The five members of the United States Supreme Court who agreed in Justice Kennedy's opinion that the federal government has no "legitimate" right to claim that the Oregon physician assisted suicide law went too far are actually ruling that a doctor does have a proper right to use drugs for the express purpose of agreeing with a patient that suicide is a preferred treatment option.
The problem with the sort of thinking, whether emanating from the Surpeme Court or a state law is that it denies the inherent dignity of the human person by equating assisted murder with appropriate care of the dying. First the court denied the personhood of the preborn child by ignoring his humanity; now the court is denying the personhood of the dying by agreeing that man has the right to choose when his time on earth should be over. Once again, God is being told to butt out.
As writer Flannery O'Connor once wrote, the smell of the gas chambers cannot be far off.
