Carta aberta ao Ministro da Saúde

Lisboa 26 de Agosto de 2011

Saudações de Paz e Bem!

Excelentíssimo Senhor Ministro da Saúde, Dr. Paulo Macedo

1. Vossa excelência, segundo noticia a comunicação social, tem tido o ingente trabalho de cortar nas despesas excessivas da saúde de modo a racionalizar esse bem tornando-o mais acessível aos que mais precisam. Porém, os média têm ignorado, estranhamente, que vossa excelência, na peugada dos seus antecessores, não só tem cerceado os gastos descomedidos como tem prejudicado e mesmo eliminado a própria saúde de muitos portugueses.

Apesar de não ser formado em medicina, vossa excelência não pode ignorar que a palavra saúde significa, etimologicamente, salvação, conservação da vida e, portanto, integridade e harmonia do todo da pessoa.

2. Não é necessário ser médico para perceber que uma mulher em idade fértil é natural e salutarmente fecunda. É, por isso, que a prescrição de fármacos às mulheres saudáveis, por parte de médicos, com o objectivo deliberado de impedir a fecundação constitui um ataque directo à sua saúde delas. Os serviços de saúde empenham-se encarniçadamente para que aqueles organismos de pessoas saudáveis enfermem, se tornem disfuncionais para que não engravidem. Saberá vossa excelência que a gravidez não é uma doença mas sim uma presença. Quando o senhor ministro foi concebido, nesse exacto momento, começou a gravidez da senhora sua mãe e eu, por mais que me esforce, não consigo, é-me simplesmente impossível, conceber que vossa excelência seja uma maladia. Acresce que os fármacos ou dispositivos receitados com essa finalidade, como as próprias bulas, em parte, o admitem têm graves consequências nefastas na saúde das mulheres (por ex., o cancro da mama) que os tomam ou introduzem e com frequência um efeito mortal nos filhos concebidos mas ainda não aninhados no útero. Um ministro da saúde não pode ignorar estes factos.

Se há razões sérias, médicas ou de outra ordem, que aconselham o espaçamento ou mesmo a evitação de uma gravidez saberá vossa excelência que os médicos, que o são de verdade, estão, ou devem estar, preparados para indicar os meios naturais, gratuitos, com uma eficácia superior à farmacológica, e que não põem em perigo nem a saúde das mulheres nem a vida dos filhos. Um desses métodos é mesmo infalível.

3. Todos sabemos que há homens e mulheres sofredores pelo facto de não conseguirem ter filhos. A resposta que o ministério, a que vossa excelência preside, tem dado a estas pessoas, através da reprodução artificial, não é de todo consentânea com a saúde que diz tutelar, pelo contrário é mesmo oposta a esse cuidado. O ministro da saúde não pode ignorar que aquilo a que em Portugal se chama “procriação medicamente assistida” é, de facto, uma procriação medicamente substituída, ou seja os médicos substituem os pais, reduzidos a fornecedores de matéria-prima, no acto da geração. Deste modo, o filho não é fruto de uma relação corpórea-pessoal de amor mas sim uma produção efectuada pelo poder, pela tecnocracia. E, como é evidente, não curam nem a esterilidade nem a infertilidade. Se os agentes de saúde se limitassem a coadjuvar os pais no acto da concepção nesse caso, sim, estariam a exercer a sua missão e não a usurpar o que lhes não compete. É isso, por exemplo, o que faz a NaProTecnology ou o FertilityCare com um sucesso muito superior à reprodução artificial, com custos muito reduzidos e, principalmente, sem baixas pelo caminho. Os primeiros vitimados, cronologicamente falando, são os pais, muito particularmente as mães, devido às devastadoras consequências psicológicas e fisiológicas que o processo artificial requer. Mas verdadeiramente sacrificada é aquela imensidade de pessoas humanas, na sua etapa embrionária, que é eliminada.

De facto, as técnicas artificiais “… exigem, por ciclo, pelo menos a transferência de três seres humanos, na sua fase embrionária, para o útero, sendo que se perdem (morrem) dois em 70% dos casos em que se dá a gravidez enquanto todos se perdem nos outros 80% de casos em que não se alcança a mesma. Acresce que a crio conservação de uma imensidade de pessoas humanas, na fase inicial da sua existência, destina-as, na prática, a morte certa quer por resolução da lei, quer porque entregues à experimentação, quer pelos próprios processos de congelação e descongelação (a possibilidade de êxito em caso de adopção pré-natal é diminuta, pelo que o número de vidas que poderá salvar é ínfimo). Segundo estatísticas recentes calcula-se que de mil e oitocentas pessoas humanas “produzidas” artificialmente somente vinte nascerão: de 100 mulheres que queiram um filho, recorrendo a este número de embriões, como mínimo, somente 20 o alcançarão. Temos pois que para virem à luz essas vinte pessoas se programa a morte de mil e setecentas e oitenta. A proposta, que alguns adiantam, de transferência de um único embrião humano, na fase de blastocisto, para o seio da mãe não resolve o problema, uma vez que a “produção” de mais seres humanos embrionários permanecerá sempre uma exigência técnica (Cf Angelo Serra, S. I.,L’uomo-embrione – il grande misconosciuto, pp. 147, ed. Cantagalli, Marzo 2003, pp. 69, 71). Todos os profissionais de saúde envolvidos no processo - e os legisladores que o autorizam - (talvez os casais o desconheçam) estão conscientes de que irão colocar uma multidão inumerável de pessoas em circunstâncias que as conduzirão à morte certa, embora esperem que alguma se safe. Não se trata aqui, de maneira nenhuma, de um processo natural, como o que resulta da fecundação originada no acto conjugal, mas sim da actuação deliberada de um poder técnico e artificial. O facto de morrerem muitas pessoas acidentalmente numa avalanche, por exemplo, não autoriza ninguém a colocar outras em circunstâncias de morte certa, deliberadamente produzidas. Nunca é lícito reproduzir voluntariamente um facto natural negativo: se a natureza causa desastres importa corrigi-la, não imitá-la (Cf Antonio G. Spagnolo, «Fecundacion Artificial e Inicio de la Vida Humana», in Comentario Interdisciplinar a la “Evangelium Vitae”, pp. 811, Madrid, BAC, 1996, pp. 607-608). Por isso, não faz sentido nenhum a comparação com as mortes acidentais dos embriões humanos, que podem resultar da união conjugal. De facto, estas são padecidas e, no estado actual da ciência, pouco se pode fazer (mas o que já se pode deve fazer-se) para as evitar, enquanto as outras são queridas – uma vez que são absolutamente previsíveis e termo de uma eleição livre - como meio e condição (pelo menos) para alcançar o fim procurado (Cf Idem, p. 607 e Dionigi Tettamanzi (Cardeal de Milão), Nuova Bioetica Cristiana, pp. 653, Piemme, II Edizione, dicembre 2000, p 219). No primeiro caso está-se diante de um acidente, no segundo perante a programação consciente de uma catástrofe.” (In Nuno Serras Pereira, CNECV Sobre PMA: Um Parecer Execrável, 02.08. 2004).

