Legalizing Death Or Protecting Life

A single week can redraw moral boundaries. When New York and Illinois announced support for “Medical Aid in Dying,” the language sounded compassionate, but the shift was seismic: freedom recast as control over life’s endpoint, medicine repositioned to facilitate death, and “autonomy” installed as the supreme value. We trace what that framing means in practice, why euphemisms matter, and how policy teaches culture what to accept as normal.

We unpack the promised safeguards—adult age limits, terminal diagnoses, repeated requests—and ask the harder question: what counts as voluntary when bills mount, caregivers strain, and the vulnerable fear becoming a burden? Then we look north. Canada’s MAID began narrow and widened to include suffering untethered from foreseeable death, with proposals to extend to mental illness alone. The pattern repeats across Belgium and the Netherlands: once the line moves, categories soften, incentives tilt, and death becomes a system option.

Along the way, we reflect on how a culture of death doesn’t stay contained to clinics or statutes. Despair listens when society calls death “care.” We honor victims by name, consider the moral spillover from policy to personal choices, and argue for a different vision of dignity rooted in belonging, presence, and community. Autonomy without limits isolates; love with obligations sustains. Choosing life is not naïve—it’s disciplined solidarity: palliative care that comforts, mental health access that persists, families and neighbors who refuse to disappear when pain doesn’t yield to quick fixes.

If this conversation challenged your assumptions or gave you language for a hard debate, share it with someone you trust. Subscribe, leave a review, and tell us: where should a humane society draw the line—and how will you show up for someone who’s suffering?

Chapters

• 0:00 Opening And Moral Whiplash
• 2:48 Governors Advance MAID In NY And IL
• 5:11 Autonomy Versus Dignity
• 8:36 Safeguards, Pressure, And Coercion
• 11:16 Canada As A Cautionary Tale
• 15:51 Slippery Categories And Policy Creep
• 20:58 Culture Of Death And Its Spillover
• 22:23 AI “Hitchens” On Israel–Palestine
• 30:58 Futility, Leadership, And Hard Tradeoffs
• 37:08 Breaking News: Campus Shootings And MIT Murder
• 40:53 Names, Grief, And Meaning
• 44:08 Death As Policy, Despair, And Rage
• 48:08 Choose Life: Belonging Over Autonomy

