Subscription: $15 / year Membership: $15/year All correspondence to: Editor: Duane Bates All correspondence to: P. O. Box 1744 Greenville, SC 29602 November, 2007

The Voice of Sanity THE NEWSLETTER OF THE UPSTATE S.C. SECULAR HUMANISTS Visit our web-site for current and back-issues at: www.uscsh.org e-mail: secularhmnst@aol.com

ASSISTED SUICIDE STUDIES PUBLISHED

Two studies, one from the Netherlands and one from the state of Oregon, indicate that the concern that legalizing assisted suicide would expose vulnerable groups such as the mentally or physically disabled to coerced euthanasia are unfounded. The “slippery slope” arguments against legalizing doctor-assisted suicide asserted that once terminally ill adults were allowed to choose to end their lives it would eventually lead to the expansion of the principle to include those persons considered unworthy of continued life for a variety of reasons.

The Dutch study covered the twenty-year period from 1985 to 2005, while the Oregon study covered the eight-year period from 1998 to 2006. The only group that was disproportionately represented in the study was AIDS patients who were thirty times more likely to request doctor-assisted suicide that other chronically ill or terminally ill patients. There is no evidence that any racial or ethnic minority, the mentally or physically disabled, poor or elderly or any other vulnerable groups were disproportionately represented among those persons who requested doctor-assisted suicide in either study.

About eighty percent of the persons requesting doctor-assisted suicide in the Netherlands and Oregon were cancer patients with an average age of seventy. Under the Oregon law two doctors have to diagnose the patient as terminally ill with less than six months to live. The patient then administers the lethal drugs to himself or herself. In the Netherlands doctors are permitted to administer the lethal drugs to the terminally ill patients.

Regardless of the above results, the subject of suicide, doctor assisted or not, remains a highly controversial subject in America, with most people, and doctors, firmly opposed. Our experience with the actions of Dr. Jack Kevorkian in assisting over 100 people to commit suicide, for which he served eight years in prison, shows us the worst possible way to deal with this issue. As the US population ages and medical science allows us to live longer, substantial numbers of persons will face the last months of their lives incapacitated and in pain as the result of terminal diseases.

I freely admit that I have a personal bias on this issue. In 2003 at the age of 62 I was diagnosed with stage one colon cancer. That year I had two surgeries followed by six months of chemotherapy that was completed in June of 2004. Although there is never a guarantee, I never thought that my illness was terminal in the near term. Since my cancer was discovered at an early stage, I had confidence that advances in cancer treatment would allow me to have many more years of life. Yesterday (10/8/07) I underwent a colonoscopy as part of my five-year exam cycle. It confirmed, along with a PET scan I had two months ago, that I am cancer free as of now.

One brother, who was ten years older than me, died of colon cancer and another brother, six years younger than me, had part of his colon removed last year. There is clearly a pattern with the three of us, in spite of the fact that I could not find any cancer in my family going back two generations. All of us lived in different parts of the country and had different life styles, so there is a high probability that our cancers are to some degree genetic.

Even though my health is good now, I must face the fact that ultimately all of us die. I believe that many people, including myself, want to have some control over the end of life experience. Poor health and advancing age tends to focus more of ones attention on what our final days of life will be like. I view this issue as a basic question of automony and personal freedom, but there are also ethical and moral issues on both sides of the debate. I intend to do everything in my power to make sure that my end of life process does not selflessly utilize medical resources to extend my life my a few weeks or months, even if that means moving to Oregon. The same medical advances that extend our lives and improve our quality of life are also being used in some cases to extend our lives beyond the natural limits of our bodies.

As a society we certainly do not want an assisted suicide process that allows anyone who has a serious illness or injury to expect to be helped to end her or his life. In at least two instances Dr. Kevorkian helped persons commit suicide that who’s only illness was severe depression. At the other extreme, society should not demand that terminally ill persons to spend that last months, or sometimes years, in extreme pain or in vegetative comas like Terry Schiavo. Our society quite rightly insists that we as individuals assume more personal responsibility in managing every aspect of our lives while refusing to allow us to make decisions on how our impending death will occur.

