Tea at Trianon: A License to Kill

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

A License to Kill

From The Federalist:

Simon Binner killed himself on camera at a Swiss suicide clinic last October. His death aired last week as part of a BBC documentary on dying. Once we tried to stop people from committing suicide. Now we watch.

Advocates say it is “compassionate” to prescribe death-inducing chemicals to the terminally ill, thereby giving them a choice to end their lives “on their own terms.” They speak of dignity as if it were a condition of the body, rather than a quality of the soul.

I know how brutal dying can be. I’m a hospice volunteer, and I helped care for my own dad as he wasted away from terminal cancer. The fear of helplessness or suffering and the desire to end a person’s suffering is only human.

Enabling suicide, however, is not humane. In the five U.S. states and as many western countries that have legalized physician-assisted suicide, such laws have opened a Pandora’s Box of unintended consequences that are anything but compassionate or liberating. (Read more.)