SUPREME COURT UPHOLDS OREGON'S SUICIDE LAW

ap ^

[SoFloFreeper]

BREAKING ON THE AP WIRE:

WASHINGTON (AP) -- The Supreme Court has upheld Oregon's one-of-a-kind physician-assisted suicide law, rejecting a Bush administration attempt to punish doctors who help terminally ill patients die.

[antiRepublicrat]

He only does so because he feels like he has to to keep the law in line with the Raich medical marijuana case and other commerce clause cases, even though he disagrees with them.

That's one reason I didn't like the dissent. I didn't see anything in the majority opinion that said the federal government couldn't regulate, only that Ashcroft went beyond his powers under the CSA to apply it to assisted suicide.

Unfortunately, there's no real state's rights issue here, mainly an issue between the legislative and executive. People here should praise this decision's legal precedent, as it reigns-in political appointees who would like to twist an existing law to their own desires, and then enforce them.

[antiRepublicrat]

It's amazing to me that people have no problem letting an 18 year old make the decision to go to the military

But we don't trust that young man with his finger on the triggers of various deadly weapons to drink a beer. Aren't we just messed up?

[epow]

Thanks for you understanding. I see from your comments that you have seen that kind of situation up close with your own grandparents. Maybe you were too young to become totally involved in the situation they way your grandfather was, but you saw enough to know it wasn't any picnic.

I hope my first reply to you wasn't offensive. It wasn't meant to be, but late last evening I was beginning to run short on patience with some of the stuff I was reading on this thread. We all have our own opinions, and I suppose I feel as strongly about mine as the other guys do about theirs.

Here's hoping you don't have to repeat your parent's ordeals at some point in the future.

[TKDietz]

Whether or not to live life is a duty one has to God is between a man and his God. Our federal government should not make that determination. In fact I think that it would be wholly contrary to the 1st Amendment for our government to require people to fulfill their "duty to God" to continue living.

Whether a man has a duty to his government to continue living is between a man and his government. We are not subjects of our government. We are not owned by them. We have not given over our rights to them, neither our state nor our federal government. You say that a right to life also contains a duty to live, but have given no evidence or made no convincing argument to back up your statement. But let's suppose for a moment that a person owes some duty to continue living to his government. Would this duty be owed to the state, or the federal government? The federal government had certain limited and enumerated powers, policing the internal affairs of a state not among them. The Constitution says nothing of a duty to live owed to the federal government. Any such duty would be one owed to the sovereign states. If the state to whom you owe this duty makes it legal for you to take your life in some limited instance and you take advantage of that law, acting within the confines of it, have you breached any duty to your state? Of course not. But again, I see no duty to live owed to our government. Perhaps we would if we were subjects of a king, owing our rights and existence to him, but that is not the case. We are free men in a free country, allegedly. A state may with its inherent police power ban suicide, but it can then also allow it. The feds need to stick to their limited functions and stay out of state business.

[TAdams8591]

Your above post is fantastic, every word of which deserves to be repeated, below! Simply superb, Ohio and exactly right! *whistles and standing O*

"No. They are not the same thing at all. You are using a liberal argument. The person given the death penalty is guilty of taking someone else's life, and is being punished (hint...PENALTY) for what he or she has done.

The terminal patient in Oregon is being murdered by a doctor, guilty of no crime deserving death.

The fact that they may want to die is irrelevant to what is being done. If I say to my friend or family member, "Shoot me because I don't want to live any longer" they are still guilty if they do it.

It is wrong to take innocent life. It always has been, and always will be, regardless of what 6 'moderate' and liberal SC justices say.

And people claiming to be conservative, but supporting this very liberal decision need to think again about its consequences."

[Da Bilge Troll]

I'm very glad to see this vote by Roberts. With Alito on the bench, will we see a lot of 5-4 votes, I wonder?

Yes.

While I personally do not have a problem with leaving such issues as this up to the states, this puts the lie to the whole "O'Connor is a swing vote" nonsense. Even with Alito on the bench, there will still only be 4 conservative votes on the court.

[ohioWfan]

I made that statement in relation to the liberal argument that conservatives are hypocrites because they believe that abortion is wrong, but the death penalty and death in war are justified.

I was very careful in my wording. It's the left that tries to play those kinds of games with moral conservatives. I don't expect it here.

