Thursday, February 20, 2025

Part I

---

The Culture of Death and Dementia—In the Netherlands, Some With Alzheimer’s are Trying to Make Plans for Assisted Suicide Before Their Decline

As we look at the big issues across the cultural and moral landscape, it’s quite easy for Christians in the United States to avoid looking squarely at the issue of assisted suicide, euthanasia, because in one sense it can seem rather remote. That’s not true in several jurisdictions in several states in the United States, where you have assisted suicide or physician assisted death, as the euphemism now is presented to us, where it’s legal. But on this issue, it’s really important to look across the Atlantic and across our northern border as well to Canada and to Europe, and understand that the issues that are framed there now are going to be framed here very quickly. Now, the fact that we do have states contrasted with other states in this nation on the issue of euthanasia or physician assisted suicide, that demonstrates the cleavage in the American mind, in the American worldview on this.

We’re looking at blue states and red states, and primarily we need to notice that there is an overlay on this issue, areas of the country where there is greater Christian influence or the influence of the Christian worldview and where there is less influence, and that map also is very indicative. Few surprises there. You are looking at states particularly on the Pacific coast and in particular in the Northwest, you’re looking at some in the Northeast. And you’re looking at a predictable cultural pattern, but you’re also looking at a deep cleavage in the United States. In Europe, you’re looking at nation by nation, interestingly a very similar pattern. Nation by nation, you see there are different laws, whether it’s called physician assisted death or assisted suicide or euthanasia, the reality is that you can predict to a considerable degree where a country is, depending on where it is on the slide towards secularization and political liberalism.

But there are some exceptions. As you look at a nation like England, which is very secular at the present, but not quite at all where many of the continental nations are on the issue of physician assisted suicide. The question there, however, is how long will it last? But I’m pointing to the reality that if you want to know where this issue is headed, you look to countries such as the Netherlands, that country in particular is where you want to look to see where this is headed. And secondarily, I would say to the Netherlands, would be Canada because the striking, horrifying thing is how fast the logic of death has proceeded in Canada. But let’s look at the Netherlands right now, and in particular a front page article that appeared in the New York Times. That’s interesting in this case, the New York Times just this week ran a front page print story with a headline, “How Dementia Derails Plans for Assisted Dying.” How Dementia Derails Plans for Assisted Dying.

What in the world is this about? Well, I’ll cut to the bottom line and then we’ll come back and fill in the gaps. The bottom line is this, there are persons in the Netherlands who do not want to experience continued cognitive decline, or they are so concerned about developing something like Alzheimer’s disease, that they are signing assisted suicide or euthanasia agreements or compacts when they are understood to be mentally stable in order to make that kind of decision. But there’s also a very sensitive issue of deciding at one point in the progression towards some kind of dementia, this kind of physician assisted death would come into play.

But the whole point of the article is that this is presenting some real complications on both sides of the equation in the Netherlands because there are some people who want to end their lives rather than experience dementia, and yet they don’t want that to happen too early. But here’s the thing, if they make that decision too late, indeed, as this article says, even a day too late, it’s too late. This is the horrifying equation that results from the culture of death gaining control. Stephanie Nolan is the reporter, and she writes from Castricum in the Netherlands. The article begins, “Soon Irene Meckel will need to pick the day she dies. She’s not in any hurry, she quite likes her life. In a trim, airy house in Castricum, a Dutch village by the sea, she has flowers growing in her back garden and there is a street market nearby where vendors greet villagers by name. But if her life is going to end the way she wants, she will have to pick a date sooner than she might like. It’s a tragedy.” She said.

This woman now aged 82, was diagnosed about a year ago with Alzheimer’s disease. “She knows her cognitive function is slowly declining and she knows what is coming. She spent years working as a nurse, she cared for her sister who had vascular dementia. For now she’s managing with help from her three children and a big screen in the corner of the living room as they update remotely to remind her of the date and any appointments.” “In the not so distant future,” the article continues, “it will no longer be safe for her to stay at home alone. She had a bad fall and broke her elbow in August. She does not feel she can live with her children who are busy with careers and children of their own. She has determined that she will never move into a nursing home, which she considers an intolerable loss of dignity. As a Dutch citizen, she’s entitled by law to request that a doctor help her end her life when she reaches a point of unbearable suffering, and so she has applied for a medically assisted death.”

