Which has more value \u2014 human life, or human choice? And I\u2019m not talking about abortion.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
The \u201cEnd of Life Option Act\u201d was modeled after neighboring Oregon\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n
While Maynard\u2019s parents and husband played an important role in getting the bill passed, there\u2019s more here than misguided \u201ccompassion.\u201d Physician-assisted suicide, like other bad ideas making their way through our culture, has been a long time in the making.<\/p>\n
The California bill passed despite the opposition of disability-rights activists and concerns voiced by ethicists who fear \u201cthat 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.\u201d<\/p>\n
It passed because, in the words of supporter Mark Leno, who represents San Francisco, \u201cIt allows for individual liberty and freedom, [and] freedom of choice.\u201d<\/p>\n
Sound familiar? As the New York Times pointed out, Leno \u201ccompared the issue to gay marriage.\u201d Of course he did. Behind the high-sounding rhetoric of \u201ccompassion\u201d and \u201cdignity,\u201d both same-sex marriage and physician-assisted suicide are ultimately about the pursuit of personal autonomy and self-expression.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s wife and home-schooling mom. She was also an academic: a tenured professor of English at Syracuse University specializing in feminist and \u201cqueer\u201d theory.<\/p>\n
On a recent appearance with me on the \u201cEric Metaxas Show,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
As Butterfield wrote in her new book, \u201cOpenness Unhindered,\u201d Romanticism \u201cclaimed 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\u2019s subjective frame of intelligibility.\u201d<\/p>\n
Unchallengeable subjective experience as the basis of truth is how men and women went from being \u201cmade in God\u2019s image with souls that will last forever to people whose sexual drives and gender identifications define them and liberate them and set them apart.\u201d<\/p>\n
But Romanticism did more than provide the basis for the modern idea of \u201csexual orientation.\u201d It also put self-expression on a pedestal. And that self-expression could include suicide.<\/p>\n
As Butterfield reminded me, the first great Romantic novel, \u201cYoung Werther\u201d 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.<\/p>\n
While the people championing same-sex marriage and physician-assisted suicide probably haven\u2019t read the novel or even know much about Romanticism, they are living out its precepts. When Justice Kennedy wrote about defining for oneself the \u201cconcept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life,\u201d it was straight out of the Romantic playbook. As events in California demonstrate, our enshrinement of \u201cpersonal experience\u201d has turned lethal.<\/p>\n
________<\/p>\n
Resources:<\/p>\n
Rosaria Butterfield, The Eric Metaxas Show
\npodcast | September 11, 2015<\/p>\n
Greasing the Slippery Slope: The Court, Autonomy, And Anything Goes
\nEric Metaxas | BreakPoint.org | July 2, 2015<\/p>\n
Always Care, Never Kill: The Dangers of Physician-Assisted Suicide
\nEric Metaxas | BreakPoint.org | March 30, 2015<\/p>\n
The Language of Assisted Suicide: Deception Instead of Dignity
\nJohn Stonestreet | BreakPoint.org | February 27, 2014<\/p>\n
Four Problems with Physician-Assisted Suicide
\nRyan Anderson | Heritage Foundation | March 30, 2015
\n________<\/p>\n
Copyright (c) 2015 Prison Fellowship Ministries. Reprinted with permission. “BreakPoint” is a radio ministry of Prison Fellowship Ministries.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Which has more value \u2014 human life, or human choice? And I\u2019m 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 \u201cEnd of Life Option Act\u201d was modeled after neighboring Oregon\u2019s law. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[460,1094,2519,3808,3807,1015],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6184"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6184"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6184\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6184"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6184"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.churchedge.com\/illustrations\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6184"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}