Osama bin Ashcroft
Stuffin' Jesus Down Our Throats

By: Bryan Zepp Jamieson

Never mind what 650,000 voters in Oregon decided. Never mind that the Supreme Court, in 1997, ruled unanimously that states have the right to determine so-called "right to die" laws. We have a crackpot religious whack for attorney general, and his Jesus has whispered in his ear that good, god-fearin' Amerkins like Jesus don't hold with letting people die without a whole lot of pain and suffering.

For anyone not familiar with John Ashcroft, he's a right wing religious nutcase who likes to anoint himself with Crisco oil when making important career moves. Never mind that there is nothing in the bible that justifies this behavior. Ashcroft has decided that the bible thinks anointing is a good thing, and since all it says is that oil is used for anointing, then cooking oil ought to work just fine. The bible doesn't say anything about anointing yourself, but Ashcroft apparently figured some kind of dodge around that.

He's also, believe it or not, the Attorney-General of the United States of America, and our chief law enforcement officer. I kid you not.

The man simply likes to get greased up and jam his weird religious views down everyone's throats. Nowadays those views tend to involve our civil rights and liberties.

Ashcroft's version of God told him that assisted suicide is wrong. Perhaps he believes that if you commit suicide, you'll go to hell. Of course, he also believes that if you don't accept Jayzus into your life as yuh puhsunel sav-yer, you're going to go to hell anyway, so it doesn't make much sense for him to worry about the immortal souls of non-believers. He should just remind his fellow religionists of what he believes, and let the heathen go to hell in their own way.

He's a religious nut, and he just can't see it that way. If you don't believe what Ashcroft's god believes, then you are defying that god, and since that particular diety is incapable of taking care of you himself, then it's up to John Ashcroft, as god's personal representative on earth, to take care of you.

Oregon voters passed "death with dignity" not once, but twice, and by hefty margins. It went through the courts, all the way to the top, where the SC ruled that a doctor could not be compelled to assist a patient in dying (something the Oregon law didn't do, anyway) but that otherwise, it was a law legal and constitutional for any state to enact.

Doctors prescribe lethal doses of medication every day. I can buy lethal doses over the counter, for that matter. I've got a bottle of 300 Motrins in my bathroom that I could swallow all at once, and it would cause my liver to shrivel up and try to climb out my rectum. It would definitely kill me if I took all that Motrin, but it would be an excruciating death.

What the death-with-dignity law did was permit doctors to prescribe medication that would cause an easy death, and protect them from liability. It also, of course, allows patients to secure an easy death, since most forms of suicide tend to be extremely uncomfortable and messy, and traumatic to the survivors.

Every day, doctors prescribe "final friend" dosages with a wink, and can only hope that the patient doesn't have any religious whacks – an Ashcroft – in the family who will come in two days later, claiming that prayer was going to save Uncle Fred from his end-stage metastatic bone cancer any time now, and the doctor thwarted god's will.

The law in Oregon demanded that the patient be rational and capable of requesting the death-with-dignity prescription, and that two other physicians examine the patient independently, and independently determine that he is in a terminal condition, with less than six months to live.

No doctor is required to prescribe the lethal dose, and no doctor is required or even obliged to consider it. The two independent physicians know that unless there is either extreme pain and discomfort, or immediate prospects of same, the patient will not qualify for death-with-dignity at that time.

It's rational, it's humane, it's the right thing to do, and it is a kindness to those who need it the most.

Naturally, Ashcroft hates it, and says that God hates it too. The same man who is cheerfully pushing for genocide by starvation in Afghanistan says that he's against death with dignity because the bible says you shouldn't take innocent life.

Now, the good news is that a Federal Court judge, one U.S. District Judge Robert Jones, has granted a temporary restraining order until the courts can process it. The courts will almost certainly strike Ashcroft's arbitrary order down on the grounds that it is a state issue and he doesn't have jurisdiction. Of course, if it reaches our corrupt Supreme Court, all bets are off.

In the meantime, Ashcroft is continuing to be the poster boy for Christianity: along with an all-out assault on civil rights and freedoms, he is now talking about getting permission to torture suspected terrorists who are in custody.

What a great Christian and American he is!

Of course, most Americans might have something to say about that.

I'm sure every Christian reading this will want to pray tonight.

But I'm betting that most of those prayers won't be something that Ashcroft would want to hear.