That ideology is exactly what is wrong with the world. The value of humans beings isn’t found in the amount of pleasure and pain found in their life. Beethoven’s last years were filled with pain and so I guess String Quartet No. 16 just wasn’t worth it. Too bad there was no government Death counseling.

Liberty is about what is necessary for life not making judgment’s about the relative values of pleasure or pain. There is no right to die without pain anymore than there is right to live without it.

Why have medical treatment and try to cure anyone if the only value we have in life is pleasure or pain? After all there is no way of knowing if we can save anyone at all so why not just hand out the opiates and let people self medicate themselves to death?

The entire basis of medicine is that human life is worth saving because it has value beyond the pleasure and pain of mere animal existence and the second you talk about euthanasian is the second you’ve ended human basis for medicine.

Hey why don’t we follow this cost saving measure and just give paramedic guns so when they come upon horrible car accident they just shoot the victims to put them out of their misery.

I mean if it’s good enough for dogs why not humans after all “Human beings are nothing but large mammals and large mammals can die very hard and very slowly.”

I wish this was the sincere view of a majority of American Christians; if it were then atrocities like the Iraq war wouldn’t have been remotely possible and untold thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians wouldn’t be dead as “collateral damage.”

I’d have more respect for the views of traditional Christians if they would advocate their deep respect for innocent life on a more consistent basis.

“To traditional Christians, God is the author of life and innocent life… Heroic means to keep the dying alive are not necessary, but to advance a natural death by assisting a suicide or euthanasia is a violation of the God’s commandment….”

Well, there are some other Christian traditions too, such as the American Christian one of not imposing one’s beliefs on others.

Few will argue, I think, that Buchanan is wrong to be concerned about the development of a “culture of death” springing up that essentially cajoles the elderly and/or infirm into ending their lives. But it can seem that the only reason he really raised the fear of same was to then strike directly at things like Oregon’s physician-assisted suicide law and to get at that which he can’t quite bring himself to plainly state: That he supports the right of government to tell a terminally-ill person not to commit suicide and to tell physicians that they cannot help those persons do so painlessly either.

Liberty, Pat, liberty.

This is exactly the kind of issue that makes the public distrust Republicans: To say that people have all sorts of economic rights and talk about the horror of having one’s income taxed at too high a level, but to then say that a terribly suffering and hopelessly ill person ought not have the right to end their life free of pain.

Of course the Dems present the flip side and discount economic rights, but the leftward drift of things over the past umpteen decades can be seen as the public agreeing with them that there are other rights even greater than the economic.

In other words, an opportunity. Will the Republicans walk their talk of limited government and limited government interference in people’s lives, or do they want the kind of disgust they engendered with the Schiavo thing? (Except even worse because at least in the Schiavo case there was some question of her intent.)

Human beings are nothing but large mammals and large mammals can die very hard and very slowly. And I believe I’ve seen a report indicating that a very large percentage of all the deaths in the U.S. today are already essentially “arranged” between patients and/or their families and their treating physicians in the form of agreements not to resuscitate or etc.

So what’s it going to be? Conservatives walking their talk and respecting people’s rights and concentrating on doing so but yet confronting the genuine, hard issue of preventing a “culture of death” from springing up? (Such as looking hard at the genuine issue Buchanan raised about “end of life counseling” and such, but which he then simply used to segue into his opposition to suicide and physician-assisted suicide.)

Or are they just going to go with what can seem their reactionary gut?

Maybe I’m wrong, but it seems to me the public would agree with the deal that the government ought not be telling terminally ill people and their physicians what they can and cannot do, and also not be pressuring them what to do either. And I also suspect that it wouldn’t have much respect for those who get apoplectic about government “counseling” on the issue all the while still trumpeting the right of government to do the former.

What if the nice young doctor sent to counsel me has heard all his life that my generation stole trillions of dollars from him and his generation, and indeed sold our country to slavery to the Chinese, to feed our spendthrift habits.

Then I try to explain to him/her that I wish to live a bit longer, and that giving me that privelege is the moral thing to do.