Death Panels, Right!

Death panels! "Bah hum bug, that's just right-wing extremists rhetoric!" you say?
Read this from the Colson Center's December 22 Breakpoint Daily. This is the inevitable consequence of letting the government act as our "health insurance" company.
Curt
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Who Decides to End a Life?

Remember when those who worried about “death panels” were mocked? Well, it’s no joking matter now.

 JOHN STONESTREET

Imagine you’re the mom or dad of a 46-year-old former sheriff’s deputy who’s been in the hospital for two months after a non-cancerous mass was found on his pancreas. Imagine further that your son is on a ventilator but can still interact with you and make his wishes known via movements of his hands or head. Imagine that in these interactions your son has clearly said he wants to live. Then consider your son had no health insurance when he went to the hospital, and now, a hospital “ethics committee” has decided it’s time to pull the plug, because further treatment is not “in the best interest of the patient.”

Unfortunately, this is not a bad dream for Evelyn Kelly, who’s fighting desperately to save the life of her son, Christopher Dunn.

Dunn is at Houston Methodist Hospital. Under the Texas Advanced Directives Act, Houston Methodist has decided to withdraw life-sustaining treatment. His mother is taking the hospital to court, saying the law is unconstitutional. “They want to kill my son,” Mrs. Kelly says. They say there is nothing else they can do for him, but I don’t believe that. When they found out that Chris did not have insurance, they said they were done.”

The Act, which was signed into law in 1999 by then-Governor George W. Bush, allows hospitals to withdraw life-sustaining treatments if an ethics committee agrees that further treatment is futile. Their only responsibility to the family is a written ten-day notice. The ethics committee for Houston Methodist gave its imprimatur earlier this fall, and the hospital defended itself by saying, “Houston Methodist is a faith-based, values-centered organization that strives to make the best choices for all our patients. End-of-life decisions are never easy, but Texas law is clear about our hospital’s responsibility in these cases.”

It’s hard to see how euthanizing Christopher Dunn is the best choice for Christopher Dunn! In fact, in a video distributed by Texas Right to Life, Christopher Dunn clearly indicates he wants to live. The organization is also circulating an online petition that in part says, “We demand that this secret and unaccountable decision-making by a bureaucratic committee—obviously motivated by its own financial interest—be reversed immediately so that Christopher Dunn can continue to live.” Come to our website to see this video and sign this petition.

And there are others shocked by the hospital’s violation of the Hippocratic Oath who have also joined the fight. Prominent disability rights activist Mark Pickup, who is chronically ill with degenerative multiple sclerosis, is asking Texas Governor Greg Abbott to intervene so Christopher can be placed in another facility. As Pickup notes, “The Governor can commute death sentences of murderers on death row. Surely he must be able to commute the death sentence imposed on a helpless man by the terrible Texas Advanced Directives Act!” Well, you’d think so.

But we must ask ourselves, how did it even come to this point, where people have to appeal to governors and so-called “hospital ethics committees” to keep hospitals from killing their patients? You know, Chuck Colson saw all this coming. He knew that turning over healthcare choices to the government would mean a bureaucratic panel—potentially more interested in cutting costs than saving lives—would be given the power over life and death.

As Chuck once said, “the only medical choices I’m interested in are the ones I make in consultation with my doctor and my family. Not with a government commissioner with tight budgets.’”

While U. S. citizens differ on the best way forward on providing healthcare for the nation, the fact is we should all agree that a hospital forcing a patient in its care to die is very, very wrong. Please come to our website for details on how to stand for Christopher Dunn’s life, and against a kind of death panel that, if unchecked, threatens all of us. And please, do it today. 

Who Decides to End a Life?: Saving Christopher Dunn

Here's something we can be proactive about when it comes to pro-life issues. Click here to get  information about signing the petition to save the life of Christopher Dunn.

Scalia a Racist? Hardly.

