Why Can't People Just Do What They Want?

Why do you Catholics have all those stupid rules? Why are you so set on telling everyone what is right and what is wrong?

This is why.

A good part of what people want is to fit into the society in which they live. What we want is not really what we want, it's what we want shaped by the mores and standards of the culture. That image above of the young woman who has had her breasts removed because she was convinced by outside forces that she could turn into a man would have been an unthinkable horror just 10 years ago. Now we're told it's "affirming" and if we don't support it, we're anti-science bigots.

When we hear messages about "being yourself" it's more lie than truth. I am a huge fan of the country band Confederate Railroad. They were formed by some guys from the Tennessee coal mining country. Their style is blue collar country with a lot of self-deprecating comedy thrown in the mix. Their most famous song is Trashy Women.

Yeah, an' I like my women just a little on the trashy side
When they wear their clothes too tight and their hair is dyed
Too much lipstick an' too much rouge
Gets me excited, leaves me feeling confused
An' I like my women just a little on the trashy side

Formed in the 1980s when Dukes of Hazzard was a big hit on TV, they named themselves after a famous Tennessee locomotive, The General. The General traded hands over and over again during the Civil War as each side captured it from the other. It's a pretty goofy story, perfect for the band. There is absolutely nothing racist about Confederate Railroad. Still, I cannot wear their t-shirt in public.

Be yourself! Do what you want! Right.

Why Catholics Are So Fixated On Rules

Our hypothesis about reality includes the following.

1. God exists and He created the Universe.
2. You were created in His image and are therefore sacred.
3. He made an ordered world and gave us a rational mind to understand it.
4. Part of that order is a moral order. He informs us of this moral order through Scripture and our logical inferences from observing the world around us.
5. Biology, created by God, informs us that all people, each of whom is sacred, were made by the sexual union of one man and one woman. Ergo, sex is a big part of the moral order.

When I hear someone say that people should be free to be themselves, I can see that they will never be truly free to be themselves because the culture won't allow it. The culture has a moral order just as rigid as Catholicism, enforced through social pressure. Hence, I am not free to wear my Confederate Railroad t-shirt in public and young women are poisoning themselves with testosterone injections and getting their breasts removed.

When Catholics take strident positions about sexual morality that are at odds with the modern zeitgeist, we are staking out the differences between God's moral order as we understand it and the moral order of the time. His hard and fast rules are boundaries to prevent the popular culture from driving us all into a ditch. Which it has.

When I rant about black kids graduating from high school illiterate or girls being mutilated like the poor kid above or how young women are suffering from depression as they realize they will never have a husband and a family, I'm saying that much of our cultural morality does not work. It is producing injustices far more damaging than the ones it allegedly prevents.

Both sides have a rigid structure of rules and regulations. The culture's big book of rules is inferior to God's.