In speaking with young people (and not-so-young people) who support gay/lesbian “marriage,” transgender medicine and sociology, abortion, contraception, cohabitation, and all the rest of the agenda on the other side of the great divide, two words are constantly thrown down as the great gauntlets of the left:
Choice and Consent.
To those given to support of the aforementioned lifestyle choices, choice and consent are the imprimaturs of the end behaviors and lifestyles. For them it is quite literally the case that having arrived at a given behavior through choice and consent that the behavior is imbued with all moral virtue, because it has been chosen by the individual and consented to.
“My body, my choice.”
It is radicalized autonomy on parade. The self determining all that is right and good.
At first blush it seems to be a return to the Fall of Man in the Garden of Eden. But there, Adam and Eve blushed at their nakedness after their eyes were opened. Nobody blushes today when they taste evil. It is celebrated precisely because it was chosen, because it was consented to. At least our original parents had the moral sense to hide from God after getting a taste of evil.
To an intellectually and morally mature person, choice and consent are immediately recognized not as moral virtues, but as capacities and components of the moral decision-making process. They are neither objects, nor ends. They are components of reason and free will. They are used to arrive at what is good and what is evil. As Pope John Paul II said,
“Freedom consists not in doing what we like, but in having the right to do what we ought.”
Boil down all of the differences on both sides of the great divide and it comes down to that last word from John Paul: “Ought.”
“Ought” presupposes a locus of moral agency outside of the self that makes certain demands.
Demands. Not suggestions.
Adam and Eve knew that, because they were in intimate relationship with that Moral Agent. He was their loving Father and Creator. His only demand was that they not opt for experiential knowledge of good and evil, that they abide in Him in faithful obedience. The narcissism and hedonism of the other side today can no more abide in faithful obedience to demands that run counter to the will than light can coexist with darkness at the same point in space.
Such is the spiritual malaise that conflates choice and consent with moral goodness. The sickness that is narcissism and hedonism sees the desires of the self as good, and cannot abide any suggestion to the contrary. One need only look to the persecution of those who dare to stand in the way of the LGBT agenda to see how disordered desire is elevated to the heights of moral acclaim simply because such a lifestyle has been chosen and consented to. Bakers and florists have been sentenced to Maoist reeducation for having the temerity to choose fidelity to their God over obeisance to the gods of hedonistic desire in customers. And this leads to the greatest of all moral confusion regarding choice and consent.
Choice and consent are the moral coin of the realm only insofar as certain deities are being obeyed. To the narcissist and hedonist the god of self cannot desire anything other than that which is good, and so it is that the God of revelation becomes the false deity. It is Cardinal Ratzinger’s tyranny of moral relativism. The moral relativists of our day see choice and consent as virtues precisely because they have become twisted hallmarks of the narcissism and hedonism afflicting them, persons who never experienced an impulse they didn’t love.
In the end, both sides of the great divide speak radically different languages. The narcissist and hedonist never moves past the impulses of self-indulgent disordered desire. The one who sees choice and freedom as consisting of having the right to do what they ought, knows and practices sacrificial love for God. That one prays and practices the prayer of St. Ignatius of Loyola:
“Take, Lord, and receive all my liberty, my memory, my understanding, and my entire will, All I have and call my own. You have given all to me. To you, Lord, I return it. Everything is yours; do with it what you will. Give me only your love and your grace, that is enough for me.”
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.image via: https://moa.byu.edu/events/exhibition-opening-art-after-dark/
Coming Home 
Glad to see you’re still alive, old man. (And I mean really really OOOOOLD man.)
It was over a year, so I wondered whether your blog was finally defunct. After all, if one looks at the number of posts each year since its inception, the blog seemed to have a half-life of approximately one year. Given the laws of decay, I stopped by your blog (after almost a year!) just to take one last look at the blog’s graveyard, the electronic equivalent of Larkin’s “…and a tense, musty, unignorable silence, brewed God knows how long.” Yet, lo-and-behold (and quite a coincidence), you’re back! And better than ever!
You’re probably wondering how I’m doing. Actually, you’re probably not. But I’ll tell you anyway. I’m old and cranky. I complain about everything, the food, the entertainment, and constant rolling back and forth (I’m writing to you from the Queen Mary). Speaking of cranky, I know you’re an expert at this writing business, but sentences like “To those given to support of the aforementioned lifestyle choices, choice and consent are the imprimaturs of the end behaviors and lifestyles” might benefit from a simpler touch for simpler people (I should know, because I can’t make head or tails of it).
I must be dumb: do people actually confuse choice and consent as objects – did you really mean objects? – such as “the man who mistook his wife for a choice?” I don’t think that makes much sense, because we all know that once the man got married he no longer had a choice.
I must be super dumb: where does “consent” come in? That wasn’t clear. One would think a moral guy would first seek a lady’s consent, eh? So, consent can be moral, but that’s a story that I’ll only tell over a coupla beers at Lee’s Tavern, and I’ll be committing a sin just by telling it, unless I lie about it, of course.
Good luck with your blog. If you die before me, I can run it for you if you wish (since you don’t seem to want to let it die). I might not have the right moral spin, of course, but I do complain as good as you, don’t you think? I need to complain because I’m old and complaining is all I have.
Just call me if you want me to take it over; I won’t complain.
Hello, pt-109! (waves)
I keep this blog bookmarked, right below a news site I check daily, and my finger sometimes slips and I click on it by mistake, and say, “Huh. I remember that blog.” But for some reason, perhaps nostalgia, I have never bothered to un-bookmark it.
Today, when my finger slipped, I saw a new post here! Wow!
I am still out here, too, and still have no wish to move past “the impulses of self-indulgent disordered desire.”
I wish you both well, & your families.
Glad to see you both here. Just posted one about Alfie Evans.