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Today all over the world,
radical feminism is busy deconstructing the natural order. An errant
philosophy has taken hold that all history is constructed, that there is
no single true history, no single truth: that all societies, all systems
of law are mere constructs; they may be deconstructed and reconstructed
differently.
Around the world, legislatures, judiciaries and the media
are also caught up in this nonsense, all in a ludicrous attempt to free
human activity from the moral constraints of the natural law. Even
fundamental institutions like marriage and the family are being ordered
differently, experimentally.
Perhaps the most disturbing of all is the
push to sever “recreational” or “fun” aspects of sexual
intercourse from the serious responsibilities of procreation. Indeed,
the last decades of the 20th century have seen determined and
ingenious attempts to disconnect sexuality from family formation.
Around the world, in order to be “freed from unwanted fertility”,
the healthy reproductive systems of more than a billion women are being
deconstructed or reconstructed differently with contraceptives, or
surgery. Every year, while a fast-growing team of IVF technicians
construct tens of thousands of unnatural pregnancies, an army of
abortionists deconstruct some forty-five million pregnancies. Often in
the same hospitals, depending on which room and which womb, new life is
deliberately created and new life deliberately destroyed. And amidst all
this, sexual aberrations and moral disorders are being proclaimed as
human rights, as experts in deconstructionism declare with great
certainty "There is no natural order"! Nonsense, of course. We
have only to step outside of an evening and look up at the stars to be
conscious of Divine Order, to see just a little of the awesome miracle
of order that has made life on earth possible. We see everywhere
evidence of a powerful, purposeful Intellect, everywhere God's dazzling
creativity, an infinite talent for brilliant, unerring design.
Some 18
billion years ago, as near as 20th century physicists can make it out,
space, time and matter came from nowhere and from nothing into existence
in a singular burst of light that was at one and the same time
fortuitously and precisely calculated to bring forth carbon-based life.
This universe, or at least the part we know, was made to order, with
stunning precision ordered that human beings might live. Had our earth's
orbit or tilt or force of gravity, or any one of countless other
attributes of earth and its universe been ever so slightly different, we
would not be here. And the question arises: is it probable that in so
finely wrought a universe, we alone are completely free of law, free to
live in moral lawlessness, to be a
law unto ourselves?
Radical feminists today answer "Yes"; and
their infamous "right to choose" has unleashed anti-family
forces of formidable destructiveness. True, we are creatures of free
will, but because God has endowed us also with intellect, we know that
we must make our choices rational and moral. Choices that line up our
will with God's Will. Choices that respect the absolutes of the
universal moral law. Choices that are logically consistent with natural
law. Look around us. All the earth obeys the Lord. Spring, Summer,
Autumn, Winter; the trees, rivers, the crops, the birds of the air, the
animals of the wild, the creatures of the deep. Everywhere is intricate,
ordered ecology, a pattern of obedience, a pattern of natural laws and
natural consequences, an enduring pattern of generation and
regeneration.
Human life, too, has pattern and form and order that calls
for our obedience, for our good will towards God's will. The generation
of each new human being calls for our cooperation with the creator. Each
human life is a unique unrepeatable gift from the Lord. There is a
genuine human ecology, an ecology protecting the family based on
marriage, an ecology in which the mutual gift of the man and the woman
creates a climate of love wherein the child can be born and grow. It is
an ecology receptive to life, an ecology that can have no place for the
moral disorder of contraception, or for the abominable crime of
abortion.
Yet for much of human society today, there is no understanding
of this ecology. Everywhere there is a growing perversity that refuses
to acknowledge the fundamental order of things. Emerging is a recklessly
foolish bloody-mindedness that scoffs at the age-old moral absolutes,
that refuses to face the true consequences of defying the natural order.
