Replies

I've published this short essay in other venues.

0bamacare is neither about health nor care. It is ultimately about control and the devaluation of human life. The ideas informing the construction of this monstrosity have a history and a pedigree.

Here is the Vulcan mind-meld translation of the core premise of the Left: you have no right to live. By their lights, you are no more than a thing, an animal, or a machine. Therefore, you have no right to the fruits of your labors. You are a ‘resource’ at best, a fungible, and ultimately disposable asset of the State. Or you are in their way and must be eliminated. There’s the last 200 years of leftist philosophy and its practical consequences in a nutshell.

The progressive refusal to acknowledge the value of individual human life over an evanescent conflation of group rights and collectivist ideology is one of the principal reasons why no peace, no accommodation, no compromise can ever be made with them. Theirs is a reckless, willful and fundamentally evil disregard for the most fundamental of all of our rights: and that is the individual’s right to live.

This premise is, has been, and continues to be central to the justification for the wholesale slaughter of millions of human beings and the enslavement and impoverishment of hundreds of millions more. I have written a modest essay concerning the idea of killers without conscience and the pedigree of their ideas. These ideas are on display in the details of 0bamacare. 0bamacare represents the deliberate and willful devaluation of human life - the reduction of people to mere objects. That is the next step on the way to physician-assisted suicide and, if it is not stopped, government-mandated euthanasia.

And worse. Far, far worse. But that's precisely the intent of the so-called "Obamacare" legislation.

Why else would modernity’s Left seek to 'move the goalposts' that define life? And further, to define the value of individual life by its utility? "Utility" - to whom or for what? We have moved from questioning whether any sane human being should be allowed to make such decisions to dithering over who will get to decide. How can such things be done right in front of our very eyes? Slowly and by degrees. Then it simply becomes part of the discussion and before you know it – that discussion has turned into the reality. This is monstrous. And if any of you feel that this is hyperbole or tinfoil hattery, consider the source of such ideas.

Listen to Dr. Peter Singer speaking blithely of extending that 'right to choose' to children as old as 28 months! Why? Because Singer argues that at that age, well... they're not fully conscious and capable of reason! Who among you will dare to follow that chain of reasoning to its final destination? Is Singer some crackpot who no one takes seriously? Hardly. Singer is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He is lionized among the intellectual elites and his ideas are almost universally applauded within academia.

Why else would we hear of Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel - Rahm Emanuel’s brother - also an 'advisor' to 0bama, advocating the assessment of the relative 'quality of life' under the aegis of his innocuous-sounding “Complete Lives” program? Emanuel’s guidelines are strictly utilitarian, and are based in part upon the notion of an individual’s ‘value to society’.

Emmanuel cites this entry from the Jan. 31, 2009 edition of the British medical journal Lancet:

"When implemented, the complete lives system produces a priority curve on which individuals aged between roughly 15 and 40 years get the most substantial chance, whereas the youngest and oldest people get chances that are attenuated." This may be justified by public opinion, since "broad consensus favours adolescents over very young infants and young adults over very elderly people."
"Strict youngest-first allocation directs scarce resources predominantly to infants. This approach seems incorrect. The death of a 20-year-old woman is intuitively worse than that of a 2-month-old girl, even though the baby has had less life. The 20-year-old has a much more developed personality than the infant, and has drawn upon the investment of others to begin as-yet-unfulfilled projects.... Adolescents have received substantial education and parental care, investments that will be wasted without a complete life. Infants, by contrast, have not yet received these investments.... It is terrible when an infant dies, but worse, most people think, when a three-year-old child dies, and worse still when an adolescent does."

Again, this is an argument for the value of human life based upon its social utility and it is not difficult to trace this view of human life back to its origin in late 19th- early-20th century eugenics. Dr. Emanuel claims further that this system will not be subject to corruption – at best, this fantasy assumes that all men are angels and the millennium has arrived. Systems such as this one, once entrenched, are easily co-opted by fiat and placed in the service of those who wish to arrogate the power of life and death to themselves. Dr. Emanuel offers the following as commentary to the Lancet article:

“Unlike allocation by sex or race, allocation by age is not invidious discrimination; every person lives through different life stages rather than being a single age. Even if 25-year-olds receive priority over 65-year-olds, everyone who is 65 years now was previously 25 years. Treating 65-year-olds differently because of stereotypes or falsehoods would be ageist; treating them differently because they have already had more life-years is not.”

