The United States of America, of late, has been demonstrating strange democratic ethos, stretching all type of freedoms to ridiculous breaking point and may break it.
For a country like America, which prides itself as model in the practice of democracy and, therefore, freedoms of all kinds, the recent additions, in form of gay marriage and the right-to-die bill in California have put a big question as to the moral input that is supposed to shape the society with doses of Godliness.
America it was which recently ruled that man could marry man and woman too can marry woman that love themselves. As a matter of fact, when the court delivered the judgment in the case in favour of gay marriage, some sections of that country went agog in celebration. There were public displays of what in saner society, were obscenity, with men hugging themselves and falling short of kissing themselves in public, even as women did the same.
Not long after that wired judgment, the Californian law makers – the House of Representatives and Senate – came up with a bill practically legalizing suicide. The two law making bodies, early in the week, passed what was termed right-to-die bill.
One of the bill’s co-authors, Senator Lois Wolk said the bill seeks to “eliminate the needless pain and the long suffering of those who are dying,” even as opponents said the measure could prompt premature suicides. The R-Rosevelle Senator, Ted Gaines said: “I’m not going to push the old or the weak out of this world, and I think that could be the unintended consequence of this legislation.”
The content of the bill, which is just awaiting the assent of the Californian governor, Jerry Brown, a former Jesuit seminarian, includes requirements that the patient be physically capable of taking the medication themselves; that two doctors approve it; that the patient submit several written requests, and that there be two witnesses. Already doctors in Oregon, Washington, Vermont and Montana have been given a go-ahead by law to prescribe life-ending drugs for living human being.
The bill came after the heavily publicized case of Brittany Maynard, a 29-year-old California woman with brain cancer, who moved to Oregon to legally take her life.
The bill was passed amidst protests and condemnations from people who still have some form of sanity.
Of course, no one would have raised an eye-brow on what America is doing to its moral and religious fabrics if it were not that it has been trying to rob those things on other countries.
The American establishment tried to sell the gay marriage stuff to President Muhammadu Buhari when he visited that counry recently, a situation that showed the desperation of America in ramming its so-called freedom of association down the throats of others.
In science, it is said that for every course there is repercussion or that for every action there is reaction. America should know that the acts of disregarding the simple God’s orders, taking refuge in the so-called freedoms have their repercussion.
Indeed, America appears to have allowed its way-word citizens to dictate how the society should run. It is as if there is no one leading: as if everyone is for himself and God is for all, if at all they believe in God.
The country and its leadership need to take a break, re-think and apply the brakes otherwise, the rate at which it is going, the country may run into moral, psychological, social, political, religious and even socio-economic quagmire. It is going to find itself in situation where it would lose every other thing that humanity values. And then crash.
America and its leadership should begin to put price for every freedom to enable even those who are the direct beneficiaries of such freedom to enjoy it, and not observing the tenets of freedom in isolation of the happiness of its people. For, the freedom that allows a person to take his life knowingly, for whatever reason, is emphasizing the freedom of the grave yard. [myad]