Feminist arrogance goes on insisting that women today must have more
choices. There's a kind of collector's fanaticism for acquiring choices,
but without the collector's discernment for what's genuine and what's
counterfeit. There is the fanatic's insistence that all possible choices
be made available, irrespective of the consequences. New counterfeit
choices, new emergency contraceptives, new abortion pills, new vaccines
against pregnancy (as though it were some ghastly disease): all of these
are being developed for women, by ideologically driven United Nations
(UN) bodies, and sold dishonestly as new international human rights. I
have attended many UN conferences and I have witnessed at these meetings
a sustained attempt to compromise the fundamental basis of human rights,
the inherent and inviolable dignity of every person. In particular I
have seen the development of an exceedingly clever campaign to
obliterate the human rights of the unborn child. I have witnessed also a
bold attack on the rights of conscience and on religious freedoms. In
particular, I have seen attacks on the freedom of health-care providers
to refuse to perform abortions; attacks on the rights of parents to
raise their children in the fullness of their own faith and morals, in
particular, to teach them that abortion, contraception and sterilization
are wrong, that promiscuity is wrong, that homosexual practices are
wrong, that homosexual partners cannot marry. What I have seen is the
trivialization and distortion of the fundamental meaning of sexual
relations and roles, of the dignity and value of marriage, of motherhood
and of fatherhood, and their critical importance to social
sustainability.
Yet there is no other way, no alternative lifestyle
capable of maintaining a coherent and stable society. There is no
alternative morality, no alternative methods of family formation capable
of protecting the most vulnerable in human society.
At the heart of any
caring, stable society is the practice of ordering sexuality towards the
service of the family and the community. Responsible sexuality adheres
to three essentials: sexual relations must be based, on a truly tender
love; on truly faithful love; and on truly intimate love. And this love
must all come together in the deep, irrevocable commitment of marriage.
Prostitution, IVF, divorce, pornography, homosexuality, promiscuity,
abortion and contraception—all of these things violate one or all of
the essentials—at best, they can only simulate true intimacy,
tenderness and fidelity.
It is a curious paradox that, everywhere,
physical sexuality is being displayed, promoted and distended, yet
perversely the real and full meaning of human sexuality is being
trivialized. Displays of physical sexuality pervade society: the media,
the cinema, literature, drama, education and politics. All are saturated
with sexual innuendo and graphic eroticism, bent on destroying intimacy,
and mocking fidelity and tenderness. In sexual relations, the
unspeakable has become commonplace; and it is increasingly difficult to
foster in our children the normal protective mechanisms of childhood
innocence.
There can be no doubt that late 20th century attitudes
towards family and sexuality are threatening the moral and social
coherence of our communities. I want you to consider for a moment an
interesting idea put forward by Professor Leon Kass: that we ignore at
our peril the role of natural human repugnance as a protective mechanism
for our societies.
In an excellent article “The Wisdom of Repugnance”
in the New Republic[1],
Professor Kass, addressing the issue of human cloning, says that
repugnance is the emotional expression of deep wisdom, beyond reasons
power fully to articulate it. Beginning with the natural and social
anthropology of sexual reproduction, he says: Human societies virtually
everywhere have structured child-rearing responsibilities and systems of
identity and relationship on the bases of these deep natural facts of
begetting. The mysterious yet ubiquitous love of one's own is everywhere
culturally exploited to make sure that children are not just produced
but cared for and to create for everyone clear ties of meaning,
belonging and obligation.
But, he says, it is wrong to treat such
naturally rooted social practices as mere cultural constructs that we
can alter with little human cost. He warns us to resist those who have
begun to refer to sexual reproduction as the traditional method of
reproduction, who would have us regard as merely traditional, and by
implication arbitrary, what is in truth not only natural but most
certainly profound. It seems to me that at least some strands of human
rights education and sex education today are undertaking the elimination
of natural repugnance towards abortion, homosexual practices, and the
whole tacky range of fertility-regulating procedures being sold to women
and adolescents.
Sophisticated sexual health programs are being designed
quite specifically to eliminate the cultural, social, and religious
barriers to dubious new and existing methods of fertility regulation, to
hitherto illicit sexual practices, to promiscuity and pornography. These
mega-marketing programs produce a manipulated consent. In effect,
education programs are now tampering with the deep natural facts of
begetting. The human cost is incalculable, immense. Society has always
been able to accommodate a few aberrations, but if those aberrations
become a critical mass, then the center cannot hold—order caves into
chaos.
