Pennsylvania Court: Guardians Can't Pull the Plug on Mentally Disabled People

The cloak of Christianity.

Yes, even here.

Here’s the deal.

Yes, the fedgov including all it’s “benefits” is a more or less fascist monstrosity that has to be changed. Yes, federal health care and all that stuff is bad and needs to change.

But it isn’t going to change this afternoon.

In the meantime, what to do?

Second, there is no hint or clue whatsoever that this man’s health treatments were paid for with gov money. None whatsoever.

For all we know, private insurance or other private monies or health plan paid for his care.

You mean like people who think the 8th Commandment doesn't apply when the stealing is being done for a purpose they agree with?

You and the other Ron Paul/Ayn Rand devotees have yet to demonstrate where money is even an issue in this case and if money isn't an issue it is impossible for it to be theft.

While we may not agree with Social Security, Medicaid and taxes in general, the Bible DOES recognize taxes as valid, therefore taxes are not theft.

I didn’t ask you for verification of the legitimate functions of governments.

Ask for it? No. Need it desperately? Very much. You stated that the Founders allowed for this. I proved you wrong. They didn't.

I already stated the government does have a legitimate function.

Which doesn't include paying for the medical care of private citizens. Period.

I never claimed that governments don’t have the right and responsibility to allocate money for various purposes.

Duh. You claimed that they have the 'right'. Governments don't have 'rights', people do. Governments have powers. There's a difference. Look into it. In our system those powers are few and specifically enumerated.

The concept is "Constitutional Republic" Look into it sometime.

I’m the one who said the opposite of that.

Once again, duh. You're arguing in favor of organized, wholesale, Government sponsored theft. It's both completely unsupported Bilbically and Constitutionally. I'm arguing for limited, Constitutional government.

You were the one who argued against the government allocating funds.

Wrong again. I argued for the Government not to be involved in the first place. That subtle difference is obviously much too fine a point for you to get into your pretty little head.

I don’t know where the funding comes from for this man’s care. Do you?

With about a 99.8% certainty, yes.

Civilized societies do not dump infants and disabled people naked on the side of a frozen creek to die of exposure, just to satisfy our own gluttony and sloth.

Once again I wasn't advocating that you silly, hysterical, ignorant woman.

Now have a nice day.

L

But it isn’t going to change this afternoon. In the meantime, what to do?

Oh I don't know. Maybe try to educate certain people who say that all this crap is Biblical and Constitutional about just how wrong they are? You think folks on a Conservative forum dedicated to 'rolling back decades of Government largesse' might be on board with that. Instead they'd rather call people Nazis and accuse me of wanting this kid dead. Real nice, huh?

Second, there is no hint or clue whatsoever that this man’s health treatments were paid for with gov money. None whatsoever.

I'll bet you 5 bucks that Government money is involved somehwere. Take me up on it?

With about a 99.8% certainty, yes.

Then PROVE IT, show us the documentation that this case was about money.

Let me ask you a question, if a person (handicapped or otherwise) has a treatable medical condition and they do not have the means to pay for the treatment themselves, and no charitable groups come forward, WHAT should be done? Should they simply be allowed to die? YES or NO.

You say that God allows taxation only for the purpose of having a governemnt to carry out prescribed punishment; and then, only for these 5 kinds of offenses: "Murder, Adultery, Theft, Fraud, and Covetousness. And THAT'S IT."

I would like to ask if this is an interpretation on Romans 13 endorsed by a particular church, religious movement, political party, or political movement which you support, or if it is an interpretation you came up with yourself.

(This is sincerely asked: I'd like to see some religious or politcal context here, since I'm interested in how these ideas originate and who is propagating them.)

