Eroding our moral way of life

WITH reference to your recent editorial on marriage, allow me to make a few points about human well-being and happiness.

I deem the moral health of a culture the key to living freedom nobly and that insight to be within the capacity of every human being.

I have my ear to the ground and am aware of the desire in many parts to stamp out the influence of Christianity, for the sake of new “rights” especially around those basics: life and marriage.

Clear moral wrongs are being turned into “rights”.

The current attempt to define marriage as something it manifestly is not and cannot be reflects an attempt to remake something so basic and natural by means of law and to enforce that remanufacture by coercive state power.

If the state can redefine such a basic as marriage and enforce the redefinition what is to stop it redefining all other relationships such as doctor/patient, lawyer/client, parent/child, confessor/penitent?

Am I alarmist if I reach for that awful word we had stopped using since the collapse of the Berlin Wall: totalitarianism springing from a tyrant state. We had thought that our manner of living would be directed everywhere in a more humane direction after the collapse of European communism.

Let me say we, in the west, were fooled into thinking that we were immune to that temptation to remake human nature by coercive state power.

Yes, I’m ringing an alarm bell before public representatives, public officials and all media outlets because I sense the pervasiveness of the no-God atmosphere being propagated worldwide and utility becoming the sole basis for new laws and all those so-called “rights”.

Depending on utility will eventually shred the moral fabric of society and even erode the very foundations of the democratic way of life.

Money and power seem to dominate all public life now and there are pressures to conform to what I must bluntly call the culture of death, by being lampooned from so many quarters among whom are the pro-choice and political correctness brigades.

I’m sorry for the heat of some of these words especially coming up to Christmas, now for many no more than the old pagan yuletide.

But light to shape the contours of public policy though might follow after some heat, especially when I repeat that I deem what I have uttered about the dignity of the human person flows from the reason of every human being, who makes an effort to think through this grass roots-based knowledge.

Fr Tom Kelleher

Ballinspittle

Co Cork