"Lethal Subjectivity - THE ROOTS OF SUICIDE AS AUTONOMY" - By: Eric Metaxas| Breakpoint.org: September 23, 2015;
http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/entry/13/28194 [AS I SEE IT: This, and the follow-up post THIS SUNDAY (10/11), is offered in view of California just legalizing assisted suicide on Monday [See link to article at VERY end of this post.] Join me in praying that the American people will wake up to the truth of this renewal of the anti-life movement in our society. - Stan]
Which has more value -- human life, or human choice? And I’m not talking about abortion.
On September 11th, California lawmakers approved a measure, which if signed by Governor Jerry Brown, would make the Golden State the sixth state to legalize physician-assisted suicide.
The “End of Life Option Act” was modeled after neighboring Oregon’s law. The California Act gained political momentum with the story of Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old Californian who moved to Oregon to end her life after a terminal diagnosis. While Maynard’s parents and husband played an important role in getting the bill passed, there’s more here than misguided “compassion.” Physician-assisted suicide, like other bad ideas making their way through our culture, has been a long time in the making.
The California bill passed despite the opposition of disability-rights activists and concerns voiced by ethicists who fear “that low-income and under-insured patients would inevitably feel pressure from family members to end their own lives in some cases, when the cost of continued treatment would be astronomical compared with the cost of a few lethal pills.”
It passed because, in the words of supporter Mark Leno, who represents San Francisco, “It allows for individual liberty and freedom, [and] freedom of choice.” Sound familiar? As the New York Times pointed out, Leno “compared the issue to gay marriage.” Of course he did. Behind the high-sounding rhetoric of “compassion” and “dignity,” both same-sex marriage and physician-assisted suicide are ultimately about the pursuit of personal autonomy and self-expression.
Someone who understands this all too well is Rosaria Butterfield. Butterfield is probably best-known for her extraordinary testimony: she went from being a partner in a committed lesbian relationship to being a pastor’s wife and home-schooling mom. She was also an academic: a tenured professor of English at Syracuse University specializing in feminist and “queer” theory.
On a recent appearance with me on the Eric Metaxas Show, Butterfield told me that this quest for personal autonomy and self-expression long predated the Sixties, the Sexual Revolution or even Sigmund Freud. Its roots stretch back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries and the rise of Romanticism.
As Butterfield wrote in her new book, “Openness Unhindered,” Romanticism “claimed that you know truth through the lens of your personal experience, and that no overriding or objective opposition can challenge the primal wisdom of someone’s subjective frame of intelligibility.” Unchallengeable subjective experience as the basis of truth is how men and women went from being “made in God’s image with souls that will last forever to people whose sexual drives and gender identifications define them and liberate them and set them apart.”
But Romanticism did more than provide the basis for the modern idea of “sexual orientation.” It also put self-expression on a pedestal. And that self-expression could include suicide.
As Butterfield reminded me, the first great Romantic novel, “Young Werther” by Goethe, was a story about a man who kills himself as the ultimate form of self-expression, living life on his terms. It inspired copycat suicides all across Europe over 200 years ago.
While the people championing same-sex marriage and physician-assisted suicide probably haven’t read the novel or even know much about Romanticism, they are living out its precepts. When Justice Kennedy wrote about defining for oneself the “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” it was straight out of the Romantic playbook.
So, how do we oppose this? That’s the subject of [ THIS SUNDAY'S post] ... as events in California demonstrate, our enshrinement of “personal experience” has turned lethal.
[bold and italics emphasis mine]
FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION - The altar to personal autonomy and self-expression has been erected in our culture with very little opposition. But as Eric implies, the consequences of worship at this altar are devastating. Listen to tomorrow's commentary for practical steps to foster a worldview that values the image of God in every life, at every stage of life.
RESOURCES
"Rosaria Butterfield, The Eric Metaxas Show podcast "| September 11, 2015;
https://soundcloud.com/the-eric-metaxas-show/rosaria-butterfield-1
"Greasing the Slippery Slope: The Court, Autonomy, and Anything Goes" - Eric Metaxas | BreakPoint.org | July 2, 2015;http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/breakpoint-commentaries-search/entry/13/27713
"Always Care, Never Kill: The Dangers of Physician-Assisted Suicide" - Eric Metaxas | BreakPoint.org | March 30, 2015;http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/breakpoint-commentaries-search/entry/13/27113
"The Language of Assisted Suicide: Deception Instead of Dignity" - John Stonestreet | BreakPoint.org | February 27, 2014;http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/breakpoint-commentaries-search/entry/13/24643
"Four Problems with Physician-Assisted Suicide" - Ryan Anderson | Heritage Foundation | March 30, 2015;http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/03/four-problems-with-physician-assisted-suicide
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"Give Me Liberty to Give Me Death?" - Tony Perkins, Washington Update, Oct. 6, 2015; http://www.frc.org/updatearticle/20151006/give-me-liberty
"..."'Adding this so-called 'choice' into our dysfunctional health care system will push people into cheaper lethal options.' There's no freedom in taking a life -- at any stage. Unfortunately, this is the lie of the culture of death that's expanding right along with abortion. Both movements are fueled by a selfish belief that people are burdens, not blessings. But as far too many people find out -- too late -- ending a life will always cause more suffering than it cures."
http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/entry/13/28194 [AS I SEE IT: This, and the follow-up post THIS SUNDAY (10/11), is offered in view of California just legalizing assisted suicide on Monday [See link to article at VERY end of this post.] Join me in praying that the American people will wake up to the truth of this renewal of the anti-life movement in our society. - Stan]
Which has more value -- human life, or human choice? And I’m not talking about abortion.
