Rick Santorum's 'Involuntary Euthanasia' Claim Outrages Dutch

The International Business ^ | February 20, 2012 | MELANIE JONES

[BarnacleCenturion]

Rick Santorum's claim that the Netherlands advocates mass murder through involuntary euthanasia has prompted a furious backlash from the Western European country, with local news sources calling the Republican a "crazy extreme" candidate making up facts to stir up his political base.

"Rick Santorum Thinks He Knows the Netherlands: Murder of the Elderly on a Grand Scale" fumed the headline of the newspaper NRC Handelsblad on Saturday.

The article references an interview, barely played up by the American press, in which Santorum claims that euthanasia makes up "10 percent of all deaths" in the Netherlands," and that many of those people were essentially murdered by the state.

[muawiyah]

I happen to be a Gingrich supporter, but the 10% figure is more nearly correct than wrong, and DNR means "do not resuscitate". If the Dutch are putting that on ALL the tags on all the patients who check into Dutch hospitals I think you've got a very serious problem there.

I sure wouldn't check into any hospital that put a DNR on me as I checked in!

We can just see Mohammad Ali doing an advertisement for Dutch Hospitals: "They check in but they don't check out".

[muawiyah]

Just add back in the "extended sedation without hydration" ~ that's euthanasia here and everywhere ~ the Dutch just don't count it as euthanasia because they've categorized it as "not euthanasia" even though it is.

You must dig beyond the categorizations provided by the killer docs and look at what is going on. They are killing people because it suits them to do so.

[muawiyah]

BTW, Marguerite, REAL Jews are opposed to euthanasia.

[b9]

Gingrich/ Adelson 2012!!!

[TheOldLady]

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[aruanan]

Nowhere in the US Constitution is written that the president have to be Catholic or Christian for that matter. Santorum points are irrelevant as far as the religious trend is concerned.

Gingrich, who is also Catholic, claims the right way to put out any controversy: the respect of the Constitution and its First Amendment and Sixth Article.

“Congress shall make NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion, or PROHIBITING the free exercise thereof ....”

Article VI

“NO RELIGIOUS Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”

Period.

You are entirely missing the point. Whereas under the Constitution, no one, as a condition of law, shall be required to pass a religious test for public office, it doesn't at all follow that the religion of a candidate, his degree of adherence to that professed religion or no religion at all, has or should have no relevance to the voting public or to the other candidates or that they or any of their supporters should be prohibited from referring to it or that if they do they are hypocrites or are being unConstitutional--the restriction in the Constitution is on the government in making by law a requirement for a religious test.

Imagine that someone's a closet-worshipper of Molech. Does it make any sense to say that he is just as qualified as any other candidate to hold public office in spite of being a participant in a religion that features the ritual sacrifice of living children to death by burning in metal hands of the Molech idol?

Imagine that his religion is Communism (and, yes, in spite of being atheistic, Communism is as much as religion as other atheistic religions). Does it make any sense to say that he is just as qualified as any other candidate to hold public office in spite of professing a religion the tenets of which call for the destruction of the nation and the government that he is running as a candidate to represent as chief executive?

[Eva]

Denial of service is involuntary euthanasia.

[Marguerite]

I never said otherwise.

What I did say is - what’s happening in Netherlands has no relevance whatsoever in the GOP primaries elections.

If it were, next you know Santorum would start blabbering about what happens in the other 191 countries in the world, one by one, providing the American public with the most powerful soporific ever.

[muawiyah]

Nazism spread from a small center in Germany ~ things like that ALWAYS get involved in our Presidential elections ~ we are concerned. PLUS, there’s this history. What goes on in the old homeland for millions of Americans (we got more Dutch than you got) is always of interest.

[muawiyah]

Typical of so many Europeans, Marguerite let slip that in Nederland the authority of the current state was derived from the authority of the last state, and that came from the DIVINE RIGHT OF KINGS.

That is, their governments have all the power in the world to do whatever they wish at any time to anybody.

They simply do not read our rules in the sense that WE RESTRICT THE POWER OF THE STATE FIRST.

The Bill of Rights is a limitation on government, not individuals. The "religious test" clause is a restriction on the state, not private individuals, or people running for office, or even officers of state acting as individuals.

One of the errors made at the end of WWII was we did not FORCE all the European states we'd liberated to adopt a Bill of Rights before we cut them free of occupation.

Next time we'll fix that problem ~ in the meantime we just have to be patient with these people who not only don't understand our Constitution, they can't understand it. Europeans have no frame of reference for understanding it in fact!

[aruanan]

As I said elsewhere with respect to health care:

Some health professionals seem to believe that the government should sponsor their efforts to counter the self-interested efforts of others (nutrition and diet quacks for example) because they are right and the others are wrong, because they are altruistic and the others are not. It may be true that they are factually correct and genuinely altruistic, and that what they wish to do will have a beneficial effect on many people, but it doesn’t follow necessarily that the government should fund them.

This is a manifestation of a widespread phenomenon brought about by the advent of the secularized state. Instead of viewing the state as a limited means to a limited end, the tendency has been to imbue it, a temporal entity, with the attributes of a transcendent final judgment in which all injustices and inequalities are finally rectified. In this way, the secular state has been categorically, though not personally, deified and expected to act accordingly (something of a diffuse divine right of kings).

This is seen in those who believe the necessary response to a social ill is the passage of a law, especially a federal law, and the enactment of a program, especially one that they can devise and administrate (and that not necessarily for cynical reasons). Those who feel they are on the side of right, certain they aren’t acting against society’s interest, often appeal to the State to aid them in their struggle against evil. Since the spirit of the secular state is money and power, they ask to be endowed accordingly. It’s pathetically naive and dangerous.