The Briefing with Albert Mohler - Thursday, December 18, 2025

Episode Date: December 18, 2025

This is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview.Part I (00:14 – 13:42)New York and Illinois Set to Approve Assisted Suicide: The Culture of Death is Expanding at a Rapid Rate in the U.S.Governor Hochul Reaches Agreement With State Legislature to Pass Medical Aid in Dying Act in New York by New York State (Gov. Kathy Hochul)Governor Pritzker Signs Bill Expanding End-of-Life Options for Terminally Ill Patients by Illinois State (Gov. JB Pritzker)Part II (13:42 – 19:46)This Should Flag Your Attention: Australia Says the Islamic State Was Behind the Attack on Bondi BeachThe clash of civilizations on Bondi Beach by WORLD Opinions (R. Albert Mohler, Jr.)Part III (19:46 – 24:14)LGBTQ Books are a Crisis: Librarians Claims Banned Books are a ‘Manufactured Crisis’, But Parents Must Know the TruthUS librarians tackle ‘manufactured crisis’ of book bans to protect LGBTQ+ rights by The Guardian (Claire Wang)Sign up to receive The Briefing in your inbox every weekday morning.Follow Dr. Mohler:X | Instagram | Facebook | YouTubeFor more information on The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbts.edu.For more information on Boyce College, just go to BoyceCollege.com.To write Dr. Mohler or submit a question for The Mailbox, go here.

It's Thursday, December 18, 2025. I'm Albert Mueller, and this is the briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from a Christian worldview. We think about moral change happening. We know what's happening in the society. How fast is it happening? Well, just take this into consideration. In the last week, indeed, less than the last seven days, two of the biggest states in the

Union have moved to legalize assisted suicide. and that's just in a matter of days. The states are Illinois and New York. They are respectively New York, the fourth most popular state, Illinois, the sixth most popular state. So two of the top 10 in a matter of days moving forward, the announcements came in both cases from the offices of the governors, respectively, J.B. Pritzker in Illinois and Kathy Hokel in the state of New York. The more recent one, just yesterday in terms of the formal announcement in New York. The headline from the statement coming from the governor's office is Governor Hockel reaches agreement with state legislature to pass medical aid in dying act in New York. Now, this is the euphemism again.

M-A-I-D, medical assistance in dying. This is medical aid in dying. That's a euphemism to avoid saying assisted suicide or euthanasia. It's to make it more politically palatable. But all right, I want to get to the most foundational worldview issues here. And I want to remind us how you find them. You find them, for example, in the statement that came as a second headline from the governor's office. So this, again, is the way the governor's office has chosen to announce this decision.

Listen to this. Quote, New York will always fight for and protect the right to bodily autonomy. That's the first explanatory line. It simply asserts here that the most basic moral reality is what is defined as bodily autonomy, which is now extended to the autonomy to end one's own life and to demand medical assistance in doing so. Now, it won't stop there. We'll talk about that in a moment. But the big issue here is personal autonomy. It comes up again and again. In a statement released by the governor's office on Tuesday of this week, the governor said,

quote, New York has long been a beacon of freedom. And now it is time we extend that freedom to terminally ill New Yorkers who want the right to die comfortably and on their own terms. all right let's just look at the language again new york has long been a beacon of what a beacon of freedom freedom is now defined in the next step as assisted suicide now is the time said the governor we extend to that freedom to terminally ill new yorkers okay a couple of specifics about this law very similar to the structure of the law in illinois we are told that persons must be over the age of 18 or in some cases they would say 18 years or older there must be legally classified as adults they must be terminally ill with the expectation that they would die in about six months.

They must take the initiative to ask for this. And when it comes to the physician-assisted or medical aid in this case, it points back to the fact that the state of New York and the state of Illinois are both claiming they have protected patient rights, but even more emphatically, they have honored patient autonomy, this idea of bodily autonomy. Okay, so let's just step back for a moment and recognize what's being claimed here. even before we get to the issue of assisted suicide, what is this idea of bodily autonomy? Well, you know, there has to be something legitimate to it in some degree.