Transcript

SPEAKER_02: 0:46

Welcome to the Darrell McLean Show. I'm your host, Darrell McLean. Independent media won't reinforce tribalism. We have one planet, nobody is leaving. So let us reason together. Let me start here on something a bit different. We talk a lot about moral change in the country. And we talk about it like it happens gradually, like erosion, like a little sand washed away each decade, barely noticeable until the coastline is actually gone. But sometimes moral change doesn't creep. Sometimes it actually sprints. And this past week, not a year, uh, not a decade, not a legislative session, nor a generational shift. A single week, two of the largest states in the United States moved to legalize assisted suicide. Now remember, I just talked about this a few weeks ago on the show when I told you about the euphemism uh mad. And so this is what this is. Um so in the states I'm talking about is Illinois and New York, fourth largest state and sixth largest state, two of the top ten in the matter of days. So let that sink in. The announcement didn't come from fringe activists or obscure communities, they came straight from the governor's office, Governor J.D. Pritzker in Illinois and Governor Katie Hutchell in New York. And the language they use tells us everything we need to know about where we are and where we are going. So the headline from the New Yorker uh New York reads Governor Hochel reaches agreement with state legislator to pass Medical Aid in Dying Act. Medical Aid in Dying, M A I D. That's not an accident. That's a euphemism, a carefully chosen one, because assisted suicide sounds like what it is, and what it sounds like is morally alarming. So they have decided to soften the language, they've decided to sanitize the language, they decided to dress it up while coding it and calling it some type of compassion. You know, put the the white doctor's coat on so you don't act like you're about to murder someone. But listen closely because the world view is actually revealed in the very next sentence from the governor's office. Quote, New York will always fight for the it will fight and protect the right to bodily autonomy. End quote. And it extends that autonomy not just to how you live, but to when you live and how you die. And it asserts that the state's role is not to protect life, but to also now facilitate your death if the individual happens to demand it. And notice something else. They never actually define bodily autonomy, it's simply just asserted. And it's asserted as self-evident, and if it's asserted as if no serious moral tradition in human history has ever questioned it. That, my friends, is the tale. Now, Governor Hocho went further when she said this, and I quote, New York has long been a beacon of freedom, and now it is time we extend that freedom to terminally ill New Yorkers who want the right to die comfortably and on their own terms. End quote. Freedom redefined as death. Read that sentence again and let it chill you like it properly should. Because freedom in this framing is no longer ordered toward life, toward responsibility, toward care for the vulnerable. Freedom in this context is reduced to control. Control over the timing and terms of one own's existence, and control over the timing and terms of one's own extinction. Now let's get to the specifics because details do matter. In both Illinois and New York, the laws are structured similarly. You must be over 18 years of age, you must be diagnosed as terminally ill, you must be expected to die within roughly six months. You must request it yourself. And we're told repeatedly, this is about choice, this is about dignity, and this is about autonomy. But if we step back for a moment, the concept of bodily integrity, respecting the human person, is not new. English common law recognized it centuries ago. Um holy books recognized it, natural law recognizes it. We all understand that bodies should not be assaulted, we understand that bodies should not be abused, we understand that bodies should not be raped, we understand that bodies should not be murdered, we understand that bodies should not be exploited. But autonomy is something else. Autonomy doesn't mean dignity, it doesn't mean care, it means self-rule, and not just any self-rule, it means a self-rule detached from all moral or civil obligation. It means that the body stands alone, severed from its community, severed from moral limits, severed from its family, severed even from biology. And we've already seen where this logic actually lands. If I have absolute authority over what I do with my body, then the next step is claiming authority over what my body is. And that logic is behind a lot of the what we will call the gender revolution, and no amount of euphemistic language changes biological reality. You can remove parts, you can cosmetically alter appearance, but you cannot rewrite human design. Reality resists that type of anonymity. And here's the principle that we cannot afford to forget. When humanity asserts autonomy in the name of dignity, dignity ends up collapsing. When autonomy is exalted in the name of life, life itself will eventually be destroyed. Because taken out of its moral context, autonomy becomes an idol. And idols always eventually will demand blood. Now let's talk about the so-called safeguards here. We're told, as we're always told, that this will always be voluntary and never coerce. But is it really voluntary when someone is staring at mounting medical bills? Is it voluntary when someone is staring at family members under financial stay uh strain? Is it voluntary when somebody is um suitable or not so suitable signals that they are a burden and that is something that happens all the time. Is it voluntary when the choice is framed as end your life quietly or during your family emotionally or financially for months, years, decades? Pressure doesn't have to wear a uniform to be coercion, and history shows us exactly where this type of thing is going to go. The distinction between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia doesn't hold because once death becomes a solution, costs and convenience will eventually enter the equation. Hospital beds become resources, lives become calculations, and make no mistakes, this is not about passive care. This is about withdrawing extraordinary treatment. We already allow that. This is active euthanizia. This requires law because it requires society to reverse itself, to declare that intentionally causing death is now a legitimate caring medical act. Now, once that line is crossed, every other line moves, age limits fall, diagnosis