NRO Kathryn Lopez: The Pope, the Palins, and the Pursuit of True Happiness

Kathryn Jean Lopez of the National Review recently wrote a piece for the NRO entitle exactly that: The Pope, the Palins, and the Pursuit of True Happiness. In she describes a world where sex sells, the government is relied upon more heavily than a spouse, and where poverty and family are undisputedly linked. It is the second article in the past week where Lopez discusses the Pope and his new book: Light of the World.


Lopez's premise is this: The Pope and Sarah Palin both put out a book on the same day and they have a similar message in common: the pursuit of happiness must start with the family and with love -- all else is a wasted pursuit. She details the point that Pope Benedict tries to make in his book, that sex cannot be a pursuit in and of itself. If it is, we risk losing the fabric of what sex is supposed to enhance -- the family. Lopez writes:

He explains that “the fight against the banalization of sexuality is also a part of the struggle to ensure that sexuality is treated as a positive value and to enable it to have a positive effect on the whole of man’s being.”

From there she segues into Palin's new book. Lopez outlines Palin's premise that the hyper-sexualization of our culture lead to the decay of the family, and thereby brought about poverty, welfare, and cultural dismantling. When the family structure is lost, people cling to other things to fill the void that is inevitably left. Lopez explains:

In America by Heart, Palin writes, “It was the mid-1960s before divorce and single motherhood really began to take off in the United States. And it was another twenty years before the country really began to feel the effects of the decline of the family in rising crime rates, drug abuse, and long-term welfare dependency.”

From here she went straight to Katrina and the “horrific images” we all saw in New Orleans in the late summer of 2005. It wasn’t just government incompetence to blame. As Palin writes, “Hurricane Katrina revealed something other than government incompetence. It revealed a population of Americans dependent on government and incapacitated by the destruction of the American family. The victims of Hurricane Katrina we saw huddled at the Superdome were overwhelmingly poor and minority.”

Lopez does a masterful job of entwining sex, marriage, and the problems in society together. She shows the definite link between the success of family and the success of society. She uses Africa, the catylst for the condom comments from the Pope, as an example of one problemed area and draws similarities to New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina. Her purpose is to explain that happiness comes from stability and opportunity not sex and the pursuit of pleasure. She concludes with:

We live in a fallen world, but one that’s never irrevocably severed from the good. The conversation with Pope Benedict was specifically sparked by the issue of AIDS in Africa. Africans, poor black New Orleanians, and your teenage daughter and son all deserve a chance at the full “humanization of sexuality” — a healthy, holistic view of sex and love. A condom’s not a key to true happiness; it can be a barrier. Ditto the government. Education and encouragement and love are true game changers. And, as Dan Quayle pointed out years ago, lives depend on it. When we stop ridiculing and dismissing and misrepresenting the prophets and teachers and other voices of common sense, we might just get somewhere.

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