[ohioWfan]

Sorry. The other poster I was discussing this with used the specious death penalty argument.

We will never agree on this matter, highball, because the writings of the Founders in the Declaration of Independence acknowledge the Creator, the Laws of Nature and Nature's God.

If you don't agree with the Founders as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, we have nothing more to discuss.

Suffice it to say, some of us know that there is a higher law than the Constitution, regardless of whether or not the rest of you understand that.

And killing people because they are sick will always be wrong by that Law.

Good day. Thanks for the good discussion.

[ohioWfan]

You know what I was talking about based on my previous comments. You can play games with it all you want, just like liberals do. Look at my tagline, and you'll know how I feel about the necessity of death in war.

It is ALWAYS wrong to take the life of one who is sick, just because he or she is sick and doesn't feel like living any longer......or worse yet, whose family doesn't feel like having them around any longer.

It is an innocent life, and it violates God's law. Our nation was founded on God's law, as clearly stated in the Declaration of Independence.

Those of you who do not acknowledge a higher law than man's will never agree with that concept, nor would I expect you to.

Thanks for the discussion.

[highball]

Suffice it to say, some of us know that there is a higher law than the Constitution, regardless of whether or not the rest of you understand that.

Maybe there is, but the State cannot enforce it. That's a matter for each person's conscience.

As far as the government is concerned, there is no higher law than the Constitution of the United States of America.

[ohioWfan]

Not according to the Founders.

[highball]

Not according to the Founders.

Yes, according to the Founders.

Where did they write down this "higher law" that the government is supposed to enforce? Where in the Constitution do you find it?

[F16Fighter]

"Prosecution for murder has always traditionally been dealt with under State law."

True -- but nonetheless, murder isn't "constitutionally" protected.

"If you kill the first person you randomly meet on the street today, you will be tried in a State court under State law unless he happens to be a Federal employee on Federal duty at the time.

It is such stretching of the Constitution that made abortion a "constitutional issue", took it out of state hands and made abortion a "constitutional right" when, in fact, the Constitution is silent on the matter of abortion."

While I concur that the constitution was "stretched" or subverted in order to circumvent State Law, I again revert back to the definition of "abortion," which is indeed legalized murder.

[ohioWfan]

It's fine if you don't want to acknowledge that the Founding Fathers based our laws on the laws of God.....on Judeo-Christian law.

But it doesn't change the fact that those laws were understood and absorbed into our Constitution without specific mention of them.

Thomas Jefferson wrote that democracy without morality would fail. Where did that morality come from? Certainly not from ourselves.

Tell you what, highball........I gotta go now, but you can join in with the ACLU and scrape that engraving of Moses holding the Ten Commandments off the Supreme Court building, if acknowledging that they are the source of our law is so odious to you.

Until then, good day........

[F16Fighter]

"It's not suicide if someone else does it for you."

If I ask you for bullets and I have a gun, shall it still be considered "suicide," OR "assisted suicide"?

Doctors and spouses leave pills "around" or the plug "nearby" --suicide OR "assisted?" (what IS the issue here??)

" Let's say I'm having severe emotional and psychological problems that are causing me extreme pain and I think I want to die. Got the needle ready for me? Will you do it? Do you have a Constitutional 'right' to do so?"

Nope. I ain't doin' it....

But there ARE obvious some extenuating circumstances and excruciating degrees of suffering that may merit careful consideration, aren't there? Anyway, I DO get your point (or needle ;-)

But should it be a Constitutional 'right' to do so? No, not imo. I don't think it merits sanction on political or religious grounds either.

However, folks seem to have the notion that everything in life is either "constitutional" OR "un-constitutional"; black or white; Right or wrong. Don't ask, don't tell. Occasionally there ARE shades of gray. This is such a case.

[highball]

Tell you what, highball........I gotta go now, but you can join in with the ACLU and scrape that engraving of Moses holding the Ten Commandments off the Supreme Court building, if acknowledging that they are the source of our law is so odious to you.

Cute. If you don't have anything substantive to say, lob insults. Yeah, that'll distract everybody.

Still doesn't change the fact that the Constitution is the supreme law of the land....