requirements are expanded, physical suffering becomes psychological suffering, terminal illness becomes quality of life, and this isn't just speculation, this is documentation. Look at Canada, look at Belgium, look at the Netherlands, every safeguard that they promise eventually collapse because autonomy once enthroned knows no stopping point. And now here's the final uncomfortable truth. These governors didn't stumble into this. Politically, they couldn't avoid it because if bodily autonomy is absolute when it comes to abortion, if bodily autonomy is absolute when it comes to sex, if bodily autonomy is absolute when it comes to identity, it cannot suddenly stop at death. And this is the grim consistency of a lot of these choices here. And consistency detached from moral truth can be lethal. So let me say this plainly as I open this show. What we are witnessing is not compassion, it is not freedom, and it is not dignity, it is a rapid expansion of a culture of death dressed in medical language, baptized in the words of autonomy, and defended as progress. And if we keep using words that we refuse to define, and if we keep celebrating autonomy, we refuse to limit, if we keep calling death care, then this will end exactly where the logic says it must. It will end deadly. So if you want to know where the United States is heading when it comes to this type of stuff, you don't need a crystal ball, you just need a passport. So you need to just look north. Canada is not a hypothetical, Canada is not a slippery slope argument. Canada is the slide itself, already polished, smooth by the bodies on the way down. In 2016, Canada legalized what they called medical assistance in Dye. Made sound familiar or mad, M-A-I-D, some euphemism, same moral, same moral fight, same moral claims, same moral moral anesthesia, same insistence that this was narrow, compassionate, and tightly controlled. But then Canadians were told this would apply only to competent adults with terminal illnesses whose deaths were reasonably foreseeable. Now that phrase matters. Reasonably foreseeable death. It was the guardrail, the reassurance, it was the promise. It lasted all of five years. By 2021, Canada had removed the requirement that death had to be imitated. Suddenly, you no longer needed to be died. You just needed to be suffering. And suffering, as defined by the state, became so elastic anybody could say anything. Chronic illnesses, disability, psychological distress, and then came the moment that should have ended the entire experiment, but didn't. Canada announced that it has plans to extend medical assistance and death to mental illness alone. Now let that land. Nobody is dying. No terminal illnesses, no physical pain. Canada said that you could kill yourself if you had depression, if you had PTSD, if you had anxiety, or any other type of psychological suffering. The very conditions that medicines exist to treat now become justifications for the state to assist you in the state assistant suicide. And if you think that this is an exaggeration, listen to all the stories coming out of Canada. Veterans being offered assisted suicide instead of mental health counseling and care. Disabled citizens being told death is a reasonable option when housing or support fails. People seeking treatment being handed paperwork for ending their lives. That is not autonomy. That is abandonment. And now the Canadian government, alarmed by its own momentum, is scrambling. Court challenges, parliamentary delays, last minute pauses, even lawmakers admitting, hey, we move too fast. But here's the problem. Once anatomy becomes absolute, there is no principled place to stop. Because you can't say anatomy applies here but not there. This suffering counts, but that suffering doesn't. This life is eligible, but that one isn't. Because uh autonomy, by definition, answers only to itself. Now let me bring this home. New York and Illinois are using the same language Canada used at the beginning, the same assurances Canada promises its citizens, the same framing, terminal illnesses, voluntary choice, strict safeguards. We've heard this sermon before, and we know how this ends. The age limits will fall because why does uh uh you know why does autonomy magically appear when someone turns 18? The diagnosis requirements will eventually loosen because suffering isn't measurable on a chart, the physical and mental distinctions will collapse because pain doesn't respect categories, and eventually the unspoken question will serve as why should society invest resources and lives that are already deemed unbearable? And that question never stays just theoretical, it becomes public policy. And now here's the hard truth. Nobody wants to say out loud assisted suicide doesn't empower the vulnerable, it pressures the vulnerable, it whispers to them, you're expensive, you're tired, your family would be better off without you, your suffering is inconvenient, and that is not mercy, that's moral triage, and it hits the poor people first, the disabled people first, the lonely people first. Canada did not intend that outcome, but intentions don't govern systems, logic does, and logic of autonomy untethered from moral truth is always the same. Life becomes unvaluable and life becomes negotiable. So when American governors say they will never go further, forgive me if I don't believe them because history says otherwise. Canadian history says otherwise, human nature says otherwise. Human holy books, scriptures say otherwise. A society that redefines death as care eventually redefines care as optional and life as disposable. So this is not a cultural issue, this is not a left versus right issue, this is a civilizational crossroads. The question before us is very simple and it is very terrifying. Will we be a society that walks with people through suffering or a society that hands them a prescription, it kills them, and calls a compassion? Because Canada answered that question, and now America is being asked to sign the same form. I'll be right back on the Terrell McLean show. AI is a very powerful and effective tool. Um while he was alive, uh, one of my favorite uh writers, witty witty people was uh Christopher Hitchens. This is not real, but it is accurate when it comes to the tone and tenor of what he believed, uh, having read his work. I was very fascinated when I uh received this clip, uh being that he died some years ago, but um I thought it was still uh very pressed. So let's go to uh somewhat a fantasy blast from the intellectual past. Uh we're gonna visit somebody speaking to us from the grave of what they would think about a conflict.

