Pope Paul talks about marriage and love in his order and structure of life. Pope Paul states that within a marriage, both couples must work together regardless of how they feel during their marriage to seek a "profound and enduring happiness". Finding happiness in a relationship between the two couples is not the only mission in a marriage but also to fecund, produce offsprings. Pope Paul claims that within marriage, there are two things that the couples must face and go through together. Love and reproduction.
The problem with this statement is that...
1. Not every married couple is be happy but are still together. Not every marriage is perfect. There are flaws, arguments, and happy moments. However, we just cannot think about a regular couple consisting of a male and female. We must consider that there are gay couples out there that are married or plan on marrying one another. Today's society and culture is different from the past. There are rights and privileges for the gays, lesbians, bisexual, and trans. They are just as human as any original normal human being. This is something that the Pope does not mention and take into consideration. In modern time, there are legislative laws that allow for gay marriage. There are organizations in communities and college campuses that unite and allow the gays to express their emotions and feel they belong somewhere. The gays had to work for their love in order to make it a 'free love'. They were discriminated because many non-gay people followed the traditional way of married and dating. Male and female in a relationship was the social norm.
2. Not every couple wants to have a child/children in their marriage. There are people like that in this world that just wants to be in a married relationship with no kids. Or maybe there are parents that have children and are stressed about their life and wants out. Susan Bordo would say that a women's body is to reproduce and make babies. However, because today's society and culture is so much different from the past, there are new beliefs, values, and new traditions that are followed in modern time. Young children's future are the first to go down when it comes to reproduction because of modern time. Adults seem all to busy to be making babies even though they are sexually active. They're using protection/birth pills to prevent fertilization. Adults just don't have time with all the technology and time that slips away from them.
3. Interestingly enough, Pope Paul promotes reproduction and at the same time allows birth pills to be used with an exception of doing evil for a good cause. This corresponds and goes hand-in-hand with my number 2. Modern technology and time commitments are shaping our future and the way we live our lives. We make our decisions based on our society and the culture that is created from all the new gadgets and trends. Technology is the new culture, the new generation of what many adults will follow in the future.
The point to take home Pope Paul, is that we are the new society. We all have developed and changed the past to what we see fit with our modern time and culture. Martial love is not free. We all have to work for it. There are choices that we all have to make in marriage and these choices have effects on our future. Women can take birth control pills that can prevent them from having children and men can get themselves sterilized thanks to stem cell researches and experiments. Moreover, even when families are having issues, there are programs such as family planning and counseling that allows for another chance if both couple allows and cooperates. So what if today's society is not perfect, we changed it to see fit for our busy and chaotic lives and for our survival.
I think that you make a really good point in this article. It is interesting to see that maybe technology, such as the pill, did not change us as much as the changes in society may have cause that to come around. I agree with your point that what Pope Paul seems to be missing is the fact that society is not the same as it was even 10 years ago and we have to adapt to the changes. Progress is only going to be made if we adapt and it seems as though that is what Pope Paul is trying to stop. I think you did a really good job of analyzing this part of Pope Paul's theory with our theory.
ReplyDeleteThis reminds me a lot of the backwards momentum that right-wingers and fundamentalists sometimes rely upon. The idea that the way things were in the past (before all the modern technology and post-modern ideas of sexuality changed our society) was the best way. That all the progress and change that our society has corrupted our "true natures". The family is 'under attack' because of these modern notions, our faith is being questioned because of these modern notions. There is a failure to recognize that we left behind those outdated ideas for a reason.
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