[TKDietz]

First of all, it should be made clear the Declaration of Independence is not a source of law. Secondly, our nation was not founded on some fundamentalist Christian version of God's law if it was founded on God's law at all. Look at the Declaration of Independence. Notice these first words, "When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the Powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation." Do you think that this talk of the "Laws of Nature" and "Nature's God" refers to a Christian God, as seen through a fundamentalist Christian's eyes? That is not at all what it was. Thomas Jefferson was not a Christian. These terms he used to describe God are the terms Deists use. Jefferson did not believe in the Holy Trinity. He did not acknowledge the divinity of Christ, although he had great respect for Christ's teachings. He did not believe that the Bible was the divine word of God. He questioned the very existence of God and thought everyone should do that. He did not believe in miracles. He didn't really have any religion but his own and what he did believe was heavily influenced by Deism and early forms of Unitarianism. Deists at the time believed that there was a Creator who created the world, but that he did not play a part in managing it after that. The looked to nature and science to define truth, and eschewed religious dogma. When Jefferson wrote of laws of nature, Nature's God, the Creator, and so on, he wasn't talking about what you might think he was talking about.

Now, you may get from what I have written in past posts that I am an atheist. That is not the case. I just do not believe in mixing religion with government. I do not wish to live in a theocracy, and I doubt you would like it either except in the highly unlikely event that the government's religious views were exactly the same as yours. I'm with Jefferson on the wall between church an state.

Here are some quotes on religion from Jefferson:

"Our civil rights have no dependence upon our religious opinions more than our opinions in physics or geometry." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:301, Papers 2:545

"Religion is a subject on which I have ever been most scrupulously reserved. I have considered it as a matter between every man and his Maker in which no other, and far less the public, had a right to intermeddle." --Thomas Jefferson to Richard Rush, 1813.

"[If] the nature of... government [were] a subordination of the civil to the ecclesiastical power, I [would] consider it as desperate for long years to come. Their steady habits [will] exclude the advances of information, and they [will] seem exactly where they [have always been]. And there [the] clergy will always keep them if they can. [They] will follow the bark of liberty only by the help of a tow-rope." --Thomas Jefferson to Pierrepont Edwards, July 1801.

"Believing... that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their Legislature should 'make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,' thus building a wall of separation between Church and State." --Thomas Jefferson to Danbury Baptists, 1802. ME 16:281

"To suffer the civil magistrate to intrude his powers into the field of opinion and to restrain the profession or propagation of principles on supposition of their ill tendency is a dangerous fallacy which at once destroys all religious liberty, because he being of course judge of that tendency will make his opinions the rule of judgment and approve or condemn the sentiments of others only as they shall square with or differ from his own." --Thomas Jefferson: Statute for Religious Freedom, 1779. ME 2:302, Papers 2: 546

"The clergy, by getting themselves established by law and ingrafted into the machine of government, have been a very formidable engine against the civil and religious rights of man." --Thomas Jefferson to Jeremiah Moor, 1800.

"History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes." --Thomas Jefferson to Alexander von Humboldt, 1813. ME 14:21

"In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty. He is always in alliance with the despot, abetting his abuses in return for protection to his own." --Thomas Jefferson to Horatio G. Spafford, 1814. ME 14:119

"I have been just reading the new constitution of Spain. One of its fundamental bases is expressed in these words: 'The Roman Catholic religion, the only true one, is, and always shall be, that of the Spanish nation. The government protects it by wise and just laws, and prohibits the exercise of any other whatever.' Now I wish this presented to those who question what [a bookseller] may sell or we may buy, with a request to strike out the words, 'Roman Catholic,' and to insert the denomination of their own religion. This would ascertain the code of dogmas which each wishes should domineer over the opinions of all others, and be taken, like the Spanish religion, under the 'protection of wise and just laws.' It would show to what they wish to reduce the liberty for which one generation has sacrificed life and happiness. It would present our boasted freedom of religion as a thing of theory only, and not of practice, as what would be a poor exchange for the theoretic thraldom, but practical freedom of Europe." --Thomas Jefferson to N. G. Dufief, 1814. ME 14:128

