Author: Ophelia Benson

Christopher Hitchens is irritated.

What in God’s name – you should forgive the expression – is all this about there being “no religious test” for appointments to high public office? Most particularly in the case of the U.S. Supreme Court, there is the most blatant religious test imaginable. You may not even be considered for the bench unless you have a religion of some kind. Surely no adherent of any version of “originalism” can possibly argue that the Framers of the Constitution intended a spoils system to be awarded among competing clerical sects.

Argue, no, probably not, but then the adherents don’t have to, do they, since no one (Hitchens apart) ever makes an issue of it. Especially not the people who actually vote whether or not to confirm Supreme Court nominees – which is Hitchens’ point, and why he’s irritated.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about the man who is now our chief justice. I pointed to unrebutted evidence that, in answer to a direct question from a fellow Catholic (Sen. Richard J. Durbin, D-Ill.), Roberts had replied that in the case of a conflict between the law and the teaching of the Vatican, he would recuse himself. Since obviously it is impossible to nominate, let alone confirm, anyone who does not answer that the law and the Constitution should control in all cases, I proposed that Roberts ought to be asked the question again and in public. For this, I got exactly what I expected: allegations of anti-Catholic bigotry from the fideists at National Review and then (not just for my benefit) a full-page ad or two in the press, saying that anyone who dared raise such a question would be accused of applying … “a religious test.”

So much for that little issue then.

But what is honest skepticism – and a regard for evidence and logic – when set against the profession of a mere “faith” that neither demands nor offers any evidence of any kind? And this latter “qualification” is now urged upon us with special fervor in the selection of – a judge.

Score one for the theocrats.

More on the ‘no you may not die until God says you may’ line of cant. This time from Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks on Thought (thought?) for the Day.

Nine years ago my brothers, my mother and I saw my father go through five major operations in his eighties. It was almost unbearably painful to see one who was once so strong and upright, fight a long, slow, losing battle with death. Yet I can’t begin to imagine what it would have been like if he, or we on his behalf, had been given the choice to bring that last day closer. He was a proud man who hated being a burden to others. How easy it would have been for him to spare us those final tormenting days. I can see him doing it. Yet he would have been so wrong – because, more than anything else, we wanted to be there with him in his suffering giving back some of the care he’d given us when we were young.

That’s meant to be good – to be in some way compassionate, kind, sensitive – in some way that rises above, or digs deeper than, the possible desires of the person in question. It’s meant to be good, but it’s horrible. It’s horrible that he’s glad his father didn’t have the choice to end the torment. It’s horrible that he’s glad his father wasn’t able to do what would have been easy – that he doesn’t think ‘ease’ may be desirable when the alternative is torment. It’s horrible that he apparently thinks (although he may just have expressed it badly) that what he and his brothers wanted should outweigh what his father might have wanted. It’s horrible that he skirts the issue of whether his father would have preferred to end his own suffering for his own sake.

The doctors were heroic in treating his pain. All of us, doctors, nurses, the family, my father himself, were united in cherishing life, leaving it to a will larger than ours to decide when it should end. There are some choices we should not be allowed to make, and of these the most fateful is to decide that a life is not worth living. My father was able to leave this world gently because he was spared that choice. Better a society that strives for life, than one that offers us the choice of death.

Gently? Because he was spared that choice? Where does the ‘because’ come in? What’s ‘gentle’ about for instance suffocating to death, the way Diane Pretty did? Or dying in horrible ever-increasing pain? Is that leaving the world ‘gently’? Is a society that ‘strives’ to force continued life on other people who don’t want it because they are in pain or totally disabled and helpless, better than one that allows them the choice to end it? Well, possibly. There are arguments to be had – secular ones. But dragging in the ‘will larger than ours’ (whose? where? what’s its phone number? what’s its email address? how do we ask it for a review?) doesn’t help. Thinking it does can motivate people to produce some horrible arguments, that boil down to ‘my father might have preferred to end his life himself and avoid the last few days of pain, but fortunately he wasn’t able to make that choice.’

Archbishops are very presumptuous, aren’t they.

The Archbishop of Canterbury says even watching his mother’s slow, painful death did not persuade him of the arguments for euthanasia…But despite this experience, he is still against assisted dying “chiefly on the grounds of my religious commitments – the conviction that life is a gift from God that we cannot treat as a possession of our own to keep or throw away as we choose,” he said.

Well that’s a stupid argument. Those grounds are not good grounds – not for a public debate, especially not for a public debate that influences legislation, they’re not. Life is not a gift from ‘God’ any more than it’s a gift from Krishna or Aphrodite or Baal or Mr Potato Head. If the Archbish wants to think it is for his own pleasure, fine, but he has a hell of a nerve making the rest of us die a slow painful – agonizing torturing degrading – death when we don’t want to on the basis of his belief in a fictional being. He has a nerve telling us that we cannot treat our lives – our lives – as possessions of our own, because he thinks they’re a prezzy from The Big Guy. He has a colossal nerve telling us we cannot keep or throw away (i.e. end) our own lives as we choose simply because he thinks they were a valentine from the deity. There are other reasons for saying that, or something like it, but they are secular reasons. The reason he gives is unadulterated blither, and it’s disgusting that he is allowed to impose it on everyone else. There is a debate to be had about euthanasia, there are secular, rational reasons to cite against it as well as for it, but allowing pious untrue cant to clutter up the subject is 1) not helpful and 2) a ridiculous, coercive intrusion.

We would know that if the wording were just a little different. If he said ‘chiefly on the grounds of my religious commitments – the conviction that life is a gift from Wallace and Gromit that we cannot treat as a possession of our own to keep or throw away as we choose’ – the worthlessness and intrusiveness would be obvious. Replace ‘Wallace and Gromit’ with Lucille Ball, or Spock, or Yosemite Sam, or Widow Twankey, and the worthlessness and intrusiveness remain just as obvious. But replace it with a different fictional character, and people become blind to the worthlessness and intrusiveness. It’s accepted that archbishops have something of value to say on the subject – something extra (deep, profound) that secular reasoners don’t have. But they don’t. They think they do, but they don’t. They have emotive formulas about gifts from God, and that’s not something of value, it’s nonsense. Nonsense that causes people not to change their minds even when they watch people die painful deaths. We don’t watch our dogs and cats die painful deaths, but people? Well, their lives don’t belong to them, unlike those of cats and dogs.