If common sense fails

The announcement made by the French Minister of Justice, Ms. Christiane Taubira, to the Catholic newspaper “La Croix” of submitting, by the end of October, a bill containing substantial changes in the definition of marriage and parenthood, arouses an understandable concern. Practically speaking, this bill, by eliminating the difference between man and woman, would pave the way to marriage between partners of the same sex and adoptions granted to homosexual couples.The French bishops have reacted by encouraging the opening of a wider and more secular debate, in the context of a shared and deeper reflection. This is very likely the fairest way to go. In fact, the good which we identify as marriage and the family, as the latter are known so far, belongs to everyone: it is a heritage of humanity. On the contrary, our impression is that these bills aimed at changing this good, and so destroying it in its typical features, are the produce of the thinking of someone, or of the pressure of some lobbies, which act in the darkness of social life.The French bishops very wisely asked to stop and evaluate what we are doing, and look into our conscience about the absurdity of the whole project: terms such as father or mother, wife or husband, grandfather or grandmother would disappear. An essential truth, in fact, would be denied: that man and woman are different, not to fight each other – as uphold by feminism in the past decades – but to be complementary. Masculinity and femininity meet and complement each other in many areas of life, one of which is specifically marriage, where everything is under the sign of love. This complementarity gives rise to potential openness to life: it is not secondary that a child is conceived in the union of a man and a woman, and that he or she is born and grows up in this bipolar context.Rewriting all this is true madness, and we do not see any usefulness in it. Unless we affirm that the basic orientations which have governed our social life for thousands of years until today should take the second place in front of the desires of some, formulated as rights. For example, the desire of a homosexual couple who wants to have a child. This desire would become such a strong right that rulers should acknowledge and protect it. We need to stop and think: are we entitled to have a child, or rather, should we not say that there is the right of a child to be born in the context of marriage, where his or her biological parents are supposed to welcome and educate him or her in a bipolarity of relationships? These reflections belong to the realm of natural law, that is, to thosemeanings inscribed in the project of man, as an expression of the good order that the Creator intended. They have a religious basis, but are accessible to reason, unless we confer them the authority to rewrite man from scratch. Objections to the teachings of natural law are carried out under the sign of personal choices and often lead to ridicule, such as the abolition of the word father or mother.Bringing things to the level of ordinary people means to refer and appeal to common sense, to what everyone finds easily in himself or herself as a teaching which precedes any individual desire. It means to refer to what, precisely because we lived and received it, we want for others. Excluding the exceptions that, for this very reason, express tragic cases, everyone is born of two parents and grew up under the sign of their paternal and maternal care. Parents, in different but harmonious ways, shape and enrich their children who, when adults, shall recognize with gratitude what their father and their mother have done for them. Scientific studies of pedagogues and psychologists show the impact of the distinct role of each parent vis-à-vis the child from very early age.The question of what is marriage and the family should be brought to the level of common sense, which exists and is more universally widespread than one might think; it teaches that before any further thought, there are some primary items of evidence concerning universal human existence. They are judgments on the existence, based on nothing else than a general unity of sense. Changing any of these items would modify and eventually destroy an unspoken but real consensus, on which human living is based. A general sense of all humans, which easily becomes “common sense".The French bishops ask to place ourselves on this level, where other projects to rewrite marriage and the family appear, as a matter of fact, as the speculations or discourses made for the use of someone. They perceive the responsibility that others – perhaps the same children to whom a father or a mother is intentionally refused – may one day demand an explanation. This concern, then, does not touch only the Church, it affects the whole society.