The New York Legislature has just approved a bill permitting same-sex marriage in the nation’s third most populous state. The hold-up for the past week was a debate over what is called the “religious exemptions,” granting special rights to people who, for ostensibly religious reasons, object to same-sex marriage. For example, will the Knights of Columbus be required to open its halls for same-sex weddings? Will Catholic adoption agencies be allowed to refuse to place children with same-sex married couples? Can a Muslim caterer or chauffeur lawfully refuse to serve a same-sex wedding?

The religious exemption push is a ploy for elevating God experts above the laws that apply to the rest of us. Suppose, for example, that a non-believer declines to photograph a same-sex wedding not for any religious reasons, but just because he finds the whole idea offensive – that “guys kissing guys” is really gross. Nothing in any of the proposed exemptions would cover that. But if it’s God telling him to stay away, that’s different.

The exemption finally adopted by the legislature Friday night does not go as far as the God experts wanted. It covers only religious organizations and clergy, not just individuals claiming religious belief. “Religious organizations,” though, covers a lot more than churches, including any affiliated group like the Knights of Columbus. Ordinary caterers and photographers are not exempted. It shouldn’t be a demanding legal challenge, though, for haters to affiliate themselves with some sort of church organization so they can thumb their nose at the law as well.

The new exemption for religious organizations covers a lot more than same sex marriage. “Nothing in this article shall limit …[any such religious organization] from taking such action as is calculated by such organization to promote the religious principles for which it is established or maintained.” I’m not a New York lawyer, but it looks to me like this guarantees the right of religious adoption agencies to refuse to serve legitimately married New York couples of whom they disapprove, such as couples belonging to the same sex.

What’s more, this new religious exemption is in no way limited to same sex marriage. It allows these organizations, most of which are tax exempt, to discriminate against anyone, at any time, for any reason that they allege will promote their religious principles. Historically, God-based discrimination in matters of marriage and family has centered far more on race than on sexual preference, so the legal door is now open to roll back 60 years of racial progress.

God’s disdain for sexual race-mixing goes all the way back to the Old Testament, which was as clear as it could be on the question of Jews marrying non-Jews: “And when the Lord thy God shall deliver them before thee; thou shalt smite them, and utterly destroy them; thou shalt make no covenant with them, nor shew mercy unto them: Neither shalt thou make marriages with them; thy daughter thou shalt not give unto his son, nor his daughter shalt thou take unto thy son.” When Ezra returned to Jerusalem from Babylon he was shocked:

For they have taken of their daughters for themselves, and for their sons: so that the holy seed have mingled themselves with the people of those lands: yea, the hand of the princes and rulers hath been chief in this trespass. And when I heard this thing, I rent my garment and my mantle, and plucked off the hair of my head and of my beard, and sat down astonished.

God experts in the New World relied on these passages and others to persuade civil authorities to pass laws against miscegenation as early as 1660. Eventually, thirty different states banned interracial marriage. Six of them put the ban in their state constitutions; Mississippi made mixed-race marriage a felony punishable by life imprisonment. Just as with same-sex marriage today, the opposition to mixed-race marriage was overwhelmingly cast in religious terms – it had to be, because common-sense arguments were so unpersuasive. For example, Richmond’s Christian Herald explained in 1877 that “God has made the two races widely different not only in complexion, but in their instincts and social qualities. We take it for granted it was not the purpose of the Creator that they should be blended. Nature abhors the union.”

William M. Brown, bishop of the Episcopal Church of Arkansas warned that if the black race were “absorbed” and the white race “ruined as a result of intermarriage,” then

God’s plan in the creation of the two races, so far as America is concerned, would be defeated. … Inasmuch as God made yellow, black and white people, instead of only black or yellow, or white when He could have made all any one of these colors, it must be concluded that He had some great purpose to accomplish in doing so. Hence, the amalgamation of the races, or the aping of one by the other, must be wrong because it thwarts God’s plan.