We know that a substantial amount of medical and financial resources are devoted to caring for terminally ill patients in their last six months of life. In spite of Living Wills and “ do not resuscitate” instructions families and doctors ignore the wishes of the patient to control the final days of their lives. We understand the desire of the families to maintain their loved ones life as long as possible and the very real concern on the part of doctors and hospitals that they will be criticized and sued for not using all of their medical skill to maintain life regardless of the medical realities, but we also need to respect the wishes of the patient.

Even more importantly, we need to understand that expending our finite medical expertise and resources on maintaining the lives of terminally ill elderly patients automatically deprives younger patients of needed medical care. This year a poor thirteen-year-old boy in New Jersey died of a brain infection because his mother did not have enough money to have an abscessed tooth treated.

The reports from Oregon and the Netherlands demonstrate that we can design a rational system of assisted suicide where no person can be pressured into accepting a premature death and no medical professional can be required to participate in a process that he or she believes is immoral, unethical or illegal.

The Evolution of Conservatives

A Short Essay by Harry H. McCall

The conservative voice is often strongly associated with the Good Ole Days or a set nostalgic past. That is, they champion the values on which they claim the United States was built upon. Based on this, time and again, the many conservative talk radio programs lash out at the “political liberal agenda” as the bases for the destruction of America.

In Upstate South Carolina, conservative talk radio is represented by WORD Radio with its one of many, but main, conservative commentator Rush Limbaugh on the secular side and Christian Talk Radio 660 on the religious side. Theses stations host conservative commentary from men who see the destruction of the moral and ethical system of the United States where most of the problems can be traced to a progressive liberal agenda; usually the Democratic Party.

More over, on the conservative Christian side, and as a one time student at Bob Jones University, I heard guest evangelists radiate their contempt form the chapel platform against any “lily livered liberal” whose “spine was made of jelly” and folded in compromise instead of standing firm against modernism (notice the term modernism is still used in the school’s creedal statement even though its meaning itself has now been liberalized). An example of this strong conservative hold to past history can came about at the university in 1972 when Bob Jones II invited the ambassador from the apartheid country of Rhodesia, Africa to address the student body at chapel after he was barred from the United Nations. The relationship was that the white conservative country of Rhodesia mirrored the same conservative white only policy the University held at the same time (It should be noted here that the University’s new move to modernity can be heard in Stephen Jones’ sermons when compared to the one sided views of his grandfather Bob Jones II).

But at what point in time did the Rush Limbaugh’s and Bob Jones’ become the hardcore conservatives as they try to convince their listeners they have always been? After all, conservatives can only be considered conservative in perspective to the time in which they live and, for the most part, their twenty first century social views would (from the perspective of an earlier time) be radically attacked as liberal by the conservatives as late a the early to mid 20^th century.

Looking back to the late 1840’s, we find recorded where the South Carolinian, John C. Calhoun (1782-1850) said that, in general, any (white) man could look at a Negro and see that they are less than human. From the antebellum South’s perspective (as even today), a general reading of the Bible gives full support to slavery, which was correctly understood as a founding issue of the Southern Baptist Convention during its organization in 1845 in Augusta, Georgia. The evolution in the social thinking of Rush Limbaugh and Bob Jones University (unlike the religious Klu Klux Klan) are cut off from this conservation past though such laws as the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 although some religious conservative sects (such as the Mormons (L.D.S. sect)) fought hard to hold to their God given roots on this matter, and were forced to changed only when a confrontation with the U.S. Supreme Court reversed their mind in 1978 via the Church Prophet and President receiving a liberal revelation.

The conservative past was based on social injustices drawn form a Biblical patriarchal society now illegal by the United States Congress. As such, modern social advances were attacked by both the secular and religious conservatives and included, but no limited to, such major national liberal advances such as anti-slavery, women’s suffrage movement / women rights, civil rights, anti-trust legislation, labor unions, integration, environmental laws, protection of animals and other major social advances. The very issues of social and political that conservatives claimed would be the down fall of the United States have place this country in the progressive top nations for liberty and freedom while those highly conservative countries where rule falls under a monarch or some type of theocracy are locked so tightly to the past as to violate our basic human rights over the past fifty years.

In light of the above, I would view the conservative mindset as a halfway dug-in boat anchor slowly being dragged on the bottom of fixed history by secular ship driven by the winds of social change. Or, put another way, conservatives could be view as retarded liberals since the evolution of the legal system coincides with the slow forced advance of the conservative mindset negating a past they had loved and supported.

