We live in an era defined by a fierce cultural craving for the authentic.
We reject processed foods in favor of what is organic. We are repulsed by tech conglomerates that mine our lives, reducing us to algorithmic data points. In our relationships, we demand vulnerability, instinctively knowing we are not objects to be used, monetized, or chemically managed.
We demand to be respected as whole, integrated human beings.
Yet, in the most intimate sphere of human existence, we have accepted the exact opposite.
We surrendered our profound, organic human dignity to the most sterile, artificial environments imaginable: the courtroom and the government bureaucracy.
Over the last century, profound questions of human intimacy and the creation of life were radically removed from our democratic legislatures.
Embracing the hubris of "living constitutionalism," the Supreme Court acted as an unelected super-legislature.
Beginning with Griswold v. Connecticut in 1965, the Court invented a "right to privacy" from invisible constitutional penumbras, initiating a cascade of rulings that legally severed the physical reality of the human body from its natural purpose.
To understand the magnitude of this tragedy, we must look to the philosophy of the human person articulated by Pope John Paul II.
He accurately diagnosed the core illness of the modern age: the opposite of love is not hate.
The opposite of love is use. To love someone is to will their good as an integrated person; to use someone is to treat them as an object.
Before this era of judicial activism, society understood human beings as integrated wholes.
But the courts decreed that true freedom requires treating the body as raw material to be chemically altered and managed. Intimacy was legally redefined as a sterilized act of mutual use.
However, the courts did not destroy the American family alone. As activist jurisprudence dissolved the cultural expectations of fatherhood, the welfare state dissolved the economic ones.
The sexual revolution promised liberation but delivered a sociological disaster. In 1960, just 5.3 percent of children were born out of wedlock.
Today, non-marital births hover at 40 percent, and a quarter of American children grow up without a father — driving poverty, crime, and generational trauma.
This was no accident. In 1996, Nobel-winning economist George Akerlof proved that widespread contraception caused a massive "technological shock" to the marriage market.
When pregnancy was culturally reduced to a technological "failure," fathers were given a societal permission slip to simply walk away.
The courts legally absolved men of their obligations, and the welfare state paid them to leave, subsidizing single motherhood on the strict condition that the father remains absent from the home.
The destructive shockwaves of this dual assault have now fundamentally broken the economic and demographic engine of our nation. By legally and financially redefining intimacy as a sterile act of mutual use, we sparked a catastrophic demographic winter. We are failing to reproduce ourselves.
Look at Wyoming as a stark, terrifying microcosm of this national collapse.
The latest state vital statistics reveal an unsustainable reality: depending on the year, we are only seeing a couple hundred more births than deaths statewide.
In 2022, Wyoming resident births outpaced deaths by a mere 155 people. That is not a sustainable society; it is a society quietly aging out of existence. It means we are forced to import people from outside our borders just to keep our communities afloat.
Nationally, the story is the same. We have literally sterilized away the next generation of American workers.
Today, we cannot even fund Social Security because the vital ratio of young workers to retirees has collapsed.
To mask this self-inflicted demographic suicide, our political class relies on a massive inflow of immigration just to backfill the labor shortages caused by our own inability to produce a workforce.
The profound meaning of human life, the organic design of the family, and the demographic survival of a nation should never have been decided by an unelected tribunal fabricating rights, nor compounded by bureaucrats incentivizing fatherlessness.
This was a catastrophic experiment in social engineering, resulting in a broken culture and a bankrupt future.
True rebellion today is not found in defending the artificial, chemically altered, state-subsidized status quo.
True rebellion is demanding radical authenticity. It is rejecting the hubris of judicial social engineering that treats us as objects of mutual use, and dismantling the welfare incentives that reward our separation.
If we are to heal the wounds of fatherlessness and restore our economic future, we must recognize each other once again as whole, organic, unfragmented persons.
The survival of our society depends on rediscovering the courage to love authentically.
Fred Harrison can be reached at: Fred.Harrison@fjhlawoffice.com
