Gov. Hochul, make sure New York's assisted suicide bill NEVER becomes law
New York's progressive legislators have reportedly gotten behind what may be their most morally disgraceful bill yet: an assisted-suicide legalization push.
Worse, per Assembly Speaker Carl Heastie (D-Bronx), the bill has the votes to pass, which may happen as early as next week.
This must. Not. Happen.
Assisted suicide is sold to the public as a form of compassion — yet another inversion of reality.
In practice, it is anything but.
The trouble is, the promised reservation of assisted suicide to the chronically ill and elderly seems somehow always to get expanded.
Until it encompasses young, physically healthy people like Zoraya ter Beek, whom the Dutch state permitted to take her own life because she was depressed.
Or, as is the case with Canada, the poor, the disabled and the marginalized.
Like Alan Nichols, a down-on-his-luck man with a history of mental illness who listed 'hearing loss' as the only health reason for his own euthanasia — which, shockingly, was then granted.
The Trudeau government even tried to sell veteran and paralympian Christine Gauthier on suicide, simply because she fought to have the Veterans' Affairs department install a wheelchair ramp at her house.
The idea that fiscal calculations, i.e. that it's cheaper simply to kill people like Nichols and Gauthier than to help them, didn't play some role here is dubious, at best.
In the US, Oregon — the pioneer on OKing this insanity — is already mulling the idea of expanding the class of people authorized to prescribe suicide drugs to include nurse practitioners and vastly shortening the wait time from 15 to two days.
Vermont might include literal quacks on the list of people allowed to help people kill themselves.
It's the slipperiest of slippery slopes, in other words.
And a slap in the face to the nearly 3 million Catholics in the state who oppose assisted suicide on religious grounds.
And this is New York, remember, where the state couldn't even manage to roll out a legal cannabis initiative without turning it into a complete disaster.
And where within recent memory, a governor shoved old people with COVID into nursing homes to die and kill others just to make himself look better on television and earn $5 million from a book.
Even under the sanest and stablest of governments, state-sanctioned euthanasia is obscene.
Here, it would be a Boschian nightmare.
Gov. Hochul, this issue is an easy win: Keep fighting the good fight, stand up to the extremists in your own party and stop this madness if and when it reaches your desk.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
The Hill
2 hours ago
- The Hill
Hundreds of pharmacies are set to close: How it could impact you
(NEXSTAR) — Several retail pharmacy chains have shuttered some of their stores this year, with more on the way for others, like Rite Aid, which filed for bankruptcy in May. It could create what some refer to as 'pharmacy deserts,' areas in which drugstores and the additional services they provide may not be available for miles. And in areas where other pharmacies are picking up the slack, it could have an impact on current customers. 'Closures of major chain pharmacies often create ripple effects across the community,' E. Michael Murphy, an assistant professor of clinical pharmacy at The Ohio State University, told Nexstar via email. Nearby pharmacies, independent or part of a chain, can see 'a sudden increase in patients,' he explained, which could 'lead to longer lines, and increase strain on the health care team.' It could also disrupt your medical care. Shuttering pharmacies in larger cities, like New York City and Philadelphia, may have limited impacts. Take, for example, a Rite Aid located in Philadelphia that has been designated for closure. A three-minute walk down the road will take you to a Walgreens and a local pharmacy. Within smaller communities, that may not be the case. Customers may need to drive to a nearby town to pick up their prescriptions, which 'could have some negative consequences on their adherence to their medication,' Lucas A. Berenbrok, an associate professor at the University of Pittsburgh School of Pharmacy, explained to Nexstar. 'For those without reliable transportation, especially older adults or people with disabilities, traveling even a few extra miles can be a serious barrier,' Murphy said. That could lead to delayed access to prescriptions and missed dosages. Closing pharmacies also reduces health access points for people. In addition to filling prescriptions, pharmacies are able to provide vaccines, chronic disease management, urgent consultations, over-the-counter treatments, and certain health tests. 