SPEAKER_03: 20:47

One grows weary of writing about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, not because the subject lacks importance, but because one might as well be writing about the tides. The same arguments resurface with each wave of violence, the same justifications are deployed, the same atrocities are committed with the same explanations, and the same international community issues the same meaningless statements of concern. If insanity is doing the same thing repeatedly while expecting different results, then the Holy Land is the world's largest psychiatric ward. But here we are in 2025, and I'm told the situation requires comment, as if my comment or anyone else's will make the slightest difference to people who have been murdering each other over the same strip of land since before I was born, and will continue doing so long after I'm gone. Still, one must try to speak clearly about unclear things, especially when the unclear things involve the killing of children, which both sides manage to do with appalling regularity while maintaining their respective claims to moral superiority. Let me begin with what should be obvious, but apparently isn't. Both peoples have legitimate claims to the land, and both peoples have behaved abominably in pressing those claims. The Palestinians were indeed displaced from their homes in 1948, and this displacement was indeed a catastrophe for them, whatever one thinks of the circumstances that led to it. The Jews indeed faced centuries of persecution culminating in genocide, and their desire for a homeland where they could defend themselves is entirely understandable. Anyone who denies either of these facts is not serious about resolving anything. The tragedy is that these two internally legitimate narratives of suffering have become weapons used to justify further suffering. The Holocaust is invoked to excuse the occupation, as if the guest chambers of Europe gave Israel permanent immunity from moral criticism. The Nakba is invoked to justify terrorism as if the displacement of Palestinians gave their descendants the right to blow up buses full of civilians. Both sides have become so invested in their own victimhood that they've lost the ability to recognize the humanity of the other. And now, in 2025, we have the latest round of violence, which looks remarkably like all the previous rounds, except with better technology. Hamas or its successor organizations fire rockets that are increasingly sophisticated but still largely ineffective. Israel responds with airstrikes that are devastatingly effective but politically counterproductive. Civilians die on both sides, though in vastly disproportionate numbers. The international community condemns everyone and no one, and eventually a ceasefire is declared that holds until the next time it doesn't. The American position remains what it has always been. Official support for a two-state solution that everyone knows isn't going to happen, combined with unlimited military aid to Israel and occasional finger wagging about settlements that continue to expand regardless. The Europeans issue statements about international law that no one takes seriously. The Arab states make noises about Palestinian rights while secretly cooperating with Israel on security matters. The whole thing is a diplomatic kabuki theater where everyone knows their lines and no one expects the play to end. What's particularly galling is the religious dimension that poisons everything it touches. Jewish fundamentalists claim God gave them the land. Muslim fundamentalists claim God gave it to them, and Christian fundamentalists support Israel because they think it will hasten the apocalypse, wherein, incidentally, all the Jews will be converted or destroyed. One might think that adults in the 21st century could find better reasons for territorial disputes than the alleged real estate preferences of their respective invisible friends, but apparently not. The settlers, those religious zealots who believe God is a real estate agent who promised them the West Bank, continue their project of making a Palestinian state impossible by creating facts on the ground. They build their hilltop outposts and dare the world to stop them, knowing that the Israeli government will eventually legalize what was illegal and protect what was supposedly unauthorized. They are the most honest actors in this drama in their way. They want all the land and they're taking it and they don't pretend otherwise. Meanwhile, the Palestinian leadership remains what it has been for decades: corrupt, incompetent, and more interested in maintaining their own power than in improving the lives of their people. The Palestinian Authority governs like a mafia with NGO funding. Hamas governs like a death cult with Iranian backing, and ordinary Palestinians are trapped between them, their Israeli occupiers and their Arab brothers, who use their cause for rhetorical purposes while treating actual Palestinian refugees like unwanted guests. The peace process, that phrase that should be retired for exhaustion, continues to be invoked by people who know perfectly well that there is no process and there will be no peace. The two-state solution is dead, killed by settlements, demographic changes, and political realities that no one wants to acknowledge. The one-state solution is impossible because it would mean either the end of Israel as a Jewish state or the permanent disenfranchisement of Palestinians, neither of which is acceptable or sustainable. So we're left with the current reality, a de facto one-state arrangement where Palestinians live under Israeli control but without Israeli rights, a situation that looks increasingly like apartheid, yes, I'll use the word that sends Israel's defenders into paroxysms of rage. If you control a territory and its people for more than half a century, if you subject them to different laws than your own citizens, if you restrict their movement and control their resources, what else should we call it? The fact that Israel has legitimate security concerns doesn't change the fundamental nature of the arrangement. But here's what the anti-Israel crowd doesn't want to hear. None of this absolves Palestinian organizations of their own crimes. Terrorism remains terrorism even when practiced by the oppressed. Targeting civilians remains a war crime even when you're the weaker party. The fact that Israel has more power doesn't make Hamas or Islamic Jihad or any of the other death cults into freedom fighters. They're theocratic fascists who would create a Taliban-style state if given the