Sinful Behavior Quotes
This is a very important quotation because it is the official ban of the Roman Catholic Church against birth control of all forms. Prior to 1930, there was no official prohibition against birth control although individual Roman Catholics had argued that it was sinful. For example, see St. Augustine {625106}.
Harrison was a General at the time.
This was a poem on copyright infringement which he held wrong. In American history, there has always been a significant part of the American population who were opposed to copyright on both moral and public policy grounds. In the first decades of existence, the United States did not legally recognize copyright. American publishers copied and republished English works with no compunctions. Benjamin Franklin was one of the worst offenders for people who saw it as an offence. English publishers and some American authors lobbied heavily in America and finally got Congress to pass copyright legislation. However, with every new technology, the battle is fought anew, and large numbers of Americans will use copyrighted material contrary to existing law and feel morally justified in doing so, Publishers and other owners of intellectual property then over compensate and they have lobbied heavily to stop what they call piracy by impinging what used to be the legitimate rights of consumers, readers and scholars—even those who were not violating copyright. It is another of those American political issues that never gets settled and is battled in almost every generation.
The official position of the church was against the child molestation and rape by pedophile priests as it was against artificial contraception. Harris based his conclusion on the effort the church leaders and priests were making for each of the two issues. While the Pope condemned in no uncertain terms the pedophilia of the priests, the sermons and the literature of the church dealt with contraception much more frequently. At the time, the church was still covering up the sex scandal and some church officials were still in denial as to the extent. When the Pope was a cardinal, he also contributed to the cover-up, claiming to be hamstrung by the limitations of cannon law with regard to defrocking perverted priests.
