Following our look last week at the community’s mental health problem arising from the inability of large sections of the community to understand the nature and meaning of marriage, it is time to examine our serious problems in understanding human sexuality.
There are moral truths associated with the exercise of human sexuality, but these are little understood in the public arena, and, worse still, there is often a deep resentment about the existence of a moral law.
These problems stem mainly from the mistaken idea that the moral law is something imposed on us from outside – by custom, by law, by the Church, or even by God Himself.
In reality, the moral law is the truth about human nature. It is who we are and how we work. It tells us what is true to our nature and that we will suffer negative consequences if we choose to act in ways that are untrue to our nature. A big part of our nature is that we are social beings, and therefore the moral law embraces our relationships with others and with society.
Considering how opinionated and misguided we humans can be, it is not surprising that there is debate about what is moral and what is not, but the present circumstance that so many people deny the existence of morality is disturbing.
Modern science confirms the existence of the moral law in human nature. The polygraph – also called the lie detector – measures changes in the human body whenever we prepare to tell a lie. It is called a polygraph because it can graph changes in many systems – the cardiovascular system, the neurological system, the strength of the muscles, the frequency of the brain, and many other aspects of our biochemistry. The tests reveal that whenever we are untruthful, we weaken ourselves. The moral law is the truth of our nature, and whenever we breach the moral law we weaken ourselves, sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, and with repetition always a lot.
This certainty that there is a moral truth running through all of us creates an obligation of good sense to think carefully about what we believe and what we say about moral matters.
The enthusiastic support shown by the secular media for condoms and their concomitant eagerness to attack the Pope and the Catholic Church on this rather tatty subject reveals no such rational thought, nor any dedication to truthful information.
In relation to HIV/AIDS, the consistent finding of population studies conducted by reputable social scientists is that the higher the levels of distribution and use of condoms, the higher, not lower, the levels of HIV infection. This information has been widely published around the world, and has been known in one form or another for at least ten years. This should not be surprising because condoms have no moral status in human relations, so why do the secular media keep pretending they are the solution to the problem?
And why do the media keep trying to pretend that the Church is somehow to blame for the AIDS epidemic? It is well known that the major causes of the spread of HIV and AIDS are promiscuity, prostitution, infidelity, and homosexuality activity.
The Catholic Church teaches unwaveringly against all of these, and explains its teaching with great clarity and clear links to the truth about human sexuality. Do journalists imagine that people sit around deciding that they can ignore the Church’s teaching on any or all of these matters, and then concluding for no reason at all that they cannot ignore the Church’s teaching on condoms? For that matter, do journalists imagine that all the people in Africa and Asia who have AIDS have actually heard of the Catholic Church, let alone her teaching?