The Progressive Playbook

 

Attending a hearing today on “medical assistance in dying” really brought the progressive playbook into sharp relief. Feel free to put on the musical Hamilton’s “10 Duel Commandments” while reading this. 

Number one: Frame the matter as offering a free choice when everyone knows full well there’s massive coercion involved. 

A prime example is abortion. It’s safe to say most if not the vast majority of abortions are coerced in some way, often by men. 

It’s not like this is a secret or a conspiracy theory. In The Fab Five by Mitch Albom, a story of the University of Michigan basketball team in 1991-93, player Eric Riley openly tells a story of how he heard that he got a girl pregnant and immediately told her to get an abortion. Her christian mother prevented it. 

Intentionally induced death is no different. When a medical professional tells the patient that intentional death is a valid medical option, that is applying influence to a patient who views the medical profesional as an authority figure. And we have plenty of examples from the Netherlands, Belgium, and Canada where people feel pressured toward death, Roger Foley in Canada for one. 

Number two: Stage manage to limit dissent

The hearing was from 11 AM to 2 PM on a Wednesday. Obviously most working folks are unable to attend a meeting at that time, weighting the attendees toward a combination of professional activists and retirees favorable to the bill. This is a common progressive technique of pushing through milestones when most normal people are unavailable or unlikely to get involved. Fivethirtyeight pointed out that democrats are standouts at voter suppression by deliberately scheduling off-cycle elections for local officials and school budgets to engineer a favorable electorate. 

Further, the first hour was taken up by witnesses, neither of whom was from the state nor a medical professional. The next chunk was taken up by waffling from the reps. Leaving less than two hours for 62 public commenters. In a civilized polity, this kind of hearing would begin at 7 PM and stretch to 1 AM given the gravity of the matter and the number of interested constituents. But not today. 

Number three: Redefine language, then label anyone who uses real language as dangerous

Quickly the bill’s sponsor and his witnesses moved to stifle dissent by banning the use of legitimate terms to describe the bill and its effects. We were told that calling “medical aid in dying” suicide was shameful and dangerous because it equates the very different “traditional” notion of self-inflicted death to this new action of ending a terminally ill life with dignity on one’s own terms. 

The bill itself says that “medical assistance in dying” is not to be understood as assisted suicide or euthanasia. 

This is nonsense. Ending one’s life in the midst of suffering is suicide, whether it is done after a terminal diagnosis in a hospital bed or after a searingly depressing life experience as a physically healthy teenager. Intentionally inducing death through pharmacological means is euthanasia, whether it is motivated by eugenics and done on a young person with a genetic disability or whether it is done on an elderly person suffering from a significant illness. We use the exact same term in the exact same sense when speaking of animals, it is unreasonable to suggest it cannot be used in the same context when speaking of people. 

Number four: Use one-sided identity politics to exclude dissenters

The sponsor boldly told all of us that we didn’t have standing to argue against the bill because we were not terminally ill. Standing is a defined legal term. A friend of mine who is a practicing attorney made a public comment asserting that the sponsor had no idea what the word standing meant. 

Had I the chance, I would’ve asked the bill’s sponsor, cosponsors, and favorable witnesses if they were terminally ill. Of course they are not, yet that does not bar them from speaking about the bill.

This is the same garbage “no uterus no opinion” approach followed by the pro abortion lobby. By that logic, neither lesbian women nor standout pro abortion leaders like Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Ted Kennedy, Andrew Cuomo, Ralph Northam, or the seven Supreme Court justices who issued Roe v. Wade could speak about abortion. Of course men can speak about abortion, especially those who have survived abortion or those who began life post Roe as an unintended teen pregnancy (such as myself). 

Number five: Lie. 

At least four times, educated adults in the public square looked me in the eye (via Zoom of course) and told me with a straight face that the protections in the current bill would limit legally approved suicide to those terminally ill who were mentally competent to choose that “option” and would have no broader impact on the disabled or the quality of healthcare. 

