Login
The new documentary “No Way Back: The Reality of Gender-Affirming Care” criticizes transgender ideology from a self-described “liberal, west coast Democrat” perspective. Despite facing significant resistance from trans activists, it has been making an impact.
The film will be showing in select theaters across the country during a one-day AMC Theatres Special Event on Wednesday, June 21st at 4:30 and 7:30 pm. It will be available online and on DVD starting July 2nd.
Below, Joshua Pauling interviews producer Vera Lindner.
Joshua Pauling (JP): Thanks for taking the time to discuss your new documentary. It really is a powerful depiction of what is happening to people when transgender ideology takes over. I especially found the detransitioners’ stories compelling. The story you tell throughout is decidedly reasonable and anchored to reality. Kudos to you all for producing such a thorough and moving documentary on such an important and controversial topic. And much respect for being willing to say hard but true things in the documentary.
How has the response been to the film thus far?
Vera Lindner (VL): We’ve received tons of gratitude, tears, and donations. The most humbling has been the resonance the film created in suffering parents. I wept many times reading grateful, heartbreaking messages from parents. People are hungry, culturally speaking, and are embracing our film as truth and facts, and a “nuanced, compassionate, deeply researched” project.
JP: That is great to hear, and interesting that there has been an overwhelming response from parents. Parents are frequently the forgotten victims of this ideology.
How has the film been doing when it comes to numbers of views and reach?
VL: Since February 18th, the film has been viewed 40,000 times on Vimeo, after it was shut down in its first week and then reinstated due to publicity and pressure from concerned citizens. Many bootlegged copies have proliferated on Odysee, Rumble, and such, so probably 30,000 more views there as well. After we put it on Vimeo on Demand in mid-April, it’s getting purchased about 50 times a day. Our objective is the widest possible reach.
Since February 18th, the film has been viewed 40,000 times on Vimeo, after it was shut down in its first week and then reinstated due to publicity and pressure from concerned citizens.
JP: Sad to say, I’m not surprised that it was shut down within a few days. Can you explain more about how such a thing happens? In what ways has it been blocked or throttled?
VL: Vimeo blocked it on the third day due to activists’ doing a “blitz” pressure campaign on Vimeo. Then they reinstated it, after news articles and public pressure. Our private screening event in Austin was canceled due to “blitz” pressure on the venue (300 phone calls by activists in two days). These experiences help us refine our marketing strategy.
JP: I guess that shows the power of public pressure, from either side. You know you’ve touched a nerve when the response has been both so positive as to receive countless heartfelt letters from people, and so harsh that activists want it canceled.
What do you see as next steps in turning the tide on this topic as a society? What comes after raising awareness through a documentary like this?
VL: Our objective was to focus on the medical harm and regret of experimental treatments. All studies point to the fact that regret peaks around eight to eleven years later. Yet the message of the activists toward the detransitioners is, “It didn’t work for you, you freak, but other people are happy with their medicalization.”
Our expectation is that conversations about the long-term ramifications of this medical protocol will start. We need to talk not only about how individuals are affected, but the society as a whole. Wrong-sex hormone treatment and puberty blockers lead to serious health complications that could lead to lifelong disability, chronic pain, osteoporosis, cardiac events, worsening mental health. SRSs (sex-reassignment surgeries) cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. These are not just one individual’s personal issues.
The economics of our health insurance will be impacted. The ability of these people to be contributing members of society will be impacted profoundly. The Reuters investigation from November 2022 stated that there are 18,000 U.S. children currently on puberty blockers and 122,000 kids diagnosed with gender dysphoria (and this is only via public insurance data, so likely an undercount). These all are future patients with musculoskeletal, cardiovascular, and mental illnesses for a lifetime. A hysterectomy at twenty-one can lead to early dementia, early menopause, and collapse of the pelvic floor organs.
The economics of our health insurance will be impacted. The ability of these people to be contributing members of society will be impacted profoundly.
I don’t yet see conversations about the long-term health implications of “gender-affirming care,” particularly in relation to how insurance, the labor force, interpersonal relationships, and future offspring will be affected. Everyone wants to be affirmed now and medicalized now. But there are lifelong implications to experimental medicine: autoimmune illnesses, cancers, etc. Sexual dysfunction and anorgasmia have real implications on dating, romantic life, and partnering up. A few people are talking about this on NSFW posts on Reddit.
JP: It’s interesting how speaking out against trans ideology and gender-affirming care creates some unlikely alliances across the political and religious spectrum. What do you see as the potentials and pitfalls of such alliances?
VL: We align with people who are pro-reality, who respect core community values such as truth and honesty, and who see the human being as a whole: body and soul. There is no metaphysical “gendered soul” separate from the body. Teaching body dissociation to kids (“born in the wrong body”) has led to a tidal wave of self-hatred, body dysmorphia, depression, anxiety, and self-harm. We are our bodies, and we are part of the biosphere. We respect nature and the body’s own intricate biochemical mechanism for self-regulation, the endocrine system. We believe that humans cannot and should not try to “play God.” We are students of history and know that radical attempts to re-engineer human society according to someone’s outrageous vision (read Martine Rothblatt’s The Apartheid of Sex) have led to enormous human cataclysms (communism, Chinese cultural revolution).
We are our bodies, and we are part of the biosphere. We respect nature and the body’s own intricate biochemical mechanism for self-regulation, the endocrine system.
