Disability Activists Blast Invited Speaker (Euthanasia)

CONCORD, N.H., Aug. 24 - Disability rights activists are protesting the planned appearance of a controversial bioethics professor at a fall conference of Governor’s Commission on Disability.

The professor, Peter Singer, a member of the Princeton University faculty, argues that euthanasia for severely disabled infants aged up to 28 days and for some adults should be legal. Singer is one of several panel members the commission has invited to an Oct. 5 conference in Concord on genetics and bioethics. Not Dead Yet, a national activist group based in Forest Park, Ill., said the invitation to Singer was appalling. When Singer was hired at Princeton in 1999 as the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics, members of the group occupied an administration building there in protest. Michael Jenkins, executive director of the governor’s commission, said he invited Singer to let his opponents have at him.

Other conference speakers include such advocates for people with disabilities as Wellesley College bioethics professor Adrienne Asch, attorney John D. Kemp, U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commissioner Paul Steven Miller and Larry Robinson, executive director of Granite State Independent Living. Jenkins wrote an open letter in response to critics saying that the commission believed that it had a responsibility to bring Singer in to face his critics. “How could the commission not seize the opportunity to have him face the very people his philosophy has so utterly devalued?” Jenkins wrote. “His very presence will generate spirited debate and discussion about the value of human life and the importance of respecting and revering the lives and human dignity of persons with disabilities of all ages,” he said.

Gov. Jeanne Shaheen made a similar argument. “The governor considers his views abhorrent,” her press secretary, Pamela Walsh, said. “The best way to defend against these despicable viewpoints is to make sure people know about them.” In an interview, Jenkins said, “Some people wanted us to leave him in his little cubbyhole in Princeton until he went away. “But he’s not going away,” he added. “And responses and letters we’ve had are 10 to one in favor of having this guy here.”

The commission has never shied from sponsoring conferences on physician-assisted suicide and on employer discrimination based on hidden health problems, he said. Jenkins noted that Granite State Independent Living and the New Hampshire Developmental Disabilities Council were among sponsors of the upcoming conference. He said Singer would be paid for his appearance out of registration fees for the one-day event. Not Dead Yet President Diane Coleman wrote Jenkins, “This is a direct insult to thousands of disabled people in New Hampshire and millions across the country.

“ Singer is more than ‘controversial,’” she said. “He advocates changes in public policy that would deprive millions of people with cognitive disabilities equal protection of the law and allow those who do not meet his fuzzy criteria for ‘personhood’ to be killed by medical professionals with the ‘consent’ of their families.” Singer argues in his writings that people who cannot make conscious decisions about their own life or death are not necessarily harmed by a decision to take their life. That includes infants, depending on the kind of life they can be expected to have, he said. An infant suffering spina bifida would have one prognosis, one suffering hemophilia quite another, he said. “The fact that a being is a human being, in the sense of a member of the species Homo Sapiens, is not relevant to the wrongness of killing it,” he wrote in “Writings on an Ethical Life.”

“It is, rather, characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore, cannot be equated with killing normal human beings, or any other self-conscious beings.” Views like that, Jenkins said, amount to nothing short of infanticide. Singer, whose books include “Animal Liberation,” also is considered a founder of the animal rights movement.

THey'll invite this fascist professor who feels he has the right to decide who has a right to life. But I bet they will never NEVER invite Father Frank Pavone. (head of Priests for life) to explain why we should reverence life.

This "quality of life" stuff is PC in some medical schools. We sent a Native American lady who was spastic and had emotional outbursts from brain damage (frontal lobe syndrome) to a neurologist to see what medicine would help her the best. He spent the whole hour trying to talk her neice to stop the feeding tube and let her die: even though she was not in a coma, but knew her relatives and watched tv etc. The niece finally picked up her aunt and left, cursing him, saying: That's the difference between you white folks and us Indians. We don't kill off our elders.

