In the December issue of Crisis, author H.W. Crocker wrote what was apparently intended as a tongue-in-cheek essay about NFP, in which he dismisses all the current emphasis on NFP as blather that gets in the way of the real meaning of marriage: having as many kids as possible. Canonist Ed Peters replies, mostly from a canon law perspective. (A link to the original essay is also on Peters’ page.)
Now I like satire and parody as much as the next guy and perhaps we should just believe that Crocker was making a point along the lines of Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal.” And at CWR, we’ve been known to push the satirical boundaries with our own Diogenes. Hey, I even laughed at some of the lines in Crocker’s essay. Still, I think Crocker and Crisis went just a little too far this time, not in having a little fun at the expense of too-serious conservatives, but in spreading some bad information.
