Category Archives: Commentary

Commentary

Wesley J. Smith’s top 10 issues in bioethics

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Wesley J. Smith blogs at Secondhand Smoke, but he also works for the Discovery Institute. And he’s written a post about the top 10 issues in bioethics.

Here are the top 10 recent bioethics stories:

  1. The ascendance of an anti-human environmentalism.
  2. The growth of biological colonialism.
  3. The increase in American pro-life attitudes.
  4. The struggle over Obamacare.
  5. Legalization of assisted suicide in Washington.
  6. The success of adult-stem-cell research.
  7. “Suicide tourism” in Switzerland.
  8. In vitro fertilization (IVF) anarchy.
  9. The Bush embryonic-stem-cell funding policy.
  10. The dehydration of Terri Schiavo.

Do you know what “suicide tourism” is?

Here’s what it is:

Over the last decade, Switzerland became Jack Kevorkian as a country, its suicide clinics catering to an increasingly international clientele — mostly from the United Kingdom — with the victims ranging from the terminally ill, to people with disabilities, to even a double suicide of a terminally ill elderly woman and her frail husband, who wanted to die rather than be cared for by others. Alas, as was the case with Kevorkian in the 1990s, audacity was rewarded. In the face of a wave of high-profile suicide-tourism stories, England’s head prosecutor published guidelines that, in essence, decriminalized family and friends’ assisting the suicides of the dying, disabled, and infirm. Others mimicked the Swiss. In the U.S., the Final Exit Network appears to have created mobile suicide clinics, leading to the indictment of several of its organizers. Meanwhile, the Australian “Dr. Death,” Philip Nitschke, traveled the world holding how-to-commit-suicide clinics. Still, as the decade came to a close, there was a sense that the tide could be turning: The Swiss government appears poised to shut down the suicide-tourism industry, perhaps even — although this is less likely — outlawing assisted suicide altogether.

Actually, the UK is considering cashing in on suicide tourism, as well.

Commentary

MUST-READ: Rex Murphy attacks the Canadian Human Rights Commissions

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Another National Post column by Rex Murphy.

Excerpt:

There’s a trial going on in B.C. right now, under the insanely diluted and degraded understanding of the once-noble concept of “human rights,” giving full anguished adjudication – complete with lawyers and a tribunal chairman – over a heckling spat, already three years old, at a Vancouver supper/comedy club called, surely by the gods of irony, Zesty’s.

The good old days, when all a comedian had to worry about was flop-sweat, bad timing and where his or her next joke was coming from, are long gone. Nowadays, thanks to the infinitely expanding reach of bureaucratic commissions, a couple of bad-tempered moments at Zesty’s have summoned up the Mr. McGoos of the B.C. Human Rights Commission. It is currently determining whether a lesbian patron’s human rights were violated by a journeyman comic’s obnoxious heckling of her – brought on, he says, by her equally obnoxious heckling of him. The comic in question is Guy Earle.

It’s a case remarkably similar – in its gutting of common sense, its ability to bring on a puzzled frown from anyone who first hears of it – to that of the owner of a St. Catharines, Ont., fitness club. He recently was taken before the Ontario Human Rights Commission by a prospective member who, while awaiting “gender reassignment surgery,” claimed the right to undress in the club’s women’s locker room. The women objected. The owner denied. The member filed a complaint. That case, after much financial injury and anguish, was summarily dropped. No apology, no redress, no nothing for the owner.

Is Canada a serious country? Do we staff close to a dozen offices, provincial and federal, spend nearly $200-million across the great expanse of the country, to explore the human rights implications of rude heckling in comedy clubs? Or, the human right to undress in the locker room of your choice? For this, did the great armies of the West storm the beaches of Normandy? For this, did Solzhenitsyn and Sharansky endure their endless nights of hell in the gulag?

By some crude osmosis, or just from the luxuriant carelessness of our pampered lives, we have overturned one of the great concepts of all human law. The concept of human rights, as experience and history inform us, is protection from the state’s power, not oversight, interference and punishment by the state’s power.

The core concept of human rights is the protection of the irreducible safety and dignity of the individual from the massive and arbitrary power of the state. Not, the state wandering in, with its apparatus and procedures, its boards and tribunals into the doings, or speech, of the individual.

[…]If we go out into the other world, the world that doesn’t have quite as many comedy clubs, we see what real human rights are.