Here's the editorial from today's New Hampshire Sunday News:

A murderous ideology: Professor’s views inappropriate at state conference

IMAGINE a conference on Judaism at which Adolph Hitler were one of the keynote speakers, or a conference on the Russian Kulaks, slaughtered by the thousands under Soviet rule in the 1930s, in which Josef Stalin were a headliner, and you may begin to understand why some people are so upset at the Governor’s Commission on Disability having invited Princeton University professor Peter Singer to speak at Friday’s conference on the disabled.

Singer has become famous in academic circles for advocating the killing of non-sentient humans, including infants and the mentally disabled, if it is determined that their lives will not be enjoyable. His beliefs are somewhat complex, but they can be summed up by saying that he holds two views about human life that should cause any moral person to recoil in disgust.

The first is essentially that moral worth is determined not by one’s humanity but by one’s ability to understand and enjoy one’s own existence. Singer equates apes and dolphins, who seem to be able to comprehend that they are apes and dolphins and not humans or gerbils, with humans. Under this belief, it follows that any human who loses this ability to understand and comprehend loses his moral worth as well.

The second view is that the value of human life is determined not by its mere existence but by the quality of living of which each individual is capable. Therefore disabled or diseased individuals have diminished value because they will not be as happy as their healthier counterparts.

The combination of these two precepts has led Singer to believe that it is OK to take the life of humans who are unaware of their existence and who will be unable to live what he views as a happy life. In this category would fall unborn babies, newborn infants, and all sorts of individuals with mental or physical disabilities.

According to Singer, it is perfectly fine to kill in the name of happiness. “I do think it is sometimes appropriate to kill a human infant,” Singer said on Friday. For example, he said, killing a child born with spina bifida would be perfectly justifiable because so few spina bifida babies live anyway, and those who do will not lead an enjoyable life. “If parents and doctors decide it’s better, in some cases it might be permissible for them to kill,” Singer said. Singer defends these views by saying that Hitler wanted to kill in the name of racial purity but he, on the other hand, only wants to kill in the name of happiness. But that’s not the way Germans and Austrians see it. Singer can no longer speak in those countries because so many people protest his speeches. Those who suffered under Nazi and Soviet occupation see something in Singer that too many Americans don’t. They see that his views are the foundation upon which any murderous ideology can justify its killing. What is more, they understand that Singer’s philosophy is in itself a murderous ideology. There is no moral difference between slaughtering innocent babies while humming “Ride of the Valkyries” and slaughtering innocent babies while singing “Happy Happy, Joy Joy.” One still ends up murdering in the name of an ideology, elevating one’s self to the status of God. Former U.S. Sen. Gordon Humphrey said it best on Friday when he said, “Professor Singer has a First Amendment right to advocate his monstrous ideologies. However, he has no Constitutional right to appear before a prestigious forum such as the Governor’s Commission on Disabilities. Let him wail in the wilderness if he must, but no civilized government in America should give him an honored place to speak.”

Worse part is that Singer is a Jew and has been condemned by a number of Jewish communities. He sits at the Bioethics committee.

You see, when liberals discuss arts, they discuss which art is the best. They will tell you with a straight face that Mozart is superior to Beethoven or what not. What court of law can prove that save for a court of law lead by the insane twisted and wicked judges?

I mean what court of law can prove that an infant's smile, a theatrical artistical endeavor, is inferior to Pamela Anderson's breasts? See, our disgusting society is attempting, like the nutcase nazies, to establish a measure of consciousness and artistical abstract production in various human types. And, frankly, this is appaling for people working in liberal arts to support things like Singer or abortions. It's not liberal arts, it's nazi art of the insane.

Ever since make love not war came out, the art of war has been despised in favor of the art of love. Physical attractions primed over substantive moral and biological mandates and inalienable contents that deserve recognition beyond the physical. Then we switched to supporting the likes of gays who have fundamentaly based their attractions on a physical sexual organ - much like the Nazi physical obsession for white aryan skin. Next we have the likes of abortion advocates and Singer advocating the destruction of children because they do not express a physical ability to be thinking human, despite the very ability of infants to smile interactively and purposefuly - unlike any other animal.

Frankly those people are no better than the islamic jihad. The terror against art forms they wage in their midst is bound to be exported and enforced against others and other nations.

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