chance. And no amount of legitimate grievance changes that fact. The BDS movement, meanwhile, continues to pretend that boycotting Israeli academics and artists will somehow bring about peace, as if the problem were insufficient economic pressure rather than fundamental disagreements about existence itself. They adopt the tactics of the anti-apartheid movement without understanding that South Africa's white minority needed the black majority in a way that Israel doesn't need the Palestinians. The boycotts make Western activists feel good about themselves, but do nothing for actual Palestinians except to convince Israelis that the world is against them, which hardly encourages concessions. And through it all, the body count rises. Palestinian children killed by Israeli missiles aimed at Hamas leaders who may or may not have been there. Israeli children traumatized by rockets and sirens, even if the Iron Dome intercepts most of the projectiles. Young Israeli soldiers enforcing an occupation that corrupts them even as it oppresses Palestinians. Young Palestinians who see no future except resistance that usually means their own deaths. The whole thing is a machine for producing human misery, and everyone involved knows it, but no one knows how to stop it. The truth that no one wants to acknowledge is that this conflict will not end until both sides give up things they consider essential to their identity. Israel will have to give up the dream of greater Israel and accept that security doesn't come from controlling territory but from making peace with neighbors. Palestinians will have to give up the dream of return and accept that the refugees aren't going back to homes that no longer exist in villages that have become Tel Aviv suburbs. Both will have to give up the notion that they can win this conflict rather than merely survive it. But this won't happen because both sides are led by people who benefit from the conflict's continuation. Israeli politicians win elections by promising security through strength. Palestinian leaders maintain power by promising resistance until victory. The conflict has become an industry that employs thousands: soldiers, bureaucrats, aid workers, journalists, activists, propagandists. Peace would put them all out of work. So we continue with this grotesque dance, this call and response of violence and retaliation, this competitive victimhood where everyone's grandfather's suffering justifies today's cruelty. The Israeli right becomes more fascistic, the Palestinian resistance more nihilistic, the international community more useless, and the prospects for peace more distant. Anyone who points out the obvious that this is insane, that it solves nothing, that it only perpetuates suffering, is dismissed as naive or treacherous or anti-Semitic or Islamophobic or whatever label serves to shut down thought. I've been called all of these things, usually by people who think criticism of Israel is automatically anti-Semitic, or that acknowledging Palestinian suffering makes one a terrorist sympathizer. This binary thinking, this with us or against us mentality, this inability to hold two thoughts simultaneously, that Israel has the right to exist and Palestinians have the right to freedom, that terrorism is wrong and occupation is wrong, that Hamas is fascistic and Israeli policy is oppressive. This is what makes the conflict so intractable. What would I propose? Since no one asks, but everyone expects a solution: complete withdrawal from the occupied territories, massive international investment in Palestinian development, a truth and reconciliation process, shared sovereignty over Jerusalem, compensation for refugees, security guarantees for Israel, and a gradual normalization of relations. Will any of this happen? Of course not. It requires leaders on both sides who care more about their people's future than their own power. And such leaders are notably absent. Instead, we'll have more of the same: more settlements, more rockets, more airstrikes, more children dead, more hatred cultivated for the next generation, more conferences that achieve nothing, more statements of concern, more weapons sales, more humanitarian aid that doesn't address the fundamental problem, more of everything except peace. The saddest part is that Israelis and Palestinians are more alike than different. They're both traumatized peoples who've convinced themselves that their trauma justifies anything. They both claim to want peace while taking actions that make peace impossible. They both believe their cause is just and their methods are justified. They're like two drowning people pulling each other under, each convinced that their survival depends on the other's destruction. Years ago, I met a Palestinian doctor and an Israeli teacher who had both lost children to this conflict. They had become friends, united in their grief and their determination that other parents not suffer as they had. They were working together for peace, against the wishes of many in their respective communities who saw such cooperation as betrayal. They knew their efforts were probably futile, but they continued anyway because, as the doctor said, what else can we do? Hate forever? That's the question, isn't it? What else can we do? The answer apparently is yes. Hate forever, kill forever, suffer forever, in the name of causes that have become more important than the people they're supposedly serving. The land has become more sacred than the lives lost fighting over it. The past has become more important than the future. The dead have become more important than the living. And so it continues this war that's not quite a war, this peace that's not quite a peace, this endless, grinding, soul-destroying conflict that makes everyone involved worse than they might otherwise be. In 2025, as in 1925 or 2005, or probably 2055, the Holy Land remains the place where hope goes to die, where God's supposed favorites act in ways that would shame the devil, where the promise of redemption has become a guarantee of damnation. The international community will continue to pretend that a solution is just around the corner, if only everyone would be reasonable. But reason left this building long ago, replaced by rage and righteousness, and the kind of certainty that allows people to kill children while maintaining their sense of virtue. Until that changes, until both sides decide they'd rather live in peace than die for justice, the killing will continue, and those of us watching from the outside will continue our useless commentary like a Greek chorus in a tragedy that never ends.