JP: Well, then count me a realist, too! Funny you use the term pro-reality. I’ve written similarly about the possibility of realist alliances. While this makes for some improbable pairings, there can be agreement on the importance of fact-based objective reality and the givenness of the human body.
Realists can agree that the world is an objective reality with inherent meaning, in which humans are situated as embodied, contingent beings. Such realists, whether conservative, moderate, or progressive, might have more in common with each other on understanding reality and humanity than some on their “own side” whom I call constructivists: those who see the world as a conglomeration of relative meanings, subjectively experienced by autonomous, self-determining beings, who construct their own truth and identity based on internal feelings.
But I do have a related question on this point—a bit of respectful pushback, if I may.
Your pro-reality position seems to have implications beyond just the transgender question. Can one consistently oppose the extremes of gender-affirming care while upholding the rest of the LGB revolution? If our male and female bodies matter, and their inherent design and ordering toward each other mean something, then doesn’t that raise some questions about the sexual revolution more broadly?
As we see the continued deleterious effects on human flourishing unfold as thousands of years of wisdom and common sense regarding sex and sexuality are jettisoned, there are both religious and non-religious thinkers raising this question, though some go farther than others. I think, for example, of Louise Perry’s The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex, Mary Harrington’s Feminism Against Progress, and Erika Bachiochi’s “Sex-Realist Feminism.” An enlightening panel discussion with many of these thinkers was co-hosted by Public Discourse earlier this year. When the real human body is considered, its holistic structure as male or female is clearly ordered and designed to unite with its complement.
If our male and female bodies matter, and their inherent design and ordering towards each other mean something, then doesn’t that raise some questions about the sexual revolution more broadly?
How does this reality relate to the rest of the sexual revolution? If one argues that individuals should be able to express themselves sexually and fulfill their desires with no external limits beyond human desire or will, how does one justify saying that transgenderism is off-limits?
VL: I will answer the question, but I need to say that this is my personal opinion. I’m fifty-five and have worked in entertainment for more than thirty years, and in Hollywood for twenty-five years. The entertainment industry attracts LGBT people, so I’ve hired, mentored, befriended, and promoted LGBT and gender-non-conforming people every day of my career. I believe that being gay or lesbian is how these people were born. Some were affected by their circumstances, as well, but in general I believe that homosexuality is innate, inborn, and has existed for millennia. There were a handful of “classic” transsexual women as well. I have three close friends who transitioned in their late forties.
But the explosion we are seeing now is different. A 4,000-percent increase of teenage girls identifying as trans? This is unprecedented. Mostly these are autistic, traumatized, mentally ill teens who seek to belong, who wish to escape their traumatized brains and bodies, who have been bullied relentlessly (“dyke,” “fag,” “freak”) and now seek a “mark of distinction” that will elevate their social status. Instead of being offered therapy, deep understanding, and compassion for their actual traumas, they are being ushered toward testosterone, mastectomies, and hysterectomies. This is not health care. The tidal wave of regret is coming, because these adolescents were never transsexual to begin with. Many of them are lesbians or gay boys who have internalized so much homophobia and bullying that they would rather escape all of it and become someone different than deal with it.
This is what we want to address. Kids explore identities. This is a natural process of discovering who they are. Medicalizing this exploration cements this exploration they were doing when they were teens. Life is long, and one goes through many phases and many “identities.” To be “cemented” for a lifetime in the decision you made as a distressed sixteen-year-old to amputate healthy sex organs does not make sense.
JP: The rise in the rate of transgender identification is indeed stunning, as is the stark increase in the percentage of Gen-Zers who identify as LGBT. What those trends portend is a live question, as are the varied possible causes. And as you say, there is a tidal wave of regret building, from those who have been pushed toward gender transition. We will all need to make special effort to love and care for them.
You’ve been so gracious with your time. As we conclude, are there any other comments you’d like to share with our readers?
VL: Find a theater near you to attend the theatrical one-day premier on June 21st. Then the movie will become available online and via DVD on July 2nd. Watch the documentary and pass it on to all in your circles!
And ask commonsense humanistic questions:
– Can adults make decisions on behalf of kids that will forever change the path of the kids’ lives?
– Is it worth it to ruin one’s health in the name of a belief system?
– Is what you are reading in academic medical research based on evidence, or pseudo-science?
– If humans have been going through puberty for millennia, who are we to mess with that now?
– Is puberty a disease?
JP: Thank you for your work on this vital issue. I hope this documentary continues to make an impact. And realists unite!
I find the term “medical aid in dying” (MAID) deeply pernicious. It is not only an assault on human dignity (which it implicitly claims to defend), but it also employs a rhetorical sleight of hand. The term conjures up an image of someone who is already dying of a painful and terrible disease, and the aid they receive seems good and possibly even heroic. So I will switch from the misleading term “medical aid in dying” and now speak of “physician-assisted killing,” or PAK.
These misleading ideas associated with MAID have taken a firm hold of the Canadian imagination. According to a poll from Research Co., a representative sample of Canadians were asked the following question: “At this point, only an adult with a grievous and irremediable medical condition can seek medical assistance in dying in Canada. Do you agree or disagree with allowing adults in Canada to seek medical assistance in dying because of the following reasons?”