We talk about, and even the English common law, going back for centuries, recognizes the integrity of one's person. That has generally meant one's body. The most important thing is that that personal body that is to be respected is not to be, well, murdered. it is not to be taken advantage of. It is not to be abused. It is not to be subjected to something like rape or assault. All that is simple, common sense. And yet it has to be based in some kind of legal definition. And at least a part of that legal definition has to be honoring the body, honoring the individual as represented by the body. And so at least to some degree, this makes sense. But what doesn't make sense is when the word autonomy is instead, of honor being inserted here. Now, the word autonomy means it stands simply as its own good. I think we hear the word autonomy and we think, well, that just means freedom. No, it actually means in this case that one's bodily self is now autonomous from other concerns. It stands alone. We are respecting the individual's body in such a sense that they can now determine what shall be done

with the body. But increasingly, of course, what you see is that's now unhinged from biology. Now the transgender revolution, they say they have the right to say not only what I will do with my body, but I will have the right to say what my body will be. And of course, there are limits to this. There are enormous limits to this so-called personal autonomy. So currently, when they talk about, you know, gender reassignment or now, again, the euphemism, they call it gender affirmation surgery or sex affirmation surgery. Let's just be really clear. I'm not going to go to. too far here, folks. Don't worry. The really clear part is this. They can take things away. They can cosmetically say they've done something else, but they cannot create ovaries where testes have been,

nor testes where ovaries have been. It doesn't work. Or to put it another way, there is no way that a human baby that is to say, ready for birth is going to pass through a male pelvis, no matter what the male calls the pelvis. It is still a male pelvis. But this is where the logic of bodily autonomy goes, and this is where we need to remember a deep biblical principle, and that is that the human sinful assertion of personal autonomy in the name of dignity actually destroys dignity. In the name of life actually destroys life. Taken out of context, this becomes idolatrous. The idea of personal autonomy becomes the great good that supposedly trumps everything else, so much so. that in the governor of New York statement,

quote, New York will always fight for and protect the right to bodily autonomy. I want you to notice something. The governor's office does not define those two words. They are simply asserted. And that's another symptom of our age. It's another symptom of an age gone mad. You have the assertion of things

and the obvious implication is this leads immediately to legalized assisted suicide, medical assistance in dying or aid in dying. They never say where this ends. And that's because the progressivist ideology behind all of this, it's a logic that never ends. It simply reaches this transformation, then that transformation, this denial, then that denial, this revolution, then the next revolution. The other thing we need to note is that all these protections are largely camouflaged.

So let's just take the time to think for a moment about these protections. You have the statement in both Illinois and in New York that you have safeguards put into place so that, for instance, it will be entirely voluntary, never involuntary. Okay. So that's one of the major moral distinctions when it comes to euthanasia-assisted suicide. Is this the individual's choice or is it being forced upon them? And of course, you're going to have the state of New York. You're going to have the state of Illinois.

You're going to have the respective governors say, this is entirely voluntary. Well, you know, wait just a minute. Is it entirely voluntary? If persons are told, you know, you have the choice between taking this medicine and ending your life or saddling your family with weeks and months mounting medical bills that could lead to financial disaster or as is the case already in some places around the world you have someone who is assigned to make that decision once the patient is declared to be no longer able to make that decision on his or her own okay so how many motivations enter into that the difference between

voluntary and involuntary euthanasia is not entirely absent the problem is is it is entirely insufficient to hold. And that's because all kinds of things can be brought into coercion. All things can be brought into the pressure put on people. And frankly, the logic is simply there that at a certain point, this patient becomes just too expensive. And you have a societal imperative. There's no reason why society should invest this hospital bed, should invest these resources, should invest this attention in someone whose life is effectively over anyway. Let's just end it now and wash our hands of the matter. There are other distinctions historic to the conversation about suicide or euthanasia,

and that is passive or active. In other words, there is one sense in which passive euthanasia means we're stopping medical treatments. You'll notice that is not what is included in either state's legislation. In neither New York nor in Illinois is the issue passive euthanasia. It's active euthanasia. It is taking action intended entirely to bring about immediate death. and the cessation of life. Okay, so they don't want to say that part out loud, but that is what's going on here. You don't need a law for passive euthanasia or the denial of medical care.

