Who Cares What The Bishops Think? Old Catholic Guys Do.

The last few days have seen a lot of moaning and wailing from certain liberal pundits (E.J. Dionne and Mark Shields chief among them) who are Deeply Concerned that the fracas over Obama's contraception policies is going to somehow derail the Catholic Democratic vote. 

Never mind (as many worthy writers have pointed out) that 99% of married American Catholic couples already use contraception. The real worry, in their minds, is that it's bad politics to piss off the bishops, whom they quaintly believe still have tremendous cultural sway over the Catholic faithful. And yet Dionne and Shields and their fellow concern trolls are being taken very, very seriously by the Very Serious people.

There's a huge disconnect here that begs for an explanation. So I'll offer one. 

It's not only that the liberal Catholic pundits who are presuming to speak with concern about what this will do to "the Catholic vote" are all male. It may also be important that they're all men who are over 60, who were therefore products of a much more restrictive pre-Vatican II church. And it seems possible that they're still carrying the Church of their childhoods in their minds -- and that this 1950s memory is the Catholicism that, on some level, they're really talking about.

It's not hard to imagine they're still carrying the morality as it was laid down to them by the nuns and priests as boys -- the Madonna/whore stuff, the big squick about anything sexual, and the sense of overweening power and infallibility of the church hierarchy. Even though a lot has happened to both them and to the Church in the long decades since, there's some of this childhood stuff that gets deep into your bones and never leaves you. And it tends to come back out at the oddest times.

On top of this, apart from the Catholic thing, these guys all have something else in common: they're also members of the first generation of American men to deal with second wave feminism -- and I can tell you (from a lifetime of dealing with them) that a lot of the early Boomer men never really did get with that program emotionally, even when they got it intellectually. In their deepest heart of hearts, even though they know it'll never actually happen, they really wish we'd stop being so difficult and just go back to being the kind of nice women Mom and Sister Mary Catherine were. 

Because they lived it and cherished it, that old Donna Reed model is still a live possibility -- and not a completely undesirable one -- in these men's minds. it remains on the table as a sort of default Plan A script for women's lives -- which renders feminism, even if they support it, as an intellectually-desirable-but-not-truly-essential Plan B that they'll only fight for half-heartedly. To them, gender equality is something that we're working toward over time, but in the meantime (in their minds) the girls always have home and kids as a fallback.  And this is why they view "women's issues" like contraception as optional. They know that a very satisfactory life can be had (for the men, anyway) if all of that goes away.

It seems possible to me that these old memories of church and home, remembered only by people who are now into their 60s and beyond, is putting some extra pull on those jerking knees we're seeing. At any rate, the general vintage of the people who seem most deeply panicked about what the bishops think is telling.