Em nome da saúde o ministério de vossa excelência “admite (nem na lógica que assume poderia deixar de fazê-lo, uma vez que o recurso a estas técnicas é incapaz de obstar aos chamados “embriões excedentários”, isto é, seres humanos excedentários! Mesmo no caso meramente hipotético, porque fantástico, de se “produzir” um só embrião para implantação há sempre imprevistos e imponderáveis, por exemplo, a morte da mãe ou a sua recusa por litigância ou divórcio do pai, etc.) (o ministério admite), escrevia, a crio preservação, a saber, a congelação de pessoas humanas, a sua suspensão no horror infernal de “campos de concentração” glaciais, atentando assim gravemente não só contra a vida, como atrás referimos, mas também contra a dignidade, a temporalidade (dimensão constitutiva da pessoa) e, portanto, a identidade, e, também, a integridade e a saúde das mesmas. … coonesta, ainda, a morte propositada de seres humanos, nossos irmãos, de outras três formas: através do diagnóstico pré-implantação (DIP) que se destina a seleccionar as pessoas humanas, na sua fase embrionária, e a desfazer-se das que padecem de “doenças graves de origem genética ou outra”; e através da investigação e experimentação científicas nas pessoas que apelida de inviáveis e naquelas que, tendo sobrevivido à crio preservação, não forem adoptadas (chamar a isto, como alguns, “antecipação da morte inevitável” não passa de farelório, de uma tentativa de manipular a realidade através de palavras ilusionistas, de um tipo de racionalização ideologicamente afim ao nazismo, que justifica a experimentação em todos os seres humanos, em qualquer fase da sua existência, já que todos inevitavelmente morreremos). Temos assim que o ser humano é coisificado e reduzido a um instrumento para possíveis benefícios de outros. Estamos perante um novo despoletar das opressoras pulsões da escravatura e do eugenismo levadas a um radicalismo extremista. … (Acresce que) inumeráveis estudos indicam que os próprios processos de procriação artificial provocam deficiências ou distúrbios físicos, neurológicos, genitais, oculares e psicológicos numa porção nada negligenciável dos filhos assim gerados. De modo que, não só não se reconhece o filho como um dom antes se o coisifica reivindicando-o como um direito, mas também se manifesta um frio desprezo e indiferença por tudo o que ele venha a sofrer, expondo-o aos perigos vários dos meios utilizados na sua concepção, desadorando e ojerizando os seus direitos.” (Idem)

Que tudo isto é repugnante, ignóbil e abominável é evidente a qualquer mente normal, a menos que tenha sido contaminada pelas perversidades, unanimemente condenadas em Nuremberga, do Dr., Josef Rudolf Mengel, de péssima memória. As pessoas martirizadas, independentemente do tamanho ou da idade, são dotadas de igual dignidade, de igual valor eminente e transcendente, porque criadas pelo mesmo Deus à Sua imagem e semelhança e, potencialmente, remidas pela Encarnação e consequente Paixão de Jesus Cristo.

Um ministro da saúde, e para mais católico, não pode ignorar estas coisas.

4. O ministério agora a seu cargo continua a cooperar, com os seus serviços, na matança generalizada, por abortamento químico (RU 486) e cirúrgico até às dez semanas de idade da criança nascente e em não poucos casos até idades bem mais tardias. Ora salvar não é matar e consequentemente estar ao serviço da saúde significa procurar eliminar a doença, não o doente nem o saudável só porque é de pouca idade, eminentemente vulnerável, estando indefeso perante a arbitrariedade dos mais poderosos.

5. A constituição afirma que a vida (humana) é inviolável, não diz que “geralmente falando a vida é inviolável” ou a “vida dos já nascidos é inviolável” assevera também que o direito à saúde é universal. Se é universal é de todos, ou seja, de todos os membros que pertencem à espécie, ou natureza, humana independentemente da idade, do tamanho e do local onde vivem. E o senhor ministro deveria cumprir a constituição em tudo aquilo em que ela não contradiga os Direitos do Homem. Outros arranjam raciocínios elaborados e intricados pra fazer dizer a esse documento aquilo que ele não diz. Seja como for as constituições são para o serviço à vida humana, não é a vida humana que é para as constituições.

6. Como vê senhor ministro tem muito por onde cortar não só nas demasias mas principalmente naquilo que pestifera a saúde de uma multidão de portugueses.

Recorde-se vossa excelência, ainda, que obrigar-nos a todos, através dos impostos, a pagar estas barbaridades cruéis é uma violência tirânica, que atropela a liberdade de consciência e reprime a liberdade religiosa em nome de uma ideologia que ignora a realidade e engendra uma reengenharia social ao serviço de um estado totalitário.

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Uphold Conscience Protection: Religious Freedom’s Contribution to the American Experience and Threats to its Survival - by Helen Alvaré

by Helen Alvaré

Religious communities are an essential part of the fabric of America, even over and above the vital services they provide to weak and vulnerable members of our communities; we must protect their conscience rights against legal coercion.

It is impossible to understand the American experiment without understanding the role that the free exercise of religion has played in our nation’s founding and in its flourishing. We are not a people who have merely “tolerated” religious commitments as eccentricities or only upon the condition that they remain hidden from public view. Rather, we have understood the debt our nation owes to fundamental principles of human rights that have their origins in overlapping theological and philosophical commitments. Particularly today, we know how religion plays a role in securing the family life that provides an irreplaceable foundation for a healthy, prosperous, well-formed citizenry.

We are also grateful to religious institutions for providing services to our most vulnerable citizens, services that government cannot duplicate, because of the thick moral commitments that suffuse them. We understand, too, the role that religion plays in inspiring untold numbers of daily, private interactions that law could neither effectively command nor police, but that are essential for creating a society in which human beings’ intrinsic dignity is both recognized and served. Finally, we recognize the prophetic role that religious institutions and persons have played during our history, when they have identified human rights’ violations and called for both a change of heart and changes in the law.

