Category — Euthanasia

….It means “goodbye to the Dutch”

I can’t recall the source of this statistic, but whoever it was had calculated that, at present immigration rates, and declining native birth rates, by the year 2020, half the male population of Holland under the age of 24, would be Muslim.   Radical Islamists in the country also represent a large percentage of the current Muslim population.

With Christianity and its Western legacies a dead issue in Holland (about 4% church attendance), and the easy-going tolerance and native inability of the Dutch to assert their culture against waves of immigrants, the end is pretty near. 

Two other statistics I will try to source reveal another problem.   150,000 Dutch citizens protested the murder of Theo Van Gogh by a radical Muslim, and the following month, 750,000 turned out to protest a one-year increase in the retirement age.   These figures, if accurate, illuminate the character of the native Dutch citizen, and the ennervating consequences of cradle-to-the-grave security and comfort.

To be fair, the Dutch are enthusiastic and bleeding-edge modern on at least one subject.   Euthanasia.  If one is a disabled, challenged newborn or a troublesome old fool who refuses to die,  they can help.   Just kill the offending pest as an emotional and financial economy.    Fifty years ago I heard the expression “Dutch courage”, and asked my Dad what it meant.  He said: “liquor”.

Now with Moroccans targeting gays in Amsterdam, the University of Amsterdam has detected the presence of Muslim testosterone in huge amounts, bubbling around in young men who are otherwise “normal”, but disadvantaged and “acting out” (that’s the expression?) a sense of inferiority.  In fact, as one young and frustrated, but upstanding, Moroccan Muslim put it:

“MUSLIM FAGS DON’T EXIST!”

Such a nice boy.   Give him a tulip…. 

Eleanor Clift is giving Democrats and Republican John McCain ideas on how to appear pro-life in the next election and makes a very good point:

[George] Allen will do well in the Republican primaries, but polls will show him losing by 7 percentage points to Hillary at the same time they show McCain handily beating her. That will be the moment of truth for evangelical Christians. What they do depends on how hungry they are to win. If they go with McCain, he could ease their anxieties by choosing Florida Gov. Jeb Bush as his running mate.

Improbable, you say, but this comes from a savvy observer of the political scene. Brother Jeb is beloved among the Christian right for shepherding the case of the brain-damaged Terri Schiavo into the national spotlight, and the Bush dynasty is yearning to be established. Tucked in a New Yorker article last month on McCain was the revelation that he assured conservative activist Gary Bauer that if elected president he would nominate pro-life judges. Bush refused to make such an explicit promise, which is why Bauer endorsed McCain in the 2000 primaries.

I don’t agree with Clift’s analysis on McCain and this CNN article from 2000 strongly implies that McCain was running away from Bauer. (The MSM birth of St. John McCain). More importantly for 2008, conservatives will be looking at his record on judges which could be very controversial if any of Bush’s high profile nominees are defeated by filibuster.

Clift’s article at least concedes that Democrats have a problem on the issue of abortion. However, her solution is pretty much lie about it to win and hide behind the Courts. Hmmm, sound familiar…..

The new liberal talking point is that Republicans, led by conservatives, seek to blur the lines between separation of church and state. Liberal Democrats like Howard Dean and Al Gore have given us a primer on what is ahead in the next election cycle - those who oppose abortion, gay marriage or euthanasia are religious zealots. Liberals cite the Schiavo affair and the judicial filibuster as evidence the GOP is hell bent on making America a theocracy.

The most conservative Republicans have responded by calling liberals “anti-Christian.” GOP Majority Leader Bill Frist was attacked for his appearance on Justice Sunday because of the religious association. Republican leaders have cautioned to attack the Democrats on religion, most likely because they fear a backlash in the MSM.

However, throughout this entire debate, Democrats have never had to explain the origin of their positions on “values” issue. On the other hand, it is widely accepted that the GOP’s positions, for the most part, are rooted in Judeo-Christian values. No one has ever really looked at the origin of the left’s positions on the most divisive issues facing this country. So I will.

Liberal values gained traction in the late 1960’s after the Civil Rights movement. Liberals successfully coupled civil rights for minorities and women with social policy such as abortion and the death penalty. And, who advanced most of these ideas? - the Supreme Court. Roe v. Wade, the 1973 decision to legalize abortion, was the birth of the culture war in America. Overnight, the Court became the final arbiter of all things controversial and more importantly, unsettled.

Liberals then formed a counter-culture based on humanistic values purposely disassociated from anything remotely religious. The value system was based on a morally relative view of values and was used to advance some of the most controversial Supreme Court rulings in this country’s history such as Roe. The movement suffered serious setbacks in national elections soon after because Ronald Reagan’s 1980 platform created a home for socially conservative (and active) voters.

The culture war has seesawed back and forth throughout the years with conservatives having most of their success in the 1980’s and liberals in the 1990’s. President Clinton’s impeachment was probably when the fight reached fever pitch and the liberal movement has suffered electorally ever since. Last fall, President Bush successfully used Reagan’s formula to become the first President since his father to win a national mandate.

As a conservative who does value the separation of church and state, I ask Republican leaders to start questioning the origin of liberal philosophy. The GOP has to expose the roots of modern day liberalism for what it is - a cult formed in the post-War, post- Civil Rights period designed to remove everything remotely religious from the public sphere.

True conservatives seek to give the states the right to choose what religion they want to follow - a humanistic counter-culture that was founded on moral relativism or the Judeo-Christian values this country was founded on. I am willing to let the people decide. Are liberals?