And by the way, in the Netherlands, they still use the word euthanasia. And that goes back to the incredible claim of personal autonomy, the center of the assisted death movement. And that is the claim that we should have the right basically, to decide when we will die, under what conditions we will agree to live. That’s where you end up in a highly secularized society in which you no longer have God, even on the horizon, the Creator of life, the one who gives us life and the one who is Lord over life. If there is no God, if there is no Lord who is indeed in control of our lives, then we are in control and assisted suicide is by this theory, just the ultimate final way of exercising that control.

The paper acknowledges the background here is the expansion of euthanasia or assisted suicide to additional nations around the world. And we are told that the Netherlands is one of just four countries that permit medically assisted death “by advance requests for people with dementia.” Add to that the Canadian province of Quebec. But as the paper tells us, “the idea is gaining support in other countries as populations age and medical interventions mean that more people live long enough to experience cognitive decline.” Now the next sentence just needs to kind of settle in our minds for a moment. “The Dutch public strongly supports the right to an assisted death for people with dementia.” Okay, that’s sentence number one, let’s just think about that for a moment. We’re told that the Dutch public strongly supports the right to assisted death for people with cognitive decline or dementia. The next sentence, however, states this, “yet most Dutch doctors refuse to provide it.” It continues, “they find that the moral burden of ending the life of someone who no longer has the cognitive capacity to confirm their wishes is too weighty to bear.”

Where do we begin on this? Well, let’s just begin at the end of this and move back just a bit. So now you have doctors who do not want to provide assisted suicide by advanced directive for patients in cognitive decline such as Alzheimer’s disease. But the sentence before that tells us that the vast majority of the Dutch people believe that a person should be able to offer in advance, word that they want assisted suicide as they slide into some kind of cognitive decline.

Let me just underline what I think we should note there. I think it’s incredibly significant. When you have medical doctors, they don’t go into the practice of medicine to end life, but to extend it. They don’t go into medicine certainly by and large, the motivation of going into medicine is to serve health and to perpetuate health, not to bring about death. As a matter of fact, the venerable Hippocratic Oath going back to ancient times, includes the admonition, do not kill. That’s addressed to doctors, but that’s exactly what doctors are being called upon to do in the Netherlands and in other nations, and in the Canadian province of Quebec, in the light of anticipated cognitive decline.

The article goes on to give some specific examples, and they’re horrifying, but they’re examples of persons who waited too late to indicate that this was the date they wanted to agree upon for their death. Once that point is reached, an increasing number of doctors in the Netherlands won’t go through with the procedure. I think that’s a matter of conscience we need to know. I think it tells us something incredible about the fact that God made us moral creatures with a moral knowledge implanted within us and what we know as the conscience, and that conscience is developed over time, certainly in those who are seeking to save and to perpetuate life. And I think it tells us a great deal that at the end of this equation you have medical doctors who say, “I’m kind of for physician-assisted suicide in some cases, but in these cases I just can’t do it.”

But there’s also something that haunts the medical conscience there in the Netherlands, and you could say, well, I could think in the 20th century that would be the Third Reich. Yes, of course, that’s very close at hand. But even closer at hand is something that happened in 2016. It is known as the Coffee Case. In that situation, there was a 74-year-old woman who as she knew she was going into dementia, wanted assisted suicide, physician-assisted death and arranged for it. But when it was actually the time according to her family and even to at least something she had given in the advance directive that this should be the time when her desk should be brought about, even as she was given a certain preparatory sedative in her coffee, that’s why it’s known as the coffee case, when those who were seeking to bring about her assisted suicide, her physician-assisted death went to actually inject the chemicals that would bring about her death, she fought back, and even as the New York Times acknowledges, members of her family had to hold her down for the death pharmaceuticals to be injected in her.

So there’s a woman who’s fighting back at the end of her life, even as she had requested physician-assisted death, at the end of the day, her family had to hold her down for the chemicals of death to be administered. This has seared at least many consciences among medical doctors there in the Netherlands.

