“Ultimately...woman's equality is not derived from any theory of human nature but rather from concepts of justice, equality and the integrity of the individual based on philosophical and political principles that we have evolved since the Enlightenment. "There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical,' writes Pinker. 'To repeat: equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”
“Equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.”
“The instinct to survive is human nature itself, and every aspect of our personalities derives from it. Anything that conflicts with the survival instinct acts sooner or later to eliminate the individual and thereby fails to show up in future generations. . . . A scientifically verifiable theory of morals must be rooted in the individual's instinct to survive--and nowhere else!--and must correctly describe the hierarchy of survival, note the motivations at each level, and resolve all conflicts.We have such a theory now; we can solve any moral problem, on any level. Self-interest, love of family, duty to country, responsibility toward the human race . . . .The basis of all morality is duty, a concept with the same relation to group that self-interest has to individual.”
“The idea of women having sex without risking pregnancy is deeply disturbing to the vision of women's role that Western civilization has inherited from the Judeo-Christian tradition.....In Britain, the Anglican Church denounced it (birth control) as 'the awful heresy'. As families grew smaller in the US during early years of the twentieth century....the moral reaction mounted. Theodore Roosevelt attacked the use of condoms as 'decadent'. He declared women who used contraceptives as 'criminals against the race...the object of contemptuous abhorrence by healthy people.”
“In 1968, Pope Paul VI responded instead with an encylical Humanae Vitae. The encyclical reaffirmed the Church's rejectionist stance: Contraceptives were evil and against God's law...In the West, many if not most Catholics ignored the ban. For them, however painful, the decision of whether to conceive or not was rarely a life-or-death issue. Unfortunately, for women in the poorest parts of the world, it often is. There, the right to choose whether or not to conceive was vitally linked to a woman's prospects for freeing herself and her family from poverty. It is in this context that the inherent and deeply rooted misogyny of the Church has taken its greatest toll on the lives of women. Pope John Paul II spent a considerable part of his pontificate propagandizing on behalf of a doctrine that tells ppor and illiterate women that to use a condom is the moral equivalent of murder and that each time they use contraceptives they render Christ's sacrifice on the cross 'in vain'. He said:'no personal or social circumstances have ever been able, or will be able, to rectify the moral wrong of the contraceptive act.”
“For every moral principle, there’s an equal and opposite government program”
“The right to choose is always the key to progress for women, as it is for men.”