"[When] the [Virginia] bill for establishing religious freedom... was finally passed,... a singular proposition proved that its protection of opinion was meant to be universal. Where the preamble declares that coercion is a departure from the plan of the holy author of our religion, an amendment was proposed, by inserting the word "Jesus Christ," so that it should read "a departure from the plan of Jesus Christ, the holy author of our religion." The insertion was rejected by a great majority, in proof that they meant to comprehend within the mantle of its protection the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination." --Thomas Jefferson: Autobiography, 1821. ME 1:67

"Question with boldness even the existence of a god; because if there be one he must approve of the homage of reason more than that of blindfolded fear."-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Peter Carr, August 10, 1787

"But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg.} -Thomas Jefferson, Notes on Virginia, 1782

"I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians." -Thomas Jefferson, letter to Richard Price, Jan. 8, 1789 (Richard Price had written to TJ on Oct. 26. about the harm done by religion and wrote "Would not Society be better without Such religions? Is Atheism less pernicious than Demonism?")

"The whole history of these books [the Gospels] is so defective and doubtful that it seems vain to attempt minute enquiry into it: and such tricks have been played with their text, and with the texts of other books relating to them, that we have a right, from that cause, to entertain much doubt what parts of them are genuine. In the New Testament there is internal evidence that parts of it have proceeded from an extraordinary man; and that other parts are of the fabric of very inferior minds. It is as easy to separate those parts, as to pick out diamonds from dunghills." -Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, January 24, 1814

"Christianity neither is, nor ever was a part of the common law."-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Dr. Thomas Cooper, February 10, 1814

"If we did a good act merely from love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? ...Their virtue, then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God."-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Thomas Law, June 13, 1814

"Among the sayings and discourses imputed to him [Jesus] by his biographers, I find many passages of fine imagination, correct morality, and of the most lovely benevolence; and others again of so much ignorance, so much absurdity, so much untruth, charlatanism, and imposture, as to pronounce it impossible that such contradictions should have proceeded from the same being."-Thomas Jefferson, letter to William Short, April 13, 1820

"I can never join Calvin in addressing his god. He was indeed an Atheist, which I can never be; or rather his religion was Daemonism. If ever man worshipped a false god, he did." -Thomas Jefferson, letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

"And the day will come when the mystical generation of Jesus, by the supreme being as his father in the womb of a virgin will be classed with the fable of the generation of Minerve in the brain of Jupiter. But may we hope that the dawn of reason and freedom of thought in these United States will do away with this artificial scaffolding, and restore to us the primitive and genuine doctrines of this most venerated reformer of human errors."-Thomas Jefferson, Letter to John Adams, April 11, 1823

"It is between fifty and sixty years since I read it [the Apocalypse], and I then considered it merely the ravings of a maniac, no more worthy nor capable of explanation than the incoherences of our own nightly dreams."-Thomas Jefferson, letter to General Alexander Smyth, Jan. 17, 1825


These are just some quotes from Jefferson. It is abundantly clear from his writings that he was no Christian. And really, if you look at the writings from and about other founding fathers, the aristocratic types who put together things like the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, you will find that many were Deists, atheists, agnostics, or people with very little formal religion. Very few were what we might consider fundamentalist Christians. The ideas our country was formed from were not religious ideas, they were political ideas. Although he didn't believe in mixing religion with government, Jefferson did though believe I think that a sovereign state could have its own religion if such was not against their own constitution. But he did not think this at all about the federal government. With the federal government especially he wanted an absolute wall between religion and state. He was very much against laws based solely in religious dogma. He believed science and the laws of nature should dictate in law making.

[bvw]

In the context of Blackstone's time his thinking about Catholics then parallels that of many today regrding extremist muslim sects, and going back a few years in the US is similar to our official thinking during WWII regarding the Japanese on the west coast. We acted upon that class suspicion too.

In Blackstone's time England had just gone through generations -- over a hundred years of rebellion and warfare between sects, particularly the Catholics. The Catholics in Engfland and Scotland even in Blackstone's own time were known -- as history records -- to seek secret alliances with Catholic France. Since France was then England's enemy, such alliances were treasonous.

Blackstone's support for such laws was a practical thing for the times, and did not really import anything to religious tolerance.

[bvw]

[T]hose laws were understood and absorbed into our Constitution without specific mention of them. Thomas Jefferson wrote that democracy without morality would fail. Where did that morality come from? Certainly not from ourselves.

Good points.