'There's a lot more going on at the pharmacy now than ever before,' Berenbrok explained, outlining how pharmacists helped to administer the COVID vaccine during the pandemic, for example, and the additional services they can provide in some states. He went on to explain that while online pharmacies can help fill the void of shuttered drugstores, they're largely unable to accommodate the additional services pharmacies provide. 'They also assume reliable internet access, digital literacy, and stable housing, which are barriers for many vulnerable patients,' Murphy said. 'For communities losing local pharmacies, online options may fill part of the gap but cannot replace the full range of services a community pharmacist provides.' Berenbrok agreed that mail-order pharmacies have 'a time and place' because of their convenience, but they require planning ahead, which may not be useful for certain medications like antibiotics. If your pharmacy is closing soon, Murphy recommended being proactive and asking your pharmacist where your prescriptions are being sent and whether that pharmacy has your insurance and medication history. He also encouraged asking for a 90-day supply or mail-order option for prescriptions if transportation is a concern. Chains poised to take on former Rite Aid clients, like CVS and Walgreens, say they're prepared to welcome new customers. Even if your prescriptions are not moving to a new pharmacy, you may want to make sure your prescription is being filled a day or two before you need it rather than the same day that your current supply runs out, Berenbrok said. Then, if you're short on time and facing a long line, you won't miss a dose. Murphy also suggested contacting elected officials and urging them to take action. 'While pharmacists are committed to stepping up to meet the need, without adequate state and federal policy changes to address the broken business model that caused the pharmacy to close in the first place, we will continue to see pharmacies close and patients having to navigate the loss of their trusted health care professional.'
Yahoo
2 hours ago
- Yahoo
Christine Van Geyn: Do police have the right to peer at you in your car with a drone?
Can police use a drone with a zoom lens to peer into the interior of vehicles stopped at red lights? Can police enter a home's private driveway and look in the windows of vehicles? Can the government track the cellphone location data of millions of Canadians to track their movements? And can a private foreign company scour the internet collecting photos of Canadians for use in facial recognition technology that is sold to police? These questions are not hypotheticals; they are real live issues in Canadian law. We are living in the mass surveillance era. But many Canadians do not have a thorough understanding of how far surveillance goes, or what the limits on it are, or whether our legal protections are adequate. The police in Kingston, Ont., are ticketing drivers at red lights for merely touching or holding their cellphones based on evidence collected by a drone. The Supreme Court recently heard a case about police entering a private driveway and not just looking in a truck window, but opening the door and collecting evidence — all without a warrant. The Alberta Court of Kings Bench just considered a case involving the facial recognition technology of Clearview AI. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Canadian government was tracking the cellphone location data of 33 million Canadians. After the Trudeau government invoked the Emergencies Act, the government ordered the freezing of bank accounts of a police-compiled 'blacklist' of demonstrators, which was distributed by the government to a variety of financial institutions and even lobby groups. What these cases are demonstrating is that we have entered the era of mass surveillance, and Canada's legal protections are inadequate. First, Canada's privacy legislation is outdated. Privacy Commissioner Philippe Dufresne has said we are at a 'pivotal time' for privacy rights in Canada. Former Ontario Privacy Commissioner Dr. Ann Cavoukian has also called for updates to Canadian privacy laws, 'so they apply to all data, including anonymized data.' Much has changed since the current federal privacy legislation was drafted in the early 2000s, but efforts to modernize this law died when Parliament was prorogued. Second, when it comes to state intrusions, the concept of privacy may be inadequate. Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms guarantees the right to be secure against unreasonable searches and seizures, and the Supreme Court has interpreted this right to mean the protection of a person's 'reasonable expectations of privacy' against state intrusions. The notion of 'reasonable expectations of privacy' has become a mantra in Section 8 jurisprudence. But some academics have said that in the era of mass surveillance, this guiding principle is an inadequate gatekeeper. In a lecture for the Canadian Constitution Foundation's new free course on privacy rights, Osgoode Hall Law professor François Tanguay-Renaud proposes a thought experiment that reveals the inadequacy of 'privacy' as an organizing principle. What if the police were recording people on the street, with drones following people and recording their movements as they went about their day, zooming in on their cellphones and recording their conversations? In such a scenario, where people are in plain view, privacy is an inadequate concept to limit what we all see intuitively as oppressive state conduct. At one time, this hypothetical might have been considered far-fetched. Today it is eerily similar to the Kingston police drone scenario. In Kingston, police are using a drone to take aerial images peering into cars and zooming in on cellphones. Those drivers do have reasonable expectations of privacy inside their cars, but what would limit this police conduct if they surveilled citizens on sidewalks or parks, where they were in plain view without those privacy expectations? A principled line must be drawn between things done in plain sight that police can view and constant surveillance using enhanced technology. It may not be possible to draw that line on the basis of the existence or not of 'reasonable expectations of privacy.' There are other values that could serve as guiding or informing principles for Section 8. There is nothing in the text of Section 8 that mandates the gatekeeper of the right be 'reasonable expectations of privacy' rather than another interest, like dignity, liberty, security, anonymity, public confidence in the administration of justice, and many more. Indeed, American jurisprudence has been moving away from the concept of 'reasonable expectations of privacy' as the sole guiding principle for their 4th Amendment. To meet the challenges of the surveillance era, it is well past time for Parliament and the provincial legislatures to update privacy laws. But as recent police conduct shows, it's time for our Section 8 jurisprudence to be revisited as well, to meet the emerging challenges of the surveillance state. National Post Christine Van Geyn is the litigation director for the Canadian Constitutional Foundation. Canadians who want to learn more about their privacy rights in Canada can sign up for the Canadian Constitution Foundation's free course at Opinion: In 2020 the world shut down, and Canadians lost their privacy rights Facial recognition tool used by RCMP deemed illegal mass surveillance of unwitting Canadians
Black America Web
4 hours ago
- Black America Web
Dave Chappelle Reflects On 2016 Trump ‘SNL' Speech
Source: Arturo Holmes / Getty For comedian Dave Chappelle, the opening monologue he gave as the host of Saturday Night Live after the 2016 presidential election isn't something he regrets. He had the chance to reflect on it during a conversation with comedian Mo Amer for the Actors on Actors series for Variety. 'I haven't watched it in a while, but I remember it fondly,' Chappelle said at the 27-minute mark of the conversation, which was shared Wednesday (June 4) after Amer asked him about his perspective on it from back then to now. The monologue went viral, as Chappelle declared that 'an internet troll' had won the White House, also pointing out his history of sexual assault. He would then segue into how he felt after former President Barack Obama won in 2008. 'And it made me very happy about the prospects of our country,' he said then. 'So, in that spirit, I'm wishing Donald Trump luck. And I'm going to give him a chance. And we, the historically disenfranchised, demand that he give us one, too.''Oh, I remember that part,' Chappelle said. 'You know what? I look at it like a photograph. That's what it felt like in that moment. Now, if it ages well or not, I don't get mad if I look at a picture because it's not today. That's what it was at that time.' He continued, 'You might look at an old set and cringe, but you could just cringe because of how you were at that time. And in that sense, I'm fine with it.' Chappelle's conversation with Amer is one of the rare moments he's opened up for media – he has declined direct interviews in the wake of brushback from jokes he made against the transgender community in his 2021 Netflix special The Closer . But he and the Palestinian comedian bonded during the COVID-19 pandemic, making this a keen opportunity for the two to talk about comedy and their perspectives on the current times particularly with Amer's hit Netflix show. 'As you know, I notoriously don't like to do press,' Chappelle said, 'but today I wouldn't have missed, because it's you.' Check out the entire conversation above. SEE ALSO Dave Chappelle Reflects On 2016 Trump 'SNL' Speech was originally published on Black America Web Featured Video CLOSE
