Amid COVID-19 pandemic, don’t put the economy ahead of people’s lives.
Opponents of the Affordable Care Act once ran around screaming the act would establish so-called death panels that could withhold treatment from the old and the very ill.
Loud rang the cry: Obama wants to kill Granny!
Back then, I laughed this off. Not in this country, I thought. Americans would never stand for such a thing. These loonies need to reconfigure their tinfoil hats.
The Affordable Care Act became law, and death panels never materialized.
But now those old doomsayers look prophetic. Except that our current, very real, death- to-Granny movement isn’t being led by pagan libertine Democrats. It’s being led by conservative politicians and pundits.
Let the old and chronically ill perish, this faction says, but save the stock market. Some are implying that if you’re older than 60, it’s practically your patriotic duty to die.
Public health experts agree that if we don’t continue fighting COVID-19 through drastic social distancing and the shuttering of schools and businesses, the virus will wreak havoc not seen in a century.
Unfettered, it could kill hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of Americans of all ages. The aged and those with underlying medical conditions are particularly at risk.
Yet Texas Lt. Gov. Dan Patrick, pundit Glenn Beck, Fox News’ Brit Hume and others are arguing that, be that as it may, the country must reopen for business. Go to work. Go to church. Let the disease cull out the unfit.
Patrick told Tucker Carlson on Fox News: “No one reached out to me and said, as a senior citizen, are you willing to take a chance for your survival in exchange for keeping the America that all America loves for your children and grandchildren? And if that’s the exchange, I’m all in.”
The assumption behind all this is that unless the shutdowns end, the stock market will tank, younger adults will lose their jobs and corporations will go bust.
All of which might be true.
But on the other hand, mass deaths can’t be good for the economy, either.
It’s discombobulating to see how quickly we’ve begun writing off millions of citizens as expendable, in the hope of rescuing the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Wags have dubbed this, “Die for the Dow.”
The politicians and pundits favoring this “cure” are the very types who tend to crow about their “pro-life” bona fides, by which they mean their opposition to abortion.
Opposition to abortion is not necessarily bad. I have reservations about abortion myself. But by putting profits before people, these same folks are proving how little they care about sentient men and women living as fully formed humans, albeit old or weak.
This is heresy to everything Christianity has preached from its founding. Christians especially must oppose the death movement with every shred of faith and decency left in us.
To their credit, other conservatives—from what I’ve seen, Christians, mainly—are pushing back hard against this wretched worldview.
It’s difficult to get more conservative than the Southern Baptist Convention. But Russell Moore, president of the convention’s ethics and religious liberty commission, wrote an eloquent rebuke to the let-the-weak-die proposal.
He agreed an economic meltdown would be devastating.
“Still, each human life is more significant than a trillion-dollar gross national product,” he said. “Stocks and bonds are important, yes, but human beings are created in the image of God.”
Well put, Mr. Moore.
“A life in a nursing home is a life worth living,” he continued. “A life in a hospital quarantine ward is a life worth living. The lives of our grandparents, the lives of the disabled, the lives of the terminally ill, these are all lives worth living.”
I seem to remember that America’s been through numerous recessions and full-on crashes—the 1930s, 1987, 2008, just to name a few.
Eventually, the economy always recovers.
Dead people don’t recover.
I try, with mixed success, to stay out of politics. People get enough politics without me howling about it. But here, no Christian with a conscience can remain silent.
As Moore put it: “We cannot pass by on the side of the road when the elderly, the disabled, the poor, and the vulnerable are in peril before our eyes. We want to hear the sound of cash registers again, but we cannot afford to hear them over the cries of those made in the image of God.”
Speak up. Don’t let the moneychangers kill Granny for a lousy buck.
Contributing columnist Paul Prather is the pastor of Bethesda Church near Mt. Sterling. He can be reached at pratpd@yahoo.com.
This story was originally published April 2, 2020 at 10:54 AM with the headline "Amid COVID-19 pandemic, don’t put the economy ahead of people’s lives.."