I had heard this was coming, but Ted Olsen at Christianity Today takes a close look at this weekend’s NYTimes Magazine covers tory on people opposed to contraception.
Shorto is right that religious conservative Protestants have been increasingly critical about the 1965 contraception case Griswold v. Connecticut, and that recent technologies (especially the emergency contraceptive pill) have forced them to reconsider facile support of earlier technologies (like the non-emergency pill). And he’s right in his implication that Catholic-Protestant alliances in the abortion wars (and the reasoning on Pope John Paul II’s writings) have also had a dramatic effect.
But for those who have actually been watching this happen, it’s like reading a U.S. history text that talks about the American Revolution without talking about colonialism, Reconstruction without talking about the Civil War, and World War II without talking about World War I. Or like trying to read a subway map that only names four stops. His connect-the-dots puzzle only has the numbers 3, 8, 24, and 31, and the only crayon in his box is labeled "anti-sex."