which, like Sanger, was manically energetic as she disseminated her views in books and columns in Redbook magazine where she advocated birth control, population control, trial marriage and the legalization of drugs.
“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed, citizens can change the world,” Mead once said. “Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.”
Sadly for the world, Mead was right.
Madalyn Murray-O’Hair
What Mead failed to point out, however, is that, like every other formidable feminist of the modern era, that ‘small group of citizens’ has been almost exclusively atheist.
This is a trait she and Sanger shared with Madalyn Murray-O’Hair (1919-1995) who also worked tirelessly throughout her life to obliterate God and everything pertaining to Christianity. To this end, Murray-O’Hair founded of a nonprofit group dedicated to the separation of church and state: the American Atheist Organization, which advocated (among other things) free birth control and the taxing of churches.
Murray-O’Hair also made speeches across the U.S. and wrote numerous articles, including a Hustler magazine piece on the benefits of masturbation.
Once described by Life Magazine as ‘the most hated woman in America’, Murray-O’Hair first achieved fame when she sued the Baltimore school district and won her bid to obliterate ‘God’ from the Pledge of Allegiance in 1963, along with abolishing prayer, Bible readings, and all religious references from the American public school system. The court ruling thus removed all the natural spiritual protections for an entire nation against the dissemination and spread of the toxic doctrines described above, particularly among its youngest and most vulnerable members.
All in the name of freedom.
Wholly unexpected, however, were the explosive effects on schools. Within weeks, unruliness among students quickly mushroomed, eventually giving rise to foul-mouthed language, bad behaviour and violence beyond the ability of teachers to control.
And more than half a century later, American schools become armed camps where children must be frisked for guns and knives and where some are even killing their teachers, their parents and each other.
This as the loud-mouthed harridan was appearing regularly on TV, her smiling belligerence regarded as a ratings enhancer. That is until Madalyn, 76, her son John Garth, 40, and her granddaughter Robin, 30, disappeared from their home in Austin, Texas in September 1995. Years later, their bodies were discovered dismembered on a remote Texas ranch.
Madalyn’s body was identifiable only by a steel pin from a hip operation. All three had been murdered by a con-artist intent of retrieving more than a million dollars from her atheist organization.
Meanwhile, much to Murray’O’Hair’s horror, her eldest son, William, had years earlier escaped her fate and influence when he became a born-again evangelical Christian.
“I don’t want some damned Christer praying over my body,” she hissed, famously.
Feminist deviance
By their fruits you shall know them, Jesus Christ warned.
Cause and effect. Thought and action. Jesus was teaching us that what we believe matters because it is from our beliefs that our actions spring. It follows then that if we believe something untrue, harm will come of it, as night follows day.
Yet despite the fact that moral relativists never cease trying to convince us that Christianity does not make for a peaceful or stable society, the history of the past two centuries has shown that secular substitutes for Christian ethics – the ethics that Sanger, Mead and Murray-O’Hair so vehemently and so virulently opposed – produce disease, destruction and death.
The simple fact is that moral relativism and do-it-yourself morality do not work.
The relativist world of soul-destroying self-indulgence that Sanger, Mead and Murray-O’Hair helped to create has proven itself to be a recipe for confusion, chaos and anarchy – conditions incompatible with a fully-functioning society.
All of which means that despite their plans for a Brave New World of fake freedoms, the result has not been B.F. Skinner’s Walden Two, but Dunblane, Columbine and Sandy Hook, among others. All distressing evidence, too, of Christendom’s moral collapse into a mindless ‘secular humanism’ where, in many places, it’s now impossible to hire enough police to maintain law and order.
Nor, given the absolute immutability of the natural moral law, should anyone be surprised by the wretchedness of these three lives and their errors which were anticipated in the 1830s by Alexis de Tocqueville who understood the catastrophe that moral relativism and all its bastards, including feminism, would invariably usher in.
“It does not break wills, but it softens them; bends them and directs them; it rarely forces one to act, but it constantly opposes itself to one’s acting,” he wrote in Democracy in America. “It does not destroy, it prevents things from being born; it does not tyrannize, it hinders, compromises, enervates, extinguishes, dazes and finally reduces each nation to being nothing more than a herd of timid and industrial animals of which the government is the shepherd.”
Anti-Life in all its forms
It prevents things from being born. What a stunning insight.
Even more stunning is the description of mankind’s perpetual fallen-ness by St.Paul, perhaps the greatest social anthropologist of all, in his Epistle to the Romans:
When they knew God, they have not glorified him as God, or given thanks; but became vain in their thoughts. And their foolish heart was darkened. For professing themselves to be wise, they became fools. And they changed the glory of the incorruptible God into the likeness of the image of corruptible man, and of birds, and of four-footed beasts, and of creeping things. Wherefore God gave them up to the desires of their heart, unto uncleanness, to dishonour their own bodies among themselves. Who changed the truth of God into a lie; and worshipped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.
For this cause God delivered them up to shameful affections. For their women have changed the natural use into that use which is against nature. And, in like manner, the men also, leaving the natural use of the women, have burned in their lusts, one towards another, men with men working that which is filthy, and receiving in themselves the recompense of which was due to their error. And as they liked not to have God in their knowledge, God delivered them up to a reprobate sense, to do those things which are not convenient. Being filled with all iniquity, malice, fornication, avarice, wickedness: full of envy, murder, contention, deceit, malignity: whisperers, detractors, hateful to God, contumelious, proud, haughty, inventors of evil things, disobedient to parents, foolish, dissolute: without affection, without fidelity, without mercy. Who, having known the justice of God, did not understand that they who do such things are worthy of death; and not only they that do them, but they also that consent to them that do them. (1: 21-32)
Thus, civilization unravels. Inexorably. Just as St.Paul describes and just as Moses witnessed when he descended from the mount with the Ten Commandments and found his people worshipping idols and behaving licentiously. To his immense disgust and distress.
Still, many of today’s social anthropologists will insist that the current unravelling is healthy, that it’s merely the result of obliterating the Christian ‘oppression’ that’s been keeping human beings from expressing their ‘natural’ sexual impulses, rather than the deterioration into anarchy, nihilism and death that it is.
Yet today’s feminist activists still imagine that – like their predecessors – if they scream loud enough and often enough, they will silence their own God-instilled consciences, thereby freeing themselves from the natural, God-created order of life on earth.
As if!
The fact is they cannot change the God-created order their souls unconsciously know and understand, much to their chagrin. They cannot change the fact that the order of this earth is a divinely created order, designed for the propagation of life – an order neither the Catholic Church nor any Pope can alter or decree as otherwise.
The truth is that God’s order demands obedience to produce human happiness. And this is a law so absolute that every divergence from it produces harm and misery.
Yet where do you hear that now?
Certainly not in a world where the ideal of freedom is promoted not as liberty to obey God but as liberty to commit sin. And certainly not in a world where there are ever more feminist avatars blindly leading the way with ever more hideous consequences.