This is the very real danger confronting any society when it
endorses for any significantly growing number of people patterns of
living that defy the natural order. Consider the growing numbers of
single-parent families. As Washington columnist Charles Krauthammer has
written: “Illegitimacy is the royal road to poverty and all its
attendant pathologies. In a competitive economy and corrupting culture,
it is hard enough to raise a child with two parents. To succeed with
only one requires heroism on the part of the young mother. Heroism is
not impossible. But no society can expect it as the norm. And any
society that does is inviting social catastrophe of the kind now on view
in the inner cities of America.”[2]
Social catastrophe, we know, is not confined to the inner cities of
America. The whole of Western society is affected: there is considerable
doubt as to whether we share any longer a core group of basic moral
values. We are a society that has abandoned reasonableness and logical
consistency, two very important structural principles of the natural
law.
Priding ourselves on being a pluralist society, we have settled for
a bumble bath of conflicting ideologies and philosophies. We have
violated intellectual integrity in order to endorse multiplicity of
choice. When a society is no longer willing to uphold family unity, or
to condemn pornography, or to ordain natural maternal care as best for
its babies, it is a foolish society. It is a society that has lost its
capacity for rational thought and for the rigorous logic that dictates
fundamental natural moral imperatives. It is rational thought and
rigorous logic, not sexism or homophobia, that forces us to recognize
that certain things men and women may want to do have unacceptable
consequences. It is reason that brings us to a recognition of the
prescriptive natural laws that are particularly relevant to sexuality,
reproduction and the raising of children, and that rule out abortion,
adultery, lying and sodomy. These acts are always and everywhere wrong,
just as it is always and everywhere right for the young of the human
species to be born into families.
There is a universal positive natural
law affirming that it is good for each of us to live in a family. For
despite the odd regional or historical aberration, the family is the
common life of a man and a woman in lawful union together with their
children. At the heart of the modern rejection of traditional family
values is a yen for freedom untrammeled by natural law. But we have
failed to grasp one of the central paradoxes of human endeavor: that
freedom can operate only within order, that your personal freedom
depends on my self-discipline. Self-indulgence leads to chaos, and in
chaos there is much fear, much injustice, and woefully inadequate
protection for the vulnerable, for the old, the weak and the very young.
Contemporary forces pressuring governments to redefine the family are
essentially destructive anti-social forces risking chaos; for example,
the growing movement for homosexuals to be allowed to adopt children.
This kind of social experimentation lacks prudence, for it would use
children as experimental objects towards others’ ends. We have all
grasped the concept of social justice. But it seems incredible how few
understand the prior concept of social prudence. Prudence, says
Aristotle, is the charioteer of the other virtues. Aquinas says “Moral
virtue cannot be without prudence because it is a habit of choosing,
i.e. making us choose well.” And it appears to me that much of the
experimentation in family formation misses the fundamental conceptual
difference between gambling and choosing, between gambling with a child’s
future and choosing rationally to secure a child’s future. Gambling,
to be sure, gives a beguiling sense of power and excitement, but it runs
counter to the natural law principles that we should favor the common
good, that we should pursue it with reasonableness, that we must be
accountable for the consequences of our actions, and that we must not
ignore the goodness of any of the basic values. (The basic value most
relevant here is the natural endowment of each child with parents of the
opposite sex).
A sense of biological parenthood is important for natural
family bonding. Benedict Ashley argues that the sense of actual
flesh-and-blood relationship is even more important for the physical and
psychological security of a child than a permanent, socially-recognized
and honorable commitment between the parents. For while commitment
depends on the variable will of the couple, flesh and blood is something
tangible and irrevocable.[3]
Forceful groups that are pushing female-headed families, homosexual
marriage and adoption rights, de facto arrangements, serial marriage and
divorce are opponents of the family. There is a sense in which such
groups can function only with some degree of hypocrisy. They prize their
sexual freedom but they refuse to acknowledge that their freedom to
thwart moral laws relies on the order being maintained, on others
continuing to obey those laws. Their ability to be immoral or even
amoral in relative safety and comfort relies on others continuing to be
moral. They rely on families who respect the moral law to hold the
natural order against the tide of chaos. There is no such thing as a
laissez-faire civilization. Tolerance is a fine ideal when we are
dealing with harmless differences. But there is no virtue in tolerating
evil. On the contrary, there is complicity.
The story of Adam and Eve
and choosing from the Tree of Knowledge has, I believe, more relevance
today than ever before in man’s history. Whether we believe it really
happened or view it rather as some quaint fable, we can hardly fail to
recognize the current significance of the warning offered by this
primeval experience or cautionary tale. For never before have we had
such unrestricted access to choices that are proving so dangerously
unmanageable.