On September 11th, California lawmakers approved a measure, which if signed by Governor Jerry Brown, would make the Golden State the sixth state to legalize physician-assisted suicide.
The “End of Life Option Act” was modeled after neighboring Oregon’s law. The California Act gained political momentum with the story of Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old Californian who moved to Oregon to end her life after a terminal diagnosis. While Maynard’s parents and husband played an important role in getting the bill passed, there’s more here than misguided “compassion.” Physician-assisted suicide, like other bad ideas making their way through our culture, has been a long time in the making.
The California bill passed despite the opposition of disability-rights activists and concerns voiced by ethicists who fear “that low-income and under-insured patients would inevitably feel pressure from family members to end their own lives in some cases, when the cost of continued treatment would be astronomical compared with the cost of a few lethal pills.”
It passed because, in the words of supporter Mark Leno, who represents San Francisco, “It allows for individual liberty and freedom, [and] freedom of choice.” Sound familiar? As the New York Times pointed out, Leno “compared the issue to gay marriage.” Of course he did. Behind the high-sounding rhetoric of “compassion” and “dignity,” both same-sex marriage and physician-assisted suicide are ultimately about the pursuit of personal autonomy and self-expression.
Someone who understands this all too well is Rosaria Butterfield. Butterfield is probably best-known for her extraordinary testimony: she went from being a partner in a committed lesbian relationship to being a pastor’s wife and home-schooling mom. She was also an academic: a tenured professor of English at Syracuse University specializing in feminist and “queer” theory.
On a recent appearance with me on the Eric Metaxas Show, Butterfield told me that this quest for personal autonomy and self-expression long predated the Sixties, the Sexual Revolution or even Sigmund Freud. Its roots stretch back to the late 18th and early 19th centuries and the rise of Romanticism.
As Butterfield wrote in her new book, “Openness Unhindered,” Romanticism “claimed that you know truth through the lens of your personal experience, and that no overriding or objective opposition can challenge the primal wisdom of someone’s subjective frame of intelligibility.” Unchallengeable subjective experience as the basis of truth is how men and women went from being “made in God’s image with souls that will last forever to people whose sexual drives and gender identifications define them and liberate them and set them apart.”
But Romanticism did more than provide the basis for the modern idea of “sexual orientation.” It also put self-expression on a pedestal. And that self-expression could include suicide.
As Butterfield reminded me, the first great Romantic novel, “Young Werther” by Goethe, was a story about a man who kills himself as the ultimate form of self-expression, living life on his terms. It inspired copycat suicides all across Europe over 200 years ago.
While the people championing same-sex marriage and physician-assisted suicide probably haven’t read the novel or even know much about Romanticism, they are living out its precepts. When Justice Kennedy wrote about defining for oneself the “concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,” it was straight out of the Romantic playbook.
So, how do we oppose this? That’s the subject of [ THIS SUNDAY'S post] ... as events in California demonstrate, our enshrinement of “personal experience” has turned lethal.
[bold and italics emphasis mine]
FURTHER READING AND INFORMATION - The altar to personal autonomy and self-expression has been erected in our culture with very little opposition. But as Eric implies, the consequences of worship at this altar are devastating. Listen to tomorrow's commentary for practical steps to foster a worldview that values the image of God in every life, at every stage of life.
RESOURCES
"Rosaria Butterfield, The Eric Metaxas Show podcast "| September 11, 2015;
https://soundcloud.com/the-eric-metaxas-show/rosaria-butterfield-1
"Greasing the Slippery Slope: The Court, Autonomy, and Anything Goes" - Eric Metaxas | BreakPoint.org | July 2, 2015;http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/breakpoint-commentaries-search/entry/13/27713
"Always Care, Never Kill: The Dangers of Physician-Assisted Suicide" - Eric Metaxas | BreakPoint.org | March 30, 2015;http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/breakpoint-commentaries-search/entry/13/27113
"The Language of Assisted Suicide: Deception Instead of Dignity" - John Stonestreet | BreakPoint.org | February 27, 2014;http://www.breakpoint.org/bpcommentaries/breakpoint-commentaries-search/entry/13/24643
"Four Problems with Physician-Assisted Suicide" - Ryan Anderson | Heritage Foundation | March 30, 2015;http://www.heritage.org/research/reports/2015/03/four-problems-with-physician-assisted-suicide
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
"Give Me Liberty to Give Me Death?" - Tony Perkins, Washington Update, Oct. 6, 2015; http://www.frc.org/updatearticle/20151006/give-me-liberty
"..."'Adding this so-called 'choice' into our dysfunctional health care system will push people into cheaper lethal options.' There's no freedom in taking a life -- at any stage. Unfortunately, this is the lie of the culture of death that's expanding right along with abortion. Both movements are fueled by a selfish belief that people are burdens, not blessings. But as far too many people find out -- too late -- ending a life will always cause more suffering than it cures."
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