There are two primary areas of contention in the euthanasia debate. The first is whether to legalize medicalized killing.
The second question arises if the answer to the first is yes: Should doctors and other health care professionals with religious or conscious objections be forced to participate in medicalized killing — either by having to euthanize or refer to a doctor they know will kill?
The second question cuts to the core of religious liberty and moral conscience. But the ever-more secular Quebec is so intent on obliterating religious freedom that it would not even let Christian doctors testify about its proposed euthanasia law. From the National Post story:
A group of Christian doctors opposing Quebec’s proposed euthanasia legislation, denied permission to present its views to the committee studying the bill, is warning the bill could require physicians to act against their religious principles. The Christian Medical and Dental Society of Canada was only told last Thursday morning — the final day of consultations — that its request had been denied . . .
The rejection of the Christian doctors’ bid to join the euthanasia debate comes amid the Quebec government’s aggressive secularism agenda, embodied by its proposed charter of values.
Quebec’s bill — about which I wrote here — firmly answers yes to question 2 posed above, requiring all doctors to kill or refer. And if you have a religious objection, quit practicing medicine — no conscience allowed!
The refusal to permit people of faith to even give their views objecting to legalization and coerced complicity illustrates a hard truth about contemporary secularism: Even though religious liberty is a core principle of all human rights documents, people of faith are being stripped of personal freedom because secularists they don’t believe the oppression affects them.
But liberty is supposed to be defended for its own sake. No longer. We have entered an anti religious era, that is specifically anti-Christian (not post-Christian).
Martyrdom is coming — not in the sense of being killed, as is currently happening in the Middle East. But those who insist on living according to their faith — of whatever tradition — are going be made to suffer with having to choose between careers and coerced adherence to (im)moral values with which they disagree.
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