At the time of our founding, Thomas Jefferson wrote that “Almighty God hath created the mind free. … All attempts to influence it by temporal punishments or burthens … are a departure from the plan of the Holy Author of our religion.” He also wrote that the “moral duties which exist between individual and individual in a state of nature accompany them into a state of society, … their Maker not having released them from those duties on their forming themselves into a nation.” In other words, God has entrusted human beings, alone and in society, with the crucial task of seeking the truth and of living in accordance with it. The state has no authority to interfere with or to direct this pursuit. Our founders’ convictions about religious freedom found their way into our Constitution as the First Amendment of our Bill of Rights.

Over the course of our history, Americans came to understand that the state’s lack of jurisdiction over questions of ultimate meaning entailed not only allowing individuals to believe privately in a transcendent reality, or to worship as they believed, or even to pray privately and perform good works. Rather, it also entailed recognizing that religion is also exercised in the form of associations that provide services to vulnerable citizens of every background in accordance with religious principles. Throughout American history, religious citizens were not only permitted, but even encouraged, to let their religious convictions to inform their work, and their contributions to public debates were understood to have important consequences for our understanding of human rights and dignity.

Americans have also historically recognized religious providers’ valuable contributions in the areas of education, healthcare, and general social services. Religious ministries often lead the way in reaching out to the most unpopular or invisible groups, whether persons with AIDS, immigrants, poor single mothers, the severely disabled, or the dying. Ironically today, these ministries are branded as bigoted and misogynistic by interest groups claiming “rights” to sexual expression of any sort, while these same ministries labor daily to piece together the lives of those directly harmed—whether by sexually transmitted disease, non-marital pregnancies, or abortions—by the exercise of such “rights.”

Institutional religious ministries also serve another valuable function, less often noticed. They act as a force for assimilation, through their services to new immigrants and inner-city students, and in their hiring and serving people who do not share their faith affiliation, especially in their healthcare and social service ministries. In their encounters with millions of diverse clients, these ministries bring invaluable wisdom about human needs to the public policy table on many issues such as healthcare, abortion, post-abortion distress, marriage, euthanasia, immigration, poverty, war, and the moral guidelines for scientific research.

Despite this record of accomplishment, religious individuals and institutions are threatened today by various social and legal forces. First, it seems that both citizens and leaders often forget or take for granted the crucial role that religious freedom has played in our nation’s founding and flourishing. We no longer clearly grasp the relationship between our enjoyment of social peace and prosperity and our long tradition of religious freedom.

Second, among elite academic and media voices, there seems to be a particular animus against Christian adherence to classical norms regarding the dignity of the human person in connection with sex, marriage, and the family. Christians have been especially condemned for their staunch refusal to agree that abortion is a “right,” for their insistence that children’s interests—not adults’—should guide marriage law, and for their refusal to accede to the trivialization of sex and the degradation of women implicit in governments’ approach to birth-control distribution and sex education. Leading Supreme Court opinions, as well as federal statutes and regulations, are more inclined than ever to posit the existence of a “right” to any form of sexual expression, on the grounds of either “privacy” or “equality.” This increasingly aggressive stance is often the cause of the most virulent attacks upon religious freedom.

Third, during the passage of the 2010 health care law (the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act or PPACA), longstanding, bipartisan agreement to shield the religious freedom of healthcare providers—especially where abortion is concerned—broke down. Democrats in the Senate and then in the House either proposed or ultimately acceded to conscience provisions significantly weaker than those available in past federal laws. Very recently, the Obama administration realized religious institutions’ worst fears by mandating all forms of birth control, and some forms of abortifacient drugs, as mandatory “preventive healthcare” services under the PPACA. Under this regulation, religiously affiliated healthcare institutions that attempt to hire or serve people of other faiths are denied conscience protection. It is almost unnecessary to point out the irony, the shortsightedness, even the cruelty, of such a denial.

Fourth, in the struggle over same-sex marriage, some lawmakers are increasingly hostile to moral and practical arguments about the unique goods intrinsic to opposite-sex marriage, and to citizen demands for conscience protections. It appears that lawmakers are responding more to cultural and media elites who express overt hostility to religion, or they are simply confused about the true meaning and purpose of marriage and the family. Some groups and politicians supporting same-sex marriage brand religious ministries to the poor and vulnerable as “bigotry” and threaten the very existence of those ministries, during a time when the government would be hard-pressed to fund additional services itself. Witness the harassment, and in some cases termination, of Catholic adoption agencies that refuse to pair children with same-sex couples.

Fifth, the expansion of state power, combined with a “creeping” notion of human or civil “rights,” also jeopardizes religious freedom today. Government regulation has spread to nearly every sphere of life and thus imposes more constraints upon a wide variety of religious ministries. At the same time, “rights” language is increasingly applied to human “wants” rather than “needs.” It is used to promote individualism and particular ideologies, rather than universally recognized attributes of human life or dignity. This increase in regulation, combined with “rights creep,” leads directly to refusals to grant religious exemptions, on the ground that people have human “rights” to consensual sexual expression with any other person, or to kill an unborn child, and that “rights” do not permit exemptions for the sake of conscience.

All of these forces are combining to threaten religious freedom at a time when we can ill afford to lose the unique voices and contributions of religious citizens and institutions. Objections to religious freedom on the grounds that religious behaviors and services are “eccentric” or “dangerous” or “against human rights” are contradicted by our historical experience with religious freedom. Furthermore, citizens and lawmakers are quite capable of distinguishing between claimed religious messages or behaviors that might threaten human lives or the common good (e.g., human sacrifice) and those that are merely different means to a good end (e.g., exhortations to practice sexual restraint, or to preserve the centrality of children’s well-being in marriage law). On the grounds of preserving peace and prosperity, strong families, and a robust network of private charitable institutions, and on the grounds of resisting the totalizing inclinations of government, federal and state laws protecting religious voices and ministries—in health care, education, and especially family life—must be enacted and enforced today.

The health of religious freedom in the United States is in large part entrusted to the Congress, to the president, and to state governments. In the near term, our lawmakers need to ensure the passage and enforcement of legislation that at the very least:

• Fixes the PPACA to provide conscience protection for all health care providers, sponsors and insurers.
• Enables religious ministries to continue to operate in accordance with their religious conscience to provide the kinds of educational, health care, and other social services to the vulnerable communities they serve.
• Requires all entities receiving government funds to avoid discrimination on the basis of religious conscience.

A more generous disposition toward religion would be even better—better not only for religious citizens and ministries, but better for the most vulnerable Americans, for American families, and for the nation’s future. For a genuinely healthy national future—for a future in which America nurtures healthy children, personal and group initiative, and volunteerism, while avoiding stultifying bureaucracy and governmental totalism—it is imperative that the next president and next Congress have a firm and intelligent grasp on the real blessing that is our tradition of religious freedom.

Helen Alvaré is an associate professor at George Mason University School of Law and a senior fellow of the Witherspoon Institute.

Os católicos e a política - Henrique Raposo

In Expresso

Há sempre um ponto que me desgosta em muitos amigas e amigos católicos: é a distância em relação ao debate público e político, é o nojo fácil pela política. Isso é visível, por exemplo, no Facebook. Ali podemos ver milhentas pessoas a assumir com orgulho a identidade católica e, ao mesmo tempo, a desprezar a identidade política. Na secção "religious views", surge triunfante a palavra "católica". Na secção "political views", surge um pobre e fácil "não uso disso" ou um "são todos iguais", etc. Na revista Communio (Setembro 1988), o omnipresente Francisco Lucas Pires escreveu um artigo que é, para mim, a melhor resposta a esta pobreza apolítica de um certo catolicismo.

Nesta prosa, intitulada "Pureza de Coração e Vida Política", Lucas Pires afirma que existem duas maneiras de um cristão lidar com a esfera política. A primeira passa por aceitar que os princípios e regras da esfera política são de "outro tipo" e que, por isso, o cristão só deve ter preocupações com a salvação da sua consciência. Ou seja, o cristão deve criar uma redoma à sua volta, retirando-se assim dos debates da Cidade. Nesta via, o cristão julga-se tão puro, que não quer sujar as mãos na realidade. "Sim, sou muito católico, mas não quero nada com a política, são todos iguais".

Como já perceberam, Francisco Lucas Pires critica esta primeira via, e defende uma alternativa. Para o ex-líder do CDS e inspirador de boa parte do PSD atua l, um cristão tem o dever de lutar na Cidade, tem o dever de fazer opções públicas e políticas. Porque o leigo não é o padre a viver fora da Cidade. O leigo tem de viver no mundo, tem de produzir e/ou participar numa narrativa normativa para a Cidade, mesmo quando essa Cidade é dura e suja. Sim, a política namora com o pecado e com a mentira, mas - precisamente por causa disso - a política é o terreno propício para se apurar a "pureza de coração". Só podemos testar a nossa pureza num mundo imperfeito e duro. A redoma apolítica é uma via fácil e pouco cristão.

Portanto, numa lógica algo parecida à de T.S. Eliot, Lucas Pires diz que o cristão tem de tentar influenciar o espaço público, tem de levar os seus valores cristãos para a Cidade. O cristão não tem apenas de salvar a sua consciência: também tem de salvar a sua cultura. O cristão não é apenas um ser metafísico, também é um ser historicamente situado. No fundo, não deve existir uma separação entre a obediência moral (a Cristo, a Deus) e a vida política e colectiva aqui na Cidade dos homens. Pelo contrário: deve existir uma tensão criadora entre a ética cristã e a realidade política.

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Legalizing Euthanasia by Omission - And Making It a Doctor's Order

by E. Christian Brugger, D.Phil., Senior Fellow and Director, Fellows Program

In Culture of Life Foundation

DENVER, Colorado, AUG. 24, 2011 (Zenit.org ).- A problematic new end-of-life medical form is rapidly gaining ascendency in U.S. healthcare. It is called the "POLST" document. (In my own state of Colorado, it's called a MOST document.) The acronym stands for Physician Orders for Life-Sustaining Treatment. (MOST = "Medical Orders for Scope of Treatment;" its provisions are almost identical across states.) Click here to see an example of a standard POLST document.

The document consolidates on a single form provisions formerly dispersed over several documents: it acts as a living will specifying the scope of medical interventions a patient wishes in case of incapacitation; it makes specific provision for a do-not-resuscitate order (DNR); it has a box to check in the event a patient wishes to refuse treatment with antibiotics; and it allows a patient to designate a proxy decision maker.

Similar to other advanced directives, patients complete the POLST form when their capacities are in tact and the document becomes effective when consciousness is compromised.

But different from older-type directives, the POLST document has provision for the signature of a physician (or physician assistant). This gives the designations on the document the force of an actionable medical order.

The national trend, supported by Compassion & Choices (formerly the Hemlock Society), is to structure state laws on medical directives in accord with the POLST paradigm (as illustrated by its recent adoption by states such as California, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, New York, Pennsylvania, Oregon, Tennessee, Utah, Washington, West Virginia and Wisconsin).

Why is the document problematic? I will speak from first-hand knowledge of the legislation that normalized the document in Colorado. I believe my criticisms are relevant to all POLST-type laws in the U.S.

The Colorado law (signed in summer 2010) abrogated an extremely important condition on living wills going back two decades. The former law authorized adults to direct medical professionals to withhold or withdraw life-support only on the condition that they were terminally ill (or in a so-called persistent vegetative state [PVS]). So for purposes of the law the refusal was conditioned by the fact that a patient was already dying. (The PVS provision was accepted under the false assumption that it was a terminal condition.) Forty-five percent of the states in the U.S. presently impose similar statutory limitations on the removal of life-support.

The POLST-type legislation removes the condition that a patient is terminally ill or diagnosed in a PVS before a refusal order is actionable. In other words, the new law permits any adult patient to refuse any treatment at any time for any reason in the event they lack decisional capacity; and health care professionals, directed by a doctor's medical order, ordinarily would be (and are) required to carry out the order. Although the law for strategic purposes is rhetorically formulated as bearing upon end-of-lifemedical decisions, it sets forth no requirement that a patient's refusal of life-support must be limited to end-of-life conditions.

If someone refuses life-support with the specific aim (or intention) of causing his or her own death, the person is choosing suicide. Morally speaking this is no different from ingesting a lethal dose of medication, or sitting in a running car with the windows closed and a hose stretching from the tail pipe to the cabin. "Why are you doing X?" If the answer is: "To die," then the person is intending self-killing, suicide, and that's always wrong.

But isn't it the case that terminally ill patients also can direct the refusal of life-support for purposes of bringing about their deaths? It is true, the condition of terminality does rule out the possibility that patients will be motivated by suicidal intentions when taking advantage of the liberties permitted by the older-type law. But in establishing the refusal of life-support in the context of medical conditions diagnosed as "terminal," the older-type law privileged as the normative context for refusing life-support the motive "to-be-free-from-burdens-in-my-remaining-days-of-life." Suffering from a condition from which one was dying, the law granted a person the civil right to refuse procedures that prolonged the dying process.