A man standing alone in front of a tank in Tiannamen Square – there’s a human rights moment. The multitudinous horror of ethnic cleansing, raging warfare in the Congo, the nightmare of North Korea, the acid-tossing at schoolgirls by the Taliban – there are people all over this world trembling at the might of the state, seeing their lives foreshortened or ruined, subject to unspeakable horrors at the hands of warlords and tyrants and revengeful dictatorships — these are the fields of real human-rights violations.

Read the whole thing. It’s really hard to excerpt from a column this fine. It seems as though some Canadians still have some fight left in them.

UPDATE: There is also a follow-up column in the National Post.

Excerpt:

Just as human rights laws were written largely by advocates who profit from finding racism when none exists, employment legislation has been written by left wing advocates with an interest in the perpetration of unions and the emasculation of corporate power. The resultant risk is not merely that of Canadians becoming infantilized; it is the risk of employers becoming too complacent or timorous to resist the increasing encroachments of the nanny state. It is also the risk of an environment wherein the best thinkers and innovators depart to more commodious jurisdictions. Many employers, particularly small businesses, are crippled by legislation that pits employers against the resources of the state. Canadians might never have agreed to this legislation had they realized its implications.

In a current case, because of arcane labour laws applying to the non-residential construction industry, an elevator installation company was unionized without a vote, despite the fact only two of its seven employees had signed union cards. And those two immediately renounced their union memberships. Although the Labour Board was aware the union lacked a single supporter, it certified the company.
Worse still, the employer was bound to a collective agreement in which it had no input. The agreement was negotiated by major players in the industry.

Smaller employers, such as this one, will cease operating if they are forced to pay the same wages and benefits.

It’s not just that the secular leftists take away human rights like the right to free speech. They also attack business and the free market itself. And that means that Canadians are actually losing jobs because of political correctness.

Commentary

MUST-READ: Rex Murphy explains Sarah Palin’s popularity to Canadians

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Sarah Palin

A Canadian perspective on Sarah Palin from the National Post. (H/T Derek)

Excerpt:

She’s been a presence in American national politics for only about two years. She is a cheerful human being, with a large family, an apparently easy-going and normal husband. She has a personality that would sell corn flakes — if not grow them. What career she had in Alaska, she earned. She’s at home indoors and out, radiates human warmth, seems to have some balance about herself, and has displayed over the last year or so a considerable fortitude under an avalanche of mockery and hatred. For the final stroke of this cameo I should note she is smart — smarter than 90% of the people who make a point of how rock-stupid they know she is.

She, by rights, should be queen of the feminists. All that self-reliance, her takeover of Alaska politics, the rocket ride to a Vice-Presidential ticket, a public career she blends with her family life– these seem gold-standard credentials for a real feminist. But official feminism derides herewith an unspeakable intensity. Her early critics were not beyond the inane claim that she was somehow not really a woman.

I side with those who venture that the nerves Palin hits have more to do with class — where she’s from, how she speaks, where she was educated, what she likes (the moose-hunting), than her politics or her gender. She’s rural, she came into national politics from (ugh) Alaska. She and her husband have the unerasable stigmata of the modern working class. She would not be embarrassed to be seen walking into Wal-Mart.

[…]But America’s professional public class, and the commentariat who still have some (though declining) power to police it, like to view Lincoln’s common man, or woman, as an object in the distance, as an object of their supercilious care and concern, but not as a player in the game. Palin is simply not supposed to be a player. She’s not only from the wrong side of the tracks, she’s so far over on the wrong side she can’t see the railway station.

But there she is, in all her roughness and candour, and her spiky wit and ability to irritate her self-nominated betters. She also happens to be the most naturally charismatic politician at the moment in the United States. She is the one major figure who can claim authenticity without morally choking on the word. That makes her the populist rallying point of a nascent rejection of the fervid partisanship and Washington insiderism that is eroding the consent on which American politics is founded.

This is probably one of the best columns I have read all year. I recommend reading the whole thing. It’s always good for men to admire women, and it helps when you have women like Sarah Palin to admire. Of course, you all know that Michele Bachmann is my favorite, but still. Not everyone can be perfect.

Canada doesn’t have a Sarah Palin. The closest person they have is Danielle Smith of the Wildrose Alliance Party in Alberta, I think.