When asked about “Disability,” a full 50 percent of Canadians agreed that someone should be able to seek PAK. When breaking down the results by age groups, one might expect to find that younger folks, more attuned as they are to the nefarious effects of structural coercion, would be less likely to support PAK in the case of disability. But the opposite turned out to be the case: for 18- to 34-year-olds, support actually jumped ten points to 60 percent. In other words, 6 in 10 of young Canadians support PAK as a response to disability.
What about poverty? A lower number of Canadians—27 percent—think of it as a reason someone should be able to pursue PAK. But once again the numbers for young people are remarkable and disturbing: 41 percent of Canadians aged 18 to 34 believe it can be a legitimate reason to request PAK.
How did Canada get here? Is the United States headed down this same path? If so, how can Americans reverse course?
PAK in America vs. Canada
As families and local communities have frayed, we no longer have a ready-to-hand idea of what a good death might be apart from PAK. The dying process has been outsourced to massive, impersonal housing projects that build sterile nursing homes underwritten by vulture capitalists who discovered they can get rich on our inability to deal with death. So, to the extent that PAK gives both the dying and their families an alternative to the horror show of dying alone (except for maybe the company of a robot) in totally inadequate “care homes,” it becomes quite attractive, and pro-lifers face a serious challenge in resisting it.
Effective resistance to PAK in America has focused largely on slippery slope arguments that emphasize what happens after you open the door to this practice. If those with terminal illness can seek death, why not those with disabilities, or those suffering from severe mental illnesses? PAK opponents, in other words, are focusing on things that invoke discomfort and even anger. But will this be enough in the long run?
If those with terminal illness can seek death, why not those with disabilities, or those suffering from severe mental illnesses?
Nothing has bolstered this strategy for PAK opponents in the United States more than pointing to what is happening in Canada, whose program has expanded in ways that invoke less a slippery slope, and more a free fall accelerating at 9.8 meters per second squared. Consider that it was only five short years ago that Canada legalized PAK. And as we’ve seen, the law has recently enabled killing the poor and the disabled precisely because they are poor and disabled.
This gold-standard reporting from The New Atlantis earlier this year clearly demonstrates the extent of the horrors of Canada’s program. The program trains those who administer death to expect patients who “choose” PAK due to lacking the support they need. In a kicker that is difficult to get out of one’s mind, the article explains the message that Canada sends to its vulnerable populations:
Just a few years ago they would have been textbook candidates for what a just society would say: Your life has value. In Canada today they hear something else: Your death will be beautiful.
But what kinds of situations are we talking about? In what kinds of cases are the powers that be in Canada telling people that they might be better off dead? Well, how about a veteran who asked for PTSD treatment? Or another veteran who asked that a wheelchair ramp be built into her home? Though neither was dying, in both cases they were asked if PAK would be a better option for them.
In another case, a woman with very severe chemical sensitivities “chose” PAK after she was denied public housing that wouldn’t trigger those sensitivities. Or how about a 63-year-old man who had been waiting for spinal fusion surgery for eighteen years, and bearing terrible pain during that time, saying “I am fed opioids and left to kill myself.” He requested PAK and was approved. And then there was the 44-year-old woman with a degenerative disease who, after being denied home healthcare, decided to be as direct as she could about what actually killed her:
Ultimately it was not a genetic disease that took me out, it was a system. There is desperate need for change. That is the sickness that causes so much suffering. Vulnerable people need help to survive. I could have had more time if I had more help.
The Toronto Star, the largest and most progressive newspaper in Canada, described the move toward these practices as “Hunger Games style social Darwinism.”
PAK and Post-Christianity
Opponents of PAK in the United States have pointed to the dystopia to the north of us, and so far their strategy seems successful: even in many blue states (especially out east), PAK is not legal. Yet why has Canada gone so far with PAK? Returning to the polling figures cited at the beginning of this essay, what are we to make of these numbers in a progressive country that has adopted a position so antithetical to how Americans understand social justice?
In Canada, killing the most vulnerable human beings comports well with a society that values giving individuals what they ask for (autonomy), and a just distribution of resources (equity) in ways that allow the most people to derive the greatest benefit from them (utilitarianism).
One reason is that progressivism in the United States has retained aspects of its Christian inheritance—with its focus on nonviolence, inherent and inalienable human dignity, and preference for the most vulnerable. Progressivism in secular Canada, especially among young Canadians, is by now far removed from these commitments. Thus, in Canada, killing the most vulnerable human beings comports well with a society that values giving individuals what they ask for (autonomy), and a just distribution of resources (equity) in ways that allow the most people to derive the greatest benefit from them (utilitarianism).
It doesn’t take a genius to point out the tensions here: equity very often conflicts with utility calculations, and the poor and disabled are some of the least autonomous human beings in our communities. But that doesn’t stop the secular state, and even secular academic bioethicists in both Canada and the United States, from attempting to muddle their way through with these incoherent values in play.
The fact that increased cultural distance from Christianity may have helped pave the way for Canada’s PAK regime is further suggested by what’s happened—and what has not happened—in the much more religious United States. While Oregon and Washington (two of the least Christian states) have had legal PAK for decades, it has only recently become legal in states like California and New Jersey. And despite the best efforts of groups like Compassion and Choices (formerly the Hemlock Society), PAK is still illegal in most of the country—including in deep blue states like New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts, as noted earlier.
