David Mills’ Feb. 14 letter shows outrage with the Catholic Church’s 2000 year teachings against contraception and same-sex practice.

After the Reformation, all Christian denominations condemned contraception until the Lamberth Conference in 1930, when the Christian teaching of 20 centuries was broken.

In the 1500s, a Protestant theologian said, “Birth control was the murder of future persons.” In the 1700s, Protestant John Wesley said, “Taking preventive measures was unnatural and would destroy the souls of those who practiced it.” Martin Luther said birth control was sodomy.

Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical “Humanae Vitae,” regarding the consequences of contraception, is proving prophetic. He warned “how wide and easy a road would thus be opened towards conjugal infidelity and the general lowering of morality …. man may finally lose respect for the woman …. considering her as a mere instrument of selfish enjoyment. Let it be considered also that a dangerous weapon would thus be placed in the hands of those public authorities who take no heed of moral exigencies.”

Here we are today: Barack Obama’s mandate forcing the violation of conscience rights and religious liberties. Whose rights and liberties are next?

It isn’t the Catholic Church’s teachings against contraception and same-sex marriage that have given us an epidemic of sexually transmitted diseases, divorce, sexual abuse and pornography.

Most of today’s so-called contraceptives are abortifacients. Complications from these steroidal drugs can cause breast, cervical and liver cancer, according to the World Health Organization’s 2005 study. Other studies show a two-fold increase of heart attacks. Heart and blood abnormalities, including blood clots, are a few of the many other side effects.

What Obama calls health care is, in reality, chemical warfare against women.

Robert Garrett

Sidney