Contraceptive politics
Sir: Ronan Fanning's sneering article claims that it was not liberal zeal which made the Irish Government introduce a Bill to legalise contraception. but rather a Supreme Court decision disallowing the ban on the importation of contraceptives (April 6.) How enthusiastic your revolutionary is for the law when it suits his book . . . only let us imagine what Mr Fanning would have written had the decision been different.
But the fact is that everyone knows that the Supreme Court, like its Washington counterpart, is not a group of wise, faithful and sleepless guardians of the law, but simply part of the mechanism whereby the ruling establishment exerts its will. The Irish establishment has decided that, for a number of reasons, contraception, and a little later, the abortion factories, divorce on demand, perversions and pornography are to be released on the Irish, and that is what will happen unless the Irish awake at the last minute.
At one time the claim that contraception was just mutual masturbation and comparable to sodomy was resisted by the contraceptionists: later they used this fact as an excuse for legalising perversion and then for establishing the abortion plants and divorce on demand. And a good thing too, many readers will say. I wonder if these reforms have brought us any nearer the new Jerusalem, in fact. In questions like these permissive legislation is near to compulsive legislation: ask any young London couple how they would stand financially if they did not use contraceptives or consign their unborn children to the furnace. Ask young actors if they find that refusing to take part in obscene spectacles or in homosexual vice enhances their chances of advancement. Indeed if one looks at it honestly, these reforms, when joined with the soon-to-be-introduced euthanasia, mean that the authorities regard us as a sort of factory farm animal to be kept in its cage and fed, but to be instantly exterminated if out of line in any way; allowed only to have such children as the State in one form or another allows, and as compensation allowed to practise vices which do not even bring transitory happiness. I can see Mr Fanning's case, but unfortunately he is so busy sneering at his opponents that he is no longer able to see theirs — a common failing of what one might term totalitarian liberalism.
G. J. A. Stern 6 Eton Court, Shepherds Hill, London N6
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