This is not the place to rehearse the ethical argument for the legitimate removal of life-support. Suffice it to say that until recently, common ethical opinion accepted the judgment that if some treatment was futile or excessively burdensome, then a person legitimately could refuse the treatment, even if its refusal promised the hastening of death. [Note: the procedure, not the life, is judged burdensome.] One intends to be free of the burden of painful, risky, or futile treatments during one's final days of life, and one accepts that one's death may be hastened as an unintended consequence.

The POLST-type law grants adults the civil right to direct healthcare professionals to remove life-sustaining procedures when those procedures are not futile and when the burden imposed by them would be offset by a reasonable hope of recovery. It juridically extends the ordinary context for the refusal of life-support to include the motive of bringing about death. Without using the term, the new law authorizes euthanasia.

This is not the only problem with the POLST model, but it's the most serious problem that the model introduces. Other problems, such as the document's provision for the removal of food and water from patients for whom they reasonably would be judged to be ordinary/proportionate care, or the simplistic designation, "No Antibiotics," whether or not such drugs are medically indicated, already infect older type documents.

When the Colorado Catholic Conference, which I assisted, was fighting (ultimately unsuccessfully) at the state capital in Denver to amend the POLST-type legislation before passage to reintroduce the condition of terminality, we argued that the legislation as written was effectively legalizing euthanasia by omission. Some legislators believed that we were being alarmist. They thought that because physician-assisted suicide was not legal in Colorado, nor explicitly legalized by the proposed legislation, we had nothing to fear. We said we thought this was short-sighted, that groups like Compassion & Choices would find fertile soil in the law for advancing its aims. Most were unconvinced.

On August 17, 2011, Compassion & Choices (CC) launched a nation-wide public education campaign entitled "Peace at Life's End – Anywhere." The euphemism means "legal self-killing anywhere in the U.S." (The press conference was held in Denver, Colorado!) The central purpose, indeed the sole purpose of the campaign is to tell people everywhere that they can kill themselves legally anywhere in the U.S.; all they've got to do is to refuse life-support, in particular food and water. The Web site reads:

One method of peaceful dying…universally available, legal, safe, painless and suitable for a gentle parting in one's own home…is the purposeful refusal of food and fluids, in medical jargon known as voluntarily stopping eating and drinking (VSED).

"VSED," its press release stated, "is a legally recognized option for mentally competent adults who wish to end their suffering." And best of all, "it requires no special laws or regulations. VSED is legal -- for patients and their caregivers -- today, in every state."

The POLST document is not a precondition for the success of CC's campaign. Any living will that permits the removal of food and water would be adequate. But the new document sure helps.

If the POLST model is not already legally recognized in your state, five to one chance that legislation is being drafted at your state house as we speak. You might call your legislator and find out.

Defend Our Laws: Justice Matters - by Ed Whelan

In developing their positions on Supreme Court appointments and the Department of Justice, presidential candidates should 1) welcome the battle over the Supreme Court, 2) determine to fight hard for high-quality justices, 3) frame the argument for why abortion policy should be restored to the democratic processes, 4) support the Defense of Marriage Act, and 5) commit to select senior legal leaders who fully embrace their goals and priorities.

by Ed Whelan

In The Public Discourse

In light of the power that the modern Supreme Court wields in shaping—or misshaping—how the Constitution is interpreted, a president’s Supreme Court appointments are among his most important and enduring legacies. The president elected in 2012 can reasonably be expected to have the opportunity to fill one or two vacancies on the Court. How the Republican presidential candidates would approach this opportunity therefore provides an important measure of their fitness for office.

The Department of Justice also plays significant roles on constitutional issues. Among other things, DOJ decides whether and how to defend federal laws against constitutional challenge, and it advises the president on constitutional issues and the selection of Supreme Court justices and lower-court nominees. A presidential candidate’s vision of how DOJ would operate under his or her direction provides valuable insights.

As conservatives begin sorting through the field of Republican presidential candidates, I offer here five pieces of advice that I believe ought to guide the candidates in forming their positions on selecting Supreme Court justices and directing the Department of Justice.

1. Recognize that the battle over the proper role of the Supreme Court is a political winner for conservatives.

As this mock memo by a former Obama DOJ judge-picker nicely illustrates, liberals lament that “conservatives have succeeded in defining the debate [over judges]: a judge is either a judicial activist or a conservative.” Conservative discourse about the proper role of judges has “tremendous public appeal,” whereas a nominee’s candid embrace of liberal “living Constitution” rhetoric will seriously jeopardize his nomination.

This political triumph of judicial conservatism explains, for example, why then-Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor, to the disgust of many on the Left, tried to disguise herself as a judicial conservative during her confirmation hearing.

Although the Left consoles itself with the notion that its problem lies in its messaging rather than in the substance of its positions, the reality is that conservative discourse is succeeding on its merits. As large swaths of the American public (especially those not suffering from the detriment of a modern legal miseducation) understand, the Constitution, within broad bounds, creates a system of representative government in which most issues, large and small, are left to American citizens to work out through their legislators at the state and national levels. To be sure, the judiciary has an essential role in enforcing those rights, and limits on governmental power, that are in the Constitution. But the unconstrained role of the judiciary that the Left advocates cannot be reconciled with core American principles.

The compelling common-sense appeal of originalism has so devastated proponents of the “living Constitution” that they have largely abandoned the term and have tried instead to rebrand their freewheeling approach or even to recast themselves as originalists. The rhetorical triumph of judicial restraint over liberal judicial activism has likewise led many liberals to reposition themselves opportunistically as champions of judicial restraint (and to charge conservative justices with the sin of activism). And Chief Justice Roberts’s umpire analogy in defense of judicial impartiality has so routed President Obama’s notoriously lawless empathy standard that Obama’s own Supreme Court nominees have repudiated that standard.

Among the positions embraced by the Left that are politically toxic is its unprincipled resort to contemporary foreign and international legal materials to redefine the meaning of provisions of our Constitution. That position is part of the Left’s broader transnationalist project to deprive American citizens of their powers of representative government by selectively imposing on them the favored policies of foreign and international elites. Sotomayor’s brazenly deceptive testimony is but the starkest of many efforts by Obama nominees to conceal their positions on this issue.

