[GovernmentShrinker]

A large and loud contingent of religious conservatives are out to hijack our nation's legal system, to prevent anyone from choosing to die when they want to. They are trampling on the most basic of individual freedoms, and I regard them as very dangerous.

A person who has clearly expressed a wish to die, due to a medical condition which they determine to make their life not worth living, should be free to make that choice without interference from those whose religious beliefs don't agree with such choices. They should have the option to employ assisted suicide, rather than starve and dehyrate themselves slowly and miserably, as some patients have been documented to have done when denied euthanasia.

But again, none of this has anything to do with Terri Schiavo. The religious zealots are just using her highly publicized case to promote their agenda. Her case has exposed serious shortcomings in Florida legal system, as it relates to end-of-life options. There is no structure providing for impartial review of medical diagnosis and prognosis, and no clear rule about what constitutes legally effective instructions from the patient in question. Both of these things are desperately needed, but the religious don't want either. They want no one to ever have their life ended, if continued tube feeding could keep them alive (and many advocate even more extreme measures on a routine basis), and they don't care a whit whether someone has left clear, written, notarized instructions about the circumstances under which they would want to be helped to die, or not helped to stay alive.

There is no perfect system, in which no one will ever be euthanized against their will, just as we will never have a system that completely eliminates murder on the streets. The unfettered right to bear arms is essential to a free society, even though it necessarily entails some deaths of innocents due to carelessness and misuse. With medical science increasingly able to keep people technically alive long past where nature would allow it, and at colossal economic cost, free people need to be free to make individual choices about how to deal with this issue, and we need a legal system that supports and protects those choices, while providing reasonable safeguards against abuse.

[Diamond]

A large and loud contingent of religious conservatives are out to hijack our nation's legal system

How can can it be said that religious conservatives are out to hijack the legal system, since what you would think of as religious conservatives were the very founders of our political and legal systems?

They should have the option to employ assisted suicide, rather than starve and dehyrate themselves slowly and miserably, as some patients have been documented to have done when denied euthanasia.

Why? Advocating the active killing of patients by the medical profession, not just allowing dying people who do not want to undergoe extraordinary medical treatment to not prolong their lives is very, very dangerous. History documents the guargantuan atrocities perpetated by a medical professionals who have been given a license to kill. In a nutshell, such a degradation and corruption of the the medical profession is a reversion to a witch doctor mentality in which the witch doctor is believed to have both the power of life and the power of death over others. Why should we as citizens not have the right to attempt to ameliorate this corruption through legislation? If someone wants to kill himself, let him jump off a building or blow his brains out, or starve himself to death, or set himself on fire, or take a drug overdose. But giving doctors a license to kill their patients is no safeguard against abuse and the killing of the innocent - it is the antithesis of it. Killing the patient was for millenia, until very recently, considered as contrary to proper medical ethics. It was not religious conservatives who have hijacked the legal sytem to promote this change.

Cordially,