In 1930, Senator Thomas Heflin used the Senate floor to propound God’s views on the marriage of a black man and white woman in New York City, which took place the previous fall:

God had a purpose in making four separate and distinct races. The white, the red, the yellow, and the black. God intended that each of the four races should preserve its blood free from mixture with other races and preserve race integrity and prove itself true to the purpose that God had in mind for each of them when He brought them into being. The great white race is the climax and crowning glory of God’s creation. … The fact that the Roman Catholic Church permits negroes and whites to belong to the same Catholic Church and to go to the same Catholic schools and permits and sanctions the marriage between whites and negroes in the United States is largely responsible for the loose, dangerous, and sickening conditions that exist in New York City and State today.

Even former President Harry Truman told a reporter in 1963 that mixed-race marriage “ran counter to the teachings of the Bible,” while evangelist Jerry Falwell warned that miscegenation would “destroy our [white] race eventually.”

A unanimous Supreme Court invalidated state laws against miscegenation in 1967, but it has taken a while to remove those laws from the statute books. When a referendum was held in 2000 to do so in Alabama, our second most religious state, over 40% of the electorate voted “No.” Those who have studied the data conclude that white voters split almost 50-50 on the question.

Then there are the Mormons, who teach that people are born non-white because their souls committed grievous sins back during their pre-birth period. According to the refreshingly blunt Brigham Young: “Shall I tell you the law of God in regard to the African race? If the white man who belongs to the chosen seed mixes his blood with the seed of Cain, the penalty, under the law of God, is death on the spot. This will always be so.” Mormon children learned from their “Juvenile Instructor” manual that “In fact we believe it to be a great sin in the eyes of our Heavenly Father for a white person to marry a black one. And further, that it is a proof of the mercy of God that no such race appear able to continue for many generations.” The Mormons have allowed miscegenation since receiving a new revelation from one of their Gods in 1978. It’s interesting, though, that a certain presidential candidate chose to spend two years of his life as a missionary spreading the Mormon race message a decade before this change was made.

I’m not complaining about the New York legislators. The majority swallowed a distasteful compromise to achieve a greater goal, proving that the profoundly humanist ideal of democracy can actually work, at least in fits and starts. But once again, the 11^th Commandment prevails: Rules are for schmucks. God experts do what they want.

Luis Granados

Hitler’s 1919 letter urging “removal” of Jews from Germany, an original copy of which was unveiled last week by the Simon Wiesenthal Center, launched his rise to political prominence in Germany. His progress was monitored nervously by Jews, labor unions, and lovers of freedom throughout the West. When he won the chancellorship in 1933, movements were launched in the United States and elsewhere for a boycott of German goods. The idea was to mobilize international pressure either to soften his threatened actions or to force him from power – exactly as international boycotts helped crush South African apartheid 50 years later.

Not everyone supported the boycott, though. In fact, many Zionist Jews not only actively opposed it, but welcomed Hitler’s victory, because it would accelerate the removal of Jews from Germany to Palestine – and teach them a lesson. The Zionist newspaper Hapoel Hatsair described Nazi persecution of the Jews as God’s “punishment” for having tried to integrate into German society instead of leaving for Palestine while it was still possible to do so.

The Zionist Federation of Germany welcomed the new Führer with a warm address:

Zionism recognized decades ago that as a result of the assimilationist trend, symptoms of deterioration were bound to appear, which it seeks to overcome by carrying out its challenge to transform Jewish life completely … Zionism believes that a rebirth of national life, such as is occurring in German life through adhesion to Christian and national values, must also take place in the Jewish national group. For the Jew, too, origin, religion, community of fate and group consciousness must be of decisive significance in the shaping of his life.

