Sometimes you run across such a unique piece of stupidity that you don’t even know what to do with it. This one had me stumped.
It is a startling mix of
- Plain ol’ stupidity.
- The kind of ahistorical stupidity reserved for 3rd graders, PhD candidates, and Salon writers.
- A complete misunderstanding of the Catholic teaching on contraception.
- A healthy dose of anti-Catholic bigotry.
- And boobies!!
That no additional commentary could add anything.
The Catholic Church forced wet nurses on French women because lactation acts like birth control and the backwards Catholic Church hates birth control, or something…No kidding.
I mentioned wet-nursing yesterday, and that has a fascinating history all its own. Before wet-nursing died a slow, rubber-nipple-assisted death, it was common practice across Europe for centuries, especially in Catholic countries like France. Why there? At least in part because the Catholic Church effectively encouraged people to use wet nurses. Since lactation was a form of birth control, the Church, which taught that the only legitimate purpose of sex was procreation, frowned on intercourse for as long as a woman was nursing. The prohibition was, not surprisingly, widely ignored. But there was a way to comply with it: If a woman stopped nursing altogether and hired a wet nurse, it would be impossible for her to violate the ban—or to be suspected of violating the ban. Having mothers not nurse was the only way the church could be sure that mothers were not having sex while nursing. It was a very clever doctrinal end-run, as long as everyone involved avoided thinking too hard about the sex lives of the wet nurses.
