Contraception, Rights, and Total State Control | Fr. James V. Schall, S.J. | Catholic World Report
Charles E. Rice's new book argues that once absolute relativism is established as the state “religion” there is no limit to what the state can and will do
“There are many paths to total state control of life—fascism, totalitarianism, communism. In the United States the path is labeled protection of individual human rights.”
— Charles E. Rice, Contraception & Persecution (2014), 86.
I.
Contraception & Persecution is a brief, blunt analysis of our polity. It presents a clear line of thought to explain, to those who will listen, the totalitarian nature of our present regime. This regime no longer follows the basic moral and philosophic premises of its founding. Nor does it acknowledge the basic human good by which any regime is limited. Indeed, Rice argues that the American founding itself, for all its genius, was flawed. It recognized no authentic interpreter of the natural law that was presupposed from Christian and classic sources by those who established this republic.
Eventually, this lack of an authoritative interpreter meant that the state itself would become the sole arbitrator of what was the human good. The state itself came to be the highest law. It would recognize no other authority but itself; no one could appeal to a higher law. As a people we are reluctant to admit that things could go so wrong. We are comfortable and hate to think things have so radically deviated from any true human good. The result is that we do not take seriously the intellectual nature of our obvious decline into an increasingly anti-human state.
Through the interpretation of the courts, the lack of understanding or resistance by Congress, and the multiplicity of arbitrary decrees now stemming from the Executive, this founding flaw has solidified itself as the ruling doctrine of the public order—“whatever the prince wills is the law”—to cite the classic Roman Law dictum designating the state with no limits.
Basically, we have established absolute relativism as the state “religion.”
Of its very nature, this state brooks no opposition.
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