Yesterday Ortho McNeil added warnings its patch labels, telling women that if they use the product, they will be exposed to 60 percent more estrogen than they would if they used regular pills.

It’s about damn time.

People have been asking questions about the safety of the birth control patch almost since its introduction in 2002.

Four months ago, an Associated Press investigation revealed that patch users suffer a three times higher rate of clotting and death than women on the pill. The AP also reported on a dozen women in their teens and early 20s who died from blood clots “believed to be related to the birth control patch, and dozens more survived strokes and other clot-related problems.”

In September, Public Citizen Health Research Group added Ortho Evra to its list of dangerous medications, while last month, the AP reports, OB-GYN Miguel Cano of Reedley, Calif., wrote to “several thousand” women patients recommending that they discontinue use of the patch.

A spokeswoman for Ortho McNeil told the AP that the warning speaks for itself and that her company is cooperating with the FDA.

But the AP also reports that documents released to attorneys show that Ortho McNeil has long been analyzing the death and injury reports among patch users, and that an internal Ortho McNeil memo shows that in 2003, the company declined to fund a study comparing the patch to the Ortho-Cyclen pill because there was “too high a chance that study may not produce a positive result for Evra.”

Maybe this is the kind of thing that will get the birth control industry off its butt to start developing new nonhormonal forms of contraception.

“You had sex with animals?” Colmes asked, with regard to reports of Horsley’s past experience with bestiality and homosexuality. “Absolutely. I was a fool. When you grow up on a farm in Georgia, your first girlfriend is a mule.”

When Colmes suggested that maybe that’s not the case for everyone who grows up on a farm in Georgia, Horsley shot back, “It has historically been the case. You people are so far removed from reality … welcome to domestic life on the farm … You experiment with anything that moves when you are growing up sexually. You’re naoveIf it’s warm and it’s damp and it vibrates you might in fact have sex with it.” (And if it has ovaries, a vagina, and it has the ability to lactate, you might in fact make it your mission to take away its control of its own body!)

It is not without irony, folks, that the man’s name is Horsley.

Since listeners obviously just can’t get enough of this stuff, Horsley returned to Colmes’ radio show on Thursday, May 12 and allowed the host to press him on whether or not he’d also engaged in homosexual acts as a horny young buck. “Certainly,” responded Horsley. “If we had a warm watermelon out in the field, I might give it a name.”

Of course, watermelons and mules have no need for safe, legal and accessible reproductive rights.

In its reports on the Horsley confessions, News Hound also noted a conversation in March between Colmes and Randall Terry, the anti-abortion activist who worked on behalf of the Schindler family to keep the late Terry Schiavo alive. (Apparently, Colmes has become a kind of health-teacher/confessor for the junior high-school boys who make up the multi-tentacled life crusaders.) In Terry’s interview with Colmes about the Schiavo case and his past statements about his beliefs that abortion doctors should be executed, Terry bizarrely changed the subject and asked Colmes, “Are you drinking Red Bull … Youre like on drugs  Are you snorting coke? I think that it’s time that you and I just admit to the whole world that’s listening that we used to be homosexual lovers ” It seemed to be a joke , but an odd one coming from a loudly anti-gay Christian.

As if you haven’t yet had your fill of the secret lives of the religious right, there is this week’s report in The Nation exposing accusations against Dr. W. David Hager, the Christian anti-abortion activist ob-gyn that George Bush appointed to the FDA’s Advisory Committee for Reproductive Health Drugs in 2002. Hager has made it his mission to prevent emergency contraception from being sold over the counter (and has so far been successful) and has also campaigned to halt distribution of RU-486. He is the author of books like “As Jesus Cared for Women,” and is a member of Focus on the Family’s Physician Resource Council, and of the Christian Medical and Dental Society. The Nation quotes a passage from “As Jesus Cared for Women,” in which Hager writes, “Even though I was trained as a medical specialist, it wasn’t until I began to see how Jesus treated women that I understood how I, as a doctor, should treat them.”