Attacking the Truth
By Thomas Sowell
Among the many sad signs of our time are the current political and media attacks on Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia, for speaking the plain truth on a subject where lies have been the norm for years.
The case before the High Court is whether the use of race as a basis for admitting students to the University of Texas at Austin is a violation of the 14th Amendment’s requirement for government institutions to provide “equal protection of the laws” to all.
Affirmative action is supposed to be a benefit to black and other minority students admitted with lower academic qualifications than some white students who are rejected. But Justice Scalia questioned whether being admitted to an institution geared to students with higher-powered academic records was a real benefit.
Despite much media spin, the issue is not whether blacks in general should be admitted to higher ranked or lower ranked institutions. The issue is whether a given black student, with given academic qualifications, should be admitted to a college or university where he would not be admitted if he were white.
Much empirical research over the years has confirmed Justice Scalia’s concern that admitting black students to institutions for which their academic preparation is not sufficient can be making them worse off instead of better off.
I became painfully aware of this problem more than 40 years ago, when I was teaching at Cornell University, and discovered that half the black students there were on some form of academic probation.
These students were not stupid or uneducable. On the contrary, the average black student at Cornell at that time scored at the 75th percentile on scholastic tests. Their academic qualifications were better than those of three-quarters of all American students who took those tests.
Why were they in trouble at Cornell, then? Because the average Cornell student in the liberal arts college at that time scored at the 99th percentile. The classes taught there — including mine — moved at a speed geared to the verbal and mathematical level of the top one percent of American students.
The average white student would have been wiped out at Cornell. But the average white student was unlikely to be admitted to Cornell, in the first place. Nor was a white student who scored at the 75th percentile.
That was a “favor” reserved for black students. This “favor” turned black students who would have been successful at most American colleges and universities into failures at Cornell.
None of this was peculiar to Cornell. Black students who scored at the 90th percentile in math had serious academic problems trying to keep up at M.I.T., where other students scored somewhere within the top 99th percentile.
Nearly one-fourth of these black students with stellar qualifications in math failed to graduate from M.I.T., and those who did graduate were concentrated in the bottom tenth of the class.
There were other fine engineering schools around the country where those same students could have learned more, when taught at a normal pace, rather than at a breakneck speed geared to students with extremely rare abilities in math.
Justice Scalia was not talking about sending black students to substandard colleges and universities to get an inferior education. You may in fact get a much better education at an institution that teaches at a pace that you can handle and master. In later life, no one is going to care how fast you learned something, so long as you know it.
Mismatching students with educational institutions is a formula for needless failures. The book “Mismatch,” by Sander and Taylor, is a first-rate study of the hard facts. It shows, for example, that the academic performances of black and Hispanic students rose substantially after affirmative action admissions policies were banned in the University of California system.
Instead of failing at Berkeley or UCLA, these minority students were now graduating from other campuses in the University of California system. They were graduating at a higher rate, with higher grades, and now more often in challenging fields like math, science and technology.
Do the facts not matter to those who are denouncing Justice Scalia? Does the actual fate of minority students not matter to the left, as much as their symbolic presence on a campus?

Morality is an Economic Issue

A recurring issue with me, I know. But my impression is that many Christians don't see the connection between the so-called economic issues and the social issues.

Welfare incentivizes immorality, and immorality undermines productivity, and an inability to produce makes one a candidate for welfare. Vicious cycle. Start it wherever you want. Start with immorality...leads to unproductive and welfare. Start with unproductive...leads to welfare and immorality.

John Kasich is the GOP candidate most obviously missing the connection on these issues. I am disappointed to see his misguided application of the Bible. Private charity can be given with accountability for moral behavior; government "charity" purports to be amoral...which is impossible given that we all have a moral essence. When you give money to someone, it sends a message. If you give money to someone who qualifies for it because they have a child out of wedlock, for instance, the message reinforces the wrong choice.

See the following, now just over a week old, column from Mona Charen.

Curt

About a Boy

By Mona Charen · Oct. 23, 2015

 “It’s about what these women will let guys get away with.” You may not expect to hear commentary like that at your garden-variety think tank panel discussion, but it got pretty lively at the American Enterprise Institute discussion on the topic “Do Healthy Families Affect the Wealth of States?”

 “It’s about what these women will let guys get away with.” You may not expect to hear commentary like that at your garden-variety think tank panel discussion, but it got pretty lively at the American Enterprise Institute discussion on the topic “Do Healthy Families Affect the Wealth of States?”

Megan McArdle of Bloomberg View is author of the above comment. The question at hand was: Why are so many young women (64 percent of moms under the age of 30) having children out of wedlock? Nowhere is the class divide in America as wide as on the matter of marriage. College-educated men and women are sticking with the traditional order of marriage first and children second. Not only that, but they are far less likely to divorce than their parents' generation was. Those with only some college or less, by contrast, are much less likely to marry before having children, and much more likely to divorce if they do marry.

McArdle was answering her own question in a sense. She noted that many who have studied the retreat from marriage among the uneducated propose the “working class men are garbage” hypothesis. According to this view, lots of young men are unemployed and playing video games all day. Why would a young woman want to marry such a loser? She’d just be getting another kid.