The arguments that have won the day in deep blue USA are—you guessed it—about the slippery slope of such laws and the effect that they will have on the poor and disabled. Unsurprisingly, the most effective advocates against such laws are disability rights advocates (and especially disabled people themselves) who point to the disturbing data about why people seek PAK. When physical pain doesn’t even make the top five reasons people in Oregon request PAK—but fear of loss of autonomy, fear of loss of enjoyable activities, and fear of being a burden on others do make the top five—this sends a very clear message to the disabled: it’s reasonable that someone like you would want to kill yourself. And in Canada, they take the next step: we think someone like you might want to take advantage of the legal right to kill yourself.
Going on Offense
Happily, disability rights activists are still winning the day, again, even in deep blue places on the east coast. But playing a strictly defensive game of knocking down legalization attempts—especially as the United States secularizes and becomes more like Canada—seems like an untenable strategy for protecting the most vulnerable from this deadly violence. Locking in the dignity and radical equality of all human beings will require more. In short, it is time to go on offense.
A broad and diverse coalition of folks is doing exactly that: seeking to make PAK unconstitutional and therefore permanently off the books in this country. The Euthanasia Prevention Coalition in the United States recently reported on a lawsuit filed in the State of California by the United Spinal Association, Not Dead Yet, Institute for Patients’ Rights, Communities Actively Living Independent and Free, Lonnie VanHook, and Ingrid Tischer. These plaintiffs are all organizations with members who have disabilities, individual persons with disabilities, and/or organizations that advocate for persons with disabilities.
The lawsuit has the goal of reaching the Supreme Court and overturning California’s law protecting physician-assisted killing. They argue that this law is unconstitutional because it treats suicidal persons with disabilities (which according to the Americans with Disabilities Act includes those with a terminal disease) differently from other kinds of suicidal persons. If the suicidal person does not have a disability, then the state of California protects her and restricts her ability to kill herself. But if the person has a disability, then California has a special set of discriminatory rules that imply that her life is worth less and (like Canada) even refuses care and supportive services in favor of steering her toward her death. This, the plaintiffs argue, is a violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s Equal Protection and Due Process clauses.
In my view, this a brilliant strategy on multiple levels, aligning “conservative” pro-life human dignity concerns with “progressive” disability rights concerns in a way (to this non-lawyer’s mind, at least) that makes a powerful legal, moral, and rhetorical case against legalized PAK. Again, it is long past time for us to go on offense in this battle. And the horror show we see unfolding with our secular neighbors to the north indicates just how much is at stake if we lose.
Today’s essay by Daryl Charles makes the case for capital punishment for those guilty of premeditated murder. Tomorrow’s essay will be a reply by John O’Callaghan, who argues for the abolition of the death penalty.
Our culture is morally confused about many things. Conservative Christians tend to focus on concerns about hot button issues like abortion, sexuality, relativism, and education. But one phenomenon that is overlooked but no less urgent is murder. A mere listing of mass killings occurring in the United States in recent years boggles the mind. The year 2022 alone, by all counts, surely must be record-setting. As I write (early October of 2022), one reads that a fifteen-year-old in Raleigh, North Carolina goes on a shooting spree, killing five (including his brother and an off-duty police officer) as he walks through a neighborhood; that five people have been shot in a northern South Carolina home; that in Bristol, Connecticut, two police officers are fatally shot and a third wounded in responding to a domestic violence call (which is said to have been a ploy to lure the officers); and that a thirty-two-year-old is charged with two counts of murder and six of attempted murder following a stabbing melee on the Las Vegas Strip. In the same week we read that four bodies have been found in the Oklahoma River. And this just in: a Florida jury recommends a life sentence without parole instead of the death penalty for the man who murdered seventeen people at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in 2018.
These randomly selected tragedies, of course, only identify the tip of the iceberg. Most of our cities are currently reeling from the sheer frequency of killings that have descended on our streets, our neighborhoods, our families, and even our schools. In the four months of June, July, August, and September of 2022, there were respectively 73, 100, 71, and 70 mass shootings, with the total numbers of injured or dead being 297, 439, 262, and 272 respectively. Tucked away in these numbers are the horrendous tragedies and suffering that have visited communities such as Orlando, Uvalde, and Buffalo. According to the Marshall Project, more mass shootings (i.e., of four or more victims) have occurred in the last five years than in any other half decade since 1966.
On the rare occasions when the death penalty is discussed today, it is almost always viewed unfavorably.
The barbarism behind increasing murder rates suggests that debates over capital punishment should intensify. But this has not been the case. In fact, what is striking is the relative absence of discussion and debate of the death penalty. On the rare occasions when the death penalty is discussed today, it is almost always viewed unfavorably. The abolitionist argument takes any number of forms: the mental health of the murderer; the possibility of prematurely ending a criminal’s rehabilitation; debates over deterrence; the misconstruction of retribution as revenge (i.e., retributivism); fallibility of the criminal justice system; and modern notions of “civility.” Religiously motivated abolitionists sometimes point to the annulment of the Mosaic code, assumed ethical discontinuity between the Old and New Testaments; and Christ’s teaching on forgiveness.
We have grown intolerant of meting out punishment that is perceived as “cruel” or “barbaric.” Strangely, however, our abhorrence of penal “barbarity” is displayed against the backdrop of increasingly barbaric criminal acts themselves. Indeed, until very recently, capital punishment was almost universally affirmed biblically, morally, and legally.