Actually, according to his ex-wife Linda Davis (formerly Linda Carruth Hager), he treated women in a most un-Jesus-like manner — by sodomizing them against their will. Davis claims he anally raped her from 1995 to the time of their divorce — after 32 years of marriage — in 2002. “I probably wouldn’t have objected so much, or felt it was so abusive if he had just wanted normal [vaginal] sex all the time,” David told the Nation. “But it was the painful, invasive, totally nonconsensual nature of the [anal] sex that was so horrible.”

Davis also told the Nation that Hager had extramarital affairs, pressured her to let him videotape them having sex, and paid her to perform sexual acts she hated, like oral sex and sodomy. When she developed narcolepsy, she said, he began sodomizing her against her will while she slept. “Since [the sodomy] was painful and threatening, I woke up. Sometimes I acquiesced once he had started, just to make it go faster, and sometimes I tried to push him off … I would [confront] David later, and he would say, ‘You asked me to do that,’ and I would say, ‘No, I never asked for it.’”

In the wake of the Nation exposé, Hager has announced that he will not be seeking another term on the FDA’s advisory board when his term ends June 30. Perhaps now he’ll have time to visit Alan Colmes and really open up about his personal life.

Hey, wouldn’t it be funny if they threw an election and one party won because of its firm commitment to moral values, a faith-based worldview and a stand against such repugnant deviancy as gay marriage? And wouldn’t it be even more hysterical if some of that party’s loudest advocates of moral values had in fact been boinking mules and watermelons, and treating their wives like prostitutes?

“I am deeply concerned that they have gone further than I have ever seen them. This is far past a woman’s right to make decisions regarding abortion to the point now that it’s about their right to make decisions on contraception,” Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., told Salon. Murray and her Senate colleague Hillary Clinton have blocked President Bush’s nominee to head the FDA, Lester Crawford, over his inaction as acting director of the agency to approve the morning-after pill for over-the-counter sale. An FDA advisory committee has given the drug overwhelming support as safe and effective, and Canada approved its nonprescription status last week. Publicly, Crawford says his indecision on the drug has nothing to do with ideology, but privately he told Murray it raises his concerns about “behavior,” apparently alluding to arguments that the pill will encourage promiscuity.

There are also indications Crawford sides with those that equate Plan B with “chemical abortion.” During his confirmation hearing two weeks ago, Clinton asked Crawford: “Would you clarify for the committee that emergency contraception is a method for prevention of pregnancy, not the termination of pregnancy?” Crawford responded: “I may need to confer with the experts in the FDA about exactly what the physiology of it is.” Labels on Plan B, the name that its maker, Barr Laboratories, has given it, say “for the prevention of pregnancy.”

Crawford’s remarks troubled Murray. “We need to have confidence as consumers that the FDA approves drugs based on science and efficacy and not on ideology,” she said. Murray added that Crawford’s views suggest trouble for reproductive rights advocates if he is confirmed. “New contraceptives have been going on the market in the last few years and they would all be jeopardized by an FDA using ideology instead of science.”

So far, Crawford’s confirmation vote has not been rescheduled and his appointment has been held up on a different issue — albeit a “moral” one. The Republican chair of the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, Michael Enzi of Wyoming, is calling for a probe into charges Crawford had a “personal relationship” with a female FDA staff member that may have led to her receiving “significant promotions.” White House spokesman David Almacy would only say that Bush still backs Crawford and that “we are hopeful they will approve the nomination so he can receive a full Senate vote and ultimately confirmation.”

Opposition to Plan B is just the latest and most visible drive by conservatives to curtail contraception, according to Heather Boonstra of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a nonprofit research group for reproductive issues. “There’s a constituency out there that equates all contraception with abortion, and they’re organizing in concerted ways to denigrate it,” she says. That constituency includes a number of social and religious groups, but the one that takes the abortion-contraception connection perhaps the most literally is the American Life League (ALL), one of the largest antiabortion lobbyists. Founded 25 years ago, it claims 300,000 families as members.