If you were to adopt Biblical principles tout court as the basis of American government, you would have to deal with a lot more roles than just punishment; and a lot more issues than just "Murder, Adultery, Theft, Fraud, and Covetousness. "

In Exodus 21-22, Biblical law addresses not justthe issues cited above, but also has rules for the accepted practice of slavery. It excuses assault and battery upon a slave by beating with a rod (even if, after a few days, the slave dies from the beating) on the grounds that a slave is the master’s property; it allows selling a daughter into slavery. (And do you think she might curse her father for selling her into slavery? well,Exodus also provides the death penalty for cursing a parent).

Exodus has rules for the purchase of a bride; it legislates a 0% interest rate when lending to the poor; it says anyone following any religion other than Judaism is to be “utterly destroyed.”

Leviticus --- in many passages --- addresses diet and food-handling, hygiene and bathing, diagnosis and treatment of disease and the quarantining of those with infectious diseases (public health laws); approved and proscribed forms of sexual conduct, including the penalties for viewing the nakedness of close family members, and for having intercourse with your wife during her menstrual period. It also provides for the extirpation of witches.

In Deuteronomy 17-22 are laws regarding violation of a court order, perjury, malicious accusations, building codes, and juvenile delinquency.

The Bible also alludes repeatedly to the principle of divine appointment of rulers. "...He (God) removeth kings, and setteth up kings..." (Daniel 2:21). "For promotion cometh neither from the east, nor from the west, nor from the south. But God is the judge: He putteth down one, and setteth up another" (Psalm 75:6-7).

And more: not only does the ruler rule by divine right, but all other officers of government were to be put in office by this one ruler. In Exodus 18:21 Moses establishes that every level of judge and government leaders shall be appointed by him, personally, without set term of office, and without explicit limitation as to what sort of matters they shall judge.

This is not made a whole lot clearer in the New Testament, where Jesus approves payment of tax to Caesar (did God appoint the Roman Emperors? All of them?) and does not stipulate what the Romans may or may not use the tax money for (I have mny own interpretation of the "God and Caesar" thing, but I don't think it's the same asyours!)

Paul himself, who presumably wrote Romans 13 apparently was a law-abiding, tax-paying Roman citizen in good standing; that is, until they arrested, imprisoned, and executed him (and that wasn't about taxes!)

I really don't think you want to use these Biblical standards to re-make American Constitutional law. Or do you?

I'm looking for your coherent reasons why, or why not.

Right. I’m not the one who’s stupid enough to believe that. I was demonstrating the stupidity of the liberaltarian argument. I didn’t expect you to understand the complexities of it.

Then PROVE IT, show us the documentation that this case was about money.

I made no representations that this case was about money. I merely said that to force private citizens through taxation to pay for the medical care of other private citizens is both un-Biblical and un-Constitutional. You're the one who got his panties in a bunch defending Government sponsored theft for un-Constitutional purposes simply because you think it's a good idea.

Theft is never moral wagglebee.

Let me ask you a question, if a person (handicapped or otherwise) has a treatable medical condition and they do not have the means to pay for the treatment themselves, and no charitable groups come forward, WHAT should be done?

A bake sale? A car wash? Put those little things in 7-11's asking for spare change? A local Church group? Moose? Elks? Rotarians? St. Judes NEVER turns down a kid because of an inability to pay so your entire question is based on a false premise.

You just want to relieve yourself of the personal responsibility to act in a Christ like manner and step up. You figure if you cheerlead for just one more instance of forcing the taxpayer to foot the bill you've done something good.

You haven't. You're just helping to perpetuate an unjust, immoral, and un-Constitutional system because it makes you feel better about yourself.

The really sad part of it is that you have absolutely no clue as to how lost you really are.

L

ADVISEMENT: Still recommend people stay out of PINELLAS COUNTY, FLORIDA, i.e. Death Central. They've turned killing and torture into an art form. It's all behind closed doors now - no need to bother the judges. Just do it.

If you want to live, avoid PINELLAS COUNTY. Kill their tourism instead. They hate that.

I was demonstrating the stupidity of the liberaltarian argument.

