The 'Let the Elderly Die' Chorus - The Bulwark - 0 views
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what the coronavirus crisis has revealed about many Republicans and conservative commentators—and what they care about most—has not been pretty.
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whether stay-at-home, social-distancing practices should be stopped sooner than medical experts recommend. This is an urgent policy matter that touches on some profound moral questions.
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if people don’t take their health seriously or if they make risky financial decisions, they shouldn’t always expect government to step in to save them.
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In the case of the coronavirus pandemic, however, some Republicans and conservative commentators have begun to make an argument more radical than “people will die.” It’s this: People should die.
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Patrick apparently sees a dilemma—two options and no other choices: Either we try to save people now, including the elderly, and risk immense damage to the economy, or we get back to work immediately and get the economy moving again by letting the elderly die, perhaps even encouraging them to welcome death for the greater good.
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Especially troubling is that some of the people who are making the case that we should intentionally concede lives to the coronavirus—especially the lives of the elderly, the disabled, the vulnerable, the infirm—are prominent figures in the pro-life movement
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a number of people who have built their careers on being pro-life have abandoned that, converting to prosperity gospel by way of Bishop Trump.
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Consider the argument posed by Rusty Reno in the pages of the magazine he edits, the largely conservative Catholic First Things. Reno criticizes New York governor Andrew Cuomo for saying “I did everything we could do. And if everything we do saves just one life, I’ll be happy.” To Reno, Cuomo’s statement represents a “disastrous sentimentalism” because “there are many things more precious than life.”
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Responding to Reno’s article, Erick Erickson writes: It is sad to see a religious publication try to cast the extraordinary effort of stopping a global pandemic [as] “demonic.” But that is what it does. It cheapens the effort to save lives as sentimental and essentially advances a materialistic approach of wanting to make money and let people die because people are always going to die. Now, of course, the writer knows he is doing this so he chooses to denounce materialism while essentially advocating for it.
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And in the liberal Catholic magazine Commonweal, Jared Lucky powerfully rebuts Reno’s argument, pointing out that “today’s quarantine restrictions complement centuries of Christian response to epidemics.
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Few Christians would ask for this cup, but we must drink it—to serve God by serving our neighbors, and to grow closer to God through the contemplation of death. . . . Quarantine is . . . a costly act of service that meets the urgent human needs of our neighbors. That service may involve going to work—at a hospital or a testing center—or staying home. But make no mistake: these sacrifices are not a surrender to death. They are a sacrifice to the God who gives life.
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Certainly the medical and economic stakes are, in Trump’s own mind, jumbled together with the political calculus for his re-election, as he made clear in a typically paranoid, anti-media tweet on Wednesday:
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Thankfully, not everyone in the Republican leadership and conservative punditry has adopted the view that we should sacrifice the vulnerable by prematurely ending social distancing and getting back to work. Here, for example, is Wyoming representative Liz Cheney: