Facilitating any behavior by way of practical accommodation confers acceptance… more so when that practical accommodation is provided by an official act of the state. That acceptance then removes the social stigma and, ultimately, dissolves the moral proscriptions which otherwise inhibit that behavior. This bit of common sense is affirmed by our shared experience and recent history. And that makes the proposal to facilitate IV drug use infuriating.

Consider:

Abortion was once a tragic rarity. Even those who promoted the practice recognized that to abort a pregnancy was to kill a preborn baby. Roe v Wade specifically recognized ‘viability’ as the point at which a state had a legitimate interest in protecting a child by prohibiting elective abortion.

But once abortion was given legal approval, the stated goal of making abortion “safe, legal, and rare” quickly gave way to promoting abortion-on-demand at every stage for any reason or no reason at all. Both the number of abortion clinics and procedures skyrocketed. With moral proscriptions completely renounced; the full denial of human status for the pre-born at all stages of pregnancy was embraced like a religious tenet. Leftists today actively encourage abortion; brag about their own, and present it as a rite of passage for their daughters.

How does personal tragedy get transformed into a political cause?

Extremes are held up as representative. The policy demands treats all women seeking abortion as if they are 12-year-old victims of incestuous rape. Having warped the moral question, political manipulation disables authentic moral, rational, and humane consideration.

The result is an entrenched, multibillion-dollar, taxpayer-funded industry that trivializes human sexuality, promotes anti-science denial of conception as the beginning of each human life, objectifies pre-born babies, and degrades women. This precise pattern was repeated with so-called “gender-affirmation” medical intervention, even on children.

With a growing portion of the population having been raised by single parents, it should not be surprising to see an increase in both the instance and severity of gender confusion among kids. Even so, child psychologists and psychiatrists have reported that in the vast majority of children exhibiting such confusion, puberty itself resolved the conflict in favor of the child’s physiological sex. This being so, the prudent course in treating the prepubescent, gender-conflicted child and his/her family is to counsel patience and provide (or refer for) therapeutic support. This is how childhood gender confusion was treated until very recently… which is why persistent (adult) gender dysphoria was very rare before Political Trans-ideology was promulgated.    

Today, children are being told that their gender identity needn’t match their physiology or even take it into account. Having thus induced gender confusion in an alarming number of kids, parents, teachers, guidance counselors, and medical personnel are admonished to treat every instance of pediatric gender confusion as a fully-developed and entirely intractable case of gender dysphoria that will result in suicide unless the patient’s “gender identity” is affirmed at the expense of his or her body.

Few rational people fail to recognize the wrongness of defaulting to drastic, permanent intervention, ultimately involving invasive surgery and lifelong pharmaceutical dependency for the patient. Few would wish such a fate on anyone about whom they care.

Yet we’ve gone from a handful of “gender-care” specialty practices (medical and/or psycho-social help in “transitioning”) in the US to over 200 in the past 15 years. Medical know-how in this area has not advanced. No one has produced a way to turn a male into a female or vice versa. The best on offer to a gender-conflicted person is an induced hormone imbalance and a surgically-affixed costume of non-functioning prosthetics.

Ideology-driven politics have trumped reason, clinical judgment, and humane consideration to turning “gender-affirmation care” into a multi-billion dollar industry that rivals abortion in both gross revenue and a place at the public trough.   

We’re poised to do the same thing again with so-called, Safe Injection Sites; facilities at which clean needles, protected space, and medical supervision are provided for the express purpose of enabling addicts to “safely” pursue IV drug abuse. The legislatures of CO, NM, NV, and RI each introduced legislation this session that would have their states join New York in the political push to establish these sites in response to the epidemic of opioid overdoses caused by the rampant trafficking of Fentanyl. None of these states have brought forth legislative efforts to control the source of the problem, an open border through which Chinese-produced synthetic opioids enter the US. But that is another topic for another time.

As was the creation and promotion of global, multi-billion-dollar industries dedicated to abortion and Transgender “healthcare,” the promotion of chronic addiction and dereliction is predicated on several talking points that are demonstrably false:

1 – “A person’s use of opioid drugs demonstrates an intractable condition; the only hope for which is mitigated danger by facilitating ‘safer’ drug abuse.” As with both abortion and transgender promotions, extreme cases are held in the spotlight and presented as if representative of all opioid users. All users must be treated as if they are end-stage, maintenance users who are rendered unresponsive to legal and social deterrence. This is false. Recreational use precedes addiction. Most whose use is experimental or recreational remain very responsive to credible threats of legal consequences.   

2 – “Clean needles and administered doses of Narcan (or other ‘reversal’ meds) may be counted as lives saved.” By that measure, proponents consider supervised injection sites a one-sided, no-downside victory against accidental overdose for the individual addicts on whom such accommodation was bestowed. And if maintaining the addicted state of the person without killing him or her is the goal, they are right. If we consider medically-perpetuated addiction (like medically-perpetuated body/mind conflict) a victory, then these sites are a rip-snorting success.

3 – “Official accommodation and facilitation of illegal opioid use doesn’t encourage illegal opioid use.” Subscription to this notion requires that we do precisely what Leftists are constantly demanding:Dismiss the evidence of our eyes and ears; eschew our ‘problematic’ habit of deductive reasoning. Undermining Federal laws against the use of illegal drugs makes enforcement of those laws yet more difficult.By removing the barriers presented by potential prosecution, more people are enticed to try euphoria-producing substances.

Do we suppose that increasing the number of people who enter the seductive world of synthetic feel-good will do other than increase the number of people who get stuck there? It’s an irrational conclusion. Do any of the Safe Injection Sites Efficacy Studies accurately measure the impact of removing legal and social barriers to the use of illicit euphoric drugs? 

Recall the swift growth in the number of abortion centers. Consider the substantially-faster emergence of new facilities and programs dedicated to helping gender-conflicted people wage biochemical and surgical warfare on their own bodies.   

Absent effective opposition, we could see a similar proliferation of facilities dedicated to facilitating and sustaining a condition of addiction, a progressive and deadly disease. The irrational, ideologically-driven narratives supporting this degrading course of action present a stark and obvious parallel to the narratives used to promote both abortion and gender dysphoria.   

Having seen the human carnage that follows in the wake of codifying these narratives, are we now ready to reject their foundational ideology?   

Compassion never consists of state-facilitated self-destruction.