THE GREENS: Peter Singer and the party of death
by Bill Muehlenberg
News Weekly, 2 October 2010
In 2006 Ramesh Ponnuru wrote a book entitled The Party of Death. It was primarily about the US Democratic Party, and the courts and mainstream media who side with the culture of death. They see the right to abortion as almost a religious obligation.
And it is not just abortion, but a general disregard for human life that is expressed in plenty of other policy positions. The culture of death is ever on the move, and it is not just the unborn who are at risk.
As Ponnuru put it in the opening page of his book: "The party of death started with abortion, but its sickle has gone from threatening the unborn, to the elderly, to the disabled; it has swept from the maternity ward to the cloning laboratory to a generalised disregard for 'inconvenient' life."
He says the phrase is not just pejorative, but descriptive: "The party's core members are those who explicitly deny that all human beings are equal in having a right to life and who propose the creation of a category of 'human non-persons' who can be treated as expendable."
The story is the same in Australia. We clearly have a party of death here: they are known as the Greens. They are quite open about how they embrace the culture of death. This could not be clearer than in today's headlines: "Greens fight for euthanasia" (September 20, 2010).
The new Labor/Green government has not even been in power for two weeks, and already the Greens are telling us what they consider to be the most pressing issue of the day - their key priority: the right to kill off the elderly, the infirm, the suffering. And of course they will push this agenda in the name of compassion.
But it is a horrific type of compassion which says that to help relieve suffering we should kill the sufferer. This has nothing to do with compassion, but everything to do with a diabolical view of human life. The Greens have bought into the mistaken notion that somehow the "quality" of life is superior to the sanctity of life.
Moreover, it is always a minority of elites and technocrats who decide for the rest of mankind who should live and who should die. They tell us that the unborn are not persons, that the terminally ill are not persons, and soon that a depressed teenager is not really a person.
But what should one expect from a party which was begun with someone like Peter Singer? He and Senator Bob Brown co-authored the book The Greens back in 1996, laying out the core beliefs, values and philosophies of the Greens. And Singer ran as a Greens' candidate for the Senate in the same year.
Singer, of course, is the animal rights activist who is pro-abortion, pro-euthanasia and pro-infanticide. Yes, he actually believes that the newborn do not have a right to life, because they are not "persons". As he and Helga Kuhse said back in 1985, "We do not think new-born infants have an inherent right to life."
Back in 1983 he wrote, "Species membership in homo-sapiens is not morally relevant. If we compare a dog or a pig to a severely defective infant, we often find the non-human to have superior capacities."
With a guru like this helping to set up the Greens, why should we be surprised at their consistent and insistent pro-death agenda?
Yet some might argue that Singer is a bit extreme, and does not really represent the Greens, and he is not with the Greens now. But the reason he is no longer with the Greens is of course because he left Australia in 1999 to lecture at Princeton University in the US.
How can it be argued that he is not representative of the Greens? He ran as their Senate candidate and co-authored their manifesto! Of course, his views are right in line with that of the Greens. So spare us trying to make a distinction between the two.
If some neo-Nazi managed to run for a conservative party here, it would be attacked by these very same people. "See!" they would cry, "This is what these conservatives are really all about - they are all a bunch of closet Nazis."
Sorry, but you can't have it both ways. If commentators take this line on the conservatives, then they must consistently take it with the Greens as well.
Trying to disassociate Singer from the Greens will just not work.
Australia: What the Rats in the silo have planned for us.
No comments:
Post a Comment