Exposing a placebo freedom
Freedom of choice is a favorite catchword of those who are for abortion and other moral distortions that make up what's now known as the "culture of death," a phrase coined by the late Pope John Paul II. This concept is behind the notorious Reproductive Health Bill now pending in our Congress.
This freedom of choice was the battle cry, the sledgehammer used to ram open the door and walls of the Christian moral order that prevailed sometime ago in many countries. It was a very popular banzai that managed to seduce a good following, for it captured the secret yearnings of those whose concept of freedom is actually licentiousness.
Thanks to this principle, the Christian tone is vanishing in many parts of the world. What used to be crimes are now redefined as rights of a person. It's now ok not only to abort, but also to engage in pornography, homosexual acts, or to do euthanasia, etc.
Growing in number, the pro-choice people now proudly declare themselves liberated from religion. To them, religious faith is a myth that has finally been dislodged from the world. They are claiming that another era of Enlightenment, courtesy of pure reason and the people's sense of practicality, is now the mainstream.
They claim they are thoroughly post-Christian, that is, they are past Christianity. Sorry, but I have another reading, and that is that they have become post-human. More than abandoning Christianity, they are actually abandoning humanity. Our sense of humanity is currently in the ICU, in comatose waiting for drastic resuscitation.
They don't admit this, of course. But it is not only because of faith that such reading can be made. If examined philosophically, it can be shown that this freedom of choice as understood by the pro-choice people is a grave anomaly and an outright attack on humanity.
In their frame of mind, freedom is stuck with the aspect of choice alone. It does not pay attention to any objective bases or criteria by which the choice is made. It's a freedom that is subjective, depending solely on the whims and preferences of the individual. It floats on the air or drifts in the ocean, without any clear object to engage with or a defined destination to head to. It starts and ends with the individual.
Pope Benedict XVI hit it bull's eye when he recently said that some people conceive freedom as an "untouchable right of the individual" while the "importance of its divine origins and communitarian dimension" are ignored.
"According to this interpretation," he said, "an individual alone can decide and choose the physiognomy, characteristics and finality of life, death and marriage." He insisted that "true liberty is founded and developed ultimately in God. It is a gift that is possible to welcome as a seed and to make it mature responsibly so as to truly enrich the person and society."
He clarified that our freedom is by definition built on an objective "universal natural moral law that precedes and unites all our rights and duties." It's never just a purely subjective affair of individuals.
Related to this disreputable type of freedom of choice is the abused and exaggerated version of what is originally an objective right to privacy. Again the pro-choice people understand this right to privacy as a blanket license for any person to do whatever he wants. The only restriction is that he does not make a public mess.
These two dangerous moral principles are the main ingredient in the very dangerous bill to be discussed shortly in the US Congress. This is the Freedom of Choice Act or FOCA, which seeks to go beyond simply codifying the case that led to the legalization of abortion, the Roe vs. Wade case. It seeks to dismantle whatever restrictions and regulations many states in the US have validly made with respect to abortion.
FOCA therefore represents the peak of the malice of an ungrounded freedom of choice and an unhinged right to privacy. It is the sum and substance of all the harm these questionable moral principles can cause.
The Reproductive Health Bill in our Congress is patterned after the FOCA, though still in its initial stage. But it clearly shares the same philosophy. It uses the same rotten moral principles.
(Fr. Cimagala is the Chaplain of Center for Industrial Technology and Enterprise (CITE), Talamban, Cebu City. Email: roycimagala@hotmail.com)