Part II

---

Euthanasia Goes Far Beyond Assisted Suicide – The Culture of Death is an All-Encompassing Worldview, From Death Before Birth to Death in Old Age

Now, on the one hand, this article in America’s most influential newspaper seems to be saying, this is a really complicated issue. Well, we knew that already, but here’s the thing Christians understand, the moment you start to negotiate with a culture of death, it gets more and more complicated.

You have a significant number of people who will say, “I think someone with a terminal disease ought to be able to take this way out. I think someone in intractable suffering ought to be able to take this way out.” And you say, “we’re going to limit that to acute physical, overwhelmingly physical pain or suffering. We’re going to limit this to diagnosable, certifiable terminal diseases or terminal conditions.” But then you turn around and you recognize once you have agreed to that, will things get complicated? How do you define that? And before long, you’re saying, “well, I think intractable suffering, this deep agony of suffering, I think that’s something that might not be in anticipation of death, but might be just at a point of life where someone says, I don’t want to experience this anymore. They should have the right to physician assisted suicide or physician assisted death as well.”

Then you have people who say, “well, psychological suffering is as real as physical suffering, so it should be extended to those whose diagnosis will be psychological suffering.” But then you have the question as to who has the moral agency to proceed with this kind of horrifying decision? And once you begin to ask that question, you begin to define it down. You say, well, first of all, it’s someone who is diagnosed as being in the last six months of life. And of course it would have to be someone of age. And the anticipation is this is someone who is an adult and in most cases, probably an older adult. And you say, of course we would not extend this to minors. But you’re the same people who said, of course we wouldn’t extend this to psychological suffering. And you’re the same people, the same legislature who said, we wouldn’t extend this to say, the experience of suffering apart from a terminal diagnosis.

You’re the same people, you’re the same country in some cases you’re even the same individuals, but you have accepted a negotiation with a culture of death. And guess what? The culture of death will demand a new negotiation at every turn. You say, we’re drawing the line here, the line will not be drawn there for long. And so you go from saying physical, not psychological, adult, not children, to the situation in which children for physical or psychological reasons can demand assisted suicide along with many others, including those who quite frankly just don’t want to live anymore. And here you notice that the culture of death has really flipped the entire moral instinct because the moral instinct of any civilization is that you try to intervene when someone reaches that point of thinking. But now you say no, such a person can simply offer a directive to a physician who by medical practice and law is authorized to help them make their exit.

There are other moral complications. For one thing, this article really doesn’t acknowledge the financial side of this, but there’s always a financial side. And the financial side on this is really powerful because you are looking at the fact that the kind of care that persons in advanced dementia require is very expensive. And so the argument quickly comes to people, you should not be a burden on society. You should not be a burden on your family. You should do the right thing and arrange in advance for ending your life in such a way that the bills end as well. The medical practice of assisted suicide, particularly with a view to dementia in the Netherlands, is described in a very interesting and indeed very dark way. It’s five minutes to midnight or five to 12:00. What does that mean? It means that there is a window beyond which a person is not qualified to make this decision.

And so you have to make the decision at the last minute when one is qualified, but not one day later. You’ll notice the qualification here is by some kind of mental or cognitive ability. And the argument of five to 12:00 is you better make that decision and set that date as far in the future as you can, but not one day further than your cognitive status will allow. You wait one day further, then it’s too late. We’re looking at a really dark picture here, but we need to know it was one that was completely avoidable, but the only way to avoid it is to refuse to go down the slippery slope of assisted suicide at the first place. And of course, I use that term intentionally because there are many people who say that slippery slope arguments don’t apply in such situations, but of course they do. It’s not a wrong argument.

And the fact is that you usually look at the history of assisted suicide euthanasia, you look in the Netherlands, you look at other European countries, you look at Canada, particularly Quebec, and you will see that it turns out to be entirely predictable. Entirely predictable. You draw the line here, then no, you draw the line the next place. Then you draw the line the next place, and then the next place. You know where this is going. You also know it’s not just about physician assisted death as they want to call it. It’s also about abortion. It is also about the continuation of human life in any number of circumstances. And the slide there is one that simply creates the culture of death as a haunting reality just about everywhere you look.