2. Make selection and confirmation of high-quality justices a top priority.

A Republican president elected in 2012 should be emboldened by the political triumph of judicial conservatism, especially if (as would be likely in the event of a Republican presidential victory) Republicans regain control of the Senate. Senate Democrats may well threaten to filibuster any conservative Supreme Court nominee. But if the White House genuinely has the will to wage a vigorous and extended campaign on behalf of a high-quality nominee, it should be able to defeat a filibuster.

Do not underestimate the danger, however, that timid political advisers to the president will try to avoid a fight in order to preserve capital for other battles. Any “compromise” candidate who would be acceptable to leading Senate Democrats would be a rank surrender. To avoid being undermined from within, the president needs to make clear from the outset that filling Supreme Court vacancies with outstanding conservative justices is one of his three or four highest priorities.

Methods of judicial appointment and configurations of party power vary considerably from state to state, but any Republican presidential candidate who has made judicial appointments as governor should be expected to show how his record indicates that he would fight hard as president to appoint high-quality Supreme Court justices.

3. Frame the argument for why the constitutional authority to make abortion policy should be restored to the democratic processes.

If a Republican president elected in 2012 has the opportunity to replace Justice Ginsburg (now 78), Justice Kennedy (75), or Justice Breyer (73) with an excellent conservative justice, there is a genuine prospect that the Court would have the five votes needed to overturn Roe v. Wade and restore abortion policy to its proper place in the democratic processes in the states. Given nearly four decades of pervasive media misrepresentations of what Roe held and what overturning it would mean, it is not surprising that many people initially are hostile to its being overturned. But there is ample reason to believe that some elementary education on the matter would dramatically increase public support for overturning Roe.

This is not an issue that Republican presidential candidates can duck. Nor, given the striking increase in pro-life sentiment, should they want to. They instead need to seize the opportunity to frame the issue in a manner that has broad appeal to Americans with diverse positions on abortion policy:

• They should educate the public that Roe imposes a radical regime of unrestricted abortion, for any reason, all the way up to viability—and, under the predominant reading of obtuse language in Roe’s companion case, Doe v. Bolton, essentially unrestricted even in the period from viability until birth.

• They should explain how Roe has poisoned American politics and culture for nearly four decades by preventing Americans from working together, through an ongoing process of peaceful and vigorous persuasion, to establish and revise the policies on abortion governing their respective states.

• They should discuss how Roe’s manifest defects have been harshly criticized even by abortion supporters (see point 2 of my 2005 Senate testimony).

• They should point out that Roe has fueled endless litigation in which pro-abortion extremists challenge modest abortion-related measures that state legislators have enacted and that are overwhelmingly favored by the public—provisions, for example, that seek to ensure informed consent and parental involvement for minors and bar atrocities like partial-birth abortion.

4. Strongly support the Defense of Marriage Act and oppose same-sex marriage.

The Obama administration’s sabotage and, more recently, formal abandonment of its duty to defend the federal Defense of Marriage Act reflects a sharp and shameful departure from the DOJ’s traditional practices. Republican presidential candidates should declare that their DOJ will vigorously defend DOMA and will intervene in other litigation to oppose the judicial invention of a federal constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

DOMA was approved by overwhelming majorities in both Houses of Congress in 1996 and was signed into law by President Clinton. DOMA’s broad bipartisan support—including from liberal Democrats like Joe Biden, Patrick Leahy, Charles Schumer, and Dick Durbin—refutes the empty revisionist claim that DOMA somehow embodies an irrational bigotry against same-sex couples.

DOMA does two things. First, it reaffirms the historic understanding of what the term “marriage” means in provisions of federal law—the legal union of a man and a woman as husband and wife. It is a profound confusion to argue, as some do, that values of federalism somehow require the federal government to accept any state’s redefinition of marriage in determining what “marriage” means in provisions of federal law.

Second, in a genuine protection of values of federalism, DOMA safeguards the prerogatives of each state to choose not to treat as a marriage a same-sex union recognized in another state. It thus helps ensure that one state does not effectively impose same-sex marriage on another state. At the same time, it leaves the citizens of every state free to decide whether or not to redefine their marriage laws.

Beyond defending DOMA, a president should declare his support for a federal marriage amendment that would preserve—and, for some states, restore—the traditional definition of marriage in the states.

Our predecessors understood what too many Americans today have forgotten or never learned—namely, that the marriage practices a society endorses have real-world consequences that extend far beyond the individuals who seek to marry, and that strengthen or undermine the broader culture. That understanding of marriage underlay the 19th-century effort to combat polygamy, which was regarded as inimical to democracy. That is why Congress, in its separate enabling acts for the admission of several states, conditioned their admission on each state’s inclusion of anti-polygamy provisions in its constitution. That history disproves the claim that how states define marriage has been a matter left entirely to the states.

The acceptance of same-sex marriage would permanently sever the inherent link between marriage and responsible procreation and child-rearing. The more confusion there is about the mission of marriage, the less effective marriage will be in accomplishing its mission. And the countless millions of victims of a collapsed marriage culture—children born into unstable or nonexistent families—will continue to pile up, with all the attendant disastrous social consequences.

5. Select White House advisers and DOJ leaders who embrace your goals and priorities.

Personnel is indeed policy. It is essential that a Republican president select senior White House advisers (including chief of staff and White House counsel) and leaders for the DOJ—especially for the positions of Attorney General and Solicitor General—who are deeply committed to his or her goals and priorities on selection of Supreme Court justices and on the operation of DOJ.

* * *

By his oath of office, the president commits that he “will to the best of [his] Ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States.” What a president means by this oath depends on his own understanding of what the Constitution means. In setting forth their positions on selecting Supreme Court justices and directing the DOJ, the Republican presidential candidates can offer valuable insights into how well they understand the Constitution and how well-prepared they are to exercise presidential authority.

Edward Whelan is president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center and is a regular contributor to National Review Online’s Bench Memos blog on constitutional law and judicial nominations.

Sexual anarchy: The Kinsey legacy

by Judith A. Reisman, Ph.D. and Mary E. McAlister, Esq.

August 24, 2011 (LifeSiteNews.com) - Our children are under attack by an insidious and virulent enemy.

On August 17, 2011, more than 50 activists attended a conference for “minor-attracted adults,” i.e., pedophiles, which sought to eliminate the “stigma” attached to pedophilia and to redefine pedophilia as a normal “sexual orientation.” The United States Department of Justice has determined that 64 percent of forcible sodomy victims are boys under the age of 12 and that 58,200 children were kidnapped by non-family members in 1999.

