California

California reprehensibly enacted a law that prohibits school administrators and teachers from informing parents about their child’s gender confusion. It is almost beyond belief that the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals quashed a trial court injunction against the law — but then again, it is the Ninth Circuit. Thankfully, in a per curiam emergency-docket ruling, the U.S. Supreme Court just restored the injunction against enforcement. From Mirabelli v. Bonta (citations omitted, my emphasis): California’s policies will likely not survive the strict scrutiny that Mahmoud demands. The State argues that its policies advance a compelling interest in student safety and privacy. But those policies cut out the primary protectors of children’s best interests: their parents. California’s policies also appear to fail Read More ›

California Governor Gavin Newsom is clearly running for president and — surprise, surprise — has a new memoir coming out. In an interview about the book, he recounted attending his mother’s hastened death. From the Washington Post story:

It was the spring of 2002 when Gavin Newsom’s mother, Tessa, dying of cancer, stunned him with a voicemail. If he wanted to see her again, she told him, it would need to be before the following Thursday, when she planned to end her life.

Newsom, then a 34-year-old San Francisco supervisor, did not try to dissuade her, he recounted in an interview with The Washington Post. The fast-rising politician was racked with guilt from being distant and busy as she dealt with the unbearable pain of the breast cancer spreading through her body.

Newsom’s account of his mother’s death at the age of 55 by assisted suicide, and his feelings of grief and remorse toward a woman with whom he had a loving but complex relationship, is one of the most revealing and emotional passages in the California governor’s book, “Young Man in a Hurry: A Memoir of Discovery,” which will be published Feb. 24.

Some call it assisted suicide, but it appears to have actually been homicide because she was lethally injected by a doctor:

Freedom of religion is on the ropes in increasingly authoritarian Canada — despite a specific charter guarantee of “freedom of religion and conscience.” Indeed, an Ontario court ruled previously that doctors can be coerced under threat of professional discipline to perform lethal jabs or abortions against their religious beliefs and conscience objections. Why? The court ruled that the unenumerated right of patients to receive any legal procedure paid for by the government superseded the specific charter protection. If doctors don’t want to kill, the court also ruled, they can either provide an “effective referral” — meaning soliciting a doctor known to be willing to kill — or get out of medicine. Now, in British Columbia, the family of a euthanized woman, who Read More ›

When assisted suicide/euthanasia is legalized, people who are eligible to be killed because they are seriously ill may become objectified by their societies. For example, they may be thought of as so many organ farms to be harvested after their lives are ended.

Such objectification of the sick can be infectious. In California, there is a new research program called Last Gift that seeks people with “life-shortening” conditions who also have HIV to be experimented on — not to find cures or ways to extend their lives, but to better understand the virus. From the Last Gift research subject solicitation:

UC San Diego is looking for altruistic people with HIV, who have been diagnosed with a life-shortening disease and reside in San Diego County. The Last Gift tissue donation research study aims to understand the behavior of HIV in the human body — giving scientists the rare opportunity to learn where the virus hides in an individual and inspire medical advancements for generations to come.

I think it is worth noticing that Anthony Fauci’s old outfit, the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, is a funder of the program.

I always enjoy Kathryn Lopez’s ongoing Corner feature in which she posts about news stories that “caught my eye.” So I decided to blatantly steal the concept to discuss euthanasia/assisted suicide stories that have recently been in the news.

1. A Spanish father lost a legal case to prevent his daughter’s euthanasia. The young woman, who has a severe mental illness, tried to commit suicide previously by jumping off a building, leaving her with paraplegia. A court has now decided, in a bitter irony, that due to her disability, doctors can finish what she started. Awful.
2. Euthanasia killings in the Netherlands increased by 10 percent between 2023 and 2024, with nearly 10,000 killed by doctors in one year. Lethal jabs for the mentally ill also increased to 219, and 427 dementia patients. There were also 54 reported cases of simultaneous euthanasia deaths of family members. The report doesn’t say how many of these people were organ-harvested.
3. Nearly 4,000 Belgians were euthanized in 2024. According to the Brussels Times, “The vast majority of patients experienced both physical and psychological suffering (82%). Just under 16% experienced only physical pain and 1.9% psychological suffering.” Belgium was also a euthanasia tourism destination, with 120 people traveling to Belgium from other countries to be killed.

San Francisco was once a conservative city. Oh, sure, it had its bohemian side. The Beats of the ’50s were at home in North Beach, and Harry Bridges, the suspected communist who served for years as head of the longshoremen’s union, had a definite influence. But for the most part, San Francisco was well within the cultural mainstream. Indeed, the city was so staid that the Republican Party’s nominee for mayor won landslides in 1955 and 1959, and the GOP nominated the archconservative Barry Goldwater as its presidential candidate from the Cow Palace in 1964.

Then, San Francisco changed. Radically. In 1964, the University of California, Berkeley, a few miles across the bay, became the center of the “free speech” movement. Civil rights and then militant anti–Vietnam War advocacy found great sympathy. The Haight-Ashbury neighborhood became a hippy haven and the focus of a growing drug culture. The gay-rights movement sprang energetically out of the Castro District, and the once predominately Italian working-class neighborhood was transformed into a radical front of the sexual revolution. By the 1980s, the term “San Francisco values” — wielded by conservatives to describe the cultural and political radicalism of the Bay Area — had turned the city into something of a national joke.

Over the years, policies enacted by the city’s ever more extreme progressive leaders slowly destroyed San Francisco. I lived in and around the city for almost 25 years, starting in 1992, and saw the decline happen in real time. It broke my heart.