“Many forms of so-called contraception work by preventing the implantation of an already created human being, and that kills a baby in the womb, and we consider that to be an early abortion,” says ALL’s vice president, Jim Sedlak. He says ALL’s main mission is to inform women that all hormonal birth control methods and the IUD “are actually causing abortions themselves” and to force manufacturers to put that description prominently on contraceptive labels.

ALL’s STOPP International campaign also seeks to cut government funding for Planned Parenthood, which it believes misinforms women about how contraception works. Sedlak says STOPP has been successful at the city level — closing over 100 clinics around the country in the last 10 years — and is now targeting state funding. He pointed to the Texas Legislature’s recent decision to cut Planned Parenthood’s state funding as one of ALL’s biggest victories. “It’s not as fast as we would like, but we’ll take it, and we believe it will have a snowball effect and that when people understand what they’re doing we’ll be closing clinics even faster.”

ALL is not the only threat to Planned Parenthood’s funding. In every one of his budgets, Bush has frozen funds for Title X, the 30-year-old program that pays for family-planning services for low-income women. Susanne Martinez, Planned Parenthood’s vice president for public policy, says that although Congress has restored some of that money, this “assault on family planning” has crippled Planned Parenthood’s contraceptive distribution — about 95 percent of the Title X funds it receives go directly to that service. She is also concerned Bush has appointed to agencies like the FDA and Health and Human Services “people who have very publicly said they opposed the use of birth control for the unmarried. It’s something [Bush] has been doing in a very strategic way.”

Several other groups support ALL’s views and its mission. The Family Research Council joined Republican leaders last Sunday on a national telecast blasting the Democrats for blocking appointments of conservative judges who could decide key reproductive-rights issues. And while the conservative Concerned Women for America (CFA) says it does not take a position on contraception, it does oppose abortion and has been vigorously defending the recent drive by anti-choice pharmacists to stop distributing emergency contraception, which CFA considers an “abortion pill.”

One of the social conservatives’ biggest victories has been the “abstinence-only until marriage” sex education programs in the public schools, according to Boonstra, of the Alan Guttmacher Institute. Those federally funded programs prohibit any discussion of contraception except in the context of failure rates — which Boonstra says are inaccurate. An AGI survey of teachers found one in 50 schools taught abstinence-only in 1988; the number increased to one in four in 1999. That is the most recent accounting period, but the movement has clearly snowballed. The federal government has spent more than $1 billion since 1982 on those programs — of that, $620 million has been spent in the past seven years, and President Bush is seeking an all-time high of $206 million for the 2006 budget. Some states are also moving the programs into elementary schools.

The abstinence-only programs — which have largely replaced safe-sex education — have not only curbed the distribution of condoms and birth control pills in school health clinics, but have entirely banned information about contraceptives and sexual health. The nonprofit Abstinence Clearinghouse, which promotes such programs, says few could argue that refraining from sex is the only sure-fire way to prevent pregnancy and sexually transmitted diseases. And it dismisses repeated studies finding that abstinence-only programs are ineffective in either delaying sexual experience among teens or protecting them from disease. So does Alma Golden, Bush’s pick to head the Population Affairs department, which runs the programs. “One thing is very clear for our children, abstaining from sex is the most effective means of preventing the sexual transmission of HIV, STDs and preventing pregnancy and the emotional, social and educational consequences of teen sexual activity,” she says on the Clearinghouse’s Web site.

Recently, pharmacies have provided another avenue for restricting access to contraception. At least 12 states have introduced “conscience clause” laws that would allow pharmacists to refuse to fill contraceptive prescriptions on moral or religious grounds. Four states, Arkansas, Georgia, Mississippi and South Dakota, already have such laws on the books. The flap over Plan B and RU-486, which results in an abortion within seven weeks, have intensified this drive, but some pharmacists are refusing to dispense any form of birth control. The American Pharmacists Association, which represents about 52,000 pharmacists, supports a compromise that would allow pharmacists to “step away” from dispensing drugs they oppose as long as another pharmacist is on hand to fill the prescription.