SPEAKER_02: 33:39

So now that was amazing because, like I said, uh uh he died years ago. That was all AI generated. Um and I and I found that to be fascinating simply because I have most of all the books that were written, and um it's concluding uh the uh the conversations between uh him and Ebert Saeed on the topic, and I do believe that him and Everett Saeed would uh somewhat have the same position, especially and I feel confident saying that, um because even when he was dying from cancer, he had a famous debate with uh Tony Blair, which will be in uh one of our So You Think You Can debate segments, and the topic did come up. So let me bring you up to speed on some breaking news, and then I want us to slow down long enough to understand what it means. So late Thursday night, law enforcement officials found the body of a man suspected of killing uh the two Brown University uh students and an MIT professor. His body was discovered inside a storage unit in Salem, New Hampshire. Authorities say he died by suicide. Now he was 48 years old, and a um his name was uh Claudio Manuel Neve Valente. He was a former Brown student at last known address in Miami, and with his death, three lives remained taken. Two students at Brown and one professor at MIT, and the central question remains unanswered. Why? And let's remember what happened. So Saturday night, a lecture hall at Brown University's final week, students gathered for a review session. A masked gumman dressed in black walked in and opened fire. Two students are killed, nine are wounded. Days later, in Brooklyn, Massachusetts MIT professor Dr. Noon F. G. Lauren, a world-class physicist and a director of MIT's Plasma Science Infusion Center, is shot in his home. He dies the next morning. For days, New England held his breath. Doorbell footage, rainy images as suspects who vanished, and then Thursday night, a storage unit, federal agents, a warrant, and finally suicide. Now here's the part we cannot rush past. The victims had names. Mohammed Arze Yumruzi, an immigrant, a scholarship student, a young man whose family came to this country seeking opportunity. Ella Cooked, a gifted uh pianist, a student leader, vice president of Brown's Republican Club, and Dr. Loreno, a Portuguese-born scientist devoted to understanding the universe itself. These people were not statistics, these were lives. And a man who took them then took his own life. And now once again, we are told that his motives are unclear. And that may be true, but here is what is clear. We are living in a moment where death keeps presenting itself as a solution. Sometimes it's wrapped in a policy, uh magazine, and then it's wrapped in the language of medical aid and dying. Sometimes it's wrapped in despair, and sometimes it's wrapped in rage, sometimes it's wrapped in silence behind a locked stores unit door. But the threat is still the same. A culture that grows increasingly comfortable with death does not keep death contained. And when we normalize death as an answer, whether to the suffering, uh, failure, isolation, illness, or despair, it doesn't stay polite and it doesn't stay clinical, it doesn't stay rare. It spills. Now let me be very clear, very, very clear. Uh suicide is not courage, it is not clarity, nor is it control. It is tragedy layered on another tragedy. And every time we talk about bodily autonomy or the right to die or the death with dignity, we have remember um something. The human mind under pressure does not reason like a philosopher, it reasons like someone who is drowning. And when society teaches through law, through language, through policy, that death can be a rational option, a merciful option, a respectable option, then the people in despair will listen. This man did not die in a hospital bed surrounded by doctors of uh and uh and euphemisms. He died alone in a storage unit. Now that's not dignity, that's isolation, and its most final form. And here's the connection that I can't let us all afford to miss because we keep insisting that these things must be separate. Assisted death from violence, suicidal from social meaning, personal despair from a public moral framework, but human beings don't live in compartments. Ideas shape imagination, language shapes limit, and culture shapes permission. When death becomes a tool, whether it's policy or psychology, it reshapes how people think about themselves and how they think about others around them. And when it leaves behind families with no culture, it it uh leaves campuses with empty seats and communities asking, how does this keep happening? So as we debate laws, as governors sign bills, and as legislators praise autonomy, we need to ask the questions no one wants to answer. What kind of people are we actually forming? Are we forming people who sit with the suffering? Are people who escape it at all costs? Are we forming communities that intervene? Are institutions that exit? Are we teaching endurance care responsibility, or are we practicing a disappearing guy? Because three lives are gone, and the man who could explain why they are gone is also gone. Now that is not progress, that is a warning. And if we don't listen, if we keep telling ourselves that death is neutral, that it is manageable, and that it can be contained, then the culture of death won't announce itself with legislation, it will announce itself with silence.