Christian History and Capital Punishment
Even though abolitionist arguments have been dominant in recent decades, it is worth recalling that for most of history, a variety of civilizations have used the death penalty and grounded it in serious moral reflection. Capital punishment was practiced in the earliest recorded history. Its prescription appears in the mid-eighteenth-century-BC Code of Hammurabi, in sixteenth-century-BC Assyrian codes, in fifteenth-century-BC Hittite codes, in the thirteenth-century Mosaic Code, as well as in ancient Greek and Roman law.
Among the church fathers, one finds varying perspectives on the death penalty, although there is a general recognition of the state’s responsibility to implement capital justice. Tertullian (late second century) and Lactantius (late third century) affirmed that in the case of murder divine law consistently required a life for a life. Both Augustine (late fourth and early fifth century) and Theodosius II (mid-fifth century) acknowledged the state’s role in mediating capital sanctions. In addition, various councils from the seventh century (the Eleventh Council of Toledo) to the thirteenth (the Fourth Lateran Council) followed the lead of Leo the Great (fifth century) in forbidding clerics from engagement in matters of capital justice, even as they understood the state’s legitimate role in facilitating such matters.
It is worth recalling that for most of history, a variety of civilizations have used the death penalty and grounded it in serious moral reflection.
In the Summa Contra Gentiles, Aquinas insisted that the community had both the right and the duty to “cut away” an individual in order “to safeguard the common good.” The common good, he reasoned, is “better than the good of the individual,” notably because “certain pestilent fellows” who serve as “a hindrance to the common good, that is, to the concord of human society.” Such persons, he concluded, therefore “are to be withdrawn by death from the society of men.”
Late medieval and Reformation-era theologians also affirmed the state’s duty before God to impose capital sanctions upon murderers. Even the so-called “left wing” of the Protestant reform movement—from which much modern religious opposition to capital punishment is thought to derive—recognized the death penalty. The Schleitheim Confession of 1527, an exemplary document adopted by the Swiss Brethren (the progenitors of earliest Anabaptism), reads: “The sword is an ordinance of God. … Princes and Rulers are ordained for the punishment of evildoers and putting them to death.” This Anabaptist declaration concurs with the 1580 Lutheran Formula of Concord, which prescribes for “wild and intractable men” a commensurate “external punishment.” In summary, the patristic, medieval, and late medieval periods generally mirror the church’s tacit acknowledgment of capital punishment in cases of murder.
There has been much debate about the place of capital punishment in Catholic social thought, but the pre-2018 version of the Catechism of the Catholic Church articulates the most sound position on the topic:
Preserving the common good of society requires rendering the aggressor unable to inflict harm. For this reason the traditional teaching of the Church has acknowledged as well-founded the right and duty of legitimate public authority to punish malefactors by means of penalties commensurate with the gravity of the crime, not excluding, in cases of extreme gravity, the death penalty. (no. 2266, emphasis added)
The Church’s teaching on the death penalty historically finds expression in Thomas Aquinas’s question “Is it legitimate to kill sinners?” (S.T. II-II, Q. 64.2). His response is predicated on “the common good,” with an analogy. If the well-being of the whole physical body requires the amputation of a limb, the treatment is to be commended. “Therefore if any man is dangerous to the community and is subverting it by some sin, the treatment to be commended is his execution in order to preserve the common good, for a little leaven sours the whole lump.” What is forbidden, Aquinas argues later, is to take the life of an innocent person (Q. 64.6).
Theological Arguments
It is no surprise that for most of Christian history, the death penalty was widely embraced. To understand the theological basis for capital punishment, we must first look to the nature of law. Fundamental to the biblical story is the depiction of the Creator as Lawgiver. Law, as the reader of the biblical narrative discovers, is of no human origin, nor does it issue out of pragmatic or popular consent. Its authority issues not out of cultural or intellectual enlightenment but from the universal created order. Whether individual cultures and regimes recognize this reality is, of course, another matter. Yet the effects of moral law are as the law of gravity: its disregard always and everywhere results in the rotting of social culture.
In a remarkable—though little remembered—series of homilies in 1976 (eventually published under the title Sign of Contradiction), Karol Wojtyła, at the time Archbishop of Cracow, delivered a sustained reflection on the question of man’s purification from sin in the present life. Guilt incurred by sin, he observed, constitutes a debt in the present order that must be paid. Punitive dealings, thus, provide necessary atonement and restore the balance of justice and moral order that has been disturbed. In theological terms, they prepare the human being for a destiny in eternity.
Punitive dealings provide necessary atonement and restore the balance of justice and moral order that has been disturbed.
In Sign of Contradiction, we find the necessary response to religious abolitionists who ground their bias against capital punishment in a particular (mis)reading of Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount and a purported “forgiveness” ethic. Pitting a misinterpreted Jesus against Paul, they ignore ethical continuity in the broader sweep of biblical revelation and prefer, based on the flaws of human government, to dismiss its divinely instituted commission to punish evil and reward good.
This defect in religious thinking—“the cross is not a sword”—demonstrates conspicuous disregard for what is recorded in the text of Genesis 9, where God makes his covenant with Noah after the flood, the implications of which are stated in universal terms. It is precisely because the human being is fashioned in the image of God that one who purposely sheds the blood of another must die. Genesis 9:5–6 is to be understood foremost as an institution that protects life, in accordance with the Decalogue’s pronouncement “Thou shalt not murder.” The rationale for this morale imperative is none other than the safeguarding of human life. Retribution discourages invasions on the sanctity of the human creature. (Here let us pause for a moment: any society that advances an “inversion ethic” of killing human beings in utero while refusing to take the life of a convicted murderer should strike us as barbaric.) The Genesis narrative suggests that premeditated murder is an assault on human life and is comparable, as it were, to an assault on the very being of God. The fact that justice demands punishment befitting the crime—i.e., just retribution—reveals the essential difference in character between revenge and retribution.
Having been created in the imago Dei, human life is a sacred trust. The implication is clear: murder—i.e., the deliberate extermination of a life by another human being—is tantamount to killing God in effigy. Moreover, as confirmed in Mosaic legislation, premeditated murder is the one crime for which there exists no restitution. As C. S. Lewis noted in his wonderfully prescient essay, “The Humanitarian Theory of Punishment,” to be punished however severely because we in fact deserve it is to be treated as a human being created in the very image of God.
Justice, Charity, and Restitution
When a murder occurs in our community, we are obliged, regardless of our comfort level, to clear our throat as it were and make a public, communal declaration. The deliberate extermination of another human being is an absolute evil and therefore absolutely intolerable. Period. This was the argument advanced by David Gelernter in a 1998 Commentary essay. Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale who was letter-bombed in June of 1993, almost lost his life. The essence of Gelernter’s argument was that we execute murderers in order to make a communal statement: deliberate murder embodies evil so terrible that it defiles the community, and as a result the community needs catharsis that occurs through criminal justice properly construed. Gelernter correctly noted that in the face of murder, contemporary society, however, is more prone to shrug it off than to exact just retribution and affirm binding moral standards.
In the case of premeditated murder, compensation is not available. Hence, as much of human history attests and as the biblical witness affirms, it is the one crime that carries a mandatory death sentence.
Justice has classically been defined as rendering to each person what is due. Desert, then, is foundational to ethics; it is a part of the human moral intuition. Parents know this, children know it, and indeed people from Kansas to Canada to Kenya to Kazakhstan know it as well. Retributive justice, then, is a social good, for it corrects social imbalances and perversions. Herein we find the wedding of justice and charity. When through social attitudes and the rule of law we affirm retributive justice, we are addressing several levels of “imbalance” and disturbance: we are attentive to (1) the victimized party who has been wronged, (2) society at large, which has been offended and is watching, and (3) future offenders who might be tempted to do evil. This trifold application of justice, as Augustine and Aquinas understood it, was in fact an application of charity. And as an extreme example, both saw going to war as an act that can express the wedding of charity and justice properly construed: it is charitable to prevent the criminal (whether domestically or in war) from doing evil, and it is charitable toward society, which needs protecting.
Punishment for a crime and restitution for the victim are interrelated concepts. In the case of premeditated murder, compensation is not available. Hence, as much of human history attests and as the biblical witness affirms, it is the one crime that carries a mandatory death sentence. To suggest or argue that the ultimate human crime should not be met with the ultimate punishment being meted out by civil authorities, at least in a relatively free society, is not some “higher” ethic as some might contend; nor is it “Christian” by any stretch of the imagination. Rather, it is a moral travesty because it fails to comprehend the nature and meaning of the imago Dei.
Civilized societies do not tolerate the murder of innocent human beings; uncivilized regimes do.
Canada has recently been in the news due to its imminent legal expansion of assisted suicide to include the mentally ill, beginning in March 2023. The Canadian government specifies that an “expert panel” will be used to evaluate the requests of the mentally ill “in a safe and compassionate way.” The virtue of compassion, which the Canadian government here invokes on its own behalf, is concerned with the best interests of the sufferer. So the question naturally arises: is it really “compassionate” for the state to offer death as an aid to the sufferer? Is it just?
To answer these questions, one must consider the state’s duty to its citizens. On this topic, there are few better guides than the Roman statesman and philosopher Cicero. Some things he gets right (the state’s duty to preserve justice and protect the well-being of its citizens) and others he gets wrong (the occasional permissibility of suicide). But if Cicero’s teachings are supplemented with Christianity’s teachings on suicide, we get a clear understanding of why assisted suicide cannot be counted among the state’s duties to its citizens.
If Cicero’s teachings are supplemented with Christianity’s teachings on suicide, we get a clear understanding of why assisted suicide cannot be counted among the state’s duties to its citizens.
In Book 1 of On Duties, a truly indispensable landmark in the history of political ethics—and Cicero’s last philosophical composition—Cicero says this (all translations in what follows are my own):
Absolutely all those who intend to preside over the commonwealth must observe Plato’s two precepts: first, that they guard what is useful for the citizens in such a way that they refer all of their actions to it, having forgotten about what is advantageous to themselves. Second, that they care for the entire body of the commonwealth, lest, while they guard some part of it, they abandon the rest. (On Duties 1.85)
Prima facie, this perhaps lends some support to the Canadian government. After all, those who are seeking death certainly believe that that is what is most useful to them; the government is merely assisting them in obtaining what they find useful. This would appear to fulfill Plato’s first precept as Cicero describes it.
And indeed, when it comes to suicide, Cicero allows that it is sometimes licit when done for the sake of honor. In On Duties 1.112, he points to Cato the Younger’s preference of death to subjection to Julius Caesar—“since nature had bestowed unbelievable seriousness on him”—as an example of honorable suicide. So if the magistrate is responsible for safeguarding what is advantageous for citizens, perhaps virtuous suicide should be legal. In other words, can suicide be both honorable and useful?