Meanwhile, condoms remain on most drugstore shelves, but Boonstra says conservatives have made significant inroads on those as well. “There’s been a campaign against the condom since the late 1990s to say condoms don’t prevent disease,” Boonstra says. She points to a chart on the government’s www.4parents.gov Web site that shows that condoms are only 50 percent effective in preventing chlamydia, gonorrhea and syphilis. “There’s no scientific evidence for this, and in fact, the National Institutes of Health says condoms provide an ‘impermeable barrier [to disease].’ Social conservatives are trying to use science to say condoms don’t work, and they do work.” Fewer clinics, like college health and AIDS-prevention centers, are distributing condoms now thanks to things like budget cuts. Human Rights Watch, a gay-rights advocacy group, has also charged that police have confiscated condoms from AIDS outreach programs in some areas for use as evidence of prostitution or sodomy.

Today, nine in 10 insurance plans cover contraceptive prescriptions, a considerable climb from just a few years ago, but that number could slide again. Twenty-one states mandate contraception coverage in insurance policies, stemming in part from a push by women’s groups outraged that insurers covered Viagra for men but excluded birth control for women. However, about half of all Americans with workplace insurance are covered by employers who self-insure (rather than buy an insurance company plan), and the self-insured are exempt from state requirements.

Conservative groups like the Heritage Foundation and some Catholics are lobbying for plans that can also sidestep state rules. Bush backs such proposals and has made his own moves against contraceptive coverage. His 2002 budget dropped funding for contraceptive benefits in federal-employee insurance plans. Congress restored that funding — though lawmakers have rejected a federal mandate to require contraception benefits as the states do — and the president has since dropped the effort. But last year Illinois became the first state to allow federal employees an insurance plan that does not cover contraceptives, fertility treatment or abortions. Adam Sonfield, of the Alan Guttmacher Institute, is not surprised that the Republican-led Congress and businesses — including conservative ones — are unenthusiastic about such plans; they realize that pregnancy prevention is cost-effective. “There’s only so far the congressional conservatives are willing to go,” he says, “but sometimes they get pretty extreme.”

So how far will this anti-contraception campaign go? As usual, both sides are looking to the polls and public opinion to support their cause. Sen. Murray welcomes the Plan B debate and insists that as the conservatives’ contraception agenda is exposed, they’ll lose ground. “I think the American public is basically outraged. People just cannot believe that access to birth control is in jeopardy. So the more they’re aware, the more they’ll act,” she says. Murray believes she is backed by the polls, which show most Americans still support abortion rights. A New York Times/CBS News poll late last year also found 78 percent of Americans favor requiring pharmacists to fill prescriptions for birth control despite religious objections.

ALL’s Sedlak agrees exposure is key — and that his side will ultimately win over the public. He points to a survey showing that 78.6 percent of Americans believe using birth control will reduce the number of abortions. However, he says that if the public is informed of his position that most contraception actually constitutes abortion, that same majority will then oppose such birth control methods.

“We’ve found that once the women understand that, their whole attitude really changes,” Sedlak says. Bush may also be counting on support for his anti-conception agenda from all those “moral values” voters who turned out overwhelmingly for the Republicans in the last election. A new Belcher poll commissioned by the Democratic National Committee found that in eight battleground states — Ohio, Iowa, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Wisconsin, New Mexico and Nevada — 47 percent of the voters and 51 percent of white women said religious faith influenced their votes as much as traditional political issues.

The sermon enraged my mother, even though I don’t think she considered herself a pro-choice Catholic. I’m a little ashamed that I don’t know for sure, but sometime in the early 1970s we stopped talking politics. I knew she was the house conservative, since my father’s politics were well to her left. Still, she was appalled by the church’s turn to blatant political campaigning on culture-war issues, especially abortion, at the expense of dispensing spiritual wisdom and comfort. I’ve thought about my mother all weekend as I found myself unable to mourn Pope John Paul II. Although he didn’t reach the Vatican until two years after she died, when he got there he promoted leaders just like the antiabortion zealot who so wounded my mother. He cracked down on all dissent and toughened the church’s teachings on issues of sexuality — which happen to be issues of love — which even my somewhat conservative Catholic mother was wise enough to know might require different answers for different hearts.

