It’s a dark day in California politics when a bill supporting life is killed before even being assigned to a legislative committee, and a bill pushing assisted suicide gets Republican votes.
Two California Repoublicans helped pass the revived assisted suicide bill, thereby helping Democrats fast track it.
It’s as if some have been reading from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals: “If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.”
What’s up is down right now in the California Legislature.
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Alinsky
Following the release of several horrific videos exposing top Planned Parenthood directors negotiating to sell aborted fetus organs and tissue to the highest bidders, Assemblyman Jim Patterson introduced a bill to eliminate state funding for any clinic in California that provides fetal tissue for research in exchange for money.
The Fetal Tissue Exploitation Prevention Act was introduced Aug. 3 in response to the undercover videos by the Center for Medical Progress showing Planned Parenthood officials casually discussing the practice of providing aborted babies in exchange for payment.
“If you push a negative hard enough, it will push through and become a positive.” Alinsky
Patterson’s bill was killed by the Assembly Rules Committee before it ever even got assigned a committee.
At the same Assembly Rules Committee hearing where they refused to put Patterson’s pro-life bill on the agenda, the assisted dying bill, which had been killed previously, and was just reintroduced using a new bill number, ABX2-15, received enough votes to make it out to its first hearing. Death over life.
ABX2-15 is by Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman, D-Stockton, Senators Bill Monning, D-Carmel, and Lois Wolk, D-Davis, the same three bill authors of the recently shelved SB 128, the End of Life Option Act.
SB 128 couldn’t get any traction at all in committee because there were enough Democrats who opposed it. Six Latino Democrats on the Assembly Health Committee would not support it after Los Angeles Archbishop Jose H. Gomez spoke out fervently against the bill. “The compassion that doctor-assisted suicide offers is hollow,” Archbishop Gomez said. “And this legislation has dangerous implications for our state, especially for the poor and vulnerable.”
Eggman, Monning and Wolk, all Democrats, took advantage of a special session of the California legislature, called by Gov. Jerry Brown, to jam the pro-death bill through. This is an abuse of the legislative process, and should concern all Californians.
Assemblywoman Eggman insists assisted suicide has worked so well in Oregon, that there are no court cases against it. However, in Oregon, the law was written with a clause protecting those involved in an assisted suicide from lawsuits.
“The risk of mistake and coercion and abuse are really too great,” said Diane Coleman, founder and CEO of Not Dead Yet, an advocacy group that informs and lobbies on behalf of the disabled.
“Keep the pressure on. Never let up.” Alinsky
June 2015--Wolk celebrates the Senate's passage of SB 128, The End of Life Option, with coauthor Senator William Monning and supporters of the bill.
What is also concerning are the Republicans who have voted in support of this bill — apparently all part of the newly arranged committee to make sure the previous “no” votes were gone. Committee members Assemblywoman Catharine Baker, R-San Ramon, and Assemblyman Brian Maienschein, R-San Diego, voted to pass ABX2-15 from the Assembly Public Health and Developmental Services Committee.
Baker, the only elected Republican in the Legislature from the San Francisco Bay area, now finds herself in hot water. The Patients Rights Action Fund has been calling voters in her district, expressing their dismay with her “breaking ranks with Republicans,” and “cutting political deals with liberal Democrats.” I was told that Baker even had cover from Assembly minority leader Kristen Olsen on her vote. What’s up is definitely down right now in the California Legislature, if Olsen did indeed break ranks with the Republican Party Platform, which states: “The California Republican Party is the party that protects innocent life because we believe life begins at conception and ends at natural death.“
During her campaign, and in an KQED interview following her win, Baker said individual decisions as to how one conducts their life should be left up to the individual. So it’s odd that she voted with Democrats on government mandated assisted suicide.
Even Gov. Jerry Brown shared displeasure with the bill’s special session introduction. Brown called the Extraordinary Session to pass $6 billion in transportation taxes. He said it is not the proper place or process to try to implement the controversial assisted suicide bill.
“The third rule of the ethics of means and ends is that in war the ends justifies almost any means.” Alinsky
“We’re shocked that they would use this legislative maneuver to jam through a bill that’s clearly a life and death matter for Californians,” said Marilyn Golden, a policy analyst with Disability Rights Education and Defense Fund. Golden has been fighting assisted suicide for many years, and has repeatedly warned that “choice is deceptive.”
“The problem, of course, is that once the issue is reduced to a subjective personal choice we are, for all intents and purposes, out of the suicide prevention business,” Republican media consultant Wayne Johnson recently wrote in an op ed. “Why? Because when choice is king, waiting periods and consent forms become nothing more than infringements on a basic right, one that the 15-year-old heartbroken over a romantic breakup has as much right to claim as a presumably terminal cancer patient.”
Assemblywoman Susan Talamantes Eggman, D-Stockton
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also, it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.” Alinsky
Proponents of assisted dying also gloss over the actual data and experiences of the significantly increasing number of doctor-assisted deaths in the Netherlands and Belgium, two countries with medically assisted suicide. In the Netherlands, where euthanasia has been legal since 2002, deaths doubled in just six years.
“Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” Alinsky
The bill’s authors claim the bill is necessary because of Brittany Maynard, the 29-year-old California newlywed who became a media darling when she chose to relocate with her husband to Oregon to end her life following a diagnosis of late-stage brain cancer.
What many don’t know is Maynard also became a full-time activist with Compassion and Choices, a George Soros-funded pro-suicide-organization that has tried to convince lawmakers it is a grassroots organization. Compassion and Choices is formerly known as the Hemlock Society, whose founding slogan, “Good life, good death,” was discarded for the politically correct sounding, “Promoting end-of-life choice.”
Far from grassroots, the well-funded Compassion and Choices works to convince the sick and depressed that taking your own life is honorable.
ABX2-15 was also passed out of the Assembly Finance Committee, but received “no” votes from Republican Assembly members Frank Bigelow, Melissa Melendez, and Jay Obernolte.
“The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.” Alinsky
According to the CA Department of Health Care Services, California Planned Parenthood providers received $230 million in state funds to from 2012-2013. Yet rather than investigating the allegations against Planned Parenthood, California Attorney General Kamala Harris announced she would legally pursue the video creators, Center for Medical Progress. Harris is running for US Senate in the seat being vacated by far-left Senator Barbara Boxer; Harris obviously hopes her outrageous move is red-meat for the liberal Boxer constituents.
“To investigate the Center for Medical Progress for possible wrong-doing, but ignore the possibility that Planned Parenthood is selling body parts, would be wickedly irresponsible and selective,” Patterson said. “It is our hope that AG Harris will do what is morally right in this situation and revoke Planned Parenthood’s free pass to dismember babies for cash.”