In Palestine, the Zionist labor magazine Davar affirmed that:

However, even if we suppose a return to the status existing before the Hitler revolution to be within the realm of political possibility, even then the Jewish democrat, liberal, socialist, assimilationist may perhaps be satisfied with his reinstatement in equal rights, but a Zionist cannot rest content with this, since he has a special conception, since this is not the ideal of Zionism nor the altar for its sacrifices. … Now we have a new goal and no longer content ourselves with “arousing world opinion.” Our ideal is not the obtaining of rights, citizenship rights or minority rights, for the Jews of Germany, but the obtaining of a Palestine visa for them, in addition to all that is necessary for such a visa so that it, too, may not become a mere scrap of paper.

In the ultimate “politics makes strange bedfellows” arrangement, Zionists actively collaborated with Germany’s Nazis, developing a scheme called “haavara” to facilitate legal movement of German Jews and a portion of their capital to Palestine despite restrictions on currency transfer, by selling German manufactured goods in Palestine. Haavara neatly undercut the international boycott by opening new markets for Nazi products. Once goods entered Palestine, it was then a trivial matter to resell them elsewhere; one pro-boycott Jew disgustedly described Palestine as “the official scab-agent against the boycott in the Near-East.” Businessmen fought over who would have the rights to skim profits from all the money movement; the winning firm was represented in Berlin by future Israeli Prime Minister Levi Eshkol.

From 1933 through the early years of World War II, the Hitler regime favored and actively promoted Jewish emigration from Germany to Palestine. Hitler cynically remarked that he’d be delighted to see the Jews leave “on luxury ships.” At one point, the Nazis even despatched future Final Solution organizer Adolf Eichmann on a mission to Palestine, to work out loose ends of the haavara scheme. Eichmann was impressed; he wrote that “Had I been a Jew, I would have been a fanatical Zionist. I could not imagine being anything else. In fact, I would have been the most ardent Zionist imaginable.” Propaganda minister Goebbels had a medal struck to celebrate the collaboration: on one side a swastika, on the other a Zionist star.

In 1938, President Roosevelt convened a meeting of the Western nations at Evian, France, to promote alternatives for Jews wishing to escape Hitler’s oppression. Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion was deeply concerned, telling his colleagues that he did “not know if the conference will open the gates of other countries … But I am afraid [it] might cause tremendous harm to Eretz Israel and Zionism. … Our main task is to reduce the harm, the danger and the disaster … and the more we emphasize the terrible distress of the Jewish masses in Germany, Poland and Rumania, the more damage we shall cause.” With no public pressure from the people it was trying to help, the conference produced few concrete results, other than an easing of red tape for German Jewish emigration to the United States and an offer from the Dominican Republic to take in 100,000 refugees – which the Zionists never seriously pursued.

Shortly after Evian, the Kristallnacht pogroms exploded across Germany; Ben-Gurion worried that “the human conscience” might induce more countries to open their doors further to Jewish refugees from Germany. He saw this as a threat and warned: “Zionism is in danger!” While the Holocaust raged, Ben-Gurion wrote that “If I knew that it was possible to save all the children in Germany by transporting them to England, but only half of them by transporting them to Palestine, I would choose the second – because we face not only the reckoning of those children, but the historical reckoning of the Jewish people.” He later blocked plans to transfer thousands of child Holocaust survivors in frail health from wretched camps for displaced persons to safe havens elsewhere in Europe, for fear that such resettlement “might weaken the struggle for free immigration of Jewish refugees to Palestine.” Even the Final Solution had not altered his view from the time that Zionists opposed the boycott in the early 1930s: “The Zionist role is not to rescue the survivors in Europe, but to rescue Eretz Israel for the Jewish people.”

Despite Ben-Gurion’s intensive efforts, though, far more Jews who escaped Germany in the 1930s chose to live in the Americas rather than in Palestine. According to some Zionists, that’s because they were bad Jews. “There is something positive in their tragedy,” Menahem Ussishkin said at a meeting of the Zionist executive, “and that is that Hitler oppressed them as a race and not as a religion. Had he done the latter, half the Jews in Germany would simply have converted to Christianity.”

Zionists not only talked the talk; some of them tried to walk the walk. In 1941, the Zionist “National Military Organization,” whose leadership included future Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir, delivered an astonishing offer to German diplomats in Vichy France:

It is often stated in the speeches and utterances of the leading statesmen of National Socialist Germany that a prerequisite of the New Order in Europe requires the radical solution of the Jewish question through evacuation (“Jew-free Europe”). The evacuation of the Jewish masses from Europe is a precondition for solving the Jewish question; but this can only be made possible and complete through the settlement of these masses in the home of the Jewish people, Palestine, and through the establishment of a Jewish state in its historic boundaries. … The establishment of the historic Jewish state on a national and totalitarian basis, bound by a treaty with the German Reich, would be in the interest of a maintained and strengthened future German position of power in the Near East. …

Proceeding from these considerations, the NMO in Palestine, under the condition the above-mentioned national aspirations of the Israeli freedom movement are recognized on the side of the German Reich, offers to actively take part in the war on Germany’s side. This offer by the NMO, covering activity in the military, political and information fields, in Palestine and, according to our determined preparations, outside Palestine, would be connected to the military training and organizing of Jewish manpower in Europe, under the leadership and command of the NMO. These military units would take part in the fight to conquer Palestine, should such a front be decided upon. … The cooperation of the Israeli freedom movement would also be along the lines of one of the last speeches of the German Reich Chancellor, in which Herr Hitler emphasized that he would utilize every combination and coalition in order to isolate and defeat England.

The Nazis never replied. The founder of the NMO, Avraham Stern, was honored by an Israeli commemorative postage stamp in 1978.

Luis Granados

The Simon Wiesenthal Center put on display this week the first known anti-Semitic writing of Adolf Hitler, a letter he typed and quite legibly signed in 1919. Unfortunately, at the same time, they put a politically correct spin on what the letter actually says, while glossing over some inconvenient facts about people who were saying exactly the same thing as Hitler at exactly the same time.

As you can read here, the letter says nothing at all about exterminating, annihilating, or otherwise killing any Jews. In fact, Hitler pointedly rejects the whole idea of pogroms against the Jews, disdaining such violence as based on “emotional grounds,” in contrast to his own loftier “anti-Semitism based on reason.”

At the very moment Hitler was writing, pogroms were racking the nearby Ukraine, during which some 35,000 to 50,000 Jews were murdered. The Hitler of 1919 disdained that approach, championing instead the “systematic legal combating and elimination of the privileges of the Jews, that which distinguishes the Jews from the other aliens who live among us (an Aliens Law). The ultimate objective must, however, be the irrevocable removal of the Jews in general.”

Today, with the benefit of hindsight, the rabbi who put the letter on display said that if people had taken bets in 1919, “they all would have bet this is a lot of nonsense, nothing would happen like this. And 22 years later, it happened exactly as he wrote it.” But it didn’t happen at all as Hitler wrote it. What happened 22 years later was the commencement of the “Final Solution,” the systematic extermination of the Jews of Nazi-conquered territories. That’s not what the letter says – it says “removal,” an entirely different and not very novel idea.

The first “removal” of Jews was effected by the Roman Empire, back in the 2^nd century. After the second major rebellion in Palestine, which cost thousands of Roman lives and massive sums of Roman money to subdue, the frustrated Emperor Hadrian ordered the permanent removal of all Jews from Jerusalem, and even renamed the city.
Read the rest of this entry &raquo

Dr. Jack Kevorkian was a world-renowned activist for the cause of physician-assisted voluntary euthanasia. He waged a tireless battle against the medical establishment, politicians, theologians, and all who would actively resist a comprehensive, rational, and compassionate program of death with dignity. Kervorkian died on Friday, June 3, in Michigan. He was eighty-three.

The following article was adapted from the speech delivered by Dr. Kevorkian upon receiving the 1994 Humanist Hero Award from the American Humanist Association at its annual conference in Detroit, Michigan. It was originally published in the November/December 1994 Humanist magazine.