My mother and much of her family were proto-Reagan Democrats, pre-Ronald Reagan working-class Catholic ethnics who began to fear their party in the wake of what the movements of the 1960s unleashed. But my mom didn’t start out that way. Early on she was warmed by the sunny breezes of curiosity, activism and hope heralded by the civil rights movement and feminism, but most of all by Vatican II. Pope John XXIII was a hero in my household (along with John F. Kennedy), and the two leaders’ convergence seemed to usher in a new era of engagement for American Catholics. The English Mass, new roles for laypeople and women, the emphasis on a direct relationship with God, the overall opening up to questions and new thinking — it seemed epochal, linked to a worldwide spiritual and political enlightenment. For many people the ’60s died in 1968 with the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy, but for liberal Catholics the year things went bad was 1963, when John Kennedy and Pope John XXIII died. My parents mourned both deeply.

Still, they took the promise of Vatican II seriously. They began going to ecumenical Seders at the local Temple Avodah, taking us to the morning Folk Mass, encouraging our spiritual questions. President of our Parish Council, my father defended my substitute teacher, who was nearly run out of town for holding an impromptu sex ed talk with eighth graders (we totally set him up) in which he mentioned condoms. I knew all about condoms; I’d found them in my father’s sock drawer a few years earlier when I was putting away his laundry. I knew my parents loved the church but looked away from some of its harsher, anachronistic teachings — three children were enough! — and they were teaching my brother and sister and me to do the same.

But at some point the church began to fight that kind of relativism. And my mother was susceptible to the message, in national politics too, that the change had all been too much too soon. She was frightened by the tumult of the late 1960s and early ’70s, where my father, who had studied to become a Christian Brother, opposed the excesses but embraced the rest of it. For the first time political argument shook my home, where consensus — about the Kennedys, about the civil rights movement, about the Vietnam War — once reigned. The worst was when my mother, reminding us that we enjoy a secret ballot in the United States, thank you very much, wouldn’t tell us who she supported for president in 1972. We couldn’t imagine that meant anything except that she’d cast a vote for Richard Nixon, and she died without telling us otherwise. It was a low point in my parents’ loving partnership, but they mostly handled it with humor.

And yet, even as my mother began to count herself among the silent majority, to question the violence of the civil rights and antiwar movements, if not their goals, to embrace a certain authoritarianism in American politics and the church, she couldn’t go all the way. Some of her resistance, I think, was the influence of feminism. She wanted a larger role for women in the church. She started using her maiden name, Webster, as her middle name and began to think about going back to work. And then her cancer recurred.

We didn’t talk politics a lot in her last year, and yet I saw her shift back, a little, toward an acceptance of questions and uncertainty and rebellion. Dying I think does that. And while she was too much a traditionalist to completely accept abortion, from our conversations of the time I know she found the issue complex and painful. She was also too much a realist — and, ironically, too much a feeling, compassionate Catholic — to insist that there might never be a reason, a need, a crisis that caused a woman to make a different choice from one she herself thought was right. Dying and leaving behind three school-aged children certainly does that.

I don’t completely know why my mother snapped on that Sunday when she heard the antiabortion sermon. Maybe she worried the priest was right, and even if she went to heaven she wouldn’t see her pro-choice husband and daughter there. I just know that she was crushed, for that afternoon anyway. But I should note that my mother didn’t die without the church. She’d befriended enough priests over the years that they came and said Mass at her bedside, gave her communion, provided her the last sacrament, the anointing of the sick. And they didn’t trouble her with talk about abortion.