What you need a law for in order to protect the medical practitioners and have a reorientation of the entire society is for active euthanasia. That's what's going on here. And so the other things you have to watch is that all the other conditions will fall. You have the age distinction. Well, what difference does it make? it will soon be argued if a patient is under the age of 18 and similarly has a terminal diagnosis and has recognized suffering, how soon will it be before they say, well, it's unfair to say that that younger person can't have access to the same relief, which is how it's packaged here,

or the exercise of personal autonomy as it's explicitly named here. How soon will it be before that has extended to others? And you say, well, that's just hypothetical? No, it's actual. look at the Netherlands, look at various European countries, look at Belgium, this is the way it goes. Inevitably, because if personal autonomy or bodily autonomy is the issue, how do you say that a 17-year-old doesn't have bodily autonomy and an 18-year-old does? Quite frankly, that's fuzzy all over the law and any same person should recognize it. You also have, in this case, the fact that there has to be some kind of medical diagnosis in which there is the expectation of impending death. That's the way it started in Canada. That's the way it started in many European nations.

It doesn't stay that way. You also have another distinction. And I promise you, this won't hold. It is the distinction between physical suffering and mental suffering or psychiatric suffering. And you'll have people eventually who are going to say, you know, I am suffering just as much in terms of psychiatric distress than someone who is suffering in terms of intractable pain from cancer or another aggressive disease. And you say, well, again, you don't have to go that way. Well, you can simply see that that's exactly the way it goes. And you understand if bodily autonomy means bodily autonomy,

you'll notice that the governor in New York who released this statement, didn't say bodily autonomy, but I don't mean any kind of psychic suffering. No, it's not going to last. It just, it can't last. Bodily autonomy will eventually mean bodily autonomy. On whatever grounds the person of the body says, this is the exercise of my autonomy. We're looking at a slide into the culture of death.

It should assuredly have our attention. This is really, really horrifying. It seems to be now spreading fast. In the United States, there have been something of a pause in terms of additional states legalizing assisted suicide. We were watching with deep concern what has been going on in Canada, which, by the way, is much further down that slope and appears to be on an even deeper dissent right now, given court decisions and given the fact that the government has announced they're already reconsidering these things, even the limitations that had been put into place are likely to fall. And that's happening faster in Canada, I think, than just about any other society where the similar process has begun. But this means

that in the United States, there are something like 14 states that now have physician-assisted suicide. And you could say, well, that's a minority of the states. Well, you know, it's a minority of states by number. But look at the population. Just look at the populations of the states that already have now legalized medical assistance in dying or assisted suicide. It's a large portion, a growing portion of the U.S. population. All right, one other final issue here in these announcements. You'll notice the governors in both of these cases, Democratic governors, and in the case of J.B. Pritzker, very liberal Democratic governor in terms of Kathy Hokel of New York, very inside establishment Democrat there in New York State. You'll notice that both of them, in one political sense, had to do this.