From the lead paragraph of the encyclical: “THE GOSPEL OF LIFE is at the heart of Jesus’ message. Lovingly received day after day by the Church, it is to be preached with dauntless fidelity as “good news” to the people of every age and culture.”

Arguably, it is his signature encyclical, and elaborates upon the definitive theme of his long Pontificate. “The Gospel of God’s love for man, the Gospel of the dignity of the person and the Gospel of life are a SINGLE AND INDIVISIBLE Gospel.” And it was that triune Gospel if you will, which he strenuously preached in good season or in bad.

The Gospel of Life is not without its enemy, the painful reality of death. Not by coincidence does the story of man’s original fall immediately segue to the story of the first slaughter of an innocent. “Cain’s killing of his brother at the very dawn of history is thus a sad witness of how evil spreads with amazing speed: man’s revolt against God in the earthly paradise is followed by the deadly combat of man against man,” brother against brother. God, a loving Father “cannot leave the crime unpunished: from the ground on which it has been split, the blood of the one murdered demands that God should render justice.”

When freedom becomes mere self-assertion untethered to any truth, all of society is then thrown upon the percarious, shifting sands of relativism. The State, instead of being the common home where all live together sharing certain fundamental values, becomes one where everything is up for grabs and subject to a power struggle. Here the late Supreme Pontiff describes a scene that played itself out in the Terri Schiavo drama: ” The appearance of the strictest respect for legality is maintained, at least when the laws permitting abortion and euthanasia are the result of a ballot in accordance with what are generally seen as the rules of democracy. Really, what we have here is only the tragic caricature of legality; the democratic ideal, which is only truly such when it acknowledges and safeguards the dignity of every human person, IS BETRAYED IN ITS FOUNDATIONS….” The very claim of a right to abortion, euthanasia, {and infanticide too} “and to recognize that right into law, means to attribute to human freedom a PERVERSE AND EVIL SIGNIFICANCE: that of an ABSOLUTE POWER OVER OTHERS AND AGAINST OTHERS. This is the death of true freedom.”

John Fund has an excellent piece over at OpinionJournal.com. He compares the Terri Schiavo case to that of Elian Gonzales. In 2000, the Left hailed executive defiance of both state AND federal court rulings. Now the Left enjoins compliance upon the executive with various court decisions. Fund wants to know why Liberals view the two cases differently.

On The Weekly Standard website, Eric Cohen poses a question unaddressed throughout the Terri Schiavo drama. What if Terri’s family agreed with her “husband,” and wanted food and water withheld. Would that colour our understanding of the case? Should it?

I think withholding food and water from a brain injured person should be legally impossible, at least in the absence of DEFINITIVE brain functionality scans. Modern scanning can reveal not just the presence of brain activity, but the locale of that activity in the brain. Thus, activity in areas of the brain dealing with personality, rememberance and consciousness can be identified. In instances where no such activity can be observed, that too can be taken LEGAL cognizance of. BUT before anybody should be “allowed” to die in this manner, the state has an obligation to find out the precise level of brain activity, or inactivity.

Lastly, Terri has purportedly been administered morphine. WHY? If she is truly vegetative, as we’ve been assured, she should neither require doping, nor care for it. Schiavo’s lawyer over the weekend informed us all that Terri has never looked so “at peace.” That raises questions too, is he conceding that flashes of awareness and personality can be glimpsed in her demeanor. I didn’t know a vegetable could look “at peace,” I thought it just looked vegetative. Someone should ask the lawyer, has he seen Terri NOT at peace……

But then again, I suppose you have to be a creepy enthusiast for euthanasia, to discern the nuance in appearance in those being ushered from this world, to the next.

Partisan FemiNazi, Ellen Goodman, goes after Republicans for trying to save Terri’s life:

A Congress that rushed to intervene cared less about neurology than electability. Doing the right thing mattered less than appeasing the right wing. By early Monday morning, the president had signed an unprecedented law allowing ”any parent of Theresa Marie Schiavo” to sue in federal court to keep her alive.

Keeping up with the rest of the MSM, Goodman takes a shot at Delay and then spreads the LIE about the GOP talking points memo:

What about Tom DeLay, for that matter, a politician on his own life support for fund-raising improprieties, who cast himself as Terri’s protector against ”medical terrorism.” And don’t forget the infamous ”talking points” memo ABC News found reminding Republican senators that ”the pro-life base will be excited” and it’s a ”great political issue.”

Ellen Goodman is your typical, partisan liberal who only seeks to antagonize the right. Her claim to fame was women’s rights until Bill Clinton turned out to be a sex offender and George W. Bush installed two democracies in the Middle East giving women the right to vote. She cares only about saving the lives of vicious murderers and trashes abortion opponents as “anti-choice.” She once championed domestic violence awareness - until that meant siding against someone like Michael Schiavo and siding with someone like Tom DeLay. AND like a true liberal, Goodman invokes polls that support her position:

Down here, among the biocitizenry, 78 percent of those surveyed in an ABC poll said they wouldn’t want to be kept alive in Terri’s condition. About two-thirds of us think a spouse should have the final say, and 70 percent thought Congress should not have gotten involved.

The good news is that Republicans must have been really winning the battles of the past few years since we haven’t heard this much about polls since Clinton’s impeachment. The bad news is there are many more people that sit on the judiciary that think like Goodman than think like conservatives.