Selective Hearing (Reprise): Pope and Condoms

I love reporters. Well, actually I wash my hands very carefully after dealing with anyone from the fourth estate. I know they've got newspapers to sell, headlines to titillate, and everything, but it really doesn't excuse their collective hearing problem.

If you'll remember Pope Benedict XVI's trip to Africa, he gave many speeches, blessings, teachings, and encouragement while he was there. There were also some off the cuff remarks regarding the proper way of responding to the African AIDS crisis through a "double effort [...] to renew the human person internally, to give spiritual and human strength to a way of behaving that is just towards our own body and the other person’s body."

Reporters' collective response was: "I'm sorry, did you say 'condom'?"

Here we go again. Headlines everywhere are screaming: "Pope says condom use OK sometimes".  This is disingenuous to say the least and scandalous to boot. The context of these quotes is entirely lacking. Of course, if you're the kind of Catholic who gets his theology from headlines, you've already got other, more serious problems.

Contraception is always and remains gravely evil regardless of the means. The Pope was saying that a prostitute who decides to use condoms as a way of preventing infection was taking "a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more humane way, of living sexuality" although the Church "does not regard it as a real or moral solution".

Furthermore, he said it in terms of specific cases, not as a generalization.  The full quote from Reuters:

After the pope first mentions that the use of condoms could be justified in certain limited cases, such as by prostitutes, Seewald asks: "Are you saying, then, that the Catholic Church is actually not opposed in principle to the use of condoms?"

The pope answers: "She of course does not regard it as a real or moral solution, but, in this or that case, there can be nonetheless, in the intention of reducing the risk of infection, a first step in a movement toward a different way, a more humane way, of living sexuality."

Anyone who knows anything about moral theology knows that things get murky quickly. Although there are objective standards of right and wrong, a person's intention can mitigate some of the culpability of an otherwise sinful action.  But can we expect our press to actually deliver accurately on such nuance and fine distinction?

Reporters: "I'm sorry, did you say 'condom'?"

Maybe It's Bad For You

So bad chemicals can leach into our food and water supply through pesticides and the EPA is (rightly) concerned, but if those same endocrine disruptors get into the water supply through rampant use of birth control pills, nobody blinks?

Compare.

[Washington Post] The Environmental Protection Agency for the first time will require pesticide manufacturers to test 67 chemicals contained in their products to determine whether they disrupt the endocrine system, which regulates animals' and humans' growth, metabolism and reproduction, the agency said yesterday.

Researchers have raised concerns that chemicals released into the environment interfere with animals' hormone systems, citing problems such as male fish in the Potomac River that are bearing eggs. Known as endocrine disruptors, the chemicals may affect the hormones that humans and animals produce or secrete.

With:

[WND] While environmentalists are usually vocal about perceived threats ranging from pesticides to global warming, there is a silence when it comes to one threat already harming the water supply: hormones from birth-control pills.

According to the National Catholic Register, EPA-funded scientists at the University of Colorado studied fish in a mountain stream near Boulder, Colo., two years ago.

When they netted 123 trout and other fish downstream from the city's sewer plant, they found 101 were female, 12 were male, and 10 were strange "intersex" fish with male and female features.

And:

[CathNews] Eighty five year old Carl Djerassi the Austrian chemist who helped invent the contraceptive pill now says that his co-creation has led to a "demographic catastrophe."

In an article published by the Vatican this week, the head of the world's Catholic doctors broadened the attack on the pill, claiming it had also brought "devastating ecological effects" by releasing into the environment "tonnes of hormones" that had impaired male fertility, The Taiwan Times says.

Anybody see a pattern?