To answer this question, we must consider how honor relates to expediency.
Cicero devotes the third and final book of On Duties to showing that the useful and the honorable are never in conflict. If they were, injustice might sometimes be advantageous, as Thrasymachus argues in Book 1 of Plato’s Republic. But Plato has Socrates argue that any such advantage is merely apparent, for acting unjustly harms both the perpetrator and the victim. Cicero stands in this broad Socratic tradition: the one who commits an injustice for the sake of advantage is prevented from being a good man (On Duties 3.76); his victim suffers the consequences in his life, his property, or his reputation. Furthermore, unjust actions destroy fellowship among human beings, and thus contradict our very nature as social creatures. Therefore, they can never be useful.
Even if someone’s self-slaughter seems convenient and advantageous—perhaps because his suffering is great, or because his quality of life is low—it can never be so since it is unjust.
From the foregoing discussion, it becomes clear that the state cannot facilitate suicide without committing a grave injustice. Despite Cicero’s exemption for honorable suicide, even these are not just: all suicide is by definition the extrajudicial killing of a person who, in legal terms, is innocent. Cicero is right that the useful and just, ultimately, cannot conflict. Therefore, even if someone’s self-slaughter seems convenient and advantageous—perhaps because his suffering is great, or because his quality of life is low—it can never be so since it is unjust.
Here, Christianity’s tradition of political and moral reflection can provide further guidance. The late Roman church father Augustine takes up the question of suicide in the first book of his City of God in dealing with the question whether consecrated virgins who had been raped had justification for killing themselves. The question may strike modern ears as absurd, but it was not a crazy one at the time given that the Roman tradition answered questions like this in the affirmative, as the example of Lucretia shows.
But Augustine disagrees with his Roman forebears on the basis of the Ten Commandments of the Old Testament and the Two Great Commandments of the New Testament. He remarks,
For it is not for nothing that nowhere in the Holy Scriptures can we find God commanding or permitting us to inflict death upon ourselves either for the sake of gaining immortality or for the sake of keeping or freeing ourselves from any evil. For in fact it must be understood that we have been prohibited from doing this when the law says, “You shall not kill,” especially because it did not add, “your neighbor,” as it does when it forbids bearing false witness: “You shall not,” it says, “bear false witness against your neighbor.” Nevertheless, it does not provide grounds for someone to think himself innocent of this crime if he has borne false witness against himself, since he who loves has received the rule that guides the love of one’s neighbor from himself, since it has been written, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (City of God 1.20)
In this passage, Augustine draws attention to two of the Ten Commandments: “You shall not kill” (or “murder”) and “You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor.” He notes that the latter includes a qualification that the former does not, and yet this does not mean that one can bear false witness against oneself; such dishonesty would obviously still be wrong.
Why? Because self-love—that is, the high regard in which we naturally hold ourselves—provides the standard for the love of one’s neighbor: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” If we are forbidden to tell lies about our neighbor, then we are by implication forbidden to tell lies about ourselves because of the necessary ethical link between treatment of self and treatment of neighbor.
If we were explicitly forbidden to kill our neighbor, we would by implication also be forbidden to kill ourselves, and the latter prohibition would be the ethical and logical foundation of the former.
In the same way, if we were explicitly forbidden to kill our neighbor, we would by implication also be forbidden to kill ourselves, and the latter prohibition would be the ethical and logical foundation of the former. But the commandment against killing does not even offer the kind of apparent grounds for casuistry that the commandment against bearing false witness does, because no qualification is made with respect to one’s neighbor. It simply states that all unjustified killing is wrong, with no exceptions—including killing oneself. Therefore, suicide violates the Ten Commandments. Not even Cato, says Augustine, is off the hook.
The Ten Commandments are especially helpful in this discussion because they are summaries of the moral or natural law. Human societies have generally acknowledged that unjustified killing is wrong. When they make exceptions for the sake of expediency, they need to be reminded of what the moral law requires. This is true regardless of whether the inquiry concerns the killing of others or of oneself: both involve the taking of an innocent human life, and thus the same standard should be applied to each.
What does such a suggestion yield, if we combine the insights of Cicero and Augustine? Cicero teaches us that the conflict between true expediency and justice is an illusion. Augustine reminds us that killing the innocent is wrong. Physician-assisted suicide is ultimately the killing of the innocent. Therefore, any attempt to justify such an action on the grounds of apparent utility—here represented by two impulses that are good in themselves, that is, compassion and a desire to alleviate suffering—must be found wanting. If suicide is an action that is unjust in itself, no utilitarian arguments in its favor, however rhetorically compelling or seemingly ethical, can transform it into a just action.
The first and most important purpose of the state’s laws is to establish justice, the most basic principle of which is the protection and preservation of life. Canada’s regulations regarding so-called “medical assistance in dying” are fundamentally contrary to this purpose. In a just political order they would be overturned.
Paul Johnson, who passed away on January 12th at the age of 94, was one of the great humanists of the last century. Johnson earned the admiration of millions of readers throughout the world for his way with words, for his insights into historical figures, and for his ability to provide clarity amid the complexities of historical events. Above all, in countless books and essays, he told the story of human dignity in the twentieth century and beyond. It is a story of triumph and danger, victory and tragedy—and Johnson’s commitment to individual freedom made him the perfect storyteller.