Technological prowess is fast outstripping our capacity to
understand the social and ethical consequences of what we know how to
do. We must choose more carefully what we want to know. But researchers
even now are reaching for a whole new bag of dubious fruits such as male
pregnancy, ontogenesis, and embryo eugenics, fruits that they must know
we haven’t a hope of being able to handle wisely. Many
scientists appear to labor under the misapprehension that knowledge is
some finite pool which must all be revealed sooner or later: the order
of selection is irrelevant—it’s all only a matter of time. This is
arrogant nonsense. Knowledge is infinite, and if man lives another
billion years on this earth, he will still not have plumbed the depths
or reached the perimeters of all there is to know. He must still choose
what he wants to know and these choices will still retain significance
for how he is to live and what he is to become.
It is vital to remember
that while lobby groups can change our state and national and
international laws, there is no one, there is nothing, that can change
the natural law. It is written indelibly in the human heart. No United
Nations body, no Human Rights Commission, no Law Reform Society, no
Doctors’ Reform society, nor any emergency, crisis, catastrophe, or
other conceivable set of circumstances, can erase or alter one jot, any
part of that law. The natural law remains universally applicable till
the end of time. As Aquinas says, “…every human law has just so much
of the nature of law, as it is derived from the law of nature. But if at
any point it deflects from the law of nature, it is no longer a law but
a perversion of law”. Or as Abraham Lincoln once said more simply, “There
is no law that can give me the right to do what is wrong.”
We need to
remember this: that when man’s time on earth comes to an end, the
overwhelmingly significant factor for mankind will not be the
chronological period throughout which we managed to clutch onto
existence, but rather the morality of the methods by which we held on.
There may be some here who recognize abortion and eugenics to be ignoble
methods for enhancing human survival but can see no harm in
contraception. Yet acceptance of abortion is logically implicit in the
acceptance of contraception. To approve contraception is to approve in
principle abortion. It is to will the same principle, to propound the
same philosophy. A philosophy that will concede no reason for all acts
of sexual intercourse to remain open to conception, can find no reason
why abortion or eugenics should not be practiced. You see, if there is
contempt for the spiritual element in the human intimacies that generate
life, then there is contempt for life itself. If it is not the case that
all human life is sacred, then no human life is sacred. If there is not
an inviolable right to life for everyone, then there is an inviolable
right to life for no one.
In losing the universal acceptance of
children, we stand to lose an integral part of our humanity. It is from
the intensely private, wonderful, heart-warming intimacy between husband
and wife that it has been ordained by God that each baby should be
conceived. Yet the feminist ascendancy in the last thirty years has
brought to us the delusion that we may with impunity defy one of the
first principles of natural law: that procreation is good, to be
supported and favored, and what threatens it to be avoided. The errant
view has taken hold that babies are products, optional extras, that can
be ordered or cancelled at will, any time, for any reason or no reason.
It is perhaps the most curious phenomenon of our century, this delusion
that all of us, including adolescents, have the right to be “sexually
active”, untrammeled by the intolerable threat of having a baby. How
gross this foolish decree that we have the right to unlimited
recreational sex while at the same time reserving the right not to have
to carry to full term any child conceived in the carefree exercise of
the aforementioned right.
At the international level, gender
mainstreaming, the ethically dubious feminist tool for ideological
indoctrination, has sought to establish the notion that all human rights
are relative, are culturally constructed, and need reinterpretation over
time [E/CN.4/1996/105, paras. 13, 58]. Old male rights, such as
religious and conscientious objection, recede as new women's rights,
such as the right to abortion, emerge. The underlying premise of a great
deal of reinterpretation of UN human-rights instruments is that marriage
and gender roles are cultural constructs that can be altered. The new
core values hold that contraception and abortion and freedom to express
sexual preference are essential to the full enjoyment of human rights.
And this is the tragedy of the most affluent of the late 20th century
societies around the world: that we have allowed human rights discourse
to be hijacked in order to establish a self-obsessed culture oblivious
to the disastrous effects our willful actions have on each other.
