1. Don’t Let Assisted Suicide Come to the Nation’s Capital: DC’s assisted suicide bill is the most expansive and dangerous our country has yet seen., By Richard M. Doerflinger, The Public Discourse, November 14, 2016, Opinion.
The Council of the District of Columbia has given preliminary approval to a bill legalizing doctor-assisted suicide. Soon the Council is expected to submit this measure to Mayor Muriel Bowser for her signature and ultimately to Congress for its review.
This situation deserves national scrutiny because it poses great risks to the people of our nation’s capital. Those risks arise partly from the assisted suicide agenda generally, and partly from special circumstances in the District where I once lived and worked.
The general risks are evident from the way similar laws have worked in Oregon, which voted for this agenda in 1994, and in Washington state, where I now live, which followed suit in 2008. (California so far has produced no data on the results of its similar 2015 law.) While proponents say the data show there is no “abuse,” and no slippery slope toward a broader agenda, the opposite is true.
Yet the Council of the District of Columbia has labored to make DC’s bill the most expansive and dangerous thus far. The bill includes Washington state’s explicit requirement that doctors falsify the cause of death. More alarming still, it is designed to ensure that third parties can administer the lethal dose, effectively legalizing homicide. Departing from Oregon’s law, in half a dozen places the final DC bill has been amended to describe the patient’s key action as “ingesting” the overdose. The dictionary definition of “ingest” is to swallow or absorb. So there is no barrier to other people, such as coercive relatives, getting those pills into the patient’s body.
In short, the proposed law not only allows assisted suicide, it also carves out an exception to the law against homicide. It will allow murder of the sick and elderly, followed by a government-approved cover-up to hide the fact that any lethal action occurred.
http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2016/11/18224/
2. Making America Dream Again?, By Kathryn Jean Lopez , National Review, November 14, 2016 12:00 AM, Opinion.
The people who put their misgivings about Donald Trump aside voted for him because they’ve had it with politics; they’ve had it with business as usual; they want to have time to look up again. For most of the people I know and have talked with over the past year who supported Trump, “Make America Great Again” is about a culture of dreams — they hope to see their dreams come true rather than see them strangled by ideology. They reject hope as a political manipulation. Donald Trump is a big-league gamble, but he’s not more of the same tightening its stranglehold.
In Guadalupe, Pope Francis said, “There are so many situations that leave us powerless, that make us feel there is no room for hope, for change, for transformation.” He encouraged the faithful listening: “We can build shrines by sharing the joy of knowing that we are not alone.”
Is there any doubt, listening to some of the cry-ins on university campuses and grief and grievances on the streets, that the Beatitudes are needed? Could this havoc of an election make for a more ordered view of politics — maybe we don’t need to look for politics to give us hope? And maybe we can also refrain from labeling as “bigots” people whose identity is to live by those Beatitudes — who help make hope real and change less overwhelming?
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/442162/donald-trump-make-america-dream-again
3. Don’t listen to the ‘prophets of doom,’ Pope Francis insists, By Inés San Martín, Crux, November 14, 2016.
Pope Francis on Sunday called for the faithful not to be driven by end-times curiosities or apocalyptic preachers, urging them to focus on what is truly important: “The Lord and our neighbor.”
“Those who follow Jesus pay no heed to prophets of doom, the nonsense of horoscopes, or frightening sermons that distract from the truly important things,” Francis said.
It is important, he continued, to distinguish “the word of wisdom that God speaks to us each day” from the shouting of those who use “God’s name to frighten, to nourish division and fear.”
Francis’s words came as he was celebrating Mass at St. Peter’s Basilica, in Rome.
The celebration was one of the events of the Holy Year of Mercy, and it served as the closing point of the Jubilee for the Socially Excluded, which began in Friday, when the pontiff encountered thousands of homeless people from around Europe.
In the Gospel, Francis said, Jesus’ aim is not to produce fear. Instead, God “asks us to persevere in the good and to place our trust” in him, “who does not disappoint.”
And Sunday’s passage is also Jesus’ way of saying that every earthly thing “will inevitably pass away.”
“Even the strongest kingdoms, the most sacred buildings and the surest realities of this world do not last forever; sooner or later they fall,” the pontiff said.
Francis then said that there are only two riches that won’t disappear, and as such, shouldn’t be excluded: “The Lord and our neighbor,” because everything else, he insisted, including the heavens, the earth and the St. Peter’s Basilica, shall pass.
https://cruxnow.com/vatican/2016/11/14/dont-listen-prophets-doom-pope-francis-insists/
4. Mistaken Identity Politics: The voters Mrs. Clinton didn’t want., By James Taranto, The Wall Street Journal, November 11, 2016, 1:21 PM, Opinion.
How did the most qualified person in the history of mankind manage to lose an election she was certain to win? Assuming the world survives the Trump era, historians will long ponder that question. But we found a clue in this amazing anecdote, which opens a Hillary Clinton campaign postmortem by the New York Times’s Amy Chozick:
Last year, a prominent group of supporters asked Hillary Clinton to address a prestigious St. Patrick’s Day gathering at the University of Notre Dame, an invitation that previous presidential candidates had jumped on.
Barack Obama and Joseph R. Biden Jr. had each addressed the group, and former President Bill Clinton was eager for his wife to attend. But Mrs. Clinton’s campaign refused, explaining to the organizers that white Catholics were not the audience she needed to spend time reaching out to.
Chozick does not cite a plausible rationale for that belief, most likely because there isn’t one. White Catholics are a highly competitive demographic, not one that either party can afford to write off or take for granted.
In 2012, according to an exit-poll analysis by the Pew Research Center, Mitt Romney outpolled President Obama among white Catholics, 59% to 40%. Trump led Mrs. Clinton this year, 60% to 37%—a three-point decline in the Democratic total and a four-point widening of the GOP margin.
http://www.wsj.com/articles/mistaken-identity-politics-1478888487