In it he asks:

What is ethics? Can you define it? My definition is simple: ethics is saying and doing what is right, at the time. Does that make sense? And that changes. Notice I added “at the time.”

and says this about what it is to be a humanist:

I used to define maturity as the inability to be shocked. So I guess in some ways we’re still immature. But if you’re truly mature, and a true humanist, you can never be shocked.

A Modern Inquisition
by Jack Kevorkian

This is probably the first time that this august body has been addressed by someone under indictment on two counts of first-degree murder.

I was ignorant of many things when I graduated from college. I was uneducated; maybe I still am. All I was trained for was a craft. I think that’s true of colleges generally in this country today–they train you for a craft. But everything of value I learned in my life I learned after college, on my own: philosophy, music…. The one deficiency I have is literature; I’m very weak there.

So I wasn’t attuned, back then, to what life in our society is. I was put by fortune into this position, which has given me a real deep insight into what so-called civilized society is. And I learned one thing: that society is not civilized. And I learned another thing: that we are still deeply mired in the Dark Ages.

Superhighways crossing each other at several levels, color television sets and compact discs, these to me don’t indicate the height of civilization, and they don’t indicate enlightenment either–in fact, they’re dangerous tools of the Dark Ages.

The Inquisition is still alive and well. The only difference is that today it’s much more dangerous and subtle. The inquisitors don’t burn you at the stake anymore; they slowly sizzle you. They make sure you pay dearly for what you do. In fact, they kill you often in a subtle way. My situation is a perfect example of it.

This is not self-pity, understand. I don’t regret the position I’m in. I am not a hero, either–by my definition, anyway. To me, anyone who does what should be done is not a hero. Heroes to me are very, very rare. And I still feel that I’m only doing what I, as a physician, should do. A license has nothing to do with it; I am a physician and therefore I will act like a physician whenever I can. That doesn’t mean that I’m more compassionate than anyone else, but there is one thing I am that many aren’t and that’s honest.

To me, the biggest deficiency today and the biggest problem with society is dishonesty. It underlies almost every crisis and every problem you can name. It’s almost an inevitable thing; in fact, it’s unavoidable as you mature. Children are born perfectly honest–and slowly learn how to become dishonest. They are trained at it. We feel that a little dishonesty greases the wheels of society, that it makes things easier for everybody if we lie a little to each other. But all this dishonesty becomes cumulative after a while. If everyone were perfectly honest at all times, if human nature were such that it could stand that, you would find many fewer problems in the world. I know that’s impractical. Maybe I’m a hopeless idealist. But at least that’s looking at the problem at its root. Children, by the way, can handle honesty. They swear and curse at each other, and it doesn’t affect them very much. But it’s difficult to be perfectly honest as an adult.

I never considered myself a humanist. I’m not a joiner. I never join any organization. And yet humanism, I think, is the closest to what I think is a good way of living in society. What is the best rule for life? I often ask myself that. Some people will tell you, “the Golden Rule is best.” Well, I don’t know–is it? We spout platitudes without thinking. We’re trained not to think, really; we’re trained to respond to platitudes. Education does that. I think education in this society is geared toward making sure you are well brainwashed by the time you are an adult.

The Golden Rule states: “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” But that doesn’t always apply. What if I met a masochist or a sadist? You see, it wouldn’t work. I think the best rule for life is “Say and do what you wish, whenever you wish, so long as you do not harm another person or his or her property.” Does that sound right? Now if every adult human being acted that way, this would be a much better society. We may not have color television sets, and we may not have super-highways, but we would probably be a better society. We certainly wouldn’t have the Inquisition.So all I’m doing is what a physician should do. I’m not really frightened by what’s happening to me; I’m not even intimidated. I’m annoyed! In fact, I’m reinforced in what I’m doing because of the opposition, which is so irrational.