So very humanitarian of them, eh? Some persist in crediting Dr. Emanuel with an unblinking and fearless rationality, never once considering what it will cost them when the consequences of their very bad ideas come knocking on their door. To be sure, it will be smug self-congratulation and high fives all around for high-minded progressives until they face the real and practical application of the utilitarian praxis of what Dr. Emanuel and his ilk advocate. Say, for example, when an unelected and unaccountable government panel - not them not their doctor - decides that their premature newborn infant will receive only painkillers because ‘society’ has nothing ‘invested’ in the baby and the calculus of the cost-benefit trade-off indicates that the care required will cost too much and have too… uncertain an outcome. Or, when they discover that the treatment for their particular malady is now ‘off the menu’ because it hasn’t met one of the many new Federally-mandated prerequisites for its use and application. A paperwork detail, nothing more. But too late for them. Imagine the dismay when they find out that the cancer that their Mom or Dad survived is no longer being treated because, after all, it doesn’t serve the ‘common good’ to spend limited resources on the elderly - excuse me, elderly units as 0bamacare now deems them - in the last few months of their life, does it? But they'll doubtless take comfort in the knowledge that those resources will go to “people of worth,” as genocide enthusiast and Obama advisor Audrey Thomason defines them. Won’t they?

So the question now becomes: what sort of society, what sort of existence will we have when -

1. Those goalposts defining the beginning and the end of life at last converge?

2. The decision as to who lives and who dies eventually passes from individuals and to the state - as it most surely will if progressives are allowed to have their way?

The answer is the stuff of your worst nightmares. If that seems a tad, well, extreme to some of you, consider this: there are those who believe that Dr. Emanuel deserves a medal for his fearless and enlightened rationality. Remember that Dr. Singer's prescription for infanticide without guilt are warmly applauded in the halls of academe. Far from being an exercise in ivory-tower utopian fantasy, the ideas advocated by the likes of Peter Singer, the ‘progressive’ concepts of how we should regard human life have been given currency in the Journal of Medical Ethics, a peer reviewed journal for health professionals and researchers in medical ethics. There, a recently published article by two Australian philosophers, Alberto Giubilini and Francesa Minerva, poses the question: "After-Birth Abortion: Why Should the Baby Live?" Why, indeed? Again, ask yourselves this: how did we get from whether those decisions should be made to who will be making those decisions?

These ideas have consequences: they pave the road to a nightmare world of slaughter and atrocity – and if you don’t think so, then you simply haven’t been paying attention to the history of the last 200 years. Progressives, and more importantly those whom they serve are on the verge of achieving their sick utopian dreams. For the rest of us, it’ll be nudge, the gradual squeeze - and then the shove into submission, slavery and oblivion. This is the foundation and the prerequisite for the sort of world that Orwell envisioned in his 1984, a world in which neither love, nor mercy, nor hope survive. It is a world where all of your hopes, aspirations and dreams, all of your love of country and family count for naught, for those hopes and aspirations - and you - will be extinguished as if you never had existed. Because you surely must be eliminated if these will-to-power driven monsters are to rule without fear of opposition. One of the chief instruments to achieving their ambitions has and continues to be the substitution of a culture of death for the culture of life that lies at the heart of the values that uphold Western civilization.

Pope John Paul II in his 1995 work, The Gospel of Life made this observation regarding the rise of the culture of death in modern times:

This reality is characterized by the emergence of a culture which denies solidarity and in many cases takes the form of a veritable "culture of death". This culture is actively fostered by powerful cultural, economic and political currents which encourage an idea of society excessively concerned with efficiency. Looking at the situation from this point of view, it is possible to speak in a certain sense of a war of the powerful against the weak: a life which would require greater acceptance, love and care is considered useless, or held to be an intolerable burden, and is therefore rejected in one way or another. A person who, because of illness, handicap or, more simply, just by existing, compromises the well-being or life-style of those who are more favored tends to be looked upon as an enemy to be resisted or eliminated. In this way a kind of "conspiracy against life" is unleashed. This conspiracy involves not only individuals in their personal, family or group relationships, but goes far beyond, to the point of damaging and distorting, at the international level, relations between peoples and States.

You surely don't have to be Catholic to understand the truth of what JP II has said. There is only one way that the monsters who seek to impose such a hellish existence on this world can be stopped. Only one way.