Both of them in that political sense had to do this because they are the ones who are making the case, the unrestricted case, the absolutely consistent, constant case for bodily autonomy. This has to do with their understanding of laws related to sex, laws related to the transgender revolution, laws related to abortion. It's virtually impossible. They could say, well, it doesn't apply to physician-assisted suicide. And so there is a remarkable, if entirely dark and lamentable and tragic consistency here. But it also reminds us, it sure to mind all of us, that when you use a term like bodily autonomy, you better mean it. And if you mean it, it's going to end up deadly. All right. Now, shifting to another issue, similarly deadly, something's happened in recent weeks

that should have our attention. And I point specifically to the mass murder at Bondi Beach there outside Sydney. It was deliberately, intentionally premeditated as an anti-Semitic attack. At least 15 people killed, many others wounded. It was a direct attack on the Jewish. community there in Australia as part of a larger picture. And we've seen of the picture, the landscape, the larger dots. We see them start to connect. Okay, here's something that we haven't wanted to connect that is now very much connected. Even when I spoke about this on the briefing on Monday morning, we did not know something we knew just hours later. And that is that the Prime Minister of Australia said explicitly that Australia believes that the Islamic State was a major factor behind the attack.

They knew that because once the car had been found, the car that had been used by the murderers, they found Islamic State flags. Okay, immediately this should, pun intended, flag your attention. And the reason for that is this. You go back to the Christmas market attacks, Islamic flag. You go back to car attacks intended to kill him. human beings, even in the United States, just a matter of less than a year ago, Islamic state flags. You look at other events that seem to be disconnected and all of a sudden there is a connection.

It is the Islamic State flag. Let's just remind ourselves that if you go back a decade or so, just a little bit more than a decade, the Islamic State claimed the reestablishment of an Islamic Caliphate. Okay. So what in the world is that? Basically, it's an Islamic State of government over territory through the direct. rule of the Quran, and it basically means an Islamic empire of sorts under a caliph, a scholar, Islamic leader. And that's an absolute rule. It's absolutely inconsistent with Western liberty,

with our understanding of government, our understanding of freedom and liberty. It's absolutely at odds with Western understandings of human dignity and even human life. The Islamic State was known for its absolutely ruthless rule, all in the name of Islam, all in the name of Islam, all in name of explicit citations from the Quran and it claimed territory that's what made the Islamic State that's the state part of the Islamic State it was often referred to as ISIS ISIS as the Islamic State and it is still referred to that way but it is very interesting the Prime Minister of Australia didn't say ISIS he said the Islamic State United States authorities responded to this didn't say ISIS they said the Islamic State

people in the Middle East also pointed to the existence of the Islamic State. Okay, the Islamic State at one point occupied and controlled territory in Syria and Iraq about the size of the United Kingdom, about the size of Great Britain, England. In other words, it controlled that much territory as the UK. It lost most of that territory some years ago. And there were people in the West who thought, well, okay, that threat's done with. It's gone. But it wasn't gone for a number of reasons.

Let me remind you of reason number one. The militants and the warriors, and in particular, we've talked about this, even in recent weeks, the widows and the children of the Islamic State, they are still very much committed to the Islamic rule of the entire globe as they were by any means necessary, especially by war and violence. They're just as committed to it as before. This is one of the huge problems. It's a problem faced by the current Syrian government and the current Iraqi government. what do you do when you have the widows and children?

Some of those widows, by the way, were recruited from the West, absolutely marinated in the Islamic State's ideology. And those children, especially the boys, are being raised to be the next generation of warriors for the Islamic State. This is a wake-up call to the West that we are in this clash of worldviews, that is a deadly clash of worldviews. And Islam, as in this case so often declares itself, is irreconcilable with the values of the West. And you also have the fact that you have the Islamic State that has gone into decline as a territorial power. But we've seen this before.

We've seen it in other terrorist groups, other political ideologies. It doesn't go away. It goes in the modern sense online. And so even American and Australian intelligence authorities are saying it might be, it just might be, that the Islamic State is not controlling these people the way it did when the capital. was intact there in Syria and Iraq. It might be that they're simply mobilizing and instigating all of this online in such a way that they're setting people loose and giving them an attack manual and they're basically able to incite this kind of violence even though there is no direct

line of communication or control. That doesn't make the Islamic State less dangerous. If anything, it might well make it more dangerous. So wake up call for a soul. This is a continuing battle. You know, civilization has enemies. Western civilization has a particular kind of enemies. The world of order has enemies who intend disorder in order to create a new order. In the case of the Islamic State, a clearly Quranic Islamic order. They have plans. They have plans for Western civilization.