By the way, this is not a one-man operation. I keep getting all the credit, and I don’t deserve it. I’ve got tremendous legal support in Geoffrey Fieger and Michael Swartz. You’d be amazed how much of a burden they relieve me of I can’t think of anybody else who could do it the way Geoffrey does it, and he deserves as much credit as I. He handles all the legal aspects, which, as you know, are enormous, and gives me free rein on what I should do. Credit must also go to my sister Margo and to my other sister Flora, who’s now in Europe. Margo and Flora were with me during the Janet Atkins case, and I must admit that I couldn’t have done it without them. I was very nervous–I was actually a little frightened–and they gave me great moral support. They were just as nervous as I, but they tried not to show it, which helped. I must also mention my other assistant, my medical technologist Neal Nichol. These people make up the nucleus of the group that deserves the credit; I’m just the figurehead here.

When we first started this work, we didn’t expect any of the publicity that followed. We tried to keep this low key. I have been accused of grandstanding, recklessness, and publicity seeking, all of which, of course, is not true. You must understand that the entire mainstream media, especially in the first year or two, were totally against what I’m doing. Entirely! It was unanimous. They tried to make my work look very negative–they tried to make me look negative–so that they could denigrate the concept we’re working on. They said I should not be identified with the concept, yet they strived to do just that. They insulted and denigrated me and then hoped that it would spill over onto the concept. It didn’t work, however; according to the polls, people may be split 50-50 on what they think of me, but they are three-to-one in favor of the concept, and that’s never changed.

Now isn’t it strange that on a controversial subject of this magnitude–one that cuts across many disciplines–the entire editorial policy of the country is on one side? Doesn’t that strike you as strange? Even on a contentious issue like abortion, there is editorial support for both sides. And our issue–death with dignity–as far as we’re concerned, is simpler than abortion. So why is every mainstream editorial writer and newspaper in the country against us on this? Not one has come out in wholehearted support of us, even though public opinion is on our side.

As I surmise it, they’re in a conspiracy, which is not a revelation to many people. But with whom? Well, let’s take a look at who’s against this: organized religion, organized medicine, and organized big money. Now, that’s a lot of power. Why is organized medicine against this? For a couple of reasons, I think: first, because the so-called profession–which is no longer a profession; it’s really a commercial enterprise and has been for a long time–is permeated with religious overtones. The basis of so-called medical ethics is religious ethics. The Hippocratic oath is a religious manifesto–Pythagorean (pagan, by the way)–they don’t even mind that. It is not medical. Hippocrates didn’t write it; we don’t know who did, but we think it’s from the Pythagoreans. So, if you meet a physician who says, “Life is sacred,” be careful: we didn’t study sanctity in medical school. You are talking to a theologian first, probably a business person second, and a physician third.

The second reason that organized medicine is against physician-assisted voluntary euthanasia is because of the money involved. If a patient’s suffering is curtailed by three weeks, can you imagine how much that adds up to in the medical and healthcare field? Let’s look at Alzheimer’s disease. They say, “Well, that’s not terminal.” Well, it is terminal. Any process that curtails natural life is a terminal disease; the duration of the terminal process is the only difference. Some cancers last a week in their terminal phase. Alzheimer’s disease is terminal. I understand that we have four million Alzheimer’s cases in this country. Let’s assume that one out of ten opts to end his or her life at a certain stage, just when it is getting bad. That’s 400,000 people depriving some nursing homes of perhaps four or five years of care for a vegetating human being. At $30,000 a year, multiplied by 400,000, times five years–you’re into billions of dollars. And that’s just one disease, and one out of ten people.

How about the pharmaceutical industry? A lot of drugs are used in those last several months and years of life, which also add up to billions and billions of dollars. So you can see why they are going to oppose this.

That’s what is so dismaying to me; that’s what makes me cynical. You have to be cynical in life when you read about a situation that’s so terrible and so incorrigible. There are certain ways to deal with it: you can go along with it, which is hard to do; you can go insane, which is a refuge (and some do that); or you can face it with deep cynicism. I’ve opted for cynicism.