Finally, the article also indicates that there are persons in cognitive decline who seem to have quite satisfactory lives, who have moments of joy and whose lives turn out to be different than they had feared. And so the article actually ends with one family, and for a son asking the question of his mother. The article tells us “Her youngest son Melchior, asked her gently not long ago, if a nursing home might be okay, if by the time she got there, she wasn’t so aware of her lost independence.” The article then ends, “Miss Meckel shot him a look of affectionate disgust. No, she said. It wouldn’t.” Now, I just want to underline the fact that the cause of the intended horrifying suffering here is simply a loss of independence. I don’t mean to depreciate what that loss would be like, but I do want to say the Christian worldview affirms something very, very important, very important. And that is that a dependent human life is just as precious as an independent human life.

Just think of how every single one of us entered this world. We were born into complete dependency. We could do nothing for ourselves. There are moments in which, there are ages in which, there are decades in which in a normal human life, it appears that we have far more independence, but we are not nearly as independent as we believe ourselves to be. And then at the end of life, if we live long enough, the likelihood is that we will be dependent once again. And there’s something in that, that actually just affirms the reality of human life as the Creator intended it, the beginning and the end under his sovereign control.

It might be quite easy for Christians living in a place like the United States and especially living in a state that doesn’t have physician-assisted suicide. It might be easy to say this is a long way off geographically, perhaps even just in space and time as well. But the reality is it isn’t far from us. The logic is increasingly present right here. We need to understand it for what it is. And here’s something Christians understand, from the start we have to know we can’t negotiate with a culture of death. We can’t negotiate with a culture of death because that would be to defy God. And we can’t negotiate with the culture of death because in the end, let’s be clear, the culture of death always wins.

Part III

---

Modern Art as “Transgressive Art” — Why Artistic Culture Leans Left

Okay, shifting to a different issue. The collision of worldviews often takes place in well, locations you’d expect. You’d say, well, that collision of worldviews, it’s going to take place in an academic setting. Well, you bet it will. It’s going to take place in the arena of politics and legislation. It’s going to take place in the arena of law. Well, you bet it does, and you better be ready for it. But it also takes place in some locations you might not anticipate or think about very often until you do think about it and then you go, well, yep, that’s exactly what’s going on.

I want to point to one of those right now, and that’s the world of the arts. The world of the arts is a world of constant worldview combat, unless it’s not, in which case, it is entirely given over to one worldview. And where it has been entirely given over to one worldview, I can assure you, that is a worldview far on the secular Left. That’s one of the realities about the arts, and this is just something that we need to speak about honestly. When you look at the arts, you are looking at an arena of life in which there are certain persons who are unbelievably gifted, just unbelievably gifted. Sculptors, painters, authors. You just go down the list, playwrights. The cultural creatives as they are known, when it really reaches the level of art, we are looking at an ability at which other human beings simply have to say with awe and respect, that is an amazing gift. Of course, we as Christians understand the very fact you’re using the word gift reminds us that that gift has its origins in a giver.

But it’s also true that in a fallen world, the arts tend to have concentrations of two phenomena. Number one, more secular, more liberal than the rest of the culture. And secondly, when it comes to a lot of issues of morality, the artistic impulse is sometimes translated into the claim that artists are liberated to a different moral set of standards. Well, I’ll just put it this way. You look at the infamous sex lives of so many artists, and you come to understand it’s not by accident. There’s a certain permission they give themselves, a certain permission the artistic class reinforces about what is now translated into the ideology on the Left of transgression. You’re not really a true artist if you’re not transgressing both with your art and with your artistic lifestyle.

And by transgression, that means number one, transgressing cultural expectations, pushing the boundaries, offending people. But it also means in the classic mode of cultural Marxism, it means transgressing in order to keep moving the boundaries, in order to press a revolution. And that revolution, of course, will imply economics and law and so many other things, but it also implies very clearly, a revolution in morality. And that often means a denial of morality. And one of the moralities centrally denied is Christian morality, particularly when it’s put in a Marxist frame, it’s dismissed as a bourgeois morality. Artists transcend that. Prophetic witness, transgressing the boundaries in order to push culture forward.