Riiiiigggghhhtt. Jefferson, Adams, Madison, and Franklin were well known for their Libertarian leanings and hatred of all things Christian.

So here's what we done in the last 12 hours you and I:

We've established that you don't know jack squat about the Constitution, the Founding Fathers, the arguments made by the Federalist or the anti-Federalists, and that you don't really give a rip that you don't know.

You just want what you want and you're going to stomp your widdle feeties and call people names until you get it.

P.J O'Rourke summed people like you up quite succinctly:

"At the core of liberalism is the spoiled child - miserable, as all spoiled children are, unsatisfied, demanding, ill-disciplined, despotic and useless. Liberalism is a philosphy of sniveling brats."

L

Thank you for your very thoughtful and insightful post. I’m also curious where such ridiculous notions come from. I suspect it’s just made up out of whole cloth, in a feeble attempt to justify their own bloodlust.

No, actually, you’ve demonstrated that your attempts to derail the thread and force me to discuss other subjects has been a complete failure. You’re still stuck with posts containing statements you made but can’t defend. Your feeble attempts to paint our Founding Fathers as being opposed to everything they openly stood for, has failed. Your attempts to deflect blame for your disrespect for life onto God and Country are transparent, but not very convincing.

No, actually, you’ve demonstrated that your attempts to derail the thread and force me to discuss other subjects has been a complete failure.

I wouldn't count your inability to discuss the Constitution and our Founding Fathers as a failure on my part. I think it speaks more to your shortcomings than to mine actually.

Your feeble attempts to paint our Founding Fathers as being opposed to everything they openly stood for, has failed.

I'm curious. What color is the sky on your planet?

I made no representations that this case was about money.

Though in post #245 you claimed "with about a 99.8% certainty" to know where the funding came from.

I merely said that to force private citizens through taxation to pay for the medical care of other private citizens is both un-Biblical and un-Constitutional. You're the one who got his panties in a bunch defending Government sponsored theft for un-Constitutional purposes simply because you think it's a good idea.

As I said, we can dislike taxation all we want, but that doesn't make it unconstitutional or unbiblical.

A bake sale? A car wash? Put those little things in 7-11's asking for spare change? A local Church group? Moose? Elks? Rotarians? St. Judes NEVER turns down a kid because of an inability to pay so your entire question is based on a false premise.

You just want to relieve yourself of the personal responsibility to act in a Christ like manner and step up. You figure if you cheerlead for just one more instance of forcing the taxpayer to foot the bill you've done something good.

You haven't. You're just helping to perpetuate an unjust, immoral, and un-Constitutional system because it makes you feel better about yourself.

The really sad part of it is that you have absolutely no clue as to how lost you really are.

You just can't bring yourself to answer a simple question can you.

If a person (handicapped or otherwise) has a treatable medical condition and they do not have the means to pay for the treatment themselves, and no charitable groups come forward, WHAT should be done? Should they simply be allowed to die? YES or NO.

As far as your claim that, "you figure if you cheerlead for just one more instance of forcing the taxpayer to foot the bill you've done something good," YOU have yet to demonstrate that this is even true.

Is this what they teach in the Ayn Rand courses? Is the Ron Paul/Ayn Rand method just to pretend that it's about public money and then disregard morality based on that premise.

Whittaker Chambers was absolutely right about Ayn Rand (and by extension her mindless devotees) when he wrote his review of Atlas Shrugged:

The overlap is not as incongruous as it looks. Atlas Shrugged can be called a novel only by devaluing the term. It is a massive tract for the times. Its story merely serves Miss Rand to get the customers inside the tent, and as a soapbox for delivering her Message. The Message is the thing. It is, in sum, a forthright philosophic materialism. Upperclassmen might incline to sniff and say that the author has, with vast effort, contrived a simple materialist system, one, intellectually, at about the stage of the oxcart, though without mastering the principle of the wheel. Like any consistent materialism, this one begins by rejecting God, religion, original sin, etc. etc. (This book’s aggressive atheism and rather unbuttoned “higher morality,” which chiefly outrage some readers, are, in fact, secondary ripples, and result inevitably from its underpinning premises.) Thus, Randian Man, like Marxian Man, is made the center of a godless world.
~snip~
One Big Brother is, of course, a socializing elite (as we know, several cut-rate brands are on the shelves). Miss Rand, as the enemy of any socializing force, calls in a Big Brother of her own contriving to do battle with the other. In the name of free enterprise, therefore, she plumps for a technocratic elite (I find no more inclusive word than technocratic to bracket the industrial-financial-engineering caste she seems to have in mind). When she calls “productive achievement” man’s “noblest activity,” she means, almost exclusively, technological achievement, supervised by such a managerial political bureau. She might object that she means much, much more; and we can freely entertain her objections. But, in sum, that is just what she means. For that is what, in reality, it works out to. And in reality, too, by contrast with fiction, this can only head into a dictatorship, however benign, living and acting beyond good and evil, a law unto itself (as Miss Rand believes it should be), and feeling any restraint on itself as, in practice, criminal, and, in morals, vicious — as Miss Rand clearly feels it to be. Of course, Miss Rand nowhere calls for a dictatorship. I take her to be calling for an aristocracy of talents. We cannot labor here why, in the modern world, the pre-conditions for aristocracy, an organic growth, no longer exist, so that impulse toward aristocracy always emerges now in the form of dictatorship.
Nor has the author, apparently, brooded on the degree to which, in a wicked world, a materialism of the Right and a materialism of the Left first surprisingly resemble, then, in action, tend to blend each with each, because, while differing at the top in avowed purpose, and possibly in conflict there, at bottom they are much the same thing. The embarrassing similarities between Hitler’s National Socialism and Stalin’s brand of Communism are familiar. For the world, as seen in materialist view from the Right, scarcely differs from the same world seen in materialist view from the Left. The question becomes chiefly: who is to run that world in whose interests, or perhaps, at best, who can run it more efficiently?
Something of this implication is fixed in the book’s dictatorial tone, which is much its most striking feature. Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked. There are ways of dealing with such wickedness, and, in fact, right reason itself enjoins them. From almost any page of Atlas Shrugged, a voice can be heard, from painful necessity, commanding: “To a gas chamber — go!” The same inflexibly self-righteous stance results, too (in the total absence of any saving humor), in odd extravagances of inflection and gesture — that Dollar Sign, for example. At first, we try to tell ourselves that these are just lapses, that this mind has, somehow, mislaid the discriminating knack that most of us pray will warn us in time of the difference between what is effective and firm, and what is wildly grotesque and excessive. Soon we suspect something worse. We suspect that this mind finds, precisely in extravagance, some exalting merit; feels a surging release of power and passion precisely in smashing up the house. A tornado might feel this way, or Carrie Nation. We struggle to be just. For we cannot help feel at least a sympathetic pain before the sheer labor, discipline, and patient craftsmanship that went to making this mountain of words. But the words keep shouting us down. In the end that tone dominates. But it should be its own antidote, warning us that anything it shouts is best taken with the usual reservations with which we might sip a patent medicine. Some may like the flavor. In any case, the brew is probably without lasting ill effects. But it is not a cure for anything. Nor would we, ordinarily, place much confidence in the diagnosis of a doctor who supposes that the Hippocratic Oath is a kind of curse.

You say that God allows taxation only for the purpose of having a governemnt to carry out prescribed punishment; and then, only for these 5 kinds of offenses: "Murder, Adultery, Theft, Fraud, and Covetousness. And THAT'S IT." I would like to ask if this is an interpretation on Romans 13 endorsed by a particular church, religious movement, political party, or political movement which you support, or if it is an interpretation you came up with yourself. (This is sincerely asked: I'd like to see some religious or politcal context here, since I'm interested in how these ideas originate and who is propagating them.)