Legislatures and judiciaries around the world are being pressured by
powerful groups demanding that governments repeal all laws prohibiting
abortion and sodomy.. Wherever remnants of decency and traditional
morality remain, governments are being pressured to enforce
anti-discrimination laws as the tenets of decency and morality are
increasingly condemned as discriminatory against those who do not
subscribe to them. All limiting laws on access to abortion, and on the
full enjoyment by adolescents of their sexual and reproductive rights,
all protective laws such as age limits on homosexual initiation, on
access to abortion, or parental notification are being seen as
discriminatory against adolescents. Discriminatory attitudes towards
premature sexual activity and towards abortion are said to exacerbate
the dangers of adolescent pregnancy, of "adolescent vulnerability
to reproductive ill-health".[4]
The new sexual orientation rights are being supported by particularly
pernicious perversion of genuine human rights. For example, the special
protection for motherhood and childhood and special support for families
proclaimed by the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is now being
portrayed as discriminatory towards homosexual couples. In
effect, what is happening is that powerful forces within the United
Nations are conducting a form of globalized biological warfare. This is
a war against the natural sexual order and against the natural patterns
of family formation.
Towards Binding International Human Rights Law UN
treaty bodies are even now examining each article of UN treaties our
countries have already agreed to, with a view to reinterpreting them in
the transforming light of the new gender perspective. These
reinterpretations are to translate into binding international human
rights law and this international law is to override not only national
sovereignty but also individual rights and freedoms relating to
conscience and religion. And the outcome? Powerful strategists in the UN
system are proceeding to shape abortion as a human right, to craft new
rights and freedoms for homosexual partners; and to confer on
adolescents (from age 10) full enjoyment of sexual and reproductive
freedoms and rights.[5]
The objectives of the UN's shift to ideologically defined human rights
are clear: 1. To make abortion a human right. 2. To free adolescent
sexuality from parental supervision to invest adolescents with a right
to privacy, a right to contraception and abortion services without
parental notification. 3. To assign
the same rights and privileges to homosexual relationships as to
traditional marriage and the founding of a family 4. To free both adult
and adolescent sexuality from religious influence.[6]
If we wish to maintain our sanity, we must defeat these objectives and
return to what we know. We must return to family. For The basic human
survival pattern for all mankind has always been the family. Each of us
comes into the world as a son, or as a daughter; we take a family name,
which immediately dispels anonymity. It is family that establishes and
upholds the true value of each person. It should be understood that for
the survival of a truly human race we must continue to respect the
natural laws of family formation and sexuality. For if we contemplate
honestly and deeply man’s mysterious existence in this temporary,
speck-sized annex off eternity and infinity, we are forced to
acknowledge how little we know of its meaning, its origin and its
destiny. But of one thing we can be certain: that as human beings we are
singularly privileged just to be alive. And not poverty nor pain, nor
heartache, nor
desperation; not suffering nor sickness, nor deformity;
not fear nor loneliness nor depression, not even madness can alter or
negate that privilege, or warrant the coaxing or the wresting of that
privilege from us, or the denying of that privilege to others.
Whatever the future of the family, we must hold tight to that first
principle of natural law: life is good, and to be supported and favored,
and all that threatens it is to be avoided. Somehow we have to find the
honesty and the humility to acknowledge and respect the profoundly
necessary ties between sexuality and the human family. It is really a
choice beyond our ken, this choice to bring life or deny to life to
another human being. In losing the ability to accept with tolerance and
equanimity the conception and birth of all babies, we have lost an
integral part of our humanity. Our hearts have been overlaid with a
sophistication that has disguised the essential and enduring truth that
procreation isn’t a choice—it is a need, perhaps the oldest deepest,
most fundamental need of every human being, a profoundly compelling need
to share the miracle of life. Should we be able to throw off the
absurdities constraining us to deny this need, who knows, we may be
moved once again to respond spontaneously to the creation of each new
life with the heart’s joyous leap of recognition and welcome, once again
to echo Adam’s cry of deep satisfaction: “Ah, this one is bone of my
bone, flesh of my flesh…”. To the extent that we can no longer make that
response, we have become dehumanized, the foolish victims of a choice,
hailed as a freedom, and fast becoming a tyranny. In the midst of a
world which denies the fundamental truths of human sexuality, we must
continue to affirm that authentic love and fulfillment are achieved only
through openness to life, upholding the dignity of each person from
conception, and cherishing the loving commitment to marriage and the
family, on which a peaceful, caring society is founded.
Endnotes:
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