But as McArdle observes, someone is enabling that behavior on the part of the young man. Someone is providing a roof over his head, putting food in his belly and paying his power bill so that the game console stays on. Is it his parents? Or is it a young woman? If she has a child (possibly his child), she is eligible for a whole panoply of government assistance, including TANF, food stamps, WIC, housing assistance, low income home energy assistance, and much more. Thirty years ago, in “Losing Ground,” Charles Murray wondered whether the welfare state was enabling the sort of behavior that isn’t good for people — such as having children out of wedlock.

The question still stands. In the interim, Congress passed and President Bill Clinton signed a welfare reform bill that was successful in reducing welfare dependency to some degree and certainly contributed to a drop in childhood poverty. Two disheartening things have happened since: 1) the Obama administration unilaterally vitiated the work requirements in the welfare law through regulation; and 2) the secular trend toward unwed parenthood continued unabated.

Is it the lack of jobs for high school graduates that has made young men less “marriageable,” or is it the retreat from marriage that makes kids who grow up in unstable home less able to take advantage of job opportunities? Chicken? Egg?

Most of the panel members agreed that causation is probably a two-way street. What is not in doubt is the association of intact families with greater wealth, employment, security, and all-around high functioning. A study by W. Bradford Wilcox, Joseph Price and Robert I. Lerman found that states with higher-than-average percentages of married parents were associated with higher median incomes, lower levels of child poverty, greater social mobility and higher male labor-force-participation rates, among other measures of success, than states with higher levels of unwed parenting.

Life ain’t fair, and cannot be made perfectly fair. But it almost seems a conspiracy of silence among the college educated to keep from the working class the key secret to their success. Particularly in families with college-educated couples who don’t divorce (the vast majority), children are given security, stability, money, time, a kin network and a thousand other advantages. The children of single parents, by contrast (and yes, many do fine) are much more likely to suffer from feelings of abandonment, to live in poverty, to cope with emotional tumult in their mothers' lives (most live with Mom), to be sexually abused, to be forced to adapt to a blended family, and so on.

Also, David Autor and Melanie Wasserman suggest in their report Wayward Sons, published by Third Way magazine, “A growing body of evidence … indicates that the absence of stable fathers from children’s lives has particularly significant adverse consequences for boys' psychosocial development and educational achievement.”

There may be lots of reasons, starting with their parents, why many young, high school educated males are unemployed and playing video games. But if young women consider them unfit husbands, they ought also to be unfit fathers, right? Unless the state is the father. Over to you, Charles Murray.

It must be the Guns' fault, not the broken families...

Illinois Family Institute published the following. It is amazing what politicians and the politically correct among us choose to focus on when bad things happen. The gun in this case, not the evil person wielding that particular instrumentality. 

I believe in the value and ability of people of every color. I recall during my public school board days attending seminars that highlighted differences in educational outcomes that happened to correlate with race; I found it highly suspicious that they never discussed (at least publicly) the question of family breakdown or parental involvement/commitment. They dare not touch on the "freedom" to divorce or to be a lousy parent.  Dr. Ben Carson is, of course, a stellar example of a challenging family situation which was overcome by a dedicated, no-excuses, committed mother.

Another point to notice in the following article: where do mass killers generally find success? Where liberal "gun free zone" policies have been implemented. Most states in the 70s, 80s and 90s banned any concealed carry in public places (i.e., public places were all "gun free zones"). All the law-abiding individuals at the community college were, thanks to gun control, sitting ducks. You never help good people by disarming them.

Curt

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Cause of Violence: Guns or Family Breakdown?

Written By Laurie Higgins   |   10.05.15  

Another horrific mass killing, this time at a community college in Oregon. And once again President Obama preached against guns, proclaiming angrily that he would use this shooting for political ends. Again and again, when a man mows down innocent people, liberals put gun-ownership in their sights, which is like looking at the problem of teens who cut themselves and angrily proclaiming that the problem is easy access to razor blades. Women have access to guns too. If guns are the problem, then why aren’t any mass (or serial) killers women?

Of course, gun control and the Left’s obsession with killing the Second Amendment by a thousand regulatory cuts are political issues, but if the Left truly cared about protecting society from gun violence, they would look beyond the cheap, superficial, but good-for-rallying the troops issue of gun control. They would look at the deeper issue of family breakdown that likely contributes in some and perhaps many cases to mass killings and serial killings, and most certainly contributes to gang violence like that which plagues Obama’s adopted home of Chicago.

Perhaps guns aren’t the central problem. Perhaps the breakdown of the family inflicts incalculable harm on children. Perhaps the breakdown in the family renders boys less capable of responding in healthy ways to other trials in life. If only President Obama would use his bully pulpit to take our devotees of easy-peasy divorce, out-of-wedlock births, and fatherless and motherless homes to the woodshed, maybe he could actually do some good.