Now, as Christians, we have to concede that there’s some power in that. And the power in that, for example, comes with something like, say, the 50th anniversary of Saturday Night Live recently celebrated. And you look at that program, look, it defines transgression. It defines transgression and has from the very beginning. Its various ensemble cast have been pressing against the limits of accepted comedy. And you just look at how transgression has happened, and you’ll notice you’re looking at things that happened on that program years ago that you wouldn’t even notice now, that were scandalous then, and that is because the artistic agenda has pushed morality in terms of expectations far beyond where it was in the 1970s. In the early part of that era, the television program known as All in the Family produced by Norman Lear, it made news when there was the sound of a flushing toilet because nothing like that had ever happened before. Well, there’s a lot that’s happened since.

Part IV

---

President Trump Takes on the Cultural Elites at the Kennedy Center: Drag Performances are Out, But What Will Take Their Place?

But I want to talk now about one controversy in the world of art that has collided with the world of politics in a big way, and it has to do with President Trump vacating the board of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC and naming himself the temporary chairman, and appointing Richard Grenell, who’s been close to the president in times past, as his administrator to bring about change at the Kennedy Center. That center was under construction about the time that President John F. Kennedy was assassinated. His name as a memorial, was put on this massive complex. We’re told that the lobby of the Kennedy Center is so large that the Washington Monument could be laying within it end to end. I’ll just say, that’s quite a lobby. It is a massive cultural center. It is a massive investment of funds, both public and private. But the board is basically under the control of the president and the executive branch, President Trump fired the board, including David Rubenstein, very, very famous figure who’s put about $100 million or more of his own money into it.

But the preexisting board was just all into the Cultural Revolution, they saw the Kennedy Center as a way of platforming all of this and knew at least some of this, even back in the first Trump administration, was pressing the boundaries of dissent over against the president and his administration. President Trump in the beginning of his term–this tells you something of the detail of the plan for a second term–President Trump vacated the board, made himself the temporary chairman, and he wants to bring back normal art to the Kennedy Center. Now, I see that as basically a very good thing. I see that also as a partly implausible goal, but I really do want to point out that the people who are complaining about this, the very fact that they’re complaining about it, the way they’re complaining about it, affirms the fact that Donald Trump, no doubt represents the vast majority of the American people in saying no to what was going on there.

For instance, headline: “Kennedy Center Cancels Pride Performance Featuring Gay Men’s Chorus of Washington.” Turns out there was an inordinate number of, you’re surprised by this, an inordinate number of cultural events that were really propaganda for various sexual, let’s just say, proclivities and minorities. There was a protest just in recent days as one press report said, “For the many people in liberal Washington scandalized by Mr. Trump’s takeover of the Kennedy Center, that night was like a cross between a wake and last call.” That’s a theater term, of course, last call. But listen to this, “Drag performers protested outside in the cold as students from George Washington University marched around, shouting about Mr. Trump. Inside, some well-heeled patrons of the ballet were literally clutching their pearls, literally clutching their pearls as they contemplated the future of the institution. At the other end of the foyer, copies of a children’s book entitled Do The Work, an anti-racist activity book, were being sold ahead of a standup routine.”

My favorite portion in this article by Sean McCreesh is this, “Some fretted as to whether they ought to boycott the place going forward. Like a lot of people in Washington, said one man, ‘We’re trying to figure out will we continue to come? You want to support the artist, but you don’t want to support anything connected with this Philistine backward movement of the arts, which is exactly what is going to be.'” Okay, he used the ultimate curse word in the artistic world. What was it? Philistine.

Identifying someone as a cultural Philistine means you are basically back to cracking rocks. Knowing how hated he was by this artistic class, President Trump and the First Lady Melania Trump never attended a Kennedy Center event during the first Trump term. It’s not now known exactly what the fair will be, and a renewed Kennedy Center with President Trump as chairman of the board. T

he president is known to be a fan of Andrew Lloyd Webber, which leads to the interesting question as to whether drag shows will be replaced by cats or whether President Trump will show up as the Phantom of the Opera.