Month: March 2010

To the Source

Wesley J. Smith

For now, Obamacare preserves a private financing system—no public option. Nonetheless, it still represents a government takeover of healthcare. By eliminating risk assessment–and seizing control of benefit determinations—government bureaucrats will now choose winners and losers. Because we are all now ensconced in the same closed system, we each now have a direct financial stake in the health care received by every other one of us.

Government control is, by definition, intensely political. Politically powerful “in crowds” are rarely denied what they want, while “out crowds” may be excluded altogether. The same will be true in health care.

Canada is a vivid example, where terminal cancer patients are routinely refused life-extending chemotherapy by cost containment boards, while support is growing to fully fund IVF (recently allowed in Quebec) and abortions must be publicly paid.

The UK presents another disturbing look into our potential future. In the UK, the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) imposes an explicitly utilitarian quality of life rationing, with the aged, for example, refused treatments available to younger people. Obamacare was written to establish a similar centralized federal oversight system.
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I’ve been waiting for this. Robert P. George is an excellent thinker and astute cultural critic. He writes from the Roman Catholic tradition and there is much with which the Orthodox can find agreement (“Clash Of Orthodoxies: Law Religion & Morality In Crisis” is an excellent read). Frank Schaeffer, well, what can you say. I know the man and have been keeping up with his writing, not the books so much which are so-so for the most part — adequate but not memorable except perhaps for his scathing and unseemly criticism of his parents. (No parent is perfect, and no parent, except perhaps a rank abuser, deserves to have his failings pilloried in public by his children).

I knew both of his parents tangentially. A friend and I started the Students for Life group at the University of Minnesota many moons ago (the only accredited Feminist Studies program at any American university at the time) and invited Francis Schaeffer to speak at “Pro-Life Week” that we organized — the feminist studies department dutifully protested in full force. Later I got to know Edith Shaeffer. I was ordained at the time and spent a day with her on the day Frank got chrismated and explained what Orthodox Christianity was (she was relieved to find out it was not a cult). She is a very gracious and generous woman.

Later I got to know Frank a bit better (full disclosure: I was a co-editor of Dancing Alone: The Quest for Orthodox Faith in the Age of False Religion) and thus was alarmed with what appears to be a drift from the moral tradition towards libertine liberalism — moral parity for homosexuals is his new cause). I keep up with his writings on the Huffington Post but find the slide into temporal moralizing almost intolerable — lot’s of self-assured finger-wagging, no serious thinking. I only check it every few months now.

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HT: Mirror of Justice

“Natural Law” and “far right Reconstructionist extremism!”
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I haven’t listened to it yet but usually Steve the Builder has very good material.

In this podcast Steve references an article he wrote for AGAIN Magazine on the Orthodox Church and same sex attraction. In it he shares the results of several interviews with Orthodox men and women who shared their backgrounds and experiences as homosexuals before and after becoming Orthodox Christians.