Two Letters I Wrote to Senators in 2003

The following two letters surfaced when I was cleaning out my folders on my computer. THe .doc file is dated in 2003. I don't even know if I mailed these, but they do say what I think, so I'm recording them here.

Dear Senator Santorum,

As a fellow Catholic, I want to give you my support for speaking out against overthrowing laws against sodomy.

I know that you have gotten a lot of bad press, essentially accusing you of being homophobic. But I agree with Stanley Kurtz, who is research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and who wrote about your remarks in an article April 24 for National Review Online. Kurtz explained that you were making a slippery-slope argument, saying that if the Supreme Court rules that states cannot regulate sexuality in the case of sodomy, then it is quite possible that states may not be allowed in the future to regulate incest and other sexual crimes.

Something else that I think needs to be considered is that once you legalize something you make it normal.

Take abortion, for example. Many of the people who argued against abortion used the hard cases of rape and incest leading to pregnancy in their arguments. But the fact of the matter is that of the millions of abortions that occur in this country every year, a very, very small percentage are performed on victims of rape or incest. Abortion is an option that is considered along with almost every pregnancy. For example, every woman past a certain age who conceives a child is given amniocentesis, so she can decide to abort the child if genetic defects are revealed by testing her amniotic fluid.

And fornication was once a crime. An unmarried couple couldn't rent a hotel room or an apartment or buy a house together. Now the laws have changed, and it has become abnormal for couples not to live together.

Every time we leave God's laws behind and change the laws to reflect the current mores, we open the way to further concessions down the road. I agree with your slippery slope argument, but I want you consider that the slope started higher and further back when sexual morality first started being eroded in the law and in how we live our lives.

It is clear from the Catholic Catechism that the Chuch still teaches, like the old Irish priest once said, "It's not the homo- or the hetero- that's the problem, it's the -sexual outside of marriage that's the problem.

The Catholic Church, alone among all churches, teaches that sexual morality goes back to natural law, and that even though the purpose of sexuality includes the mutual joy of a married couple, sexuality's intrinsic purpose also includes the creation of new life.

Within my lifetime we have loosened the laws against fornication (sex outside of marriage) and against abortion. Earlier in my parent's generation (higher up on the slippery slope) contraception was made legal.

I suggest that these too are root causes that you should consider too. The movement to declare homosexual sex legal and good is being built on these earlier concessions. The pro-homosexuality movement is in a direct line of cause and effect.

The earlier changes that I referred to above led to today's common acceptance of sex as a good in itself unrelated to marriage and procreation.

If we don't realize sex is part of God's plan for the continuation of the species, and if we agree that everyone should be free to seek only the pleasure of sex without its procreative aspect, then what argument do we have to say that any type of sex for its own sake is wrong?

Thanks for letting me share my thoughts.



Dear Senator Daschle,

I have been following your career for about a year, ever since I saw the charming documentary about you visiting your constituents across the state of South Dakota.

I spent about 20 years in North Dakota and Minnesota and your midwestern persona attracted me. Your role in the Senate reveals you as a bright, articulate politician. I expect to hear more about you in the future.

Now today I found out that you are, like I am, a Catholic. And I am disappointed to say I also found out that you are so outspoken a proponent of abortion that your bishop has asked you to stop listing yourself as Catholic.

One of the things that characterizes a Catholic believer is obedience to the teaching authority of the Catholic Church. I pray that you will come to understand that the wisdom of God is greater than the wisdom of mankind.

You may be like a lot of Catholics after Vatican II, who came to believe that all the teachings about sexual morality were up for grabs. But the Catholic Catechism makes it quite clear that abortion, contraception, and sexual acts outside of marriage are all still moral evils. And they have grave consequences.
They harm the family, the society, individuals: men, women, and children.

Do not support abortion in a mistaken compassion for women's rights. The abortion industry came up with the phrase "a woman's choice" as a way to latch onto the selfish spirit of the age. But the truth is that I and a lot of women like me see abortion as a violation of women and oppressive of our fullest sexual fulfillment.

The legality of abortion means that countless women and men are being pressured to deny their deepest instincts. Men who want a newly conceived child are told they have no right to protect that child from death in its mother's womb. Women whose instincts are to nurture and love and protect a new life growing within them are being forced to deny their deepest selves. Grandparents are often forced to stand helplessly by while their children kill their grandchildren before they are born. And children are learning that they exist only because their parents didn't chose to abort them.

I heard one proud grandfather introduce a little granddaughter who was the joy of his life to the pastor at Church one day. He matter-of-factly said that her mother had tried to abort her, but the abortion had failed. The priest asked him to not speak that way in front of the child. What a psychological horror to know that your mother tried to take your life! And I 've heard of other children who were not aborted in spite of doctors' or teachers' or parents' advice who became the greatest joy of the parent who had the courage to let the child live.

I have personally been on the other side of the issue, and I helped some women find an abortionist before I changed sides. For an example of what I am trying to tell you, I have seen a woman who intellectually believed it was the right thing to do physically and emotionally mourning a child after she aborted it. Mentally, she didn't see that her body and her emotions were trying to tell her the truth about what she had done.

I pray that the Holy Spirit, who lives in the Catholic Church, will guide you to change your mind and your heart.

With admiration and sadness,

Roseanne Sullivan