So I’ve watched the long goodbye to John Paul II a little aghast at the uniform tone of celebration, as though this pope had not presided over the shutting down of hope for so many Catholics with his 26-year reign. I applaud his commitment to youth, to the poor, to the Third World; his support for a Palestinian state and his opposition to the Iraq war. But I abhor what he did to the church itself. The priesthood is shrinking, thanks at least in part to the prohibition against marriage and against ordaining women. The sex-abuse scandal, which he did far too little to address — and refused to directly apologize for — drove more people away. And he enshrined a leadership cadre of close-minded zealots. We could next have a Nigerian pope, which would have thrilled both my parents, but like most of the cardinals appointed by John Paul II, Francis Arinze is a strident traditionalist who weighed in during last year’s presidential campaign with the news that a pro-choice Catholic politician “is not fit” to take communion. I wonder if Arinze would have delivered it to my dying mother’s bedside, given her doubts about the church’s crusade against pro-choice Catholics.

This is not my mother’s church, and it certainly isn’t mine. I say that with a great sense of loss and sadness. Watching the pope’s long death, I envied him the peace his faith gave him when he needed it most. I found it hard not to resent the fact that men like him denied it to my mother when she most needed it, choosing instead to harangue her about abortion. But she found the church she needed in the end. I don’t expect to be so lucky.

For millions of Catholics, John Paul II is simply the only pope they have ever known; his unusually long rule is the fourth-longest tenure among 265 popes over nearly 2,000 years. Throughout his 26 years as head of the Roman Catholic Church, John Paul II traveled to more countries than all previous popes combined. “He has changed the style of being pope,” Father Thomas Reese, the editor of America magazine, told CNN. “It used to be that the pope stayed home in Europe.”

In our contemporary celebrity-obsessed media culture, the pope was a ready-made star. The 1981 attempt on his life took place at the advent of cable news and was almost too good to be true for the nascent industry which, by the end of its saturation coverage, had turned the pope into an international star/almost martyr/hero. Even at the end of his life, the pope did not fade away quietly, hiding his decline behind curtains, but instead insisted on appearing to the public in his wheelchair, with breathing tube in place, as a symbol of suffering and in solidarity with the sick and frail around the world.

In practical terms, John Paul II has left a powerful mark on the Roman Catholic Church worldwide and the American church in particular, primarily through his teachings — embodied most visibly in 14 encyclicals — and appointments of Catholic leaders. During his papacy, he appointed the majority of bishops and cardinals currently serving in the United States. Long after his death, John Paul II’s ideological positions and teachings will live on through the men he handpicked to lead the church.

Although American Catholics have constituted a significant portion of the population starting with immigration in the 19th century, it wasn’t until the second part of the 20th century that the church really came into its own. The reforms of the Second Vatican Council — primarily the work of Pope John XXIII — played a large role in developing the modern American Catholic Church. But it was the leadership of John Paul II that shaped the Church post-Vatican II, setting the tone for Catholic engagement with the American public square and political life.

Many American Catholics believed — and hoped — that Vatican II would bring their church in closer alignment with modernity, perhaps even allowing more flexibility for the church to adapt to changing times. And it’s possible that if another man had been elected to Peter’s throne after the death of Pope John Paul I, the momentum of Vatican II might have swept more reforms through the Church.

John Paul II, however, while in some ways an unconventional selection — the first non-Italian in more than 400 years, he spent part of his youth writing plays and had connections to the Polish Solidarity movement — was theologically quite conservative. Under his stewardship, the church wavered little, even in the midst of turbulence. The Cold War came and went, sex scandals arose in the American church, and technological advances posed challenges to church doctrine. Through it all, John Paul II steered his church with an orthodox hand.

The pope’s conservatism on issues of gender, reproduction and sexual orientation — he staunchly opposed the ordination of women and took a hard line on homosexuality, abortion and birth control — divided American Catholics. Yet the pope was not uniformly conservative in his thinking. Although the right wing embraced him, they were only able to do so by ignoring major aspects of his teachings. John Paul II’s death, coming on the heels of Terri Schiavo’s, is already prompting calls to honor his memory by embracing a “culture of life.” But while the pope first introduced that phrase to our cultural lexicon, what he meant by it and what is meant by those who would claim his mantle are worlds apart.

