What with the parliamentary motion to 'ease' the restrictions on suicide/euthanasia and today's reported decision by the High Court allowing doctors to over-ride parental objections to turn off the life support of a disabled and critically ill baby, I'm wondering how it is that we (society) managed to get into such a position that the right to life of the living and the long-since born - let alone the unborn - is so irrelevant to those who make the laws and those who uphold them.
I can't work it out in my mind. When did 'we' suddenly decide that we could take into our hands that right which previously we had believed belonged only to God? At what point did we decide we were better than God at deciding what life is valid and worthy of existing and what wasn't? How did we suddenly discover that people who took this position were in the majority - at least amongst our lawmakers and law adjudicators?
And how can this be reversed?
It seems to me that those who believe - as I do - passionately in the sanctity and inviolability of life from the very moment of conception need to step up and not just to be counted but to take action to become part of the rulers of the country.
People of good faith and who believe in the right to life need to decide to join their personally preferred political organisation and put themselves forward for selection for candidature to elected office. It's the only way to change things. We can sit on our backsides wringing our hands and crying about the lost and wasted lives, but those tears will, ultimately, be empty if we're not prepared to back them up with positive action (by which I mean actually doing something).
It's a question I have to ask myself. It's a question everyone needs to ask themselves. Our political class seems to be lead by those who are more than a bit amoral at times. Does our morality somehow dissuade us from joining in with them? Are we scared of being tarred by their brush? Perhaps instead Politics needs a good old-fashioned clean-out.
It's time for a new politics. It's time for people - worthy, intelligent, just people - to stand up and take the reigns. People who, previously, had never thought themselves the right sort of people to make laws and run the country. Because, let's face it, it looks like there's a lot of very wrong sorts of people doing it right now. We need a wholesale change. Not just of political party, but of the calibre of political people.
