Right-to-die issue fails in Massachusetts
The right-to-die ballot issue in Massachusetts is too close to call for certain, but at the moment, it is failing, narrowly. We will see how things turn out. has failed, narrowly. It was the single vote in the entire country that I cared about the most. The Catholic Church and other religious organizations poured a lot of money into their effort to defeat this issue. They produced campaign propaganda that said many misleading things, including outright lies about the act’s supposed lack of safeguards. There were opponents in the medical and disability-rights communities, too. But the overwhelming bulk of the opposition was motivated by religion.
I have long argued that the metaphysical claims of religions are untrue. Unlike some of my fellow nonbelievers, however, I have not argued that religion is necessarily bad for society. Religion can be a great consolation to people, and it can motivate them to do very good things. But it can also motivate people to do very evil things. The religious campaign against individual choice in dying is one of those evil things. And I imagine I will be dedicating a large portion of the rest of my life to fighting this type of evil, carried out in the name of a fantasy deity. And not just on this issue, but on a number of others.
amen, Lewis. Amen.