Turning us into enemies of the State

Turning us into enemies of the State

Hot on the heels on a recent bill that would send government agents to your home or hospital bed after your baby is born comes another proposal before the Minnesota legislature that would document all “defective” children in a database, says the Citizen’s Council on Health Care.

[This morning], there will be a hearing on a bill to fund a statewide birth defects surveillance system to identify, track and gather data on any child considered to have a birth defect.

Reporting to the state is required. The system will also collect data from the medical records of the mother, and possibly the father, as well as other data sources. No parent consent is required.

Gee, what reason could they have to collect such information, especially as it violates the privacy of individual citizens? Are we heading back toward the days when the state decreed that all “defectives” should be sterilized to prevent them from passing their bad genes on to another generation? At what point do we stop and realize that we are no longer living in a democracy but that an oppressive ideology is being forced upon us?

That’s the question asked by Rod Dreher in a post on a California bill that would require Catholic nursing homes to allow euthanasia. He recalls the famed First Things symposium on the “End of Democracy,” and wonders if that’s coming soon.

I do wonder at what point the “culture of death” will have progressed so far into law (either by judicial fiat or democratically) that morally responsible people will in some significant sense have to become enemies of the government. The Holocaust didn’t happen all at once, and it wasn’t imposed on the German people. It involved a gradual process of desensitizing them to the sanctity of life, and getting them to slowly but steadily accept the concept of “life unworthy of life.” For the German Cardinal Clemens von Galen, that day came in 1941, when he delivered a stunning speech denouncing the Nazi government’s forced euthanasia program. For the Lutheran pastor-martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer, that came earlier, in the 1930s, when he returned to Germany and organized church resistance to the Nazi program.

Also see the response from a conservative Catholic friend of Rod who gives an example of a courageous speech he’d like to hear a Catholic bishop make.

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