They have plans for more terrorist attacks. And we know this because authorities were able to see online the mobilization and enticement especially of young men, but also we now see older men and even some women into these terrorist acts. What took place in Sydney is certainly not the beginning of it. It's just one of the latest faces of it. And we understand this is going to be a very, very long battle. And at least on Bondi Beach, we are reminded again of nothing else of what is at stake. It is life or death. All right. Finally for today, I saw a headline. It just drew my attention.

It's from The Guardian. I mentioned that before. Very liberal newspaper. But a very influential newspaper, Worldwide. wide. It's based in London. And the headline is this, U.S. librarians tackle manufacture crisis. So you can put quotation marks scare quotes, as we call them, around manufactured crisis. U.S. librarians tackle manufacture crisis of book bans to protect LGBTQ plus rights. Okay, so now you have librarians, and you see this again, crying censorship, crying that conservatives and conservative parents are doing wrong by demanding that books be taken out of school libraries and made inaccessible in public libraries simply because so many of these very pro-LGB

books parents don't want their children to be subjected to. And by the way, some of it is very graphic. I'll just without giving any further detail. Let me just tell you it's graphic. Some of it is nearly pornographic. All of it is basically intended to break down any kind of moral defense against the entire rate LGBTQ. But when I got the article and when I started, started to read it, I recognized, wow, there is more here than I expected. I want to read to you one paragraph, and by the time you get to the end of the paragraph, you're going to understand, okay, all's explained. Okay, you're ready? Here's the paragraph. Quote, one of the books she was told to pull was, it's perfectly normal, the popular illustrated book

that teaches children about puberty, sex, and sexuality. Young, I'll just say that's one of the librarians, quote, had bought the book for her own 10-year-old son two decades ago when he had he expressed curiosity about his changing body. She said it later helped him come to terms with his identity as a transgender man. End the quote. Okay. All I have to say is, I think if I just read that paragraph out loud, like 99.99% of parents are going to go, okay, we get it. We get it. We get exactly what the guardian is up to. We get exactly what these librarians are up to saying this is a manufactured crisis. Well, it's a manufactured crisis in the view of those who want your children to see these books and who think it's perfectly normal to say the book was really

helpful. I could just use this. The way it's written was really helpful when it helped him. That's the way the mother describes the child come to terms with his identity as a transgender man. End quote. Only when you get to the end of the sentence do you figure out we're not talking about a he at all, but a she, not a boy, but a girl. It's insidious. So even as the guardian wants to say this is a manufactured crisis and puts that statement even in the headline of the article. By the time you read it, you go, this isn't just a manufactured crisis. This is a very real crisis. And the fact that the Guardian thinks this is a manufactured crisis, it's a crisis unto itself.

It's a crisis in terms of the mentality of groups such as the American Library Association. The worldview expressed by so many of these professional organizations, they are entirely committed not only to DEI in general, but to the transgender revolution in particular. They're not just targeting the American public in general. They are targeting your children. Or to put it another way, maybe your grandchildren. In any case, children you care about. These aren't even books that are aimed at adults.

These are books specifically written for children. That just raises the stakes. It reminds us all over again of what we're really facing here. The reality is it is creation order or it is disaster. as this kind of story reminds us. There's really nothing in between that lasts. One final thought here. If the library in your child's school has these books

or if the public library is putting them right there at eye level for children to take these books off the shelf, you may need, I think it's safe to say, to manufacture a crisis in a hurry. Thanks for listening to the briefing. For more information, go to my website at Albertmuller.com. You can follow me on X or Twitter by going to X.com forward slash

Albert Mueller, for information on the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, go to sbtsb.edu. For information on Boyce College, just go to voicecollege.com. I'll meet you again tomorrow for the briefing.