Right to be happy. . .

The right to happiness is not merely an American one but has become the universal right acknowledged by all and demanded by all.  Long before it was enshrined in the founding documents of our American republic, we were moving from survival itself as the basic goal to a certain quality of life.  Even though I am not sure that the forming fathers of our democracy were really speaking of the same thing we mean when we say the right to the pursuit of happiness, that is how we all understand it now.  We should be free to do what we want.

That right to happiness has affected many things.  It has certainly formed a leg of support for the situation ethics in which the act is without essential morality except in the moment.  It has also affected how we see a host of other things -- from marriage to divorce to children to retirement.  We believe in the right to happiness and we believe we have a right to exercise it.  While this impacts many things, it has come to be a profound actor on how we judge divorce and remarriage. 

There was a time in which the universal understanding of divorce was that it precluded another marriage -- you go one shot at a happy marriage and if that evaded you, you did not get another.  At some point in time, we began to distinguish between guilty parties and innocent parties in the breakup of a marriage.  It did not take long before we decided that the innocent party deserved another chance at happiness and so could remarry.  Then it did not take long before we decided that even the guilty party deserved another chance at happiness and were okay to remarry -- so long as they admitted their responsibility and promised never to do it again.

Before you get angry with me about the legitimacy of specific instances, lets just take a moment to review how we got to the point today where so many of our folks in the pews have had multiple marriages and even the clergy have had multiple marriages.  We decided that every moral principle is conditioned by the right to happiness.  That right has become the right that trumps every other right.  We tell our children that they have a right to be happy even if that right means they don't want to marry but might cohabit and they don't want to have children.  We tell our children going through rough patches in marriage that they have a right to be happy even if that happiness hurts others -- like their children.  We tell everyone who has another sexual attraction or gender identity that their happiness is more important than anything else and then radically alter the nature of marriage to suit all who might want some kind of it.  Can you see where this is headed?  Do we want our children to be good or happy?  Does God want us to be holy or happy?  Do we want to be holy or happy?  Happiness is a cancer of an idea that changes the landscape of everything.  Do we realize how much making happiness the highest goal affects everything else?  Haven't we enshrined in every aspect of life the very issue that was created in Eden that caused this mess?