The Meaning of Freedom and the Redefinition of Marriage

Abstract

IN THIS ARTICLE, I will address human and legal base for protection and support of the 1 I will do so from the perspective of Catholic social teaching, since I am Catholic theologian. In addressing this important theme, moreover, I find it necessary to begin by challenging very common presupposition of much social, political, and legal thought today and one representing tremendous threat to the future of the family. That presupposition concerns, specifically, the relation between human rights, personal dignity, and individual freedom. Whereas human dignity and human rights were once understood the basis of human today we all too often tend to reverse that relation, so to base human dignity and rights upon the sovereign power of which in turn is far too often reduced to subjective interests and personal desires. To be sure, we might acclaim the more lively awareness of personal freedom, which Pope Saint John Paul II accredits for various positive phenomena characterizing the in the early years of his pontificate, including greater attention to the quality of interpersonal relationships, the promotion of dignity of women and responsible procreation well heightened sense of responsibility for the education of children. At the same time, however, he mourned certain corruption of the idea and the experience of to which he in turn attributed a disturbing degradation of some fundamental values. Human freedom was, specifically, being understood and lived as an autonomous power of self-affirmation, often against others, for one's own selfish well-being, rather than as capacity for realizing the truth of God's plan for marriage and the (2) Here, in the very heart of the family, which in turn he recognized the heart of human civilization, John Paul thus pointed to confrontation between two conflicting interpretations of human freedom: antithesis between individualism and personalism. (3) An Individualistic Understanding of Freedom The first of these--an individualistic understanding of freedom-is, he explains, a freedom without responsibilities.As such, it is proper to utilitarian manners of thinking, which instrumentalize persons to one's own gain and represent a systematic and permanent threat to the family by opposing freedom to love. This, of course, is the notion of freedom that I pointed to above, socially and culturally pervasive, so to be blessed by public opinion. This blessing, in turn, leads to the confusion of what Georges Cardinal Cottier points to the and the normative. (4) Hence, when certain behaviors or manners of acting are observed with frequency among given population, they are regarded suitable or corresponding to human nature regardless of their consequences for the social order. Within our present cultural situation, marked by rampant individualism, this means that it is considered normal to accord to individual consciences prerogative of independently determining the criteria of good and evil and then acting accordingly, John Paul remarks. It follows that each individual is faced with his own truth, different from the truth of others. (5) The social norm has become, in other words, that of living and acting without norms. The consequence of this absence of ethical and ontological norms is what theoreticians in various fields refer to the survival of the fittest: not only from biological perspective, Darwin theorized, but also socially, Thomas Hobbes would have it; politically, we witness in various tyrannical forms of government, and morally, is the case in utilitarianism. Utilitarianism is, specifically, John Paul explains, a civilization of production and of use, civilization of 'things' and not of 'persons', civilization in which persons are used in the same way things are used. …