So-called “experts” in the field of human sexuality claim that children are sexual not only from birth, but even in the womb and are willing participants in sexual acts with adults.

Children are encouraged to experiment with sex early and often and to engage in sex with members of the same-sex as well as the opposite sex. Sexually transmitted diseases among teenagers are at epidemic proportions, and new and sometimes fatal strands of diseases are being reported. More than 50,000 teens have contracted HIV which has advanced to full blown AIDS and by 1992 more than 7,000 boys and 1,500 girls have died from HIV/AIDS.

How did we get here? How do we stop the madness before we lose an entire generation?

The question of how we got here can be answered by two words: Alfred Kinsey. Even 55 years after his death, Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey continues to profoundly affect American culture. Two of his most ardent supporters, Dr. Carol Vance, Columbia University anthropologist and lesbian activist, and Dr. John Money, an “out” pedophile advocate and pioneer of transgender surgery at Johns Hopkins, have cogently summed up Dr. Kinsey’s legacy – a legacy they consider sexual “progress” but is in reality sexual anarchy.

Speaking at a 1998 Kinsey symposium of fellow sexologists at San Francisco State University, Dr. Vance said, “Biography is the battleground.”[1] Should Kinsey be discredited, she warned, “200 years of sexual progress can be undone.”

Dr. Vance’s statements echo comments made in 1981 by Dr. Money at the 5th World Congress of Sexology in Israel. They also agreed that the information contained in Table 34, below, and the other data chronicling Kinsey’s and his team’s widespread child abuse, described in detail in Kinsey’s 1948 study on male sexuality, would be the undoing of the “Pre and Post Kinsey eras” globally and in the USA.

In fact, Dr. John Bancroft, director of the Kinsey Institute said at the 1998 conference, which commemorated the 50th anniversary of Kinsey’s studies, that he “prayed” that a British television program, “Secret History: Kinsey Paedophiles,” would never be shown in the United States because the public would not understand the “science” involved in Kinsey’s publication of tables 30-34. He understood that should those tables be widely publicized in the United States, then the whole field of human sexuality and human sex education would be destroyed.

This field of human sexuality and human sex education and 200 years of “sexual progress” that these elite “scientists” were so worried would be destroyed is better described as sexual anarchy. This sexual anarchy that has given these scientists and their followers prestige, money, credibility and control over the deconstruction of the Judeo-Christian civil society was crafted by Dr. Kinsey.

A gall-wasp zoologist at Indiana University from 1920 to his death in 1956, Dr. Kinsey is most famous for his earth-shaking books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948)[2] and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female (1953),[3] funded by Indiana University and the Rockefeller Foundation. Dr. Kinsey said that his mission was to eliminate the sexually “repressive” legal and behavioral legacy of Judeo Christianity. He claimed that this “repressive” sexual legacy was responsible for socio-sexual ills like divorce, rape, illegitimacy, venereal disease, juvenile delinquency, promiscuity, homosexuality, adultery, and child sexual abuse.

Furthermore, he argued that if we Americans would admit that we really were engaged in widespread licentious conduct, instead of hypocritically denying it, then these socio-sexual ills would be dramatically reduced.

In large measure, Dr. Kinsey’s mission has been accomplished, mostly posthumously, by his legion of true believers–elitists who have systematically brainwashed their fellow intellectual elites to adopt Kinsey’s pan-sexual secular worldview and jettison the Judeo Christian worldview upon which this country was founded and flourished.

The result of Dr. Kinsey’s mission has been totally antithetical to the utopia he predicted. Instead of reducing the socio-sexual ills that he claimed were rampant in pre-Kinsey America, the implementation of the Kinsey worldview has increased extant global sexual trauma while ushering in a host of new ills that are objectively defined as sexual anarchy. Like a cancer spreading throughout the body, sexual anarchy has spread throughout the fabric of society, affecting every aspect of American life and every man, woman and child.

According to the Rockefeller-funded Kinsey “study,” his “science” proved that humans had all along been copulating like insects or monkeys but systematically and hypocritically lying about their conduct. Adults claimed they were virgins, or maritally faithful, but, according to Kinsey, the truth was that most people were promiscuous and the widespread promiscuity had done no harm to the civil society.

Therefore, Kinsey said, all of the laws restraining sexual behavior–the laws that had favored and protected women, children and the family for generations –were simply old-fashioned leftovers from an uninformed and hypocritical era. Such sex laws were no longer valid in a “sexually enlightened and honest era.”

Enter “Kinsey’s pamphleteer,” Hugh Hefner and his Playboy magazine. At Kinsey’s urging, the country’s laws were gutted to resemble the free love, free life style Kinsey alleged Americans were living all along, and could finally live out with a free and open spirit–no more lies or pretense. Thus the 1955 American Law Institute Model Penal Code jettisoned the “common law” sexual standards that were based upon Biblical authority/precedent for “scientific law” based on Kinsey’s allegedly “objective data.”

The ALI recommended laws trivializing rape and allowing fornication, cohabitation, sodomy and adultery. Shortly thereafter, fornication, cohabitation and adultery were decriminalized so that they would become common, normal, and harmless, as Kinsey said they had been all along. In 1957, the United States Department of Defense used Kinsey and his team to conclude that homosexuals do not pose a security risk.

The ALI also recommended changing the definition of obscenity, which the Supreme Court did in 1960. That same year Kinsey’s claim that 10% to 37% of the male population is at least sometimes homosexual was used to promote “gay rights” in elite professions, e.g., medicine, psychiatry, social work, education, etc.

In 1961, Illinois became the first state to legalize heterosexual sodomy. In 1962 Ralph Slovenko wrote in the Vanderbilt Law Review that four or five year olds are provocateurs: “Even at the age of four or five, this seductiveness may be so powerful as to overwhelm the adult into committing the offense.”

That same year, the United States Supreme Court declared prayer in public schools unconstitutional[4] and the following year declared that Bible reading in public schools was unconstitutional.[5] The Judeo-Christian worldview was expunged from the classroom. Schools could no longer teach that fornication, adultery or cohabitation were illegal, nor could the health teachers imply that sex should be confined to marriage because that would reflect a “religious,” thus allegedly a non-scientific, worldview.

The only avenue remaining for the teaching of human reproduction was the “scientific,” i.e., Kinseyan, secular worldview.

By 1968 over 51,000 sex professionals had been trained by the unaccredited IASHS (Institute for the Advanced Study of Human Sexuality) to teach Kinseyan sexuality in schools and medical schools and to design school sex education curricula. In 1975, the IASHS began to accredit sex educators in “safe sex” through the Ph.D. level.

