The Blessing or the Curse: Whose Values Will Guide Us? Where Will They Lead Us?

Abstract

What happens when secular liberalism embraces an anthropological worldview that sees man as merely a solitary, rights-bearing individual? When radical autonomy is valued as an end to be pursued, and when individual "choice" is to be embraced regardless of the consequences to the common good?

Reviewing landmark United States Supreme Court cases that hold out as aspirational principles a right to contracept (Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird), a right to abort (Roe v. Wade), a right to engage in sodomy (Lawrence v. Texas) – though not, at least for now, a right to euthanize – the author meditates upon a simple, biologically-driven truth: western liberal secular society will cease to exist within another generation or two, having embraced a Culture of Death that will be its undoing. It will be superseded by more vibrant cultures that have not embraced such a biological dead end – perhaps Islam in a depopulated Europe, and Christianity in the global south.

Examining Catholic Social Teaching, the author makes the case that only by re-embracing a Christian, Culture-of-Life ethic that had once shaped the West will the nations of the Global North be able to reverse their death march.

Keywords: contraception, Griswold, Eisenstadt, Roe, Wade, Lawrence, culture of death, culture of life, catholic, catholicism, hyperautonomy, choice, sodomy, abortion, Catholic Social Teaching