Photo Credit: LifeNewsThe New York case that seeks to morph chimps from higher mammals into persons has reached the Court of Appeals. (Imagine the laughter if I’d written that sentence twenty years ago. Never say, “It can’t happen here”!)

The case involves Tommy the Chimp, which–not who–is being kept in allegedly neglectful and abusive conditions by Tommy’s owner who–not which–runs a roadside zoo. If the chimp is not being cared for properly, the proper response is to alert authorities to remedy the wrong.

chimpBut animal rights attorney Steven Wise isn’t that interested in the abuse or neglect angle. From the Yahoo News story:

One of the judges said the state has laws to protect animals from mistreatment and suggested they might be a more appropriate avenue to ensure Tommy’s welfare.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo Credit: National ReviewHome-schoolers represent the only authentically radical social movement in the United States (Occupy Wall Street was a fashion statement) and so they must be suppressed, as a malevolent committee of leftist academics and union bosses under the direction of Governor Dannel Malloy is preparing to do in Connecticut, using the Sandy Hook massacre as a pretext. The ghouls invariably rush to the podium after every school massacre, issuing their insipid press releases before the bodies have even cooled, and normally they’re after your guns. But the Malloy gang is after your children.

Malloy’s committee on the Newtown shootings is recommending that Connecticut require home-schooling families to present their children to the local authorities periodically for inspection, to see to it that their psychological and social growth is proceeding in the desired direction. For anybody even passingly familiar with contemporary government schools, which are themselves a peerless source of social and emotional dysfunction, this development is bitterly ironic.

Adam Lanza was the product of madness, but he also was very much a product of the public schools and their allied institutions. He was briefly — very briefly — homeschooled after his parents had exhausted every other option. His mental troubles began long before he was home-schooled and were in fact well known to and documented by the various credentialed authorities under whose management he spent his youth, from his kindergarten therapists to the scholars at Yale’s Child Study Center. Far from being removed from the public system, Lanza was still attending student-club meetings at Newtown’s high school just before the horrific events at Sandy Hook Elementary School.

As City Journal notes, the Malloy gang says that Lanza’s educational and medical records support its proposals, which is curious: Its members have no access to those records. But a government commission says that it is so, so it must be so.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo Credit: LifeSiteNewsIn a culture that elevates transient pleasure as a “value,” while reducing “value” itself to a subjective and utilitarian status, I suppose it should not be surprising that the worth of human beings is now constantly in question.

We once lived in a culture that drafted laws to protect “dependents”: the very young, the very old, and the disabled. This was done in recognition of the fact that a human being’s increased vulnerability correspondingly heightens our moral responsibility to that human being.

Now, however, the exit strategists of the Sexual Revolution are burning the candle at both ends – abortion for children in the womb, euthanasia and “assisted suicide” for the old. Both children and elderly parents, you see, can be costly and time-consuming.

I noted some time ago that the concept of “dying with dignity” is rapidly becoming “killing with impunity,” as our culture finds all sorts of excuses to assist “inconvenient” people in leaving Planet Earth.

There is a similarity to abortion, here, too—our technologically advanced culture is no longer looking for compassionate and ethical solutions to the complex, tragic, and often heartbreaking circumstances. Instead, we offer the solution that Darkness always has: Death. Disability, dependence, difficult life circumstances: a suction aspirator, a lethal injection, a bloody set of forceps. And the “problem,” as it were, is solved.

Read more from this story HERE.

Photo Credit: CNNYou may have read the poignant and powerful, CNN front-page story of cancer patient Brittany Maynard, 29, who has scheduled her death for Nov. 1? Come November 1, Maynard plans to take a pill given to her by her doctors as she wants to choose her own death and avoid hospice and the suffering her brain-tumor cancer may entail — Her story-gone-viral speaks of her plan to swallow the pill and choose death on her own terms in her own bedroom with her husband beside her and her favorite music playing in the background. Her story is raw — and she has all our love and prayers…. Before she dies by assisted suicide, Brittany states that she wants to use the rest of her time on earth to lobby for every American to have access to assisted suicide services.

After I read Brittany’s story yesterday… my friend Kara Tippetts dropped an email into my inbox — Kara was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 36. She has 4 young children. She continues to battle that cancer two years later as it has crossed the blood/brain barrier and has metastasized into her entire body. I’ve been reading Kara’s journey since the beginning, profoundly moved by this woman’s courage to embrace all of her life as it comes to her… Kara’s exceptional book released this week, The Hardest Peace: Expecting Grace in the Midst of Life’s Hard — and Kara humbly speaks important words into this current news story and national debate about assisted suicide with a tender weight & compassionate gravity that only someone, a mother, a wife, a daughter, bravely facing terminal cancer can — we earnestly love and pray for both women as they each share own their stories:

Dear Brittany Maynard,

This morning my best friend and I read your story.

My heart ached for you, and I’m simply grieved by your terminal brain tumor, for the less than 6 months the doctor’s gave you, you just past your 29th birthday.

With a heavy heart, I left my home and headed for my oncologist. I too am dying, Brittany.

Read more from this story HERE.