Reply #205: Our society is losing its collective mind [View All]

and sanctioning horrible acts under the guise of freedom. It's unbelievable to me that liberals are supporting the killing of an innocent person based on hearsay testimony that she would have wanted to die in her current situation. The fact that a judge accepted the hearsay testimony and ordered her death proves only that a judge can make mistakes -- and have no interest in preserving the rights of the severely disabled.

If the mentally and physically disabled can be euthanized, who will be next?

As Mouth magazine's bumper sticker says, "I support the right to die. You go first."

In other words, don't volunteer your disabled neighbors to die first, though of course that's been done before; in Nazi Germany the disabled were killed early on.

Those of you without disabilities don't understand this issue the way the disabled do. The media has told you that only right-wingers oppose starving Terri Schiavo but that's not true. The MSM has beeen ignoring press releases from disability rights groups, ignoring the seventeen disability rights groups that filed amicus briefs on Terri's behalf, ignoring the disabled people who have been involved in protests supporting Terri's life. The MSM has also ignored disability rights protests against Eastwood's cripple snuff film, M$B.

Here are a few quotes from Mary Johnson's article "The Scrines who Mistook the Crips for the Right":

"Religious opposition to assisted suicide is based on "sanctity of life" arguments. Disability rights opposition comes from an entirely different sensibility. The mostly-agnostic activists we know who oppose the "right to die" are steeped in progressive leftist causes. They read "death with dignity" laws as disparate impact legislation."

"The "right to die" may sound egalitarian; it may sound as though it's about nothing more than choice. In application, though, it applies only to people who are living disabled lives. And the disability rights movement continually returns to this central truth. "Since virtually all people who request hastened death have old or new disabilities, we're essential to the debate," wrote the late Barry Corbet, longtime editor New Mobility. Right to die, and death with dignity laws, Corbet wrote, "are about us."

"Many of our allies in the civil rights and health care movements have found this hard to understand. Isn't this about individual autonomy and rights, they ask?" says attorney Diane Coleman, founder of Not Dead Yet. "No, we say, it's about disability discrimination, a profit-oriented health care system, and a legal system that does not guarantee the equal protection of the law," she wrote in a 2000 article for the American Bar Association.

"The idea that people with disabilities are not worthy of society's acceptance or resources is not new," says Coleman. Actively helping someone end their life is illegal in every state. But laws permitting a doctor to provide lethal medication are being contemplated in California, Vermont, Hawaii and Arizona (such a law is in force only in Oregon.) Proponents insist safeguards exist.

Read the entire article here:

http://www.raggededgemagazine.com/mediacircus/scribesmistook0205.html