Contraception became a necessity in the face of the radical changes in the sexual landscape, and so it was legalized in 1965.[6]

TABLE 34, one of five tables documenting the Kinsey team’s child sexual abuse protocol in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948).

As evidence of lack of “consent” became the only criteria for sex crimes, alleged rape victims were commonly challenged as “liking” the rough sex and as consenting to the sexual activity. Prostitution and rape were increasingly referred to as “victimless crimes” in the courts and in the media.

Thus, the right to have sex for ‘fun’ and profit became the justification for a sex industry, inaugurated by Kinsey’s publicist, Hugh Hefner, that includes child and adult pornography, exhibitionism, prostitution and strip clubs, to name a few. That industry has grown to a multi-billion dollar market, giving its purveyors the resources and clout to negotiate grants to sexology research groups and organizations that create the sex education curricula for the nation’s schools, as well as access to lobbyists and, arguably, to state and federal legislators to continue to change the law to favor the sex industry’s interests.

Playboy, et. al also have funded Planned Parenthood, Sex Information & Education Council of the United States (SIECUS), the Kinsey Institute, and other “sexology” institutions. In 1967, Playboy provided the first of many grants to the ACLU to support drug use, pornography, abortion, homosexuality, school sex [mis]education and the elimination or reduction of sex offender penalties. Beginning in 1970, Playboy officially granted funds to NORML, the National Organization for the Repeal of Marijuana Laws.

The year 1969 brought about significant events related to the systematic effort to normalize homosexuality as championed by Kinsey 21 years earlier. The Gay Liberation Front was formed at the New York Alternative University. The American Sociological Association officially stated that homosexuality is normal, citing Kinsey’s “research.” The National Institutes of Mental Health Task Force on Homosexuality recommended legalizing private consensual homosexual acts (sodomy) citing to Kinsey’s “data.”[7] In 1972, the NIMH Task Force, led by Kinseyan disciples, urged that homosexuality be taught as a normal sexual variation in the nation’s schools.

“No fault” divorce was ushered in by California in 1970. By 1985, no fault divorce was the law in 49 states. This triggered a massive increase in the divorce rate and the impovertization of women and children, increasing the need for welfare and abortion, with the latter legalized in 1973.[8]

The absence of fathers in the home decreased the economic, social, emotional and spiritual home life, which triggered epidemic child sexual abuse, increased promiscuity, increased criminality–including rape and prostitution–increased venereal diseases and sterility in young women. With no father in the home, children were significantly more vulnerable to molestation by older children, which was redefined as “harmless” peer sex play by Kinsey. This “harmless” sex play led to increased rates of venereal disease, promiscuity, homosexual acting out and suicide.

These disorders then opened the door to additional, more virulent forms of mandated sex [mis]education couched as “pride” in one’s sexual “orientation,” anti-bullying, AIDS prevention and more instruction in “safe sex,” including mutual masturbation, oral and anal sodomy and viewing pornography.

By 1981 Dr. Mary Calderone, SIECUS president and past medical director of Planned Parenthood, took Kinsey one step further, asserting that children are sexual in the womb (Kinsey said children were sexual from birth).

Calderone announced that awareness of childhood sexuality was a primary goal of her organization. This set the “scientific” standard for distributing condoms to children nationwide. Therapeutic interventions were instituted to aid the now increasingly traumatized youth. Pharmocological intervention also increased, including mandated Hepatitis B vaccines for infants and HPV vaccines for elementary age children as STD “protections,” both of which were advocated in a 1977 “Child Rights” pedophile manifesto.

Hundreds of pages could be written on these issues and the additional fallout from Kinsey’s successful promiscuity propaganda that plummeted Reagan’s shining City on a Hill into a state of sexual anarchy.

We must focus now on how we stop the madness – not by ignoring the problem or by giving up in despair. God is on our side, just as He was on the side of those who founded this country. God used 56 God-fearing men to stand up to the largest imperial force in the free world and birth this great nation. He can use us to stand up against the current state of sexual anarchy, return this nation to our Judeo-Christian roots and rescue our children from the enemy who seeks to steal, kill and dstroy. As beneficiaries of God’s miraculous creation of these United States we cannot do anything less. Kinsey and his disciples at the Kinsey Institute have had more than 60 years to re-shape American culture. With Dr. Reisman’s decades of research we have the weapons to gain the upper hand, and we must band together to create the Judeo-Christian answer to the Kinsey Institute. We have the backing of the God of the universe. We can and must win this battle.

Notes:

1 - “Biography has become a battleground as moral conservatives like Dr. Judith Reisman strive to discredit

Alfred Kinsey in order to revisit another America era” warned Professor Carole Vance. Another infamous sexologist stated, “I have some problems, and I’m sure several of us do, with the use of the word “normal.” If you look at sexual abuse in children, the problem with defining it is, to what extent are we talking about aspects of behavior that we would call wrong….we don’t know really how harmful those experiences are….” (November 6, 1998, San Francisco State University seminar, “Kinsey At 50: Reflections On Changes In American Attitudes About Sexuality Half A Century After The Alfred Kinsey Studies,” lionizing Kinsey and addressing anarchist strategies for a new global sexual future).

2 - In the same year, Carnegie Foundation funds the ABA/ALI Legal Education Committee. Other pro-Kinsey books are published calling for sex law reforms and leniency for perpetrators.

3 - In that year, the Reece congressional committee was prohibited from investigating Kinsey’s data. Also, Planned Parenthood is founded in Washington, D.C.

4 - Engel v. Vitale, 370 U.S. 421 (1962).

5 - Abington School District v. Schempp, 372 U.S. 203 (1963).

6 - Griswold v. Connecticut, 381 U.S. 479 (1965) (married couples), Eisenstadt v. Baird, 405 U.S. 438 (1972) (unmarried couples).

7 - The Supreme Court upheld the criminalization of sodomy in Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986), but then overturned Bowers and found that homosexual sodomy could no longer be criminalized in Lawrence v. Texas, 539 U.S. 558 (2003). Lawrence was based largely on the 1955 ALI Model Penal Code, which has been widely referred to as a Kinsey document.

8 - Roe v. Wade, 410 US 113 (1973). As Justice Kennedy noted in the Lawrence opinion, Griswold and Eisenstadt were part of the background for the opinion in Roe. Lawrence, 539 U.S. at 565. This illustrates how Kinsey’s legacy has permeated every aspect of society.