Stared straight into my eyes. And lied. 

It wasn’t true in Belgium. It wasn’t true in Canada, where such limits on legal suicide were struck down last year, using the same equity logic that the sponsor used to support this bill. Even the UN has called out Canada for their gross violation of the rights of the elderly and disabled in connection with assisted suicide. People have chosen assisted suicide in Canada after weeks of laying in urine-filled bedsheets.

The notion that healthcare professionals repeatedly suggesting to patients the possibility that they intentionally end their lives does not change the culture and quality of healthcare is asinine. And willfully dishonest. 

This too is common. To push the Supreme Court to ban public schools in Engel v. Vitale in 1962, the plaintiffs’ legal team lied in identifying one of the plaintiffs as an atheist. The pro abortion lobby often lies about abortion statistics in places and times where abortion is illegal. Norma Mccorvey was pressured into lying on the affidavit that launched Roe v Wade. 

The Lawrence v. Texas Supreme Court case mandating state acceptance of same sex acts was also based on a lie. The plaintiffs of the case were having a drunken fight, not sex. 

If you like your healthcare plan you can keep it. I don’t think vaccines should be mandatory, and I will not demand that they be mandatory. And so on. 

Number six: Slant the debate with bad polls.

We were told that 7 in 10 Catholics support the provisions of the suicide bill. Really? What was the poll question and were respondents informed about the contents of the bill? 

The liberal media subjects us to endless polls about how most Americans favor upholding Roe. But Gallup has made it clear time and again that 48% of poll respondents think abortion should be legal only under certain cases while 19% believe it should be illegal in all cases. So 66% favor Roe, which mandates that abortion be legal in all 50 states, while 67% believe it should be outright illegal or illegal in many cases. 

Obviously most polled individuals don’t understand what Roe v Wade says, and most want more restrictions on abortion. The Pro Wade polls are junk data because they’re asking respondents about a case most know nothing about. The same can be said for the polls on suicide bills. 

And yes, the innumerable and hilariously wrong “Trump down by 10 points” polls for both the 2016 and 2020 elections were absolutely used as voter suppression tactics. 

Number seven: Claim a monopoly on science. 

We were subjected to a witness who is not a medical professional or a statistician asserting that there are no evidence based cases against the suicide bill. It took me about two minutes to find this heart-wrenching story of an Italian man who died by euthanasia after an incorrect terminal illness diagnosis. The story goes on to quote the former Chair of the New Zealand Medical Association confirming that autopsies show 10-15% of terminal diagnoses to be incorrect. 

This is no surprise, surely everyone knows someone who was doomed to die in short order by the medical establishment only to live for at least another few years. 

Yet today’s legislators flatly ignored real, verifiable scientific evidence provided by a qualified public health professional in favor of spotty testimonies from professional activists. Follow the science indeed. 

Number eight: Use tilted equity arguments to demolish self government

The sponsor asked his activist witness if it was equitable that individuals with terminal illness in New Jersey had a right to suicide while those in Delaware did not. 

In essence any state that has any restriction based on a social norm that is not shared by another state is viewed as guilty of discrimination. This is the standard liberal approach to forcing compliance with their ideology using the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection clause. 

Funny how this doesn’t throw out California’s punitive environmental or tax laws because they’re not equitable when viewed against more relaxed laws in Texas and Florida. 

Number nine: Use biased academia to create an aura of authority

Everyone knows that academia is heavily biased toward the political left. This enables liberals to bring in credentialed experts to back their initiatives. This is confirmation bias, and we should be perfectly comfortable pointing out that this is like running a victory lap around a Republican tax plan with economists from the American Enterprise Institute and Cato Institute. 

Stacking the deck with support from politically biased institutions does not mean your position is stronger. It means liberal academics are good at maintaining political control of their universities. 

So there you have it. Should traditionalists use any of these tactics? No. But we would be fools not to recognize them and arm ourselves against them.