THE CITY
norm around the idea that intercourse is for adults. We have an age at which young people can drive. Why not have an age (a higher one) at which they can/should engage in another activity that can be far more consequential?
One of the interesting parts of the debate over the Health and Human services mandate on employers to cover contraceptive and abortifacient drugs has been the focus on the question of how serious Catholics are about their beliefs and whether their institutions are entitled to act upon those beliefs. I heard commenters in favor of the mandate proclaim that 97% of Catholic women use contraception. I have doubts about the validity of that study. Certainly, it ignores the question of abortion and abortifacient products. But with regard to the Bible and church doctrine, I can tell you this: 100% of Protestants sin. I suspect the same figure holds for Catholics. Guess what? We’re still against sin. It doesn’t mean we don’t believe in God. It doesn’t mean we have abandoned our faith. It doesn’t mean we don’t care when the government oversteps its bounds and tries to push the churches out of community life. We don’t need the government to tell us what church doctrine is and what we believe or don’t believe. Religious liberty and the separation of church and state means that it is up to us and the churches with which we voluntarily associate to determine those matters. The bottom line is that there are certain things that belong to the state and others that don’t. The state is an instrument, not some kind of ultimacy. It is a tool. It is temporary. It is designed to solve a simple problem, which is the problem of restraining evil. The state is designed to serve persons. We are not designed to serve the state. The great French Catholic scholar Jacques Maritain said it best: “The state is made for man, not man for the state.” The United States, traditionally, has been one of the nations that most clearly understands the proper role of the government. We have welcomed the existence and development of many institutions of civil society performing tasks that need not belong to the state. But Rousseau saw a society with two powers of church and state as a liability, something that needed to be destroyed. And the French Revolution accordingly attempted to destroy it. What Rousseau 104