Assisted Suicide and Religious Liberty

 

The “unthinkable” comes to Scotland while the U.S. Supreme Court is about to rule in a battle over religious freedom

By Dave Andrusko

Hobby Lobby’s David and Barbara Green

For the last post of the day, I’d like to revisit two stories we ran Tuesday.
In February when Belgium legalized the euthanasia of children, we all knew two things. The “protections/safeguards” weren’t worth a plug nickel and that the virus would quickly spread.
I don’t know enough about Scotland to have predicted what are called “children’s charities” would come together to piggyback on efforts to legalize assisted suicide for adults, which is still illegal. That’s right, the slippery slope is so steep that an organization called “Together” has cautioned members of the Scottish Parliament not to set an age limitation of 16!

That organization includes two “children’s charities”–Barnardo’s and Save the Children.
Together bills itself as working to ensure the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is implemented in Scotland.

To that end there is a Parliamentary committee which is looking into the Assisted Suicide (Scotland) Bill. Under this bill, people as young as 16 with a “terminal illness or progressive life-shortening condition to be helped to commit suicide,” according to the Christian Institute.
But that’s not good enough (so to speak) for Together. It argues that under the Convention, “a child’s opinion on his or her healthcare ‘must be respected and given due weight’ in accordance with their ‘age and maturity,’” The Christian Institute reported. Where should the Scottish Parliament (the Holyrood) look for guidance? Together recommends (who else?) Belgium.
The anti-assisted suicide organization Care Not Killing responded, “Right-minded people will be baffled that such an idea can be advanced, not least from one organisation purporting to represent the interests of children. Such a monstrous idea should be unthinkable.”
It should be unthinkable, but it isn’t.
We also talked about the thinly-disguised attack on the Green family, which owns Hobby Lobby, one of the two family-run corporations whose challenge to the Obama mandate was heard by the Supreme Court. A decision is expected soon.

We pointed how lame was the attempt to portray Hobby Lobby as something just this side of subversive. I did not know it at the time, but Jonathan S. Tobin had written on the same topic for Commentary magazine’s website.

Tobin astutely notes that “rather than confining the debate to the question of constitutional rights, critics of the plaintiffs in Hobby Lobby v. Sebelius have done their best to portray the business owners who seek to strike down the government mandate as not merely wrong but a threat to liberty.”
His next sentences are particularly shrewd:

“In order to do this, the administration and its cheering section in the mainstream media have sought to transform the debate from one that centers on government using its power to force people of faith to choose between their religion and their business to the dubious notion that dissenters from the mandate wish to impose their beliefs on others.”

When we posted, we wrote about the “scandal” (to those who wish to marginalize the Green family) that the family is underwriting “a Bible curriculum they hope to place in public schools nationwide” as an elective and “building a huge museum dedicated to the Bible a few blocks from the Mall.”
Tobin cuts directly to the intolerance that is at the heart of this debate over religious liberty:

“Contrary to their government opponents in their lawsuit, the Hobby Lobby owners are not trying to force the actions of others to conform to their beliefs. What they want is to be left alone to practice their faith while also trying to persuade others to share it. Bible study may not be everyone’s cup of tea but the notion that it is a threat to democracy would have been hard to sell to this nation’s Founders. The attacks on the Greens illustrate the intolerance of openly expressed faith that is at the core of the mandate the administration is seeking to enforce. The Greens are no threat to the liberty of non-believers who need not visit their bible museum nor read the religious materials they publish. But a government, egged on by a liberal media establishment, that can’t tolerate Hobby Lobby’s practices is one that has little interest in defending anyone’s religious freedom. In such an atmosphere, it’s little wonder that Hobby Lobby’s advocates see the outcome of this case as a crucial moment in the fight to defend constitutional liberty.”

Source: NRLC News