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There are abuses and people ignoring the laws, even those in power, whether the laws are "informed in religion" or not. That just happens. Certainly slaves were raped and murdered in this country too and not a lot of people were punished for it. And certainly laws that those who write them claim are God's will can be and certainly have been terrible laws in many cases in the past. A lot of evil has been done in the name of religion , often by people who may have earnestly believed they were doing God's work on earth.

Look, I am not against laws that people pass because of religious convictions if they are fair laws that make sense even if we ignore the religious component. I don't like laws that are in effect simply just some people claiming to know God's will and imposing it on others if the laws needlessly restrict freedom or compel others to do things they don't want to do that they must do really just to satisfy someone else's idea of what God wants. There is a lot of danger in laws like that to me. Laws should be fair and justifiable and "right" even if we take out the religious reasoning behind them.

There are people out there who for religious reasons believe that people should not seek medical attention if they are sick. They believe God just wants them to pray about it and if it is God's will that they get better they will get well, but I guess they are tampering with God's will if they seek medical attention. If people want to believe that way, it is fine by me. But I would be absolutely opposed to laws that require others to live and die by the same standards. If I get sick or someone in my family gets sick we're going to the doctor.

I may be coming across here as some sort of terrible heathen, but that really isn't the case. In college I was elected president of our Christian Education Committee. I worked at a Christian summer camp in the summers. I was very active in our Christian choir and I sang Christian songs at weddings. I was in the balcony at a local church singing the Lord's Prayer the first time my wife ever got a glimpse of me. I actually strongly considered going to divinity school at one time.

I'm not as much of a heathen as you might think. I'm just leery of laws and governmental actions arising solely out of religious beliefs. I think that is really all that is going on in this particular matter involving Oregon's assisted suicide law. This is a case where people are trying to invalidate a state law that came about through democratic process because it does not comport with their religious beliefs. This law is what Oregonians wanted though. It is a narrow law providing for assisted suicide in certain limited situations where a person who will be dying soon anyway. They have strict controls on it and built in safeguards to see that people who avail themselves of the law are doing so knowingly and voluntarily. It does not harm innocent people. It doesn't affect me or you. The only people affected by it are those who are voluntarily involved with the assisted suicide. I personally would not avail myself of such a law, but if that's what some people there want to do, that's their business. The federal government really in my opinion does not have the Constitutionally granted power to intervene in this case.

I think that a lot of the opposition to Oregon's law is not so much because people are greatly opposed to this one limited exception to anti-suicide laws, it's more just part of the bigger fight against the pro-abortion folks. There's a big worry about a "slippery slope" from laws like Oregon's. I worry about slippery slopes too, but in this case my bigger fears are about the federal government's ever expanding powers and intrusions into things that were to be the province of the states, and a fear of government putting it's nose farther and farther into how physicians practice medicine.

As for the federal government's ever expansive use of the commerce clause to regulate things they were never intended to have the power to regulate, we have already slipped down that slope and fallen off the cliff. I want very much for us to put the breaks on this expansion and start giving states back at least some of the powers the feds have usurped.

As for my worries about the government encroaching too much on how doctors practice medicine and really how people live out their final days with dignity and as comfortably as possible, I am worried that we'll get to the point where doctors will be required to keep people alive well past their time through artificial means and that pain medications will become so regulated that doctors will not be able to prescribe enough to keep people comfortable in their final days. We really have something not entirely unlike assisted suicide going on everywhere already. Doctors often prescribe enough pain medication to kill their patients in order to keep them comfortable. Maybe they aren't trying to kill their patients, but they know the meds they give them will do it and they discuss those risks with their patients and their patients families. This isn't a malicious thing doctors are doing, they just don't want their patients living out their final days to needlessly suffer. In some cases these patients with the aid of their doctors are choosing to die before their time. They do it both by taking lethal does of pain medication and/or cutting of necessary life support.

I can see us in our zeal to see that no one dies before their time limiting pain medications to the extent that people have to needlessly suffer and requiring them to stay alive in agony far longer than they would have ever had to live because of modern medical technology that can keep people living much longer than was possible only decades before. Those who would propose these laws and try to shove them down people's throats would do so fully believing in their hearts they were doing the Lord's work. I wouldn't really agree that that is what they were doing and I wouldn't think most others dying in agony would think so either. I will forever be leery of people who in the name of God want to get between those living out their final days and their doctors and make decisions for these dying people about how they proceed with their final days, and ultimately their deaths. I think we owe enough respect to dying people to leave them the heck alone. If ever we should respect their freedom, it is in their end times in this world.