I don’t need to tell you that there’s no item on the liberal agenda that is ever abandoned. Even after being handed a defeat, they will simply wait until enough time has passed and push for it again.
That’s what’s happening now with assisted suicide.
After being defeated in all but a few states more than a decade ago, there’s a new push to legalize assisted suicide across the country. In fact, the District of Columbia has already passed an assisted suicide bill and Congress is debating whether to block it.
And as a devout Christian — and someone who is deeply concerned about the fate of the poor and marginalized — I’m worried.
The timing itself is curious. People on both sides of the political aisle agree that our health care system is an alarming state. They just disagree on the way to fix it. And yet, despite this general consensus, they are pushing for the “right” to help the terminally ill die. Is there no concern about the potential for abuse and coercion? The slippery slope? The impact on the doctor-patient relationship? What it says about our culture’s respect for life?
And when it comes to the possibility for abuse, who should be most concerned? That’s easy. The people who are always at the highest risk for discriminatory treatment … the poor, the marginalized, and minorities (especially African Americans).
Support for assisted suicide is based on an elitist fantasy about controlling the manner of your death. It has no room for worries about inadequate care, coercive relatives, overworked doctors, or anything else that is reality for most of us. (We’ve been talking a lot lately about the subtle discrimination black boys experience in preschool. Is there any reason to believe that it doesn’t exist in other forms throughout society?)
They laughed when opponents of Obamacare worried about death panels. Now they’re creating a system that will inevitably lead to the creation of such panels.
For people of faith, the objections to assisted suicide come directly from Christian doctrine. But even for those who do not believe, there are very good reasons to oppose it. Abortion has already been a genocide for the African American community. Let’s not put our grandmothers and grandfathers at risk as well.
