By ruling that obesity is like any old disability, the European Court of Justice didn’t just abuse justice. It reduced man to the level of an animal, vegetable or mineral.
Discounting the minuscule number of those cursed with rare thyroid conditions, how do people become obese?
Any medical professional will tell you that the widespread abuse of bathroom scales is a result of people consuming more calories than they burn off. In other words, stuffing one’s face without exercising the rest of one’s body.
When input exceeds output, we gain weight and become fat. When we do so for a long time, we gain more weight and become obese.
The bad news is that those who have a genetic predisposition to obesity should eat less and exercise more than those miserable bastards who never seem to pile on pounds no matter what they do.
The good news is that both the input and the output are a matter of choice, right or wrong. We can choose to walk five miles a day. We can choose not to have that extra chocolate truffle.
Those are the right choices if we don’t want to become obese. Or we can choose wrong, and to hell with obesity.
This seems straightforward enough on the surface of it, but deep down it goes to the very core of humanity. For the ability to choose comes from the gift of free will we received from God.
Man is the only thing on earth whose behaviour over a lifetime isn’t predetermined by its chemical or biological composition.
A tree can’t choose to move to a sunnier clime; a man can. A lion can’t choose not to kill weaker animals, a man can. A stone can’t choose to be thrown or not; a man can choose to throw a stone, or not to.
This points at the unique status of man, which is acknowledged by any exponent of any Abrahamic religion, and certainly the one on which our European civilisation is founded.
Christianity came to Europe two thousand years ago, but has since left. Gone with it is true reason and true understanding of man, the only animal made in the image and likeness of God and therefore an animal only in the narrow biological sense, if that.
Also gone is the ability to think straight: on its way out Christianity swiped off the table the basis for all intellectual activity in the West. It was replaced by post-Darwinian fantasies, spread by those who can analyse to death everything about man, except the only important thing.
Man’s behaviour is now seen the same way as that of a courgette, a dog or a stone – something determined by his chemical, biochemical or microbiological makeup.
This has too many practical and legal manifestations to mention here, but relevant to my theme is one: the medicalisation of addiction in general and food addiction in particular.
Hence a degenerate who gets his jollies by sticking a needle in his arm is thought to do so not because he has made a wrong choice but because he is ill. The imperative to get high on heroin is beyond his control. It’s a sort of disease, like cancer.
It’s not that the subversives who insist on this nonsense don’t realise it’s nonsense. They do. But truth doesn’t matter here.
What matters is stamping our spiritual, religious and cultural heritage into the dirt. Denying, implicitly, explicitly or through judicial action, that man is a free agent endowed with the ability to choose will serve that ignominious goal nicely.
I don’t usually like to cite myself as an example of virtue (partly not to give my friends a pretext to remind me that all too often I have been an example of sin), but I was addicted to drugs for a short period.
The addiction was indeed not a matter of choice. It was iatrogenic: I was in much pain, and doctors put me on an intravenous dimorphine drip for a month. After that I was put on another opiate, Oxycontin, a drug with much street cred.
When in due course I tried to go cold turkey, I developed withdrawal symptoms, which I recognised for what they were. I went back on my drug, then gradually reduced the dose over a couple of weeks. Having suffered some discomfort, at the end I was clean as a whistle.
I made the right choice. The wrong one would have been not to reduce the dose but to increase it, subsequently tricking the doctors into prescribing more. Barring that, I could always score some Oxycontin or ‘horse’ in King’s Cross or Brixton.
Those who make the wrong choice, and there are an increasing number of them, should be pitied, helped and guided to the right choice. What they shouldn’t be is treated as if they suffered from a disease.
The same goes for obesity. A man shot by a mugger and paralysed from the waist down is disabled: he had no choice in the matter. A couch potato who gobbles up revolting pre-processed junk isn’t disabled; he chose to be obese.
By denying this God’s own truth, the European Court of Justice has reaffirmed its credentials as a wicked, subversive setup – just like its sibling the European Union.
By issuing this obscene diktat the judges pretend they really believe that man has no free will. By submitting to it, we pretend we share this view of man.
We – or, to be more precise, our powers that be – also pretend we have no choice but to submit to it. This is a fallacy: we do have one.
Our choice, the right one, would be to get out of the jurisdiction of this legal travesty and to shake its dust off our feet.
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