Fighting for What's Important

From Chuck Colson's BreakPoint, a service of Prison Fellowship Ministries.

Yes, I'm going to do it--I am going to reveal, as Chuck Colson did, the ending of the motion picture Million Dollar Baby. You thought it was just about a woman boxer, didn't you? Then why, you asked, did all the disability-rights groups start protesting the film?

Well, I can't always vouch for the integrity or the honor of every group that protests something I find offensive as well. Nor do I know all the reasons why these groups have acted as they have. But I can tell you this: I protest this film, and I say that if this film wins as Best Picture of the Year, it will be further evidence that Hollywood has gone down the wrong road.

You all know about the woman-boxer training plot. What you don't know is that in the last half hour of the film, someone lands an illegal blow in the ring, causing the woman boxer to fly backwards and strike her head against the corner stool. That leaves her paralyzed from the neck down. The trainer determines to help her adjust to the new life she must lead--but she refuses that kind of training. Instead, she says to him, "Just kill me." And he does.

That, my friends, is murder--and I don't care that she asked for it, or why she asked for it. I quote the original Physician's Oath:

I will give no deadly preparation to anyone, even if asked, nor suggest such a course.

Those disability-rights groups have a right to be concerned--indeed, a positive duty to be concerned. Because in Holland they're getting ready to kill people who don't ask for it, on the pretext that their continued existence is an insuperable financial or other burden either on their relatives (yeah, right, we know, they just want to get the will read, or maybe settle the tontine) or on a government that has pledged cradle-to-grave health care, without telling people that they'll hasten them to the grave if they don't just go ahead and die. That some of those same disability groups support socialized medicine throughout the Western world is a gross inconsistency, and one that ought to give them the greatest pause.

Colson, of course, gives this movie two thumbs down. I say that it is worse than just another bad movie. It is dangerous to any person having greedy relatives, and it is dangerously seductive of our whole society. Under the old Hays Code, this movie would never have been made--and indeed ought never have been made.