The nation's Roman Catholic bishops, acknowledging that American Catholics pay little heed to their church's ban on contraception, undertook an effort Wednesday to reinforce it, and linked it to the anti-abortion campaign.

...The contraception question was introduced by the Committee for Pro-Life Activities, the bishops' anti-abortion body. The committee proposed the writing of an easily understandable booklet, and the conference voted overwhelmingly to approve the project.

The booklet is to address questions about the church's teaching on marriage and sex, why "natural family planning" — seeking or avoiding pregnancy according to the fertility cycle — is acceptable and why artificial birth control is wrong.

It will also examine the "relationship between contraception and abortion" by pointing out that there is a link between abortion and failed contraception, and noting the potential for some contraceptive drugs to be "abortifacient."

"Openness to the transmission of life is the common theme joining contraceptive practices and abortion," the bishops said....

--New York Times

OK, this is a Catholic thing -- it doesn't affect us non-Catholics, and any Catholic who's upset has to make a personal choice to go along with it, ignore it, or blow off the church altogether.

But if, at some point in the future, the Catholic Church kicks this up a notch and tries (perhaps in league with some evangelicals) to eliminate condoms from a large national drugstore chain, or make it illegal to give birth control to minors -- all as part of the "culture of life" -- will Nicholas Kristof say that those of us who denounce the effort are bigots whose hostility to religion marginalizes us?

*****

Oh, and by the way, the bishops were also making plans to publish a pamphlet on same-sex couples:

They wrangled over whether to add wording that would have called gay relationships "gravely sinful," and whether to call unmarried sex "gravely evil." Bishop Fabian W. Bruskewitz of Lincoln, Neb., wanted the conference to add that homosexual acts are "intrinsically evil, and if they are done with free will and due deliberation, they are mortal sins and place one's salvation in jeopardy."

In the end, the bishops stuck with calling homosexual acts "immoral"...

Gosh, and to think those nasty Nobel people had the nerve to deprive the Pope of his rightful Peace Prize.