The Return of Dr. Kevorkian

Dr. Kevorkian gets out of jail on June 1. Dr. Kevorkian has been a leader in the fight for the right to suicide. If a person doesn’t have that right, then he doesn’t own his own body, the state does. As the play title asks, “Whose Life Is It Anyway?”

Writes Thomas Bowden of the Ayn Rand Institute:

"What lawmakers and judges must grasp," added Bowden, "is that there is no rational basis upon which the government can properly prevent an individual from choosing to end his own life. Our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness means that we need no one's permission to live, and that no one may forcibly obstruct our efforts to achieve personal happiness. But if happiness becomes impossible to attain, due to a dread disease or some other calamity, a person must be able to exercise the right to end his own life."

"To hold otherwise--to declare that society must give us permission to commit suicide--is to contradict the right to life at its root," said Bowden. "If we have a duty to go on living, despite our better judgment, then our lives do not belong to us, and we exist by permission, not by right.

"For these reasons, each individual has the right to decide the hour of his death and to implement that solemn decision as best he can. The choice is his because the life is his. And if a doctor is willing--not forced--to assist in the suicide, based on an objective assessment of his patient's mental and physical state, the law should not stand in his way."

When statists object to suicide I get the impression their real reasoning is: who are you to dispose of the state’s property? You have no right to deprive the state of one of its slaves.

Dr. Kevorkian has always brought out the worst in mixed-bag conservatives such as Rush Limbaugh. We should thank the Dr. for helping us see more clearly that conservatives are no friends of liberty. The religious right lusts to enslave man’s soul just as much as the socialist left wants to enslave his body.