Here is a list of just American mass killers (yes, mass killers are found all over the world). Please note that not all of them used guns:

Andrew Kehoe killed 38 elementary school children, 2 teachers, 4 other adults, and wounded 58 in Bath Township, Michigan in 1927. Kehoe used explosives. His mother died when he was 5. His father remarried, and Kehoe had a poor relationship with his stepmother.

Howard Unruh killed 13 in Camden, New Jersey in 1941. His parents separated when he was 9, and he was raised by only his mother.

Richard Speck killed 8 nursing students in Chicago in 1966. He used a knife. Speck was close to his father who died when Speck was 6. His mother remarried a few years later. Speck’s stepfather was an emotionally abusive alcoholic with a criminal record.

Charles Whitman killed 16 people at the University of Texas in Austin in 1966. His father emotionally and physically abused Whitman and his mother.

James Huberty killed 21 and wounded 19 at a McDonald’s in San Diego in 1984. His mother abandoned the family when he was about 10.

James Ruppert killed 11 family members in 1975 in Hamilton, Ohio. His mother told him she had wanted a girl. His father had a “violent temper and no affection” for James or his older brother Leonard. His father died when James was 12. His 14-year-old brother assumed the role of patriarch and bullied James.

George Hennard killed 23 and wounded 27 at a Luby’s restaurant in Killeen, Texas in 1991. Hennard’s childhood was turbulent and unstable as was his parent’s marriage which ended in divorce when Hennard was 27.

James Pough killed 9 and wounded 4 in 1990 in Jacksonville, Florida. His father left Pough and his eight younger siblings when Pough was 11.

Timothy McVeigh killed 168 and injured 600 in Oklahoma City in 1995. He used explosives. His mother walked out on the family when he was 10. He was raised by his father who worked nights. The children rarely saw their mother.

Michael McLendon killed 10 in Alabama in 2009. After his parents divorced, he was raised by his aunt and uncle.

Adam Lanza killed 20 elementary school children, 6 staff members, and his mother in Newton, Connecticut in 2012. His parents separated when he was 16 and divorced when he was 17.

Wade Michael Page killed 6 and wounded 4 at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wisconsin. Page’s parents divorced when he was young. His father remarried when Page was 10. His mother died when he was 13. Reportedly, Page did not get along with his father, and at some point in his school years, his father and stepmother moved out of state, leaving him to split his time between his aunt and his grandmother.

Dylann Roof killed 9 in a Charleston, South Carolina church in 2015. Roof was raised in an unstable family in which his father verbally and physically abused his stepmother.

Chris Harper-Mercer killed 10 and wounded 9 in Roseburg, Oregon in 2015. His parents separated when he was less than 1 year-old.

Twenty years ago, an article in the Washington Post offered a painful image of the future:

Psychologists have warned for years that young people like McVeigh born in the late 1960s, whose families fractured in record numbers, whose economic frustrations far exceed those of their parents, are unusually alienated and vulnerable to fringe movements. In this view, the social and economic upheavals of the last 20 years have planted a virus in American society with still unrealized capacity for damage.

The author may be wrong about one thing: It seems unlikely that economic frustrations could result in the desire to go on a killing spree. Economic frustrations may be the proximate cause or a contributing factor for those whose psychological and emotional needs were not met as children, thus leaving them unable to cope with life’s obstacles. But the ultimate cause is likely something deeper, more profound than fiscal insecurity.

Of course, only a small fraction of children from dysfunctional families become mass (or serial) killers, just as only a small fraction of mentally ill, bullied, shy, or gun-owning people become mass (or serial) killers. And some mass killers grow up in intact, functioning families. But could family breakdown contribute to the impulse to do violence in some cases? Might an intact family structure help prevent such desires in children who have other conditions that put them at risk for anti-social behavior? Is there not sufficient evidence to justify the inclusion of family breakdown as a possible contributing factor in news stories and presidential pronouncements about mass killings? Is there not sufficient evidence that family breakdown may contribute to mass killings to justify studies of its potential causal effect?

Perhaps the short shrift given to the potential effects of family breakdown on children, particularly boys, reflects both our deeply embedded easy-divorce cultural ethic and the selfishness of both Democrats and Republicans—including many Christians—who don’t want to look at the damage done to children through divorce. Mass killings and gang violence should lead us to ask what we are willing to sacrifice as individuals to protect our children from the harm of family breakdown and to protect society from the effects of such harm.