Killers All.

I come across a lot of this type of rhetoric:

Surprisingly, media accounts of the story have been quiet about the people who must have been pushing to have Houben put down over the past 23 years. Will these recent findings open the debate over ending the lives of people like Houben and Terry Schiavo?

It should, but don't count on it. Most of the extremists ardently pushing for euthanasia want one thing: to open the door a crack, just as they got a foot in the door on abortion to eventually turn the practice into a revolving door.

The legalization of abuses like euthanasia and abortion always starts with the hard cases. With abortion it began with instances of women's lives supposedly in danger. Then exceptions for mental health came along, then rape and incest, and now we're at the point where a Canadian MP was labelled an "extremist" in Parliament this week for supporting time limitations on abortion.

The assertion is repeatedly made that if one supports choice in dying and abortion rights (sadly, often conflated to mean other reproductive rights like contraception, sterilization, and AIDS and STD prevention counseling), one wishes to unleash a "culture of death" on innocent beings.

This demonization of others who believe in personal autonomy and patients' rights helps accusers to reduce the argument to a black or white thing. As well, it eliminates compassion for those who are suffering from the argument. As the rhetoric would have it, life is hard and if you don't believe in my God, well then, you should suffer for your immoral ways. Any expression of need outside the ordained realm of "Christian" care is vilified as aggression, and more importantly, as oppression of those imposing strictures. Personal autonomy becomes an affront to Christian society, an evil that the government is then colluded into stymying.

Hence, the preponderance of claims for the first amendment protections. Yet, freedom of religion means more than the reverence of one faith. Or the imposition of that faith, via government funded social services, on others who enjoy different beliefs. The more I study health care and provider restrictions on patients' rights, I find that the first amendment is being used by a powerful, vocal minority to subjugate an entire society. That's not freedom. That's plain discrimination at the hands of a government meant to protect all of our rights.