Why on earth is the "most free" person the one who is MOST constrained in his choices by others.

I might not be putting this as clear as I could--The most free person is the one who has nothing stopping her from doing what is right and true.

This has nothing inherently to do with what others are forcing one to do. Obviously we should be helping to direct others to do what is right, but that doesn't equal coercing or forcing others to do what is right. (That doesn't mean would shouldn't have laws, even good laws are free to be broken, one just may have to face just consequences.)

the church most certainly defines whst behaviour people should follow, and then claims tgst ACTUAL freedom consists of following their rules.
That's not freedom. That's a right to obey.

Close--Yes, the Church seeks to teach what is the true and right thing to do. She doesn't define it, she merely seeks to discover it. Truth is not something someone "has" but rather discovers.

Actual freedom consists in doing what is right and true, so when the Church teaches something that is right and true then being truly free consists in doing also what the Church teaches.

In other words, something is not right and true because the Church says so, it is right and true because it actually is in reality that way. And being truly free means having no reservation in doing what is right and true.

(I know I repeated things several times here, but that was to hopefully make it clearer what I was trying to explain.)

You seem to be relating "normal" and "abnormal" with the Church's use of "ordered" and "disordered" in this discussion (cf. CCC #2352, #2357-2359) in your discussion of "normal" not a matter of statistics, but a matter of judgement.

I had no intention of making a parallel between normal/abnormal and ordered/disordered. It is, however, true that both involve judgments of sorts. I don't see a good analogy between homosexuality and alcoholism, since everyone may drink alcohol in moderation, but according to the Church, no one may engage in any homosexual activity at all.

A choice between making an act of the will to abstain from sex or not, or with making an act of the will to abstain from drinking or not...

No one is required to make an act of will to abstain from drinking. As I said above, every adult (according to the Catholic Church) may drink responsibly. Some who fall into alcoholism may be successful only if they commit to total abstinence, but many of the estimated one-third of recovered alcoholics return to moderate drinking.

Comparing alcoholism and homosexuality is unhelpful in almost any way I can think of. People who have never tasted alcohol do not realize at some point that they have a powerful urge to drink it and then go out looking for it. But most gay people discover their homosexuality well before they engage in sexual behavior. It is not something that they choose. If a person, for one reason or another, never consumes alcohol, he or she can't possibly become an alcoholic. However, a person can be homosexual without ever engaging in sexual activity. In fact, that is what the Church apparently expects. While I have heard from some Protestants that their denominations (or at least their pastors) believe a homosexual orientation in and of itself is evil or sinful and must be somehow changed, mercifully the Catholic Church is more enlightened and expects "only" lifelong abstinence. On the other hand, the Catholic Church recognizes (correctly, in my opinion) that a homosexual orientation is an integral part of the personality. It is really a part of who a person is. This is why the Church stopped ordaining even the most chaste and committed of homosexual men.

You seem to be relating "normal" and "abnormal" with the Church's use of "ordered" and "disordered" in this discussion (cf. CCC #2352, #2357-2359) in your discussion of "normal" not a matter of statistics, but a matter of judgement. You are free to do so, but you are not giving the Chruch's language it's correct context. There are acts (not persons) ordered toward the good and acts not(dis) ordered toward the good. Your comparison of handedness and eye color to being normal, as a matter of judgment not statistics is saying that handedness and eye color are normal, therefore ordered to the good. We ALL have desires that are disordered to varying degrees in the sense that the Church is speaking to, this in no way is some reflection of the value and dignity of the person.

Back to the issue of prejudice, I think there's a striking parallel between the goods and bads of alcohol consumption and sexual behavior in general. That is, if you go beyond the clinical perspective, which was my entire intent as I stated...

Sexual activity, like alcohol consumption, can be a good and healthy act or it can be a bad and unhealthy act. Both activities are generally accepted as normal and legal, but require the will to enact a certain level responsibility to maintain the good. This is just one part of why it's not considered normal or acceptable for youngsters to engage in either activity, wouldn't you agree? We can say that if a person suffering from alcoholism consumes alcohol bad things will eventually result, but not all consumption of alcohol leads to unhealthy (bad) ends. We can say this anecdotally, we can reference the clinical documented side effects of alcoholism and problem drinking, or we can use data from sources like the CDC, DoT, law enforcement, etc. for broader generalization. In some cases its the consumption of alcohol that leads to diseases in the consumer, in some cases it is the result of acts that follow from the effects of the consumption on the family and the public at large. In the end, we don't need entirely need the clinical side to know and understand that consuming alcohol irresponsibly is bad, the same is true with sexual behavior.

