Law by Elected Representation, or by Appointed Judges?

Who will decide on the substance of laws enacted by legislature?  Will it be the representative government that is elected of, by, and for the people, or will it rather be appointed judges, sitting with lifetime tenure, who decide what is, and what is not, a constitutional law?  Will the basis of such decisions be the words of a timeless Constitution, or the "feelings" and personal opinion of whatever judge sits and rules upon it?

 

These questions becomes significant with the election of a president who has called for more activist judges.  Bob Unruh, writing today in World Net Daily, tells the story of one state's experience.

    Physicians in Montana could be facing "kill-on-demand" orders from patients who want to commit suicide if a district court judge's opinion pending before the state Supreme Court is affirmed.

    The case has attracted nominal attention nationwide, but lawyers with the Christian Legal Service have filed a friend-of-the-court brief in the pending case because of what it would mean to doctors within the state, as well as the precedent it would set.

    The concern is over the attack on doctors' ethics and religious beliefs - as well as the Hippocratic oath - that may be violated by a demand that they prescribe deadly chemicals or in some other way assist in a person's death.

    M. Casey Mattox, a lawyer with the CLS, told WND that states allowing a "right to die" across the country - Oregon and Washington - include an opt-out provision for physicians with ethical or religious opposition to participating in killing a patient.

    Montana's situation, created late last year in a decision from First District Court Judge Dorothy McCarter in the Baxter et al. v. Montana case, is different. There is no provision for a doctor to refuse such "treatment" for a patient.

    In that case, Robert Baxter, 75, a retired truck driver from Billings who suffers from lymphocytic leukemia, filed the lawsuit along with four physicians in the state's district court system. They were aided in the case by the assisted suicide advocacy group Compassion & Choices, formerly known as the Hemlock Society.

    Baxter told the organization's magazine that society already provides death when animals are suffering.

    "I just feel if we can do it for animals," Baxter said, "we can do it for human beings."

    The CLS, joined by the Christian Medical Association, yesterday filed briefs asking the state Supreme Court to protect the conscience rights of healthcare professionals.

    The groups, representing more than 18,000 Christian medical and legal professions, are urging the court to reverse the district court's decision and recognize a right not to participate in assisted suicide.

    "The trial court's decision to create a constitutional right to 'obtain assistance from a medical care provider in the form of obtaining a prescription for lethal drugs' threatens the rights of healthcare professionals and institutions that hold sincere ethical, moral, and religious objections to participating in the intentional killing of their patients," Mattox said.

    "Medical professionals should not be coerced to violate the Hippocratic Oath in order to practice in Montana," he said.

    If a "right to die" is to be recognized, it should be developed from the people through the legislative process, not imposed by a single judge, the brief also argues.

    The district decision, the groups also point out,  would seriously undermine the relationship between doctors and patients. Patients could be uncomfortable knowing their doctor had provided a lethal dose to another patient, and doctors would have concerns about such demands from patients.

    "At a time when states are experiencing a healthcare shortage, making Montana the only state in the union to coerce professionals to assist in suicides could jeopardize the state's healthcare system," Mattox said.

    He told WND that the effort clearly is part of a nationwide agenda to impose and mandate ethical standards on Americans. Similar are the Obama administration's suggestions that pharmacists may not have the right to refuse to dispense abortion-inducing medications, and doctors may not have a conscience right to refuse to do abortions, he said.

    "I don't know where it's coming from, but there is certainly a push from government to tell people to set aside religious or ethical qualms and to abide by whatever the government tells you is appropriate," he said.

    Mattox said the state still has several weeks to file its briefs in the Montana case, and then there will be further arguments on behalf of requiring doctors to provide terminal treatment.

    "A mentally competent, terminally ill Montanan should have the right to choose a peaceful death, when confronted by death," Kathryn Tucker, Compassion & Choices director of legal affairs, told KTVQ-TV, Billings.

    But Montana Assistant Attorney General Anthony Johnston disagrees.

    Johnston told the television station, "The laws governing the medical profession say the medical profession is to heal, not to kill."

Is this what we've become as a country?  Am I the only one who remembers the recent case in Oregon where a person who couldn't afford life-saving treatment was told by the state that they would not help her get such treatment, but that they would pay for a physician-assisted suicide?  Check that organization that purports to be helping the dying truck driver; their mantra of "freedom to choose" sounds very like the "freedom of choice" touted by the pro-abortion lobby in our country. The only choice they promote or offer is death.

 

"What Were You Thinking?"

Government vs. Conscience

In his daily Breakpoint e-mail, Chuck Colson addresses the constitutional question of where Human Rights come from.  Quoted  below, you can find it on the BreakPoint Archives as well.

 

    As I've said before on BreakPoint, the Obama administration is planning to revoke the Bush-era "conscience clause" that protects health-care workers from having to perform procedures that violate their conscience - procedures like abortion.

    A leading postmodern scholar, Professor Stanley Fish, defended Obama's stance recently in the New York Times. Fish's reasoning should disturb anyone who believes that human rights come from a higher source than government.

    Fish's argument relies on 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes. To Hobbes's, "the Law is the public Conscience" and must take precedence over the judgments of an individual's "private Conscience" so that government can maintain order.

    Fish points out that the U.S. Supreme Court "has ruled that when the personal imperatives of one's religion or morality lead to actions in violation of generally applicable laws - laws not promulgated that is, with the intention of affronting anyone's conscience - the violations will not be allowed and will certainly not be celebrated."

    Well, that's true to a point. But Fish is being disingenuous when he speaks of "laws not promulgated with the intention of affronting anyone's conscience." Of course laws aren't passed deliberately to offend people, unless the lawmakers are deranged. But there are undeniably cases in which the law attempts to force decent people to act against their conscience in matters of justice and human rights.

    Has Fish forgotten that this country used to have a law forcing the return of escaped slaves? Today, we rightly regard people who disobeyed that law as heroes. While the ownership and mistreatment of human beings may have been legal, it was immoral to the core.

    It is also immoral for human beings to be involved in the deliberate taking of innocent human lives. As Professor J. Budziszewski notes, that is one of those things "we can't not know." And we know it because there is an authority higher than human government from which we derive our rights, and that authority has written His law on every human heart.

    The principle is set forth in the Declaration of Independence, the cornerstone of American government: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

    When health-care professionals refuse to perform or assist in an abortion because it violates their conscience, they are obeying a Higher Authority and His laws - the laws to which He holds every human being.

    This is a principle articulated by great saints like Augustine and Aquinas and at modern times by Martin Luther King, who, in his famous letter from a Birmingham jail, echoed Augustine: "An unjust law is no law at all."

    To argue that human law must always supersede conscience is an invitation to tyranny. The Bill of Rights is an acknowledgement that certain rights - like freedom of religion - are simply, or should be, beyond government's reach.

    Let's hope - and pray - that the Obama administration will decide not to force medical professionals to choose between their consciences and their livelihood. For their sake, and for the sake of all of our own freedoms.

 

It appears that the current administration intends to continue leading the people of the United States away from the dictates of conscience, and the truths of Scripture, in order to further their extreme liberal agenda.  What will be next?  Read the Declaration of Independence, which includes this line at the second paragraph:  "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

 

"What Were You Thinking?"