BY JAMES NIMMO

Here’s the link to a Nation magazine article about the next privacy issue the Catholic church thinks it can bully its way in to achieving: self-deliverance under medical guidance when terminally ill.

http://www.thenation.com/article/161478/catholic-church-amps-its-fight-against-aid-dying

I know there will be several members of the Catholic religion who will read this and support their Conference of Bishops in its plan to remove another choice of free citizens – this time the choice of ending one’s life when certain death from disease and organ failure is inevitable.

Thinking they have abortion under control, the Conference is now ramping up the heat on assisted suicide – aka euthanasia – hoping to detour legislative progress in the 47 states currently without euthanasia laws and to remove privacy of death from the CIVIL law books of the three states that do acknowledge this right.

The Catholic church wants to expand its power of intrusion beyond just pregnant women who are not Catholics, but to all living adults – men and women, Catholic or non-Catholic, pregnant or not.

I do not give the Catholic religion or any other religion my proxy to say that I can not end my life under medical supervision when I and the health professionals of my choice say there is no hope for a quality of life that I wish to maintain.

I’m a dedicated advocate of living wills, durable powers-of-attorney, and other legal remedies that leave control of one’s live with the adult.

If readers belong to a religion that frowns on self-deliverance, then hold to those private tenets without dragging non-believers or those who hold other religious/spiritual beliefs into still another intrusion and usurpation of privacy by organized religion.

I have had more than enough of the Bronze Age intruding into the 21st Century.

As an example of callousness posing as caring, a Catholic spokesperson quoted at the end of this article says out-right that our lives are not our own.

If my life belongs to someone else, why am I paying all the bills?

– James Nimmo lives in Oklahoma City and is an occasional contributor to The Oklahoma Observer