I distinctly remember reading Johnson’s 2006 essay “The Human Race: Success or Failure?” in The New Criterion. I was a college senior when I encountered it, and it remains one of the enduring readings of my education. In the essay, Johnson warned readers about “the spread of ideologies based on the proposition that ideas matter more than people” as well as the growth of secularism. Johnson wrote:
Somehow we have to bring back into our private lives, and into our public life, the spiritual element, the sense of awe at the magnificence and possibilities of creation, the pride in goodness and altruism, the fear of wrong-doing and materialistic arrogance, the poetry of the numinous and, above all, the love of our fellow human beings which is inseparable from the belief that all human life, in some way, is created in the image of divinity.
Johnson was not downplaying the importance of ideas—far from it. In fact, he contended “above all” that “love of our fellow human beings” is inseparable from a particular idea, a particular belief in the dignity of people. We might say that the one idea that matters the most is the idea that people matter, because people are made in God’s image. To exalt any other temporal idea above this would be, by definition, inhumane.
Above all, in countless books and essays, Paul Johnson told the story of human dignity in the twentieth century and beyond.
Johnson wrote much about the essential role of religious faith in the world: without faith, he taught, people were vulnerable to other sources of meaning that obscured the proper understanding of God’s image in the human person. The history of ideology since the time of the French Revolution is a sad history of inhumanity, and the documentation of this modern tragedy formed much of Johnson’s work.
Underlying Johnson’s historical writing was the sense that people possess an innate dignity. To Johnson, history was the story of people—flawed, creative, reasoning, exceptional—with the capacity for incredible achievement. People, he thought, were made with a purpose, and that meant history has a purpose.
Consider his stirring tribute to Americans in his History of the American People: “They do not believe that anything in this world is beyond human capacity to soar to and dominate. They will not give up. Full of essential goodwill to each other and to all, confident in their inherent decency and their democratic skills, they will attack again and again the ills in their society, until they are overcome or at least substantially redressed.” It is fitting that President George W. Bush recognized Johnson—an Englishman—with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2006.
Johnson viewed his mission as a historian as not just to convey facts but also to inspire in people a sense of their dignity. That’s why he wrote so beautifully about people. He was fascinated by human character, by the infinite variety in human personality, and by the way people could shape events.
Johnson’s conception of humanity’s beauty was balanced with a painful knowledge of tyranny’s horror. He understood the bloodiness and the wretchedness of ideologies that elevated ideas over people. Few writers have been able to describe the devastation of the twentieth century as skillfully as he did in Modern Times: The World from the Twenties to the Eighties. And Johnson was unafraid to call out intellectuals for the role they played in the unfolding of tyranny.
Johnson understood the bloodiness and the wretchedness of ideologies that elevated ideas over people.
In the concluding paragraph of his book Intellectuals—published in 1988 on the eve of Soviet communism’s collapse—Johnson wrote, “One of the principal lessons of our tragic century, which has seen so many millions of innocent lives sacrificed in schemes to improve the lot of humanity, is—beware intellectuals.” He warned against intellectuals who sought power or who sought to impose their so-called “expertise” in moments of public decision. “Taken as a group,” he warned,
they are often ultra-conformist within the circles formed by those whose approval they seek and value. That is what makes them, en masse, so dangerous, for it enables them to create climates of opinion and prevailing orthodoxies, which themselves often generate irrational and destructive courses of action. Above all, we must at all times remember what intellectuals habitually forget: that people matter more than concepts and must come first. The worst of all despotisms is the heartless tyranny of ideas.
Johnson was particularly interested in the men and women who sought to defeat the tyranny of ideology and to defend humanity. His short biography of Winston Churchill exemplifies Johnson’s admiration for those kinds of individual heroes. He begins by proclaiming, “Of all the towering figures of the twentieth century, Winston Churchill was the most valuable to humanity, and also the most likable.” For Johnson, Churchill was a hero not just because he defied tyranny, but also because of the way he lived.
Writers dedicated to humane letters like Johnson are rare in our time—and just when we need them most.
One of Johnson’s finest skills as a historian was in bringing his subjects to life. Churchill brimmed with energy and life, and Johnson captures something of the great man’s spirit in his biography. Johnson also wrote about Winston Churchill as a man of the people. He “drew his strength from people, and imparted it to them in full measure. Everyone who values freedom under law, and government, by, for, and from the people, can find comfort and reassurance in his life story.”
Alongside the heroes, Johnson also profiled ideologues who perpetuated “the heartless tyranny of ideas” while claiming to be on the side of the people. He brought to light their false teachings about human nature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he wrote in Intellectuals, “believed he had a unique love of humanity and had been endowed with unprecedented gifts and insights to increase its felicity. An astonishing number of people, in his own day and since, have taken him at his own valuation.” Other radical thinkers contributed to the political confusion that culminated in the tragedies of the twentieth century. Karl Marx’s “vision of the dictatorship of the proletariat,” for instance, “was fulfilled in the rise of Josef Stalin,” and the result was Stalin’s “catastrophic assault on the Russian peasantry.”
As for Paul Johnson, there can be little confusion about where he stood when it came to the dignity of the individual. Johnson was a defender of humanity. He made the telling of the human story his life’s work. Writers dedicated to humane letters like Johnson are rare in our time—and just when we need them most. May we carry on the spirit of individual freedom to which he was so faithful.
FreshRSS 