The West Calls Evil Good and Good Evil

If God returned to judge the inherent evil in the West today, we could hardly complain that He had come too soon. We have spent decades teaching ourselves to call evil good and good evil. Now the consequences arrive in the news almost daily. In the past month, various reports paint the picture of a civilisation in absolute moral decline.

In the Netherlands, a doctor ended the life of a severely disabled child just short of its second birthday. A review committee concluded that the doctor had acted with due care. The child could not ask to die. Independent doctors initially saw other reasonable options, including palliative care and different medications. Another doctor later agreed that ending the child’s life was the only reasonable way to relieve its suffering. The committee approved the decision. Consider what has happened to our moral vocabulary. A child is killed, and the official question is whether the killing was careful.

In Canada, police are investigating the euthanasia death of 83-year-old Christian great-grandmother Brigitte Stegemann. Her family says she had previously refused euthanasia on religious grounds and later lacked the capacity to give informed consent. Those allegations remain under investigation. But the question they raise is terrifying: what protection does a frail person have when the system already accepts death as a treatment?

Another woman, Kristin, says Canadian doctors offered assisted death while she had stage-four ovarian cancer. She and her husband went to the United States seeking treatment. In Britain, an employment tribunal found that a young hairdresser’s apprentice was fired because of her pregnancy. Her manager had suggested an abortion. She kept her baby; she lost her job.

In America, the legal parents of Baby Gabriel sought an abortion after a serious prenatal heart diagnosis. His surrogate mother refused. Now, a court has allowed his transfer from Texas to California over her objection, while requiring that his life-sustaining care continue. A child who survived an attempt to prevent his birth is at the centre of a battle over who decides what happens to him next.

Meanwhile, Joseph and Arlene Kutzko say their refusal to affirm their daughter as male contributed to Massachusetts taking her into state custody. The governor disputes that account; the family’s lawyer disputes hers. The parents also say their daughter has been denied access to Sunday Mass. In Canada, Christian activist Bill Whatcott has been found guilty of wilfully promoting hatred over leaflets distributed at a Pride event a decade ago.

Then came the Lindsay Clancy mistrial. There is no dispute that Clancy deliberately strangled her three children, aged five years, three years, and eight months, after sending her husband away from the house (clearly showing premeditation as well as acknowledgment that she was about to do something so wrong she didn't want her husband to see). Yet 11 of the 12 jurors were prepared to find her not criminally responsible.

The women jurors who subsequently embarked upon a media tour exposed how badly emotion and ideology had displaced their duty to apply the law. One complained that the lone holdout could not get past the fact that Clancy had “viciously killed her children”, as though the killing of the children were an unfortunate distraction from the case.

The forewoman said she was “so excited” when she believed an acquittal had been secured, then reasoned that because Clancy had loved her children she “had to have snapped”. Another juror admitted viewing the case as a “turning point” that could make things better for other women and families, a consideration wholly unrelated to whether Clancy knew her actions were wrong. A younger juror reportedly changed her vote because she wanted Clancy to receive treatment rather than imprisonment, despite jurors being instructed not to base their verdict upon punishment or consequences.

They praised the defence lawyer’s compassion and entertainment value, criticised prosecutors for appearing biased against the woman they were prosecuting, and invoked the private expertise of nurses inside the jury room.

These were not sober applications of the insanity test. They were admissions that sympathy for a woman who killed her children had become more important than justice for her victims: Cora, Dawson, and Callan.

Each of these cases reveals a civilisation losing its nerve to defend life, family, and Christian conviction. We call a child’s death care. We offer death to the sick. We treat pregnancy as a workplace problem. We put parents and preachers on notice.

The West did not become morally degenerate in a single week, but bit by bit, leaving us like the proverbial frog slowly being brought to the boil in the proverbial pot. And the rot has now spread so far it is difficult to see how we hop out of that proverbial pot. But if we can still tell good from evil, we must have the courage to say so.

“Human life is sacred because from its beginning it involves the creative action of God.”
– Pope John Paul II