Showing posts with label human dignity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label human dignity. Show all posts

Monday 15 July 2019

Vincent Lambert died on Thursday at 8.24am

Michel Houellebecq and Pope Francis are two names seldom found in the same sentence. Yet they are united in decrying the death of Vincent Lambert, the disabled French nurse who died this week after having his food and water removed.

Vincent Lambert, the brain-damaged French man who was in a state of impaired consciousness for 11 years while his family fought over his medical care, died on Thursday at 8.24am. After getting approval from a court, doctors stopped giving him food and water. It took him nine days to die.

Although his wife claimed that Lambert had said that he would not wish to live in such an impaired state, there were no written instructions with his end-of-life wishes.
French media have reported that his parents plan to sue his medical team. While euthanasia is illegal in France, doctors are allowed to put terminally ill patients into deep sedation until death. Lambert’s parents have argued that, while severely handicapped, their son was not “terminally ill”.


Being the head of the Catholic Church, Pope Francis’s views are, and are supposed to be, predictable, this can not be said about France’s most acclaimed and controversial novelist, Michel Houellebecq. He wrote

"Vincent Lambert was in no way prey to unbearable suffering, he was not suffering any pain at all (...) He was not even at the end of life. He lived in a particular mental state, the most honest of which would be to say that we know almost nothing …

It was strange when we saw pictures of that man laying in his be, seeing him react on words, we can wonder in what way he would be conscious or to be considered alive?

In how far can we go into a human's mind and go to decide for him or her? In a certain way the doctors and his wife decided to allow nature to take its course. But should they have kept feeding him?


Like America’s Terri Schiavo case, this has provoked controversy around the world. Thousands upon thousands of people in “vegetative states” in nursing homes could be at risk of having their hydration and nutrition withdrawn if doctors and courts accept the reasoning behind the decision to allow Lambert to die.

Reactions to his death show that France is as divided as ever.
 “It is a real relief for us,” 
said François Lambert, Lambert’s nephew.
 “Vincent had been the victim of irrational medicine for years. It had to stop.”
Unsurprisingly, Pope Francis tweeted:
 “May God the Father welcome Vincent Lambert in His arms. Let us not build a civilization that discards persons those whose lives we no longer consider to be worthy of living: every life is valuable, always.”

Surprisingly, Michel Houellebecq, the controversial and internationally acclaimed nihilist novelist, agreed with the Pope. He was scathing in his criticism of how Lambert’s death had come about. In an op-ed in Le Monde, he attacked the French Minister for Health, Dr Agnès Buzyn, for using Lambert as a symbolic battering ram to open a breach in attitudes towards the severely disabled.
“I admit that when the Minister of ‘Solidarity and health’ had appealed in to the high court, I was stunned. I was sure that the government in this case would remain neutral. After all, [President] Emmanuel Macron had declared, not long before, that he did not wish to interfere; I thought, stupidly, that his ministers would be on the same line.
"Vincent Lambert was in no way prey to unbearable suffering, he was not suffering any pain at all (...) He was not even at the end of life. He lived in a particular mental state, the most honest of which would be to say that we know almost nothing …
"Dignity cannot be (altered) by a deterioration, as catastrophic as it may be, in one’s state of health. Or is it that there has been, indeed, a 'change in attitude'. I do not think there is any reason to rejoice, "

Monday 9 December 2013

Westboro Baptist Church and Catholic Truth against Nelson Mandela


English: Young Nelson Mandela. This photo date...
English: Young Nelson Mandela. This photo dates from 1937. South Africa protect the copyright of photographs for 50 years from their first publication. See . Since this image would have been PD in South Africa in 1996, when the URAA took effect, this image is PD in the U.S. Image source: http://www.anc.org.za/people/mandela/index.html (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
Much like Martin Luther King in America, Mandela had a score of powerful detractors and enemies while he was alive — and more particularly when he was fighting and imprisoned trying to obliterate the unjust South African apartheid system.
Now he died some enemies still show their hate against this South African.

The Westboro Baptist Church which has gained international infamy for picketing the funerals of dead soldiers with offensive signs such as “God hates f*gs” and is widely considered to be a hate group which is still kicking alive after their founder Fred Phelps his death.

In a series of deliberately-provocative Twitter posts, the church says it is buying plane tickets to South Africa and is hoping to coordinate with South African police while they stage a protest at the funeral, citing Mandela’s divorce and remarriage as evidence of damnation.

Like some Catholics they claim that Nelson Mandela was a communist, a pro-abortionist and pro gays person.
Catholic Truth asks given the facts about Nelson Mandela’s support of abortion and homosexuality, should Catholics up to and including the Pope himself, be lavishing unqualified praise on him?
 Or should they speak the truth?
They forget the pope may speak the truth, like many other who have known and met Nelson Mandela at tdifferent stages in his life.

Both groups do forget that it is not because human rights campaigner Peter Tatchell writing for PinkNews  Commenting on the death of Nelson Mandela,  of how the former president became a “gay icon” that it does not mean Mandela would have agreed with everything those gay people did. But he respected their 'nature' and foudn others also had to repsect other people who felt different than the majority.

Peter Tatchell says Mandela “failed” when it came to dealing with the HIV epidemic, challenging Robert Mugabe, and tackling poverty during his time in office.
Mandela was a political and moral giant. He led the victorious liberation struggle against apartheid, and then pioneered the peaceful transition to multi-racial democracy. He was the first African leader to embrace LGBT rights. His extraordinary compassion and forgiveness led to reconciliation with his former white supremacist oppressors. For all these reasons, he is a global icon and a gay icon. Few people in history can match his moral stature.
 Tatchell continues:
Although a staunch supporter of the anti-apartheid struggle, I was never an uncritical yes man. In 1987, I exposed the ugly homophobia within Mandela’s liberation movement, the African National Congress (ANC).
I wrote to Thabo Mbeki, who was in exile in Lusaka at the time and who later become the second post-apartheid South African president. My letter criticised ANC homophobia and appealed to the leadership to support LGBT equality. I was delighted when Mbeki replied to me making the ANC’s first public condemnation of homophobia and its first public pledge to LGBT equality under a future ANC-led government – and with a request that I publicise this new ANC commitment, which I did.
Heartened by this commitment, in 1989 I proposed to the ANC that their post-apartheid South African constitution should have a comprehensive anti-discrimination clause, including a prohibition of discrimination based on gender and sexual orientation.
 The Westboro Baptist Church in the USA say they thank God for killing Mandela. They claim that is because Nelson Mandela divorced and remarried. Extremely probably, they hate Mandela too for abolishing the anti-LGBTQ laws of the Apartheid regime in South Africa.

 Geert Wilders admirer Joost Niemoller claimed in the Dutch neo-nazi party Nederlandse Volksunie (NVU) Facebook page on 6 December 2013 changed a South Africa to a “hell on earth”.
Constant Kusters, Nederlandse Volksunie fuehrer, proposes in the election platforms of his party for the 2014 Dutch local elections, to remove the name Nelson Mandela from streets, bridges etc. named after the South African freedom fighter in various towns in the Netherlands.

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Please do find to read:
  1.  
  2. Fareed’s take on Nelson Mandela
  3. Mandela Day by Simple minds in remembrance
  4. Politicians who opposed Nelson Mandela and supported apartheid
  5. Should Catholics Praise Nelson Mandela?
  6. Westboro Baptists ‘booking flights’ to protest Mandela’s funeral

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