You could be forgiven for thinking that “culture of life” was a concept created not by John Paul II but by George W. Bush. Few people have done have more to popularize the phrase — if not its correct spirit — than our current president, who used it even before his first presidential campaign in 2000. While the use of “culture of life” was almost always intended to communicate Bush’s position on abortion, it was actually part of a larger strategy to reach out to Catholic voters.

The phrase was a central part of what is arguably John Paul II’s best-known encyclical, Evangelium Vitae (“The Gospel of Life”), which he released in 1995. Bush’s savvy Catholic advisors — including conservatives Deal Hudson and Tim Goeglein — knew that the phrase would immediately resonate with Catholic voters while indicating nothing more than vague pro-life sentiments to non-Catholics. Bush’s communications staff did the same thing with Protestant hymns and phrases, using code words that went over the heads of those who didn’t recognize them while resonating deeply with those who did.

During Bush’s tenure, the phrase has been employed in the service of opposing abortion, stem-cell research, cloning and — most recently and publicly — the removal of Terri Schiavo’s feeding tube. When, in the third presidential debate, Bob Schieffer asked the candidates a question about abortion, the first words out of Bush’s mouth were: “I think it’s important to promote a culture of life.” A quick Internet search for the words “John Kerry and culture of life” and then “Tom DeLay and culture of life” revealed that the phrase is most often used by conservatives to attack Democrats who “flout the culture of life” and by liberals to sneer at Republicans and their “culture-of-life cronies.” The culture of life has become cemented in American conventional wisdom as equaling conservative social issues.

But a fair look at John Paul II’s use of the phrase and his political priorities must conclude that although he was undoubtedly concerned about abortion and stem-cell research and euthanasia, that list is far from complete. The pontiff also wrote about “the dignity and rights of those who work,” and he spoke out against the widening gap between the world’s rich and poor. He opposed both Gulf Wars in no uncertain terms and strongly communicated his outrage when the abuse at Abu Ghraib was revealed. During a 1999 visit to the United States, John Paul II spoke out against the death penalty, calling the punishment “cruel and unnecessary” and successfully petitioning for the commutation of a death sentence for a Missouri prisoner when he spoke in St. Louis.

Anti-death penalty, antiabortion, antiwar, anti-stem-cell, pro-worker, pro-poor, pro-sick. It’s hard to think of any American politician whose positions reflect the entirety of John Paul II’s “life” concerns. Even the American Catholic Church doesn’t always reflect the pope’s priorities. While John Paul II applied a fairly consistent ethic of life — what the late Cardinal Joseph Bernadin called the “seamless garment of life” — the National Conference of Catholic Bishops has taken a different stance. In 1998, the conference issued a letter called “Living the Gospel of Life: A Challenge to American Catholics” in which the bishops asserted that failure to following church teaching on abortion was more serious than any other issue, implying that a Catholic politician could neglect all other “life” issues and still be considered a good Catholic as long as he opposed abortion; at the same time, no amount of work for the poor or imprisoned or sick could save a pro-choice Catholic.

History will likely judge John Paul II as the pope of many firsts. He was the first pope to set foot in the nation of Israel, the first to enter a mosque and to visit a synagogue, the first to go to Greece since the Eastern Orthodox and Roman churches split over a thousand years ago. And he was the first to draw together centuries of Catholic teaching and vigorously promote them through the lens of “a culture of life.”

His legacy, however, may be limited by an age-old reality: the tendency of political leaders and the faithful to hear what they want to hear and disregard the rest. “The culture of life” is not simply shorthand for abortion and gay marriage and Terri Schiavo. But those are the definitions that are well on their way to becoming the established understanding of the phrase. That would be an unfortunate, but not surprising, result of John Paul II’s rule.