A parallel can be drawn with sexual behavior, both anecdotally and more generally using data from the CDC (and I'm sure elsewhere), and that data informs us about both ordered and disordered sexual behavior and its results. Using the CDC data, it is statistically normal for men having sex with men (MSM is the CDC's category abbreviation) between the ages 13-24 to contract HIV...this is the behavior category where an estimated 72% of new HIV cases originated in 2010. Note that the CDC's category label does not attempt to label the person, only the behavior. Personally I think that's wonderful, there is even a footnote saying, "It indicates a behavior that transmits HIV infection, not how individuals self-identify in terms of their sexuality." There are many people who frequent this forum that disagree with the Church's teaching on sexual acts, who would argue that MSM is both normal and good. Given the CDC information, I don't think it's prejudice or a bridge too far to suggest there's a parallel of destructive behavior choices. Many people seem to hate the Church because there is something against homosexual people, which is false, and the CCC makes that point in the reference above. I do not wish to identify people by their sexuality or label it with some kind of concept of normal, nor do I wish to label people as alcoholics. The bridge you can not seem to cross here is that there is, at every step, an individual choice to be made, an act of a person's will. A choice between making an act of the will to abstain from sex or not, or with making an act of the will to abstain from drinking or not... Both of those choices to abstain are incredibly difficult and incredibly good things to do. Both acts of the will are heroic and virtuous. Making the disordered choice, in either case, will normally (at least by the numbers) lead to bad ends.

Caveat...
As you once lamented, maybe there is no point in conversing on the topics here. There seems to be little agreement to be found anywhere.

Why on earth is the "most free" person the one who is MOST constrained in his choices by others. And I'm sorry, Phil, but you just contradicted yourself there: the church most certainly defines whst behaviour people should follow, and then claims tgst ACTUAL freedom consists of following their rules. That's not freedom. That's a right to obey.

Not quite--The Church doesn't define what is right, she merely looks to discover what is the right and good thing to do. The Church then looks to help guide us to what is the right and good thing to do. There are some things that she is more adamant about then others because they are more easily seen and discovered by reason, though sometimes these are the hardest to accept (e.g., sexual morality).

So obviously the Church would not hold that real freedom is being able to do whatever one wants without any orientation towards the true and the good. The true and good is what gives direction to freedom. I know what you are getting at, and I agree up to a point, but until you include the true and good in some way we are not quite there yet.

So a virtuous person is the most free because they easily reject what is bad and choose what is good. They have no disordered attachments to doing what is bad or doing what is "good" for the wrong reasons.

But the church claims that some choices are "correct" and some are not. And that freedom ACTUALLY consists if only choosing betwee the church approved choices. That is not freedom, that is tyranny.

Not at all. I simply claim that there is no such thing as choosing without it being oriented towards the good.

So saying that freedom is simply choosing cannot be correct because there is no such things as simply "choosing".

Honestly, I think we are just talking using different definitions lined up with different words. What you say is "freedom", I would call "license". I mean one can call it whatever one wants but that doesn't change that there is an objective difference between what you are calling the nature of freedom and what I am calling it.

I don't think you would actually support your version of freedom. I am simply saying that I am putting forth what I am calling "true freedom" and saying that this is what society and the human person is, and ought to be, oriented towards. We shouldn't be oriented towards what you call "freedom".

The coherency of language has. Itching to do with whether it is true. I could say, "my laptop is green." That is a perfectly coherent speech, and you can understand exactly what I'm saying. It just happens to be false.

Let's reason through this. Before we even get to the sentence as a whole, we have the word "laptop" and "green".

Well, what do these symbols refer too? They refer to externally existing object(s) that have the nature/universal of "laptopness". This includes all objects that take part in the nature of "laptopness".

If you do not assume in saying this sentence that it is true that there is such a thing "laptopness", that I can actually understand its specific nature, and we are actually talking about the same nature then language becomes incoherent. A single word assumes that it refers to something that is "true".

If language was not oriented towards the true, it could not be ultimately coherent. I may not be doing a great job at explaining this, but I hope its making some sense. Again, this is before we even evaluate the sentence as a whole.

You are simply playing games with words now. No profit in continuing.