Supreme Court To Close Barn Door After Horses Bolt

Look for the signs of the time: the Supreme Court is asked to mediate a case that, in saner times, people could decide for themselves. Once, only those enthralled with the unthinkable would promote suicide. In these sad days of common insanity, however, a slim majority in the State of Oregon has decided that playing God is a civil right. Thus, the "Supreme Court to Revisit Assisted Suicide" according to Yahoo! News

Note the sorry details:

he Supreme Court is revisiting the emotionally charged issue of physician-assisted suicide in a test of the federal government's power to block doctors from helping terminally ill patients end their lives.
ADVERTISEMENT

Oregon is the only state that lets dying patients obtain lethal doses of medication from their doctors, although other states may pass laws of their own if the high court rules against the federal government. Voters in Oregon have twice endorsed doctor-assisted suicide, but the Bush administration has aggressively challenged the state law.

The case, the first major one to come before the new chief justice, John Roberts, will be heard by justices touched personally by illness. Three justices —
Sandra Day O'Connor,
Ruth Bader Ginsburg and
John Paul Stevens — have had cancer, and a fourth —
Stephen Breyer — has a spouse who counsels young cancer patients who are dying.

Their longtime colleague, Chief Justice William H. Rehnquist, who once wrote about the "earnest and profound debate" over doctor-assisted suicide, died a month ago after battling untreatable cancer for nearly a year.

In 1997 the court found that the terminally ill have no constitutional right to doctor-assisted suicide. O'Connor provided a key fifth vote in that decision, which left room for state-by-state experimentation.

(snip)

The appeal is a turf battle of sorts, not a constitutional showdown. Former Attorney General
John Ashcroft, a favorite among the president's base of religious conservatives, decided in 2001 to pursue doctors who help people die.

Hastening someone's death is an improper use of medication and violates federal drug laws, Ashcroft reasoned, an opposite conclusion than the one reached by
Janet Reno, the Clinton administration attorney general.

Oregon filed a lawsuit to defend its law, which took effect in 1997 and has been used by 208 people.

The Supreme Court will decide whether the federal government can trump the state.

"It could be close," said Neil Siegel, a law professor at Duke University and former Supreme Court clerk. "It is a wrenching issue. It's one of the most difficult decisions any family needs to make. There's a lot of discomfort with having the government at any level get involved."

Under Rehnquist's leadership the court had sought to embolden states to set their own rules. Roberts, who once served as a law clerk to Rehnquist and worked as a government lawyer, may be sympathetic to Bush administration arguments that the federal government needs ultimate authority to control drugs.

In this case, that would be at odds with the concept, popular among conservatives, of limiting federal interference.

Solicitor General Paul Clement, the Bush administration's Supreme Court lawyer, told justices in a filing that 49 states, centuries of tradition, and doctors groups agree that "assisted suicide is 'fundamentally incompatible' with a physician's role as healer."

The administration lost at the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco, which said Ashcroft's "unilateral attempt to regulate general medical practices historically entrusted to state lawmakers interferes with the democratic debate about physician-assisted suicide."

In Oregon, the first assisted-suicide law won narrow approval, just a 51 percent majority, in 1994. An effort to repeal it in 1997 was rejected by 60 percent of voters.

This case demonstrates how profoundly American society requires the witness of the Gospel. Evangelization, not constitutional law, will be the only way people will come to their senses. The trouble is how deeply the people of Oregon, or at least that slim majority, have swallowed the Reasonable's promotion of the Absolute Individual Great-I-Am in the context of suffering a terminal illness.

Suffering is excruciating for both the one who suffers and the ones who love the sufferer. In those moments of unrelenting pain, it's easy to forget the redemptive value of suffering. In the presence of such misery, it's easy to conclude that life has no order, no rhyme or reason to it. It's far too easy to conclude that either God doesn't exist, doesn't care or has delegated the solution of pain into our capable hands. Well, ironically enough, only the last part is true. And we've made a butcher's job of it.

Suffering is the inevitable consequence of life in a fallen world. Christ has brought Redemption to the world, and through his Mystical Body, that communion of people made one in him and marching through history, he continues that redemption. We the Church, his Mystical Body, must look to him and his cross when confronted by suffering. Do we deserve the pain we experience? Neither did he. When we suffer, we need to remember that we participate in the redemption of the world every time we act in union with our Lord. Thus, if we bear our suffering as Christ bore his, we witness his passion, an act he chose out of love for us. We join our suffering to his, and our suffering becomes a vehicle of his redemption. In the face of such a witness, many people of Good Will might truly encounter Christ and realize how deeply their God loves them. Thoughts of taking control of one's life--and death--would then be seen as the utter insanity that they are. How could we, the stewarts of Life whom our God entrusts to us, dare to squander the gift he has given?

When society embraces this truth, then people will have no need to make assisted suicide laws that generate constitutional conundrums. As it stands now, the Federal Government has a compellig interest in preserving everyone's right to life, including the dying. Who will speak for the relative that may reluctantly agree to die so as not to "burden" their suffering family? Who will speak for the disabled, whom far too many people look upon with Darwinian eyes? If not We the People, then who? Those that would excorciate Conservatives for inconsistency on Federalism celebrate the Statist centralism that facilitated Federal intervention in States' affairs on behalf of civil rights. If a slim majority of a state succeeds in legislating away the people's right to live, then the Federal Government has an obligation to protect the people and their rights.

However, such intervention falls upon a society enthralled with it's own omnipotence. Far too Reasonable to wonder of such Foolishness like God and Natural Law, elites have persuaded suffering everymen that they can be their own God. They can terminate a life they did not give to themselves. They're commodities in society, who can end their own existence should they not find it useful. People caught in these delusions of Grandeur won't understand or accept a Federal government's intervention into their affairs.

Only evangelization will awaken society to the great reality that God loves every person first and freely. Fools must not place their trust in horses, chariots, and in the end, even on Supreme Court Justices, however important they may be in the preservation of our civil life. For if people fundamentally do not acknowledge the Reality that we, as God's children, live in his order, then no Supreme Court will ever make a satisfactory decision. Rise to the rooftops, Fools, and shout the Gospel for all to hear. Awaken the sleeping before the darkness of the death they court comes to claim them.

The Lord calls out his Prophets. Who will answer?