In responding to the religious issues, I ask this: why not let all the religious underpinnings of medicine apply only to the ethics of religious hospitals and leave the secular hospitals alone? It’s a perfect solution. We’re not going to tell the religious hospitals what to do; they can perform any insanity they wish. But what they can’t do is impose that insanity on the rest of us. The doctors who work in those religious hospitals can refuse to do abortions, they can refuse assisted suicide or euthanasia, they can do anything they want. But they have no right to impose what they call a universal medical ethic on secular institutions.

Besides, what is ethics? Can you define it? My definition is simple: ethics is saying and doing what is right, at the time. Does that make sense? And that changes. Notice I added “at the time.”

Religion claims to have eternal truths; philosophy, too. I’m not singling out religion; you’ve got idiotic philosophy as well. You’ve got Kant with his unknowable realm. What sense does it make to hypothesize an unknowable realm? When you know it, there is no longer an unknowable realm. And if it’s unknowable, you’re never going to get there.

Ethics is saying and doing what is right at the time and that changes. Geoffrey and I use the example of coal as fuel. Seventy-five years ago, if I told you that for Christmas I was going to have a truck deliver 10 tons of coal to your house, you would have been delighted. If I told you that today, you would be insulted. Doing the right thing changes with time.

That’s true of human society also. There is a primitive society–I don’t know which one exactly–whose members were shocked to learn that we embalm our dead, place them in boxes, and then bury them in the ground. Do you know what they do? They eat them. To them, it’s ethical and moral and honorable to devour the corpse of your loved one. Now we’re shocked at that, right? It’s all a matter of acculturation, time, where you are, and who you are. Now if I visited this primitive society and learned that they do that, and I was a real humanist, I’d say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” And if the so-called savage in turn said, “Gee, that’s interesting what you do,” then he or she would be a humanist. I used to define maturity as the inability to be shocked. So I guess in some ways we’re still immature. But if you’re truly mature, and a true humanist, you can never be shocked. If they eat their dead, so be it–that’s their culture. But you know what our missionaries did, don’t you? That’s immoral action.

I think you get the general gist of my position.

With Geoffrey at my side, I don’t fear this indictment for murder. In fact, everybody I’ve met just scratches their heads and laughs about it. These contemporary inquisitors have made a mockery of the judicial system in Michigan. This indictment has done one good thing, however: it brazenly manifests the depth of corruption within our society. And it’s not just the judiciary. Our legislature has manifested that as well with its silly law that I knew was unconstitutional. What kind of a legislature or government is it that would enact a so-called law it knew was unconstitutional? Can anybody get more depraved than that? Or more corrupt? Hardly. But that corruption permeates everything.

Our medical societies are just as corrupt; our medical boards are just as corrupt. I don’t have a license any more. Did that stop me from doing what a physician should do? No! You see, the licensure is not entirely to guarantee competence. In fact, I think that’s only a small part of what licensure is supposed to do. It guarantees absolute control. But they miscalculated on me. A piece of paper does not control me. They can’t take away my training, my experience, or what I want to do, what I feel is right. They miscalculated, and now their anger knows no bounds. That is why they are behaving the way they are. That is why you are seeing so much negative press. They are desperate now, and that makes them dangerous. When anyone becomes that desperate, they are dangerous, and I recognize the danger.

So you see, in effect, our society is no different than primitive society–or Nazi Germany. People easily forget that. We pride ourselves in this country and the Western world, saying, “We’re really enlightened and we’re different.” No, we’re still totalitarian to a great degree.

And I’m afraid it’s getting worse. When they added “under God” to the Pledge of Allegiance, they stepped in the wrong direction. When you get your feet mired in quicksand like that, you cannot extract them very easily. This society is thrashing around now. And you know what happens when you thrash around in quicksand. I am not optimistic at all.

It took two-and-a-half centuries for the Catholic church to apologize to Gallileo, and you can bet it is going to take something like that long for any apology to come for what we are doing today. If an apology comes at all!I hate to end on a pessimistic note, but I appreciate this opportunity to address you all. I thank you for your support. We are very much encouraged by it. We will keep going.