Natural Law and Pressing Down a Wildcat

“The paradox is that the natural law is both really known, and really suppressed. Among my Catholic friends, who see the knowledge, I stress the suppression. Among my Reformed friends, who see the suppression, I stress the knowledge. Sometimes people think that suppressed moral knowledge is the same as weakened moral knowledge with weakened power over behavior. On the contrary…pressing down on one’s conscience does not make it weak any more than pressing down a wildcat makes it docile. It only makes it more violent. Its claws are even sharper in a culture with a Christian past, like ours, for then people have more to suppress.”  

-J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man

Pressing Down a Wildcat

“The paradox is that the natural law is both really known, and really suppressed. Among my Catholic friends, who see the knowledge, I stress the suppression. Among my Reformed friends, who see the suppression, I stress the knowledge. Sometimes people think that suppressed moral knowledge is the same as weakened moral knowledge with weakened power over behavior. On the contrary…pressing down on one’s conscience does not make it weak any more than pressing down a wildcat makes it docile. It only makes it more violent. Its claws are even sharper in a culture with a Christian past, like ours, for then people have more to suppress.”  

J. Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience: Politics and the Fall of Man

Sexual Immorality: The Downward Spiral of Our Rationalizations

"Consider sexual promiscuity. The official line is that modern people do not take sex outside of marriage seriously any longer; mere moral realists say this is because we no longer realize the wrong of it. I maintain that we do know it is wrong but pretend that we do not...

...Another tactic is inventing private definitions of marriage. Quite a few people 'think of themselves as married' although they have no covenant at all. Some even fortify the delusion with 'moving-in ceremonies' featuring happy words without promises. Unfortunately, people who 'think of themselves as married' refuse the obligations of real marriage, but demand all of its cultural privileges. Rationalization is so much work that they require other people to support them in it. Such demands make the cultural protection of marriage more difficult. 

Yet another ruse is to admit that sex belongs within marriage but to fudge the nature of the connection. By this reasoning I tell myself that sex is okay because I am going to marry my partner, because I want my partner to marry me, or because I have to find out if we could be happily married. An even more dangerous fudge is to divide the form of marriage from its substance--to say 'We don't need promises because we're in love.' The implication, of course, is that those who do need promises love impurely, that those who do not marry are more truly married than those who do.

This  last rationalization is even more difficult to maintain than most. Love, after all, is a permanent and unqualified commitment to the true good of another person, and the native tongue of commitment is, precisely, promises. To work, therefore, this rule requires another: having deceived oneself about the nature of marriage, one must now deceive oneself about the nature of love. The usual way of doing so is to mix up love with the romantic feelings that characteristically accompany it, and call them 'intimacy.' If only we have these feelings, we tell ourselves, we may have sex. That is to say, we may have sex--if we feel like it. 

Here is where things really become interesting, because if the criterion of being-as-good-as-married is sexual feelings, then obviously no one who has sexual feelings may be prevented from marrying. So homosexuals must be able to 'marry;' their unions, too, should have cultural protection. At this point suppressed conscience strikes another blow, reminding us that marriage is linked with procreation. But now we are in a box. We cannot say 'therefore homosexuals cannot marry,' because that would strike against the whole teetering structure of rationalizations. Therefore we decree that having been made marriageable, homosexuals must be made procreative; the barren field must seem to bloom. There is, after all, artificial insemination. And there is adoption. So it comes to pass that children are given as a right to those from whom they were once protected as a duty. The normalization of perversion is complete."

--Jay Budziszewski, The Revenge of Conscience

 

The Cost of Sexual Immorality

"We can find a good example of such further penalties [for violating the natural law] in the consequences of breaking the precept that confines sex to marriage. An immediate consequence of their violation is injury to the procreative good: one might get pregnant but have nobody to help raise the child. Another immediate consequences is injury to the unitive good: one misses the chance for that total self-giving which can develop only in a secure and exclusive relationship. And there are long-term consequences too, among them poverty, because single women must provide for their children by themselves; adolescent violence, because male children grow up without a father's influence; venereal disease, because formerly rare infections spread rapidly through sexual contact; child-abuse, because live-in boyfriends tend to resent their girlfriends' babies and girlfriends may resent babies that their boyfriends did not father; and abortion, because children are increasingly regarded as a burden rather than a joy. The longer people persist in violating the natural law, the heavier the penalties for violation. Provided they do not refuse the lesson, eventually even the dullest among us may put the clues together and solve the puzzle. Over the course of its history a culture may have to relearn the timeless truths many times over. It may of course refuse to learn them and be destroyed."

--J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know 

Ramming Our Heads Against the Law

"For breaking the foundational moral principles that we can't not know, one penalty is guilty knowledge, because deep down we can't help but know the truth. For breaking any precepts of the natural law..there are other penalties, too. Those who cut themselves bleed. Those who give offense to others are hated. Those who live by knives die by them. Those who betray their friends have none left. Those who abandon their children have none to stroke their brows when they are old. Those who travel from bed to bed lose the capacity for trust. Those who torture their consciences are tortured by them in return. Those who suppress their moral knowledge become stupider than they intended. Those who refuse the one in whose image they are made live as strangers to themselves. We see that the principle that God is not mocked, that whatever one sows he reaps, is woven into the fabric of our nature. Not all our disobedience can unravel a single stitch. Some penalties show up within the lifetime of the individual; others may tarry until several generations have perished in the same wrongdoing. But the penalties for defiance are cumulative, and eventually they can no longer be ignored."

-J. Budziszewski, What We Can't Not Know (2011 A.D.)