My Kingdom for a Conscience

Signs and portents that we are destined to go out with a whimper after all.

The first is a little-noted incident in Luxembourg. Luxembourg is easy to laugh at: it is so miniscule as to be invisible. But it was there, earlier this month, that one of the battles for “the core” of Western values, i.e., respect for individual human life, was lost…again.

The Grand Duke Henri had the temerity to veto legislation that would permit euthanasia. For this exercise of his constitutional duty he was duly punished:

As a result of the Grand Duke’s opposition, Article 34 of Luxembourg’s constitution has been changed by the Parliament to strip him of veto power. When Parliament votes on the third reading of the euthanasia bill, the Grand Duke will be forced to enact it. The price of obeying his conscience and religious faith has been that he has been reduced to a pointless cipher.

That appears to be the end point of acting from conscience for a conservator: to be pushed to the sidelines while the dark business of killing at both ends of life’s spectrum continues apace.

Here in America, we are no better. Our abortion “laws” - in reality, our abortion judicial edicts - the most lax interpretations regarding human life to be found on this planet, have resulted in fifty million “procedures” ending prenatal life. Now our states are gearing up to snuff them out on the other end, and still it is our judges, not our legislators, who will do the deciding:
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On December 5, Montana District judge Dorothy McCarter ruled in Baxter v. Montana that the state law banning assisted suicide violates not only the right to privacy guaranteed in the Montana constitution but also the constitutional clause that reads, “The dignity of the human being is inviolable.” McCarter found here a “fundamental right” for the terminally ill to “die with dignity”--meaning in the case at hand, to commit suicide by drug overdose.

McCarter also ruled that doctors have a concomitant right to be free from “liability under the State’s homicide statutes” if they help a patient commit death with dignity: “If the patient were to have no assistance from his doctor,” she explained, “he may be forced to kill himself sooner…in a manner that violates his dignity and peace of mind, such as by gunshot or by otherwise unpleasant method, causing undue suffering to the patient and his family.” That suicide is not a necessity apparently never entered the judge’s mind.

An ugly malignment of the stars for December. Public displays, one of them meant to celebrate the birth of the Messiah and another the celebration of light in the face of annihilation, are being outlawed and in their stead we have two more polities furthering the enthralling darkness of death.

In any other context, the juxtaposition of Luxembourg and Montana would be amusing. Here, however, their inclination to annihilate the inconvenient among us does not portend well for anyone. You have only to look at the consequences of euthanasia in, say, the Netherlands, to understand how the creep of evil slowly smothers human decency:

In 30 years Holland has moved from assisted suicide to euthanasia, from euthanasia of people who are terminally ill to euthanasia of those who are chronically ill, from euthanasia for physical illness to euthanasia for mental illness, from euthanasia for mental illness to euthanasia for psychological distress or mental suffering, and from voluntary euthanasia to involuntary euthanasia or as the Dutch prefer to call it “termination of the patient without explicit request”.

Call it what it is: murder for the sake of convenience.

Do not send out to ask for whom the bell tolls. You know already that they are preparing the death bed for you and for your children. You are being granted your final “right to privacy”, a privacy you are no longer free to abjure.