Reckoning Rights
Rights bestow privileges and set limits.
The concept of justice cannot be understood without a correlative understanding of rights and responsibilities.
The whole social order may be looked at from this standpoint.
The United States was founded on the idea that there are some natural rights that all human beings possess which set limits on the power of government. "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness."
That there are inherent rights possessed by all human beings is part of the Church's understanding of the natural law. Our culture has abandoned this fundamental outlook on reality and has adopted unnatural law as its guide to life. Rights are now not determined by an objective assessment of human nature but by majority rule. Whatever the majority says is right is right.
This is how the lustful outlook on sexual ethics breeds contempt for the pillars of our civilization. We have concocted a right to privacy and self-determination in order to open the door to divorce on demand, self-sterilization, in vitro fertilization, and abortion. But we cannot limit the effects of our new philosophy of state-given rights just to those areas that serve our libido. Once the door is open, all kinds of other impostors shove their way in: sex-reassignment surgery, euthanasia, forced sterilization, ideological indoctrination in schools and public discourse, same-sex marriage, polygamy, and polyamory. All these new "rights" impose corresponding obligations on society and create new standards for "thought-crimes." From being an idea that limited the power of the state to intrude on the lives of citizens, the concept of rights has become the prybar by which government breaks into our homes and churches.
We have sown the wind.
We will reap the whirlwind.
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