SPEAKER_01: 40:10

To the extent that war-making power devolves to one person, liberty dissolves. If the president believes military action against Venezuela is justified and needed, he should make the case and Congress should vote before American lives and treasure or spend original change in South America. Let's be honest about likely outcomes. Do we truly believe that Nicholas Maduro will be replaced by modern-day George Washington? How did that work out? Weapons about drugs. If it were about drugs, we'd want Mexico or China or Colombia. And the president would not have part one Orlando. This is about oil.

SPEAKER_00: 41:20

What government cannot do is force private entities to take action. This isn't a question.

SPEAKER_02: 42:05

Anyway, I'm let those lie without a comment because I want to end the show. Not as a policy, but it is something that is taking the colours and we owe it more than just something. Uh here thinking of what I should say, and this is it. I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life. Now that command is not naive, it does not deny suffering and it does not minimize pain. It is spoken to people who knew exile, disease, violence, and grief. And it is spoken precisely because life is so beautiful and life is so fragile. Now, the biblical vision of dignity is not rooted in autonomy, it is rooted in belonging. You are not your own. You were never meant to be your own. You belong to a community, you belong to a family, you belong to God, and you belong to one another. And what makes death so tragic is because death is not just the end of breath, it's the severing of relationships. When someone suffers, the answer is not we disappear. When someone is drowning in despair, the answer is not silence. When life becomes unbearable, the answer is not to erase the bearer. The answer is presence. The hardest command in scripture is not believe. It's stay. Stay with the sick, stay with the grieving, stay with the mentally ill, stay with the aging, stay with the inconvenient, stay with those whose pain you cannot fix. Because love is not control. Love is a companionship. And tonight, as I think about the students who never made it to their graduation, and a professor who will never return to a lab, and a man whose life ended alone, I want to say this clearly. If you are listening right now and you are tired, bone tired, soul tired, in a way that sleep cannot fix, you are not weak, you are human, and your life is not negotiable. You are not a burden, you are not the problem, you are not a problem to be solved, you are not an expense to be eliminated. You are a person made into the image of a loving God, and your life has weight simply because you are here. Now, the church must say this when the culture won't. Families must say this when institutions fail, and neighbors must say this when systems offer exits instead of care. And yes, we must resist laws and policies that turn death into service, but even more urgently, we must build communities that make life livable. That means showing up. That means listening longer than it is comfortable. It means refusing to lie that dignity comes from control rather than love. Because in the end, the truest measure of a society is not how effectively it manages our death, but how faithfully it refuses to abandon us while we were living. So as I close the show, I want to say choose life. Not because it's easy, not because it's neat, but because life is sacred and because every life still breathing, including yours, is worth staying here for.