There’s just one thing to keep in mind when you hear the outrage coming from The Catholic Church over contraception: When the Church failed to act on child sexual abuse cases committed by priests who preyed on the innocent for decades (possibly centuries), and then actively engaged in covering it up once victims started going public, it lost all of its moral authority where anything related to children is concerned.

Kaili Joy Gray has an excellent post up at DailyKos that gets to the heart of what’s really behind the hissy fit the Church is having over the new health care requirements for women in regard to birth control …

[...] the pope is especially concerned that if such a policy is implemented, and if Americans continue to not give a damn about what the Church has to say on such “intrinsically evil practices” as contraception—as the vast majority of American Catholics don’t—this will “delegitimize the Church’s participation in public debate.”

That, of course, is the real fear, isn’t it? That the Church will lose its influence over policy debates, that it will continue to lose its moral authority to dictate what our laws should be. And that is why the Catholic Church, from the pope to the Conference of Catholic Bishops to the priests in churches across the country, has declared war—to further assert its “legitimacy.”

Maybe when the Holy Church cleans up its own house we can listen to their moralizing on birth control, but until then they are preaching to empty pews.