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Tuesday, July 03, 2007
Dr. Kevorkian was freed a month ago after serving 8 years for assisting a person in his own suicide. Theodore Dalrymple has an excellent job offer for him here.
Before he turned his attention to mercy killing, Kevorkian argued for a new branch of medicine—namely, physiological experimentation on those condemned to death and about to be executed. His oddity is suggested not merely by the proposal itself, but by his surprise that his colleagues did not jump at it, and instead condemned it roundly. He attributed their resistance to conservatism, this being a pejorative term, of course.

Now it so happens that on the very day on which Kevorkian went free, 310 prisoners in Italy, condemned to life imprisonment for murder, petitioned the Italian president, requesting the reinstatement of the death penalty. An imprisoned chief of the Sicilian Mafia, Carmelo Musumeci, was the prime mover behind the petition, which read in part: “We ask that our life sentences be transformed into a death sentence. Our life is totally useless and means infinite suffering: a sentence that makes the future the same as the past, a past that crushes the present and eliminates any hope for the future.”

Surely there is an opportunity here for international cooperation of the best kind? It has long seemed paradoxical that many of those most strenuously opposed to the death penalty most fervently favor euthanasia, and not always the voluntary kind. It is seldom that such an ideological paradox can so neatly be resolved.

Avanti, Dr. Kevorkian! You have new worlds to conquer, especially since a condition of your parole is to take no part in euthanasia or assisted suicide. A change of jurisdictions would be just the thing. And I am sure that Signor Musumeci, as a small token of appreciation for being put out of his misery, would be happy to be experimented upon.

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Darius' book montage

The Cross Centered Life: Keeping the Gospel The Main Thing
Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God
Overcoming Sin and Temptation
According to Plan: The Unfolding Revelation of God in the Bible
Disciplines of a Godly Man
Money, Greed, and God: Why Capitalism Is the Solution and Not the Problem
When Helping Hurts: Alleviating Poverty Without Hurting the Poor. . .and Ourselves
The Prodigal God: Recovering the Heart of the Christian Faith
Respectable Sins
The Kite Runner
Life Laid Bare: The Survivors in Rwanda Speak
Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak
A Generous Orthodoxy: Why I am a missional, evangelical, post/protestant, liberal/conservative, mystical/poetic, biblical, charismatic/contemplative, fundamentalist/calvinist, ... anabaptist/anglican, metho
Show Them No Mercy
The Lord of the Rings
Life at the Bottom: The Worldview That Makes the Underclass
The Truth War: Fighting for Certainty in an Age of Deception
Cool It: The Skeptical Environmentalist's Guide to Global Warming
The Chronicles of Narnia
Les Misérables


Darius Teichroew's favorite books »