By Judie Brown
Insanity is a descriptive adjective meaning a disordered state of mind as well as something that is unreasonable or utterly foolish. While this definition should apply to the wily avengers who stalk the most vulnerable, attempting to convince them that assisted suicide ensures “death with dignity,” we see that most folks move on untroubled. This is so because assisted suicide is growing in popularity, which underscores the fact that far too many find it perfectly acceptable to end one’s life rather than await the will of God.
Euthanasia Prevention Coalition’s Alex Schadenberg recently explained that those punishers of the suffering are attempting to ply their trade in more and more states. He wrote:
On January 8, I published an article titled “Assisted Suicide Bills Must Be Defeated in at Least 10 US States.” Now the assisted suicide lobby are stating that they are sponsoring assisted suicide bills in at least 16 states.
The current states with a new bill are: Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, Tennessee, Virginia, and Wisconsin.
As the web of support for assisted suicide grows, one wonders what it will take for the average American to understand the horror that lurks behind such tactics. But even more challenging to comprehend is why any thinking person would consider, let alone want to see, protections for the right to ask another to help her kill herself. And yes, that is what assisted suicide is, after all.
Bishop Robert Barron of Winona-Rochester, Minnesota, has made it clear that legislative proposals that protect assisted suicide must be opposed. In an incredibly insightful article entitled “It’s Not Your Life, It’s Not Your Death, It’s Not Your Choice,” he wrote:
Even if a dying person found himself in great pain, actively killing himself would not be morally justifiable. The reason is that the direct killing of the innocent is, in the language of the Church, “intrinsically evil”—which is to say, incapable of being morally sanctioned, no matter how extenuating the circumstances or how beneficial the consequences. I have argued before that when this category is lost sight of, a dangerous relativism holds sway. And when even the direct taking of innocent life is a matter of personal choice, the entire moral enterprise has in fact collapsed into incoherence.
In other words, advocacy of killing and taking innocent life, for any reason at all, is proof of moral insanity.
His words remind us of the fundamental problem we face today. We are witnessing an escalating disregard for the integrity of the human person and his inalienable right to life. In the moral vacuum created by this lack of concern, anything goes.
Proof of this lies in the story of the 62-year-old woman who wants to create a baby using her dead husband’s sperm.
Further, in what era is it acceptable for opinion polls to provide a guide for deciding what is just and what is evil?
The morally sane person has great difficulty with such concepts, yet these things are occurring in real time, right now in our present state of cultural madness.
Considering this state of moral insanity, we know that every person desperately needs God’s grace. As we read in the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us to respond to his call to become children of God, adoptive sons, partakers of the divine nature and of eternal life.”
Let us pray for that grace for every person and hold fast to Truth lest she be swept away by today’s prevailing insanity.