I'm speaking on behalf of the Biblical Theonomy exposited by Frederick Nymeyer, amongst other Conservative Calvinists.

I'll skip over your comments regarding Old Testament Law, since Paul does not place enforcement of the Moral Law (the "First Table" or first Five Laws of the Ten Commandments, including laws against Blasphemy, Disobedience to Parents, and the like) under the jurisdiction of Post-Incarnation Gentile Government, but only the Civil Law (the "Second Table" or second Five Laws of the Old Testament, specifically the laws against Murder, Adultery, Theft, Fraud, and Covetous Acts). If you want to read more on this subject, feel free to click on the link provided.

Although I will point out that the Old Testament never endorses the false religion of Judaism. Judaism, which is based upon the rejection of Jesus the Messiah, was not the religion of the Old Testament Patriarchs, who looked forward in Faith to the coming of Jesus the Messiah. If one wants to label the Pre-Christianity religion of the Patriarchs, "Old Testament Jews For Jesus (in anticipation)" would be more accurate.

This is not made a whole lot clearer in the New Testament, where Jesus approves payment of tax to Caesar (did God appoint the Roman Emperors? All of them?) and does not stipulate what the Romans may or may not use the tax money for (I have mny own interpretation of the "God and Caesar" thing, but I don't think it's the same as yours!)

Jesus does not need to specify the proper role of Government; since the Bible hangs together as a unitary whole, and Paul specifies the proper Authority of Government in Romans 13: to punish Murder, Adultery, Theft, Fraud, and Covetous Acts.

Paul himself, who presumably wrote Romans 13 apparently was a law-abiding, tax-paying Roman citizen in good standing; that is, until they arrested, imprisoned, and executed him (and that wasn't about taxes!)

All of which (arresting, imprisoning, and executing Paul) were immoral actions committed by an Administration (the direct governance of Nero) which was entirely different from the Administration of which Paul wrote in Romans 13 (the just and enlightened Quinquennium of Seneca).

When Nero executed Paul, he was operating outside of God's Law, and so did not enjoy Divine Approval for his actions (as God does approve the Government execution of Murderers, for example).

I really don't think you want to use these Biblical standards to re-make American Constitutional law. Or do you?

No need. Most of these functions of Government (punishment of Murder, Adultery, Theft, Fraud, and Covetous Acts) should Constitutionally be handled at the State level, anyway. So there's no need to alter or amend the US Federal Constitution, to support Biblically-based legislation at the State Level.

Hi, BB --- Christian_Capitalist presumably has a good, worked-out system, and as we'r both interested in it, I will ping you to it as soon as he answers (or, alternatively, C_C, please add BB to your response.)

A more obvious issue, it occurs to me, is that court-appointed legal guardians are supposed to make decisions for the health of the medically-dependent person they have been appointed to guard, protect and serve. If the guardians cannot do this in good conscience because they believe (as C_C apparently does) that public funds may NOT be provided for this purpose, they should have recused themselves from guardianship.

To accept guardianship when you honestly think guardianship involves theft is in itself an instance of fraud.

The Court, to its credit, ruled that the disabled man in question, David Bockenberry, would not be healthier dead.

Christian_Capitalist presumably has a good, worked-out system, and as we'r both interested in it, I will ping you to it as soon as he answers

Provided above. Please feel free to read through Nymeyer's journals and respond to any of his particular points, with cited references, at your convenience.

A more obvious issue, it occurs to me, is that court-appointed legal guardians are supposed to make decisions for the health of the medically-dependent person they have been appointed to guard, protect and serve. If the guardians cannot do this in good conscience because they believe (as C_C apparently does) that public funds may NOT be provided for this purpose, they should have recused themselves from guardianship.

I have no objection to this argument.

Christian_Capitalist at #257. First thought: I'll go with the U.S. Constitution instead, but thanks just the same.

Mo' later, after I do some chores.

And thanks sincerely, C_C, for your quick response.