Human Rights for All

It is a commonplace in contemporary religious discourse in our country today to rail against secularism.  In a front page story in last week's Pittsburgh Catholic, Cardinal Donald Wuerl did just that, in a speech preparatory to the ongoing Synod of Bishops in Rome.

There are many things bad about secularism.  But some are good.  One is the focus on human rights.  In an all-too-brief explanation, the articulation of human rights began with 17th and 18th century philosophers, who influenced the Founding Fathers of our country and placed human rights in the core documents of the American Revolution, and culminated in the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations.

The Catholic Church was all-too-slow to catch up with this world development.  But Pope John XXIII affirmed the rights articulated in the Universal Declaration in his seminal encyclical Pacem in Terris in 1963 (paragraphs 11 to 27 if you want to be precise).  

Since then, the Catholic Church has been among the staunchest supporters of human rights throughout the world.  It even overturned 1500 years of contrary teaching when the Second Vatican Council in 1965 affirmed the right to religious liberty for all human beings.  No more would the Catholic Church call for burning heretics at the stake, imprisoning persons of different religious, or teach "error has no rights."  Instead, in the words of Dignitatis Humanae: 

This Vatican Council declares that the human person has a right to religious freedom. This freedom means that all men are to be immune from coercion on the part of individuals or of social groups and of any human power, in such wise that no one is to be forced to act in a manner contrary to his own beliefs, whether privately or publicly, whether alone or in association with others, within due limits.

The council further declares that the right to religious freedom has its foundation in the very dignity of the human person as this dignity is known through the revealed word of God and by reason itself. This right of the human person to religious freedom is to be recognized in the constitutional law whereby society is governed and thus it is to become a civil right.

It is in accordance with their dignity as persons-that is, beings endowed with reason and free will and therefore privileged to bear personal responsibility-that all men should be at once impelled by nature and also bound by a moral obligation to seek the truth, especially religious truth. 

The Council Fathers in this statement affirmed Article 18 of the Universal Declaration:  "Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion." 

The statements of the Universal Declaration, however, can go in many unanticipated directions.  Take for example Article 3 and Article 7.

Article 3 reads, "Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of persons."  It is in this right that I believe that abortion as an important moral issue is a human rights issue.  "Everyone has the right to life."  Everyone.  Science and medicine have proven over and over that human life begins with conception in the womb, not with the moments of birth.  "Everyone has the right to life."  Therefore this right should be protected within the human community.  

Many people are under the mistaken notion that abortion is a peculiar Catholic teaching.  They say, those celibate Catholic bishops want to impose their crazy and unfair ideas on women (and men).  But from the perspective I am offering, abortion  is not a religious doctrine or teaching.  It is a grave crime against the inherent dignity and worth of every human being.  

Has this view won the day?  Not at all.  As is well known, beginning in the 1960s and 1970s, advocates of abortion on demand have managed to get their position made legal, whether through legislative or judicial processes.  The U.S. Supreme Court decisions Roe v. Wade and Doe v. Bolton in 1973 are only among the most famous of decisions throughout the world.  More than 40 million abortion -- all legal -- have resulted since that terrible ruling.

However it is my belief that eventually the human race will come to see that killing innocent human life in the womb is against the most fundamental human right, and therefore should be seen as barbaric as slavery or torture or genocide or racism.  When will this happen?  Well, I don't know.  But to the extent that anti-abortion foes join their opposition to abortion with support for all other human rights, and do so in a completely non-violent way (pace Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.), I believe that position will eventually be enshrined in the laws of the countries of the world.

But the articulation of human rights, as I said, can lead in unexpected directions.  Yesterday, the 2nd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals issued a 2-to-1 decision affirming a lower court's decision that section 3 of the 1996 Defense of Marriage Act was unconstitutional.  Section 3 defines marriage as the union of one man and one woman for purposes of federal law.  In this decision in the case of Windsor v. United States, the court goes a step farther than the May ruling from the Boston federal appeals court that also found DOMA unconstitutional in Gill v. Office of Personnel Management.  

The rationale of the court is discrimination, that is, inequality before the law.  The senior judge said in his ruling that discrimination against gays should be scrutinized by the courts in the same heightened way as discrimination faced by women was in the 1970s. He stated that "homosexuals as a group have historically endured persecution and discrimination."  This would lead to a recognition that discrimination against gays (in DOMA) would be assumed to be unconstitutional.

This decision is surely not the final word.  There are 32 states which have stated that marriage is the union of one man and one woman, similar to the federal law passed in 1996 by bipartisan majorities.  Some seven states, including Hawaii, Massachusetts and New York, have approved so-called gay marriage.

My point here is not to agree with the two judges of the 2nd Circuit Court.  My point here is to say that the argument of "equality," so important in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, will, I believe, trump the thousands of years old understanding of marriage as the union of one man and one woman.   In our country, in our day, you cannot win an argument by advocating for "inequality."  And to many eyes, and increasingly it seems to judges and justices, the exclusion of two men or two women from the definition of marriage is seen as unequal and discriminatory.  So, for example, Article 7 of the Universal Declaration states, "All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law." 

In response to the October 18 decision, Archbishop Salvatore Cordelione of San Francisco stated, "The recognition that marriage is and can only be the union of one man and one woman is grounded in our nature, being clear from the very way our bodies are designed.  This recognition obliges our consciences and laws.  It is a matter of basic rights--the right of every child to be welcomed and raised, as far as possible, by his or her mother and father together in a stable home.... The public good demands that the unique meaning and purpose of marriage be respected in law and society not rejected as beyond the constitutional pale.  Redefining marriage never upholds the equal dignity of individuals because it contradicts basic human rights."

I cannot know where this trajectory of human rights, in the matter of marriage is going.  I affirm our church's teaching, and the long experience of human history, that marriage is and only can be the union of one man and one woman.  But my strong suspicion is that the human rights language of "equality" will trump the traditional language of "grounded in our nature," and that a redefined marriage--the unions of several varieties (man/man, woman/woman, perhaps even polygamy)--will eventually become part of our culture and society and law.