From the prospective of social history, conservatives (such as Rush Limbaugh) seem to have only, and as of late, joined in on an age old tug-of-war battle where he and his conservative cronies have simply grabbed hold of a rope long held by secular and religious conservatives that has always been constantly losing ground to a progressive liberal society which has made illegal the old limited world of white male supremacy. On only needs to recall that in the conservative South (as in highly religious state of Alabama where the majority of the state’s Southern Baptist (and other churches)) the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement for integration was opposed based on the ideals of God and the Bible. I can remember my neighbor of the same conservative mind set (who was a very religious Lutheran who serve as a church councilman) either turning off his black and white TV set should a show have a black man be on it or walking out of a restaurant should a black man be seated.

Again, the modern talk show conservatives seem to be anchored in a supposed fixed past which is forced forward with the collapse of their historical environment. This conservative history leaves the stage of society as fast as the so-called liberal legal system passes a law banning it. While conservatives (such as Rush Limbaugh and Bob Jones University) are not stupid enough to call for the resurrect segregation laws banning blacks (and women) from politics, they can and do harp on Hilary Clinton as a hated liberal and rally the disenfranchised white patriarchal past (along with their wives) to their cause. But the fact remains that no woman I know of is a conservative talk host or political front-runners except the limited exposed pro-Catholic Phyllis Schlafly’s with her Eagle Forum.

Conservative secular and religious commentators have much in common in promoting some strange and never changing concept of God. Just who and what this term God means remains an enigma in light of objective evidence. By this I would call attention to scholars who are not limited by some set sectarian creedal dogma and read directly from the Bible a Judeo-Christian God who has (and continues) to reveal Himself in progressive liberalizations not only in the Hebrew Bible, but even more radically so in the ancient versions of the First Testament, but also in simply contrasting the radical paradigm shift in the New Testament with the Jewish Torah. This liberalization of God can be found advancing faster in the New Testament just by comparing the Synoptic Gospels (Matthew, Mark and Luke) with the letters of Paul. Learned societies such as the 127 year old Society of Biblical Literature and its sister organization, the American Academy of Religion have published journals and books based on this ancient literature revealing a God who as evolved theologically with His religious faithful towards a more universal and liberal concept.

The days where a major conservative religious leader could fill the broadcast airways in the United States with racial hatred once included the anti-Semitic Father Charles Coughlin (1891-1979) and the White Supremist and Protestant Evangelist Gerald L.K. Smith (1898-1976). Rev. Smith ran for U.S. President three times and published the highly conservative The Cross and the Flag along with founding the Christian Nationalist Crusade. Although those times and men have pasted, it has been pointed out that Sunday mornings are the most segregated time in America.

In light of the above, and keeping with the times of the mid twentieth century providing a foundation for a segregated United States per-war policy of isolation, many Americans were privately or openly sympatric to the conservative nationalistic policies of Adolf Hitler (such as famed aviator Charles Lindbergh (1902-1974). Although the “Negro” man was finally allowed to fight and die for freedom in Europe and Asia, he returned home to a little change conservative and segregated United States.

Indeed, it is with little wonder that such conservative religious views were a founding motivation for separatist groups such as the Church of Jesus Christ Christian/Aryan Nations. Here, unlike the secular conservatives who are forced to stay in step with the legal system, the separation of church and state gives religious conservatives a firm hold to a past via a prejudice theological system which can be, again, objectively read straight from the Bible.

In the final analysis, the conservative commentator will remain a popular demagogue of an ever dying and shrinking social past whose broadcast media life is only as conservative as the times in which he or she lives. But, as Bob Dylan’s song goes: The Times They Are A-Changin'

HAPPENINGS

The October regular dinner meeting of the USCSH will be on Sunday October 28 at 5 p.m. at the home of Joe and Elaine Norwood. The Norwoods live at 16 Oakleaf Rd. in Greenville.  Please call Joe/Elaine at 268-1889 for directions and/or for a suggestion for your contribution to the meal. The host will provide the main dish.

We combine the November/December meeting to the second Saturday brunch, which will be December 8th at 10:30 a.m. There will be NO November or December dinner on the 4th Sundays. There WILL BE a November 10th brunch (10:30 a.m